Status:
Saved my batteries up today so I could go to the allotment to top up the compost. Went across the park on my own on the scooter and did the decanting at my own pace. Had a nice short chat with a lady I hadn’t seen for a while and then came home. All managed without any help from Fi.
Reading:
- Still Expanding Those Minds — My spiritual weird uncle Erik Davis on recovering a podcast he made a decade-plus ago, but the best bit is an account of visiting one of those insane looking Mormon churches on the rare occasions they open them up to the general public. Erik addresses the building’s aesthetics (“a baroque futuristic monument that rockets toward the heavens like two frosted X-wing fighters racing neck and neck”) and gets into the weird mix of the cosmic and the anodyne that epitomises the Mormon practice. It’s easy to laugh at it but that mix of the extremely ordinary and the extremely out-there is, well, it explains Battlestar Galactica.
- The Andy Burnham I’ve met over the past 20 years gives me hope for British politics — John Harris, on the eve of the anointment of his chosen one. I joke, and I’m not expecting much once he has to eat his bowls of shit, but it will be interesting to see someone who hasn’t come up in the hothouse of Westminster take control of this island.
The Sunday Papers:
Somewhere there’s a think piece about why so many digest-style newsletters come out on a Sunday. Have they replaced the Sunday newspaper ritual of grazing in bed slightly hungover with coffee? Anyway, here’s my main three.
- Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends #777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines — Really like Caitlin’s perspective on internet culture. This issue has a fun bit about people queueing in New York which she finds horrifying but which to this Brit seems perfectly normal.
- Sentiers No.412: The looting of science fiction ⊗ We’ve been here before — Nice chunky issue before Patrick’s summer break. Will be holding this in reserve.
- Orbital Operations: Misc — I’ve long had a complicated relationship with Warren Ellis’s (not the musician) output in that I’m not a fan of his work but I do share his interest in a lot of subjects, plus I like how he documents and shares that interest. But his comics, books and community curation leaves me at best cold and at worst annoyed. Which is fine, plenty of people like what he does good for them and him, I guess. Recently he’s been retooling his Sunday newsletter to be less pointy and more curatorial but this issue, ironically due to a lack of time, is all pointing and it’s full of the good meat.