With judicious application of ice-packs, tiger balm, ibuprofen, walking up and down the garden and lying on my side, my bad back has slowly gotten less bad. I can now sit upright for more minutes than previously and occasionally forget to take my walking stick with me to the bathroom. I have a doctors appointment (more accurately a musculoskeletal specialist) tomorrow so I’m sure it’ll have totally cleared up by then. The text message with the appointment reminder called them “The MSK” which sounds like a cool rapper name and has me wondering what the K stands for. The Musculo Skeletal King? I shall try not to ask and focus on listening to their advice.
Trying out a different blogging format, in the sense that I’ve thrown out the format. I’ve bashed this out in an evening based off my bookmarks, but the future plan, such as it is, is to write through the day and see what format is needed. And in the meanwhile work on the broader project, whatever that ends up being. Be less precious.
Zoe Williams knew Rod Liddle and hated what he became. He would have wanted her to say so — What is it with this sanctity washing of arseholes when they die? Especially those who revelled in publicly being arseholes and willingly took billionaire money to be arseholes in national newspapers.
Zoe links to a useful theory of the post-1968 ‘type’, those drawn to transgression for transgression’s sake and who have happily traversed from punky socialism to reactionary fascism. Helpful in understanding why some counterculture figures turned bad.
If Cinderella was really working class she would have organised a revolution once that slipper fit.
“Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.” — This sort of thing seems to be cropping up a lot as a way to push back against AI tools and like everything else it’s not really about AI but about the drive for efficiency above all else, because that’s the best way to accumulate more capital, the only thing capitalism is interested in, hence the name. I did like Marcin’s example of deliberately choosing not to “replace all” in his code so he could spend some time with it, time that wasn’t optimised towards a goal, time which was “wasted” or “pointless” but which felt worth allocating in this way. As anyone with an art practice will tell you, pointless activities are when the best ideas come. Efficiency is the devil. Efficiency has us driving everywhere when we’d be better off walking. Fuck efficiency.
For the wishlist: Nick Abadzis' new book with Angela Watson about racism in Britain through the lens of their interracial marriage. I met them both a few times in the early 2000s and have fond memories.