Went to see the musculoskeletal specialist this afternoon about my bad back, which was doing much better today until he gently poked at my lower spine to see where it hurt, and then it hurt again. It’s nothing major, thankfully, and it should continue to improve. I have a 5 page PDF of gentle exercises for my core muscles to try. Let’s see if I can do them for a more than a few days before I forget.
This was one of those moments where I was reminded that I don’t leave the house very often and that this sort of thing takes a toll on me. I don’t think I did enough to trigger a crash but I definitely felt the fatigue afterwards.
Bobby Fingers' latest diorama, the creation of which is documented at great and meandering length. If you’re not familar with his work please watch five or ten minutes and see if it chimes with your whims. He’s developed a form of video art which feels timeless but which, and I mean this in a really good way, could only really work on the internet.
One of the most useful Mac hacks that I really resent having to employ is taking a screenshot of text which, for whatever deranged reason, is not selectable so I can open it in the Preview image viewer and use the OCR function to copy the text I was prevented from selecting. This is even worse in stupid phone apps which I’ve mostly given up on expecting any semblance of functionality from. All computer text should always be selectable unless there is an extremely good reason for it not to be. (I did hear something about this maybe being fixed in macOS releases later than 14.8 but that’s not enough of a trade-off to upgrade to that shit.)
The end of Google Search — and the Internet — as we know it
This has been brewing for a long time but it seems it’s finally here. Google is no longer a website company, and so the web has to figure out what sort of web it wants to be all over again. Back before the pandemic I ran a one-person photography teaching business which relied 100% on organic Google traffic, partly because the other photography teachers in Birmingham didn’t understand websites so getting up there was easy. But I was very aware that all my eggs were in this one basket and, honestly, I didn’t know any other way to get business. I shut it down in 2020 but I suspect it wouldn’t have survived long anyway. And that’s OK. Google search turned out to be a blip and a bad idea in hindsight. Now we can try something else. (Sidenote - some nice Station 11 references.)
New Mountain Goats album, their 24th (!), just dropped.
Some Questions for Channel 4, about their documentary ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’
I’ve been around enough blocks to have lost any and all respect for Channel 4 and this forthcoming ADHD doc looks to be another chapter in their pitiful excuse of a public service remit. Five stars for the “are the makers of this programme paedophiles? Because the public are concerned about that. Just asking!” bit.
I remember the trick of hiding an mp3 in the header data of a jpeg from back in the days when there was at least a theoretical need to do such a thing, and I’m familiar with the fungibility of filetypes, where you put images through audio processors and see what the effects look like, but I definitely didn’t know about some of these techniques, especially those that survive social media compression. Warning that the video is very “YouTube” in style and crams a lot in, but there’s plenty to follow up on if your interest is piqued.
Afronauts - the stage show telling the true tale of Zambia’s 1960s space programme
But Nkoloso was undeterred. He wrote an op-ed titled We’re Going to Mars! With a Spacegirl, Two Cats and a Missionary, asked Unesco for a £7m grant, and continued work on his mission with 12 young men and women handpicked for his training programme. The curriculum was mostly delivered on a remote farm a few miles outside the capital city, Lusaka. It included swinging the “Afronauts”, as they were so named, on ropes that were then cut as they reached their height, dunking them in rivers, and rolling them down hills in barrels.
The worker coop bakery which I’m a member of has been homeless for five months thanks to the incompetence of the social housing cartel entrusted with building their new home. They’ve been working out of other small businesses and have just about kept afloat. (I’m technically still part of the team but have been on unpaid medical leave since before this with strict instructions not to get involved.)
Wishlisting: Stewart Lee - Basic Lee (Live At The Lowry) — Weird Walk look to be packaging up Lee’s complete back catalogue as a series of DVD/CD/books. I don’t need these, especially at £25 a pop, but I kinda want them on my shelf, which I guess is the point.