Mostly a rest day today though I did get out on the scooter before the next heatwave hits. I’m enjoying photographing the same trees in the park and hope to have a good series across the seasons by next summer.
I remember when I took the previous shot at the start of July, when we’d only had a couple of heatwaves, I thought the grass was looking parched. Compared to now it was positively verdant.
The Life, Comic Art and Downfall of Joe Matt
Marking the publication of the complete Peep Show this is a lovely video recounting his complicated life and groundbreaking art with substantial contributions from Seth, Chester Brown and Matt Wagner.
Joe Matt is one of those characters that I sometimes feel a little too close to for my own liking and I found myself with some those feelings watching some of this. The urge for full disclosure confessional autobiography is one I’ve had from time to time and I can’t explain why it’s there. I think it comes from this desire to remove the tension between private and public by simply going full-steam into the public. It might be destructive and cause harm but at least it’d be over, whatever “it” is. Those in my life will be relieved that I’m not about to do that but I do find myself looking at folk like Matt and other no-filter artists with a tinge of jealousy.
Yes, this has come up in my therapy sessions.
Wellington second-hand bookstore’s mysterious orders
This is a story about AI training companies buying books in bulk to destructively scan them, focussing on a small bookshop at the end of that chain. I particularly like the inference that they’re just working sequentially through ISBN numbers and hit New Zealand publisher prefixes meaning this shop got all the orders.
This reminded me of seeing early book scanning devices a decade or so back which were designed to be non-destructive and required a human or at best a complicated robot hand to turn the pages. The new methodology is to slice the spine off and feed the pages through a document scanner, hence why book people are disgusted to find themselves implicated.
Like with the data centre cooling story yesterday, they are plenty of ways to do this sort of thing that aren’t offensive or destructive but they go against the efficiency-optimisation rubric of late-stage capitalism.
Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’
Turns out this is probably a silly-season bullshit story, but the fact that it’s plausible, because of course Harry Potter fans would do this, is telling.
I wish there was a neat term that meant liker-of-a-thing but without the fanatical fandom bullshit. Aficionado is too fancy. Ficio? Fici? Fish? Fishdom, like fandom but without the arseholes.
Bulldozers plow through Big Bend National Park, sparking fury in Texas
Weirdly enough I have a personal connection to this story. When I was reconnecting with my dad, who’d been living in Texas through the 80s after the divorce, we went camping in Big Bend in 1991. Everything they say about how awesome it is, in the literal sense of awe, is true. A fantastic, magical place. The “bend” is the path of the Rio Grande and on the other side is Mexico. One of the unofficial tourist things to do was to pay a guy to go over the border in his little boat, spend a bit of time in another country and then come back. It was a little weird with my dad peeling off dollar bills for this and that and the whole dynamic of them and us, but this is Texas which, I quickly learned, is a very strange and alien place. So I’ve crossed the border where those bulldozer are currently tearing shit up. Hmm.
- Nice short interview with John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and Shortbus fame.