A day of mooching punctuated by an overdue visit from Roo to shoot the shit. Both our social batteries were low so it only lasted half an hour, but she brought brownies, which helped.
Otherwise I seem to have got my reading bug back, or maybe people have returned from holiday and are writing again. Quite a nice bundle of links down there.
In rabbit news a magpie came down and sat on the fence right where Wally was and they stared at each other for a good 10 minutes. Wally’s quite territorial at the moment when it comes to cats and squirrels but I’ve never seen him acknowledge a bird before, let alone a bird acknowledge the rabbits. This is the best photo I could get without disturbing them.
Then Lavander bundled over and tried to hump Wally’s head and the magpie flew away.
The reminded me of working in chain bookshops (Dillons and then Waterstones) and discovering that books were not the sacred objects my mother had worshipped. Anyone could produce a book about any old thing to a remarkable low quality bar and it would sit perfectly well on a bookshop shelf.
Regarding the point of the post, I would counter that “just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard” does make it a book, and that’s the issue. We’re fetishising forms that used to have a scarcity value but which have now become functionally free, and now we’re confused because we don’t have a better way of marking quality or taste boundaries.
Calls for urgent law change as UK’s largest water reuse system cannot be switched on
This is a kinda mad story about a housing development whose grey water recycling system hasn’t be able to function because UK legislation doesn’t understand grey water. It’s a great example of how radical changes to the climate are overtaking what’s became common sense. When there was too much water on this island we didn’t need to think about it. Now we have shortages we’re struggling to move from the notion that using treated drinking for flushing toilets and watering plants is a perfectly fine thing to do.
Homeless by GSA: The housing association bankrupting a community co-op
A really good accounting of the nightmare that’s afflicted the Stirchley cooperative building. I was involved in early-to-mid stages of this project and it became increasingly apparent that GSA were incompetent but still the only option we had, so we just had to hope they didn’t fuck it up. Reader, they fucked it up.
It is past time for you to quit Elon Musk’s X
I shouldn’t be surprised that some non-fascist people are still addicted to ex-Twitter despite it being a terrible idea for them personally and professionally. Most of this is the same old arguments but there’s some interesting stuff in there about “malformed publics” which I might follow up. (And yes, all social media, corporate or federated, is massively problematic but Twitter weaponised by a fascist should have scared everyone off years ago.)
- Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored — I was hoping to read this today but still haven’t. It looks good. Give it a go and let me know.
- Sly foxes emerge from boxes and under bridges in murals by Annatomix — I think I first saw Anna’s work on the side of a building off Hurst St 15 years ago? It was very striking then and it’s great to see how she’s developed.
- The Peter Thiel-linked race science network that penetrated Cambridge University and targeted Jason Arday — I’m reluctant to embrace conspiracy theories but I do think it’s worth keeping an eye on anything Thiel has a hand in.
In nerd media consumption news there are trailers for VisionQuest and Ahsoka which both look pretty OK? And I was going to tie this paragraph up with another nerd franchise trailer I saw today but it’s not in my YouTube history and I can’t for the life of me remember what it was for. Which says it all, I guess.