Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

A daily posting on living with chronic fatigue, thinking about stuff and finding interesting stuff on the internet.
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Notes and links from 27 Aug

Two rabbits on a parched but moist from the rains lawn in a back garden. One has its head up alert to something, the other is heads down eating grass. Wally and Lav, impatient for the grass to go green again now it’s rained.

There was a thing a few years ago, back when wildfires were rare and noteworthy, where people were noticing that their cameras weren’t taking accurate photos of the red skies, shifting the white balance so it looked a bit more “normal”.

I’ve been noticing it on a more mundane scale when photographing the rabbits on our lawn. The camera is fine when the grass is green but the deep orange of the parched turf makes it want to shift everything towards a colder blue. I’m quite used to this in urban and artificial environments — a blue or orange wall is always going to need some manual tweaking — but you can generally assume that a balanced composition of nature is going to automatically calibrate correctly.

I guess that’s a new marker of the climate catastrophe reaching you: when your camera can no longer approximate an accurate reproduction of how the world looks to you.

Happy plug-in solar day in the UK!

Of course after months of continuous sunshine the weather in Birmingham has been thunderstorms and steady rain throughout the day. You couldn’t make this shit up.

This looks to be the standard piece of kit, an 800w Solar Microinverter with cables for £129. (There are cheaper ones on the various websites but they’re not necessarily compatible with the UK.) In my head I was expecting to have to buy the panels with the inverter but it just occurred to me that any panels will probably do. There’s a healthy second hand market which might be worth exploring over the winter months, potentially making this even more affordable for next summer.

In the meanwhile it might be worth plugging some hydro generators in the drains…

How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’

Zoe Williams breaks down recent research in high functioning psychopaths, the sort you find in management and politics. I’ve often thought that the reason there’s such a prevalence of neurodivergent traits becoming a disabling problem is not that autism etc is growing but that the world has become harder for people who have those traits to function in. It’s not so much that the past was better — it most definitely wasn’t — but something about the end of the 20th century (let’s say the neoliberal era) turned the screws on the weirdos a bit more than usual.

The problem is that this world was constructed to suit a certain type of personality and that those types will tend to rise to the top, meaning they have no impetus to change it. It’s a bit like how voting reform is hard because the people who benefit from the current system are those with the power to change it, and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

That would bad enough, but when a those at the top are also psychopaths then things get a bit messy, because psychopathic traits don’t allow for stuff like empathy. Look at how the billionaire class are shitting on it as a concept. You’re not going to do the ‘right thing’ and give away your power because your brain is wired to see nothing wrong with the current situation.

I guess this is how revolutions start.

Woke what? Let’s be fucking serious

A response to the “Woke 1.0 was a bit much” discourse that seems to be particularly prevalent in the New York Times, pointing out that while yes, some leftist voices were very annoying in 2020 they weren’t actually in a position to make any real changes.

The key bit for me is this perception that the “crazy” online stuff, as amplified by the algorithms, has become the received history of what was actually going on on the ground, and anyone who’s been even slightly involved in community organising knows there’s a huge gulf between the two. It’s why online commentators were so surprised when last year’s anti-ICE protests seemed to come from nowhere. Because they weren’t organised online — they were the result of years of seemingly boring (but ultimately rewarding) drudge work in neighbourhoods.

Leftists and progressives can be infuriating, especially when they get a sense that they might be able to make their strongly held utopian ideas come true. But they soon get over it. I know I did.

Fish Tales

There’s only one way to get me to read about the Nolan’s Odyssey this summer and that’s to have the redoubtable Erik Davis let the tendrils of his weird brain spread over it. Naturally he brings in Moby Dick and the Leviathan but also spins off into other movies and books, which I appreciated. (The Love That Remains is already on my watchlist.)

And of course while he’s much more generous that I would be there’s a few digs at Nolan’s sexless, anthropocentric normie style.

And while much has been made of the open-ocean shooting conditions behind the storm sequence, with actors puking as they got soaked with actual spay, I found the scene lackluster, and for one specific technical reason. Nolan anchored the cameras to the longboat, which means the film’s POV unwaveringly retains the level stability of the boat vis-à-vis the roiling rollercoaster disorientation of the sea. Besides diminishing our own participation in the wooze, this decision retains agency with the humans rather than giving it over to the ocean.

I might have to actually hate-watch the bloody film now.