Another doing-things-away-from-the-computer day in which I might have overdone it but I tried to be careful about pacing so we will see. Fingers crossed for no big crash tomorrow.

Things involved getting the third water butt connected to my array at the right level so none of them overflow (or at least they all overflow at the same time) and then testing the connections. The connections leak but I had a feeling they would because they only have washers on one side and the butts are slightly curved so no matter how tightly I screwed them in there’s likely still a gap.

Yes I did text Fiona asking for help with a tight screw in the butt. It’s not easy to do a full reach around in those things.

Sorry. Not sorry.

The other thing was helping Fi put up some shelves in her office. She could do most of it but isn’t too confident about drilling into the bricks and since this is something I only recently figured out how to do without totally fucking it up I offered to expend some exertion points. The trick, as with most power tools, is to let the drill do the work. You have to apply a bit of pressure to make sure it stays in place, but as long as dust is coming out of the hole you know it’s steadily doing its job. No need to push hard.

We also remembered to put something down to catch the dust, something I usually don’t think to do, and it made for a delightful image (see above). If I was still into transmedial nonsense I’d have fed the image into a spectrograph to see what it sounded like.

[10 minutes later]

OK, I fed it through an image-to-sound converter and this is what it sounds like.

Stewart Lee on divorce, his adoption and the twisted children’s poem that explains his life

I thoroughly enjoyed this interview with Zoe Williams this morning. It’s a bit of a cliche that beardy middle aged blokes like me like Stewart Lee but I’m happy to lean into that. I didn’t fully realise how much he influenced how I wrote until I read one of his script books and saw the rhythm of my own work. Since then I’ve accepted him as my god.

• Williams also interviewed Bridget Christie last year. Collect the set.

A trove of clip art from the 90s, with multiple images of cows and chickens

A new-to-me blog which doesn’t seem to be updated that often which is a shame as I really liked this post about the time when CDs of clip art were big business, or at least a business.

What’s fascinating about this collection is how vintage so much of it is, clearly scanned from books of public domain images that themselves used to be a business before desktop publishing. I remember Dover Books were a major supplier of such things. And of course 90s zine-heads will be familar with Sean Tejaratchi who would raid these catalogues and other archives for gems for his publication Crap Hound.