Didn’t sleep too well, pretty tired today. This has definitely been a recovery week.

What ME/CFS is, and how it’s wrecking me ‌(30:36)

Of all the people I’ve seen talking about their chronic fatigue this is probably the closest to my experience, though everyone has it different and there are plenty of things that don’t match. Definitely worth watching if you want a rough sense of what I’m going through.

The biggest issue for me has always been how boring my life now is. I decided a year ago I wouldn’t let that stop me recording my CFS life here because it’s too easy for people in my situation to become invisible (the total silence from politicians about Long Covid has been somewhat horrifying) but I am very aware that those bits at the top of each entry can get a bit relentlessly monotonous.

I’m slightly intrigued by this notion that I might have always had it in a mild form and it just recently became disabling thanks to the triple whammy of Covid, stress and grief, but I’m taking that with a pinch of salt because so little is known about CFS that it’s a fertile ground for speculation and straw-grasping.

That said, I remember in my 20s someone asking me how I was and I replied “tired” to which he snapped back “you’re always tired” implying he was sick of hearing it. I hadn’t realised I did this and have made a concerted effort since not to tell the truth when people ask how I am (this overlaps with autism, of course!) but yeah, now I think about it I’ve always been tired. And it’s always been boring.

Linky links

• Pearl: The new new wave of anti-heroes ‌(15:08) — Grace Lee is back with her first video essay in ages, and it’s a good one, using the Mia Goth horror movie to unpick 50 years of anti-heroes.
  • Her back catalogue is well worth exploring but I think my favourite quintessential Grace Lee video would be Car Parks: What do they mean? Do they mean things?! Let’s find out!
• British journalism and polling are both utterly implicated in the Farage funding scandal — Dunt goes deep with some interesting insights into how the polling industry works.
• The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism — “The Battle of Legitimate Concerns."
• The cartographers who took on centuries of western bias — The story of how the UN accepted the Equal Earth projection. The lesson here to me is that there’s no perfect flat map and each projection has specific uses. I’m sure people who actually depend on flat maps switch between them all the time. Do scroll to the end for Hao Xiaoguang’s wonderful projection which looks to me like an exploded Pangea. I’d love a poster of that.
• Tom Watson joins Palantir — I try not to get too wound up by this sort of thing but I used to like Watson. He was one of the first politicians to blog back in the day and as a local MP would come to various tech meetups. His work on Digial Economy Act and the Murdoch phone hacking scandal was admirable and it felt like he was one of us. I even voted for him as deputy leader, in the vain and idiotic hope that a Corbyn/Watson led party could unite the Labour party. Never making that mistake again. I guess that period ground out whatever I liked about him as he’s been turning to the dark side ever since. A shame.
• W/ Dude — Following links during a Wikitok scroll I found myself wondering about the origin of the term “dude” and it’s pretty fascinating. A dude was a fancy guy from the city with great clothes, which makes me wonder if it’s also the origin of the word duds.
• 🎶 Before and Afterlife by Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang and David Sylvian — Came up on Night Tracks and totally sucked me in. Delicious mix of trumpet, samples and spoken word. Here’s a nice long blog post about it.
• 🎶 Sugar on Blackstone by Kristin Hersh — New solo album just dropped. We’re going to see her play at All Saint’s Church, Kings Heath next Saturday so best swot up on these tracks.