Nothing much to report today. Bit of a fuzzy head so a rest day, all in all.

Not overly happy with my link-notes below. Can’t seem to get the phrasing right, but also my judgement might be off and it’s all fine actually. I will publish and be damned.

• 🎶 John McCowen - Pressure Chords feat. Lucy Railton, Weston Olencki (Full album is on subscription streamers) — Came across this while listening to a new-to-me Radio 3 show, Unclassified, for new composers who haven’t found a niche. It’s a bit hit and miss but good for finding something a bit different. This caught my ear due to the long pauses between notes where you can hear the performers breathing, and as a trombonist in a previous life I appreciated the impossibility of cleanly starting a quiet note on that damned instrument. But I’m mainly posting it because this morning I accidentally started playing the album on my phone and spent 10 minutes wandering around the house and garden trying to figure out where that darn noise was coming from. It was only when Fi said it was following me that I clocked.
• Are Reddit Boys’ struggle apartments actually the future of design? — I found this meditation on the photos from r/malelivingspace fascinating as I would never have lived as minimalisticly as this as a single man in the 90s and 2000s. I essentially lived in a storage unit with rooms built around my stuff which I carted from home to home. The idea of living without possessions would have been aspirational and utterly unrealistic. Obviously I couldn’t afford my own place, so we’re talking a room in a shared house, not an apartment, and maybe that voids my observations. Maybe men did live like this if they had the means. via
• Historic England’s vanishing archive — This is framed as a DRM failure, of favouring copyright protection over access, which it is, but I think it’s emblematic of a bigger issue which which has been building over the last decade. A couple of decades back, as the technology matured, heritage institutions started digitising their archives. Presuming they didn’t then dispose of the originals this was generally a good thing but it was funded on the assumption that this digitisation would increase public access. The weak point in this is that access was usually done through a website, and institutions often do not take their websites seriously. Yesterday when I posted about the Snow film I noticed there were a number of links in the YouTube description to BFI websites. The first link to the DVD went 404-not-found, while the second, “for more information about Snow” didn’t resolve until I hacked the url to remove the s from https, and then it’s like going back in time. The issue, I think, is that organisations like the BFI do not consider their websites to be part of their archive. They’re at best temporary exhibitions and at worst publicity vehicles. Sure, the archive itself is safe, but online access to it is temporary, vulnerable to the next branding or funding overhaul.
• Meet the real AI “rogue agent”: Lord Tom Watson — Carole Cadwalladr expresses disappointment in an old ally in her inimitable way.
• Schopenhauer’s half-empty glass