A quiet day, although I did finally receive a couple of widgets I’d accidentally ordered from China on eBay (hate it when that happens, not so much for the shipping time as for the wrongness feeling of getting something so cheaply from the other side of the fucking world) so I could finish the second stage of the shed water conservation system, connecting the rear butt to the three side butts so all the butts flow into each other. Now I just need a few days of heavy rain…
We watched Once Upon a Time in Space which, as a childhood space nut, I found fascinating as it covered the space stuff that came after my obsession. I was always an Apollo-head and while the Shuttle was cool I wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening through the 90s. This is basically about the space stations, from Mir to the ISS, right up to the present day deterioration of US/Russian collaboration. My biggest takehome was how those involved in the space programmes had to buy into the idealism and utterly suspend any cynicism about why their governments were funding these trips to space, and their disappointment when Realpolitik kicks in is palpable. But before that their accounts of floating in a tin can spinning around the earth are beautiful to behold.
I needed to declare browser bankruptcy so to mark the end of September I posted this bundle of links earlier today. I haven’t read any of them in full but I reckon they might be of interest to what passes for my readership demographic. Click with caution!
- Devon exhibition explores ‘cultural world’ of fungi — Interesting exhibition of artists working with fungi in Exeter.
- Static site generators for beginners — My attempts at building a new website using Eleventy have stalled due to overwhelm with the programming of it all but I’m still keen to figure out a way to DIY this shit. This was a really nice guide written in lovely language that made me feel hopeful again.
- Compost.cc — This isn’t about composting but looks very much in my wheelhouse from an archiving perspective. “Many important cultural archives lack visibility. Some are carefully preserved by archival staff without the knowledge or resources to host digital copies. Others disappear. Institutions lose funding, servers go offline, hard drives fail, political regimes change. When a digital archive depends on a single organization or a single server, it is only as durable as that organization’s budget or that server’s uptime. compost.cc invites people to share in the work of preservation — distributing archives across many machines in many places, maintained by the people who care about them. Our interest is not in decentralization for its own sake, but in collective responsibility: more hands, more resilience, more of a sense for what it takes to keep shared knowledge alive."