A fairly nondescript day. Pottered around a bit and didn’t accidentally start a project, so that’s good. Conserving energy and resting properly. Bit bored though.

Trying not to get wound up about the Zionism-is-racism stuff at the Green Party conference. I have no idea if Zionism is or isn’t racism but I’ve had a look at who’s pushing it and they seem to be exactly the sort of wankers who make progressive and community organising such a fucking ballache to be involved with. In my experience they’re incapable of actually doing anything useful and so hide behind ideological purity tests that drain energy and distract from the real work of bringing people together to make a difference. I dearly hope the Greens' policy processes are robust enough to get them to fuck off.

Other than that, feeling OK.

Today’s links

• A hacker’s guide to bending the universe — A lovely piece of writing from 2016 by Marcin Wichary about how, as a teen desperate to play Civilization, he made a broken CRT monitor usable with a software hack. Contains a nice account of how a CRT works which would go nicely into a collection of “describing a previously ubiquitous thing to someone who’s never experienced it before”. Also explains why old computer games played at lower resolutions, which I never really appreciated before.
• Doomscroll #56: Naomi Klein — A YouTube comment describes this, in I hope a nice way, as “a really heartfelt convo between a mom and her son” and there is a generational aspect to this. I’ve be liking how Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll project is a concerted effort to figure out how to unite the left to defeat the fash and the best episodes, to me, are ones like this where he talks to someone whose been in this fight for a while.
• In Our Time: Casablanca — One of the few films that actually makes this emotionally stunted fool cry so I knew a lot of the mythology and back story. Shame they didn’t pick up on the homoerotic subtext (Renault is totally in love with Rick and totally gets his man at the end) but you can only do so much in these shows. There’s also a lot to be said about how many of the cast and crew were up against the HUAC McCarthyite witch-hunt just years after making this anti-fascist classic, which is barely touched upon. Scratches the surface but if you know nothing this is a great introduction.
• Reissue of the Week: Elastica’s Debut Album is “Untouchable Louche Perfection” — I have fond memories of playing this album over and over though I hadn’t listened to it for a long time. So I dragged it up on the streamer. It’s pretty good, I guess? Bits are amazing but then bits remind me of Kenickie, and not in a great way. I mean, I love Kenickie but for being Kenickie, and Elastica are supposed to be something different? And as the album continued I remembered that while these people looked amazingly cool and sexy they were also arseholes and that whole Britpop / NME Camden scene was a fucking shitshow that needed to die and the only reason I still have a lingering fondness for Elastica is because they released one great album, introduced us to The Wire’s Pink Flag, and then vanished into rehab.