The weather this last few days has been notable. It’s not been hot exactly but it certainly hasn’t been October-typical. I did put a thick jumper on the other day but then today I was in a t-shirt. It’s that transitional thing where a snapshot is misleading and a trend will be clear in hindsight, but it’s still quite odd. Today there was no wind. The trees were still and the clouds (pictured) were static. I watched them for a good 10 minutes and nothing moved.

Psychotherapy was good today. Getting into the nitty gritty on some stuff.

Lavender is still digging her hole.

I’ve continued to scour the Internet Archive for my otherwise vanished weblogs of yore and today came across 13,500 words I wrote in 2011 about what we then called hyperlocal media. It’s certainly something and I’m going to be intrigued to see what, if anything, people think of it when I bring it back. Around that time I was trading as a blogging and then a social media consultant and it’s very discombobulating looking back at my output. I was so confident! So sure of myself! A bit of prick at times! Wrong about a lot of things, of course, but then we all were, and in places I was pretty on the money.

I need to write a final newsletter on 72 Pete to tell the people subscribed there that they’re no longer going to be subscribed. Then I can make the replacement site live and start backfilling it with my writing archive. I keep remembering stuff I wrote that will need to be found and reformatted. So many words…

Today’s links

• Pirating the Pirates - A deep dive into the underground film restoration networks who work to make illegal digital copies of films close to their original quality (which the studios are either unwilling or unable to do) and how that work is now feeding back into official licensed archive releases by boutique BlueRay labels.
• The medieval Voynich manuscript has confounded scholars for centuries. Have they been reading it wrong all this time? — Always nice to come across a weird old book I hadn’t seen before, and this is quite the doozy with “pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text”. Once thought to have been written by a mad old man it’s likely a collection of folk knowledge and remedies, but no-one really knows because the language is lost. You can download the whole thing here and it’s really quite beautiful.
• We are going to kill “unalive” — Good rant from Anil Dash on the chilling effect algorithmic filtering is having on language, where terms like “unalive” have become common due to the perceived visibility penalty of writing “dead”. The perception is the thing. Because no-one really knows what the corporate platforms do and don’t punish, people play it safe and self-censor probably unnecessarily, reducing their expression further. A great read with some useful advice for pushing back.
• Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges — Rare to have a petition come my way that isn’t fuelled by bile and fury. This is simply a very good idea that I don’t think has been articulated before. And given that gov.uk websites are incredibly efficiently designed this shouldn’t cost too much to implement.