Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

A daily-ish posting on living with chronic fatigue, thinking about stuff and finding interesting things on the internet.
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Notes and links from 19 Oct

photograph of a group of leaves on a tree which are covered in droplets of rain.

Journal

The last few days of computer action have been spent on the big blog archive project. I’ve been knocking the Art Pete blog into shape, fixing image links and reminding myself what happened during a transformative period.

I spun this blog off around 2009 when I started selling my weird photos at market stalls and it’s a nice accounting of how my idea of what “an artist” is changed over subsequent years. So much of my learning was done in public back then, which lends to a fair amount of cringe as I publicly get things wrong, but it’s all learning that got me where I am today, and that’s good! I’m not sure when all this is going to go public, possibly sometime early December at this rate.

Otherwise I feel like my mood and energies have been in a bit of a holding pattern. I’ve not felt bad but I’d struggle to say I’ve felt good. I turned down some work which would have involved doing some training to a small room of people, something I did last year and enjoyed but it cost me 10 days of recovery, and I don’t think that’s a good idea. I was hoping to run it by my occupational therapist last week but she had to cancel last minute, so we’ll hopefully talk about it in December.

I feel like I’m moving from “I can do that with a cost” to “I don’t do that anymore” which might be the acceptance part of the five stages, or it might be me being scared. I honestly don’t know.

Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna

One of the things I’ve always been interested in is how one builds spaces, online and off, for community. I’m in no way an expert but it’s been a thread throughout my activities with zines, blogging, social media, art and co-ops. A reference point that keeps coming up is Vienna between the wars, specifically the coffee houses that all the people who delivered the 20th century hung out in.

This is another nice accounting of what they were like and why they worked but I was particularly drawn to this explainer of why cafe’s existed in the first place.

Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger.

The secret ingredient seems to be economic depression, freeing up spaces from the needs of capital to find new uses. The biggest barrier I’ve seen to any kind of community activity is finding a building, or land, for it to take place on, because land has value that just seems to keep increasing. It’s a terrible thing but I find myself wishing for a recession.

  • Blocking the Internet Archive will not stop AI 🪜 — Brewster Kahle on what’s lost when publishers stop them from archiving their work. The Internet Archive is an imperfect beast with many flaws but it’s probably the best internet thing after Wikipedia. The greatest flaw of the web is it has no memory and they provide it.
    • I use the Wayback Machine browser plugin to easily access older versions of websites. Very useful when a domain has expired or a website has an unwanted overhaul.
  • Should we put solar panels on railway lines? — Solar panels on railway lines are a stupid idea for many obvious reasons, but “there’s a better solution in plain sight if you scoot the whole thing sideways by a few feet”.
  • Sneezecount — The Walkspace crew had their exhibition launch and Andy got talking to Peter Fletcher who spent years counting and accounting for his sneezes. “I know that guy!” I exclaimed upon hearing of this encounter. Internet celebrity was weird back then.
  • The Sorrows Of Painting with GothRoss ‌(47:58) — “No mistakes, just unfortunate incidents."

From the blog archives:

While fiddling with my archives I’ve come across a few links that are not only still working but bear sharing again.