Journal:

Spent a couple of days turning the first couple of years of blogging (2000-2002) into monthly pages for the forthcoming archive site. Back then I was using Blogger and it was pretty much a status-update tool, albeit without a word limit. Most of the posts are a sentence or two and none of them have titles, so it’s a bit like Twitter was, maybe?

In August 2002 a relationship ended and I moved into a shared flat which prompted me to start afresh, using titles this time (it’s very notable how from then on the chapters of my life can be delineated by my setting up a new blog) so those two years form a nice package of figuring out what it means to write a public diary that is also a web log. I find most of my early writing really cringe, of course, but not to the point where I want to delete it all. Well, not most of it.

This post from March 2001 caught my eye.

I’m going to the doctors' tomorrow. Today I was off sick. Thing is I don’t feel ill, just very very tired. Sunday I slept all day and today I slept all day (hence why I’m up at 2.30am). When I’m awake I can’t concentrate and keep having to lie down. When I’m at work it’s a struggle and my body gets jabs of pain now and again.

This has been going on for a number of months, since November at a guess, but now it’s getting to the point where I can’t cope with it any more. I need this cleared up. I need to know if there’s actually something chemically wrong with my body or if it’s just my lifestyle. But above all I want to be able to get through a week in one piece.

I’m not going to read too much into it but fuck me if that doesn’t sound like my current chronic fatigue. Back then my inabilities to cope were usually put down to depression and work stress, which have since been superseded by my autism diagnosis as the preferred explainer, but it hadn’t really occurred to me to look at my 20s through a CFS lens, something that I thought was only relevant post-Covid.

(For the record I see diagnoses as templates of symptoms which you try out and, if they fit, you explore the treatments that come with them. They do not have to define you and they can be imperfect models. You can also have more than one at once.)

Annotated linkage:

• A Pattern Language ‌(15:25) — I hadn’t heard of Christopher Alexander’s book and enjoyed this overview of how it inspired the wiki and object oriented programming, amongst other things. Interesting to see footage from Stuart Brand’s How Buildings Learn TV series, making this another spigot on his counterculture-to-internet pipeline.
• Comics and graphic novels at the V&A — Two decades ago my friend Andy Roberts died in a traffic accident. He was a musician and cartoonist and his extensive collection of comics ranged from camp superheroes to underground zines. It was bequeathed to the V&A museum and not much was heard of it again. This is not a problem — archiving is a notoriously slow process — but I’m delighted to see, via Jenni Scott, that’s its part of this overview of the museum’s comics collections.
• Are you emergency ready? — The UK government’s guide to not depending on just-in-time logistics is out and it’s not bad actually! I like how this bit emphasises getting to know your neighbours as the first step. I went through the checklist and we’re pretty well stocked (though do need to get a stash of drinking water in) which I think is mostly due to disliking shopping and bulk buying where possible.
  • Reminder that Jules and Paul wrote up their advice for what to store and how.
  • Sadly we’re probably not doing this on a national level.
• Local Wikipedia — “Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you." I’m pretty sure this is available from Wikipedia itself, maybe only on the phone app, but this is a nice interface and a lovely reminder of what the mashup web used to be like.
• Pop Will Eat Itself - Def Con One — from the Every Number One in the NME Indie Charts blog a surprisingly in depth look at an record most people have forgotten about. I, however, think about this record ofter, usually trying to figure out if it’s any good or not. via
• A functioning iPod simulation can be found on the Apple Music 404 page. It’s lovely, but also somewhat bittersweet. I miss that brief window when there was a great physical interface for digital music.
• 🎶 Dynamite with a Laserbeam: Queen as Heard Through the Meat Grinder of Three One G — Found in my archives with a link to the Melt Banana track which is very nice but the rest of the album has some real gems. I’m a big fan of Tourettes Lautrec’s cover of “Killer Queen”.
• 🎶 Shovel Dance Collective: Everything in Readiness — I’m really enjoying how properly weird|wyrd British folk music has become over the last few years. It might have been a long time coming and I just wasn’t paying attention, but this feels really transgressive while also respecting the traditions.
  • Alexis Petridis’s 5 star album review — “The music on Everything in Readiness careens unpredictably from gentle lo-fi recordings caked in distortion and tape hiss to the tumultuous, surging racket they serve up on their version of the traditional coalminer’s song Jowl, Jowl and Listen; from singing unaccompanied by anything but the sound of birdsong to the disquieting ambient shimmer of Who Killed Cock Robin? A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), which sounds like it was recorded in a vast, echoing crypt."