Journal

An eventful couple of days thanks to my deciding to get my flu and covid vaccines and there being a slot available right after my psychotherapy session. I don’t think I had a particularly strong reaction before but this one was like getting actual covid, albeit for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. Lots of shivering and sweats and headaches and very little sleep. Not pleasant but not too worrying since I knew it would pass, and it did.

I had no idea if I was eligible for free vaccines due to my CFS, and the online form didn’t help me figure it out, so I said I was and expected to be challenged at some point for evidence. But on the day the pharmacist just jabbed me and let me go, so I guess I am? They have all my details so presumably there’s a tick on my records, or something. I suppose my message here is if you think you might be eligible for a free NHS vaccine due to a disability or long term condition, try applying for one because you might be! (To be clear, I’m happy to pay if that’s the situation we’re in now, but I’m not going to quibble if I make it past Checkpoint Charlie without being shot, as it were.)

The day after all that I’d scheduled for Steve Lawson to pop over, one my friends who I’d allocated high risk for energy draining conversations. As anyone who knows him will understand one does not sit quietly in a room with Steve Lawson! But I do love him dearly so after bumping into him at the Kristin Hersh gig decided it would be worth some controlled exposure. We set a timer for 30 minutes and then Fi took him outside for more chat while I rested. It was nice!

One thing we talked about was the weirdness of being a jobbing musician, which he is, and having friends who the rest of us think are proper famous. At the Kristin Hersh gig Fi and I were going to see a proper rock star while he was checking in with a mate who was in the country. Because of course he was — knowing people like her is part of his job. But to us he’s just kooky Steve who we met on the internet and who then moved to our neighbourhood. (I was slightly surprised to see he has a Wikipedia page, not because he doesn’t deserve one but because my friends don’t have Wikipedia pages.)

Oh yeah, we went to a gig the other week. I didn’t write about it because it was one of the things that caused a big crash and by the time I was writing again it wasn’t “what I did today” material anymore. On paper it was fine — a seated acoustic gig in a church — but ultimately it reminded me of why I stopped going to gigs a decade or so ago.

I can’t properly articulate it but there’s something about the whole process that just doesn’t work for me in middle age. The acts are great and the audiences as mostly my kinds of people, but all my alarms get triggered and I need to leave. Of course I have a long history of going to gigs so every so often I forget and figure I’ll give it a go, maybe it’ll be different this time.

Nope.

Linkety-links

• We shouldn’t laugh at Ladybird books but celebrate them — An overdue look at the kids books of British youth which embraced post-war modernism and reached working-class families.
• Deadline, Hugo Tate and sober dogs: An interview with Nick Abadzis, part 2 — A great interview by Sascha Mardou with one of her and my cartooning heroes. As I think I mentioned before I got to know Nick and his wife briefly in the early 2000s and they were lovely and kind people who I remember fondly (and wish I’d stayed in contact with, but that’s how it goes when you’re me…).
• Francis Fukuyama tells the truth about Iran, AI, and the Midterms (feat. @ContraPoints ) — Fukuyama interviewed podcast-style by two transsexuals is not what I thought I needed this week but fuck me if this isn’t perfect. Instant subscribe.
• ‘I stockpiled 600 cans of food for an emergency’ — Six a day for him and the rest for his neighbours and family. What a mensch.
• “March of Intellect” Cartoons (1828–29) — I love historic visions of the future for what they say about the past as much as anything. These are wonderful, particularly the one of the “jolly automaton” sweeping away the staid establishment. Some great writing in too. I love the phrase “patchwork knowledge itself, practically applied and made widely available” which sounds like how I operate, for better or worse. It’s also, I think, refreshing to see futures which are different to the ones we’ve been iterating to death since the 1950s. If they can think of something else, maybe we can one day manage it too.
• “All these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.” — Marcin Unsung blog mentions datamoshing with a nice short explainer as to how P frames and I frames work in video encoding. I played about with this a bit back in my glitch days and it’s a lot of fun.