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 3 Nov

Black and white photo of two rabbits in a garden on a wet day.

Journal

A few days with no rain forecast so we started work waterproofing the front of the shed today. The storms the other week made it clear this was going to need to be sorted before the winter properly kicks in and I’d figured out a way to do it slowly without too much exertion. There’s now a strip of felt stapled to the height extension we had put in which should direct any horizontal rain down to the rabbit run. Fingers crossed for the next storm.

  • Have the experts who believed in a single autism spectrum changed their minds? — John Harris, whose son is autistic, talks to a number of people whose work informed how we understand autism today about what I guess you could call the fallout of all that. I’m sure some will have a different reaction but I found this to be a very reasonable, level-headed piece that illustrates how our understanding of human quirks and disorders is constantly developing, and rightly so. Plenty to think about and digest here.
  • Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics — A story as old as time, I’m afraid. The corporate platforms can give you incredible reach but you have to compromise and play by their rules, and they will fuck you over anyway in the end. It’s always some variation of Albini’s problem with music essay with this stuff. The platforms performed a cruel bait and switch and while that temporary safe harbour they teased for a couple of decades did help establish a lot of great stuff (I’m always astonished how many more weird cartoonists are active now compared with the pre-internet zine days) it was never going to last. It’ll be interesting to see if and how these scenes survive the next decade.
  • Why you should treat charisma as a red flag — There’s been a couple of times in my life when I’ve realised I was having a charismatic effect on people and it scared the shit out of me, partly because I had no idea I was any good at that sort of thing but mostly because of the power I briefly felt. I’m not saying I was able to do any serious damage but it was intoxicating, like finding the one trick that would bend others to my will. Even since then I’ve been extremely wary of people who use charisma to get people to do stuff and try to catch it in myself.
  • Sorry, you’re not notable — Fiona and I both agreed that the Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends newsletter was jam packed with almost too much goodness this week. The first two, on Wikipedia notability and streaming, are fab.
  • The Story of Democracy — Rousseau said we need an educated electorate free from influence of the wealthy for it to work. Ah well.

🎶 🎶 🎶

  • PISS: you made me / skin on linen — At first glance PISS are like a thousand bands I’ve seen before. Freshfaced young lady with three nerdy guys making a proper racket behind her. But appearances are deceptive as this band are doing something else entirely. Over 30 tight minutes singer Taylor Zantingh delivers a carefully crafted polemic against sexual violence that pulls no punches, drawing in quotes from figures from Andrea Dworkin to Manon Garcia while the music rises to meet her fury. It’s less an album of tracks as a piece of performance art. In short, it goes hard in a manner which is familar yet utterly eviscerating.