This is my notebook. Any patterns or themes are in hindsight. Typos are usually fixed eventually.

I’m a 50-something man living in Birmingham, UK. I’ve been chucking stuff up on websites since 1999, before that zines. This is all I know. Currently mentally and physically fucked by post-Covid chronic fatigue and trying to figure out how to be in the world again, online and off.

Currently I’m using a daily notes format with a short status update, sometimes about my adventures living with chronic fatigue, sometimes not, followed by links to various things I’ve seen on the internet, sometimes with additional commentary, sometimes not. It is, in many ways, a classic weblog, a log of the web as I’ve experienced it.

I write it through the day in short bursts (due to the aforementioned chronic fatigue) and then around 10pm I give it a final polish and shunt it onto the internet. Then I have a rest.

The goal is to get me writing. I’ll never be as productive as I was before Covid but hopefully I can use this to reach out to my people and start to feel human again.

I hope you like it!

Taxonomy

Within a daily note I like break my links into categories.

• Status is effectively a blog post, sometimes long, more often short. It’s my attempt to write something coherent about my life. Please be aware that I am a very unreliable narrator and my description of my condition will often be overly optimistic, because I need to be optimistic in order to get better. The little victories are worth mentioning. The crushing shite that surrounds them less so.

• Reading is articles, essays and blog posts of a reasonable length. This is also the catch-all category.

• Looking is for photography and visual art.

• Watching is basically YouTube because what other online videos are there.

• Listening is usually podcasts or radio shows. I used to listen to a lot overnight before being prescribed melatonin. I try to link to the canonical website but sometimes that doesn’t exist, which is just insane but there you go, in which case I’ll use Apple podcasts.

• Music is usually something I’ve been listening to rather than links about music, but sometimes it’s both. I try to link to Bandcamp if possible as it doesn’t require a login or subscription to listen, and musician’s websites remain awful.

• Clicking is games or things that require the click of a mouse to interact with.

I will make up new categories as necessary.

Colophon

Daily notes are drafted through the day in a text document using iA writer on my Mac and in the Dropbox app if I read something on my stupid phone.

The blog runs on Micro.blog and is crossposted to Mastodon and Bluesky. Daily notes are sent out by email. I post a screenshot to Instagram because my non-internet friends are there and I miss them now I’m homebound.

RSS feed: notes.peteashton.com/feed.xml

Other stuff I have online is listed at peteashton.com.

Email is always the best way to contact me: pete@peteashton.com

Last edited 25 May 26