Stuff I’m doing.
Stuff I’m thinking about.
Stuff I’ve seen online and feel is worth sharing.
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No shade on writers trying to put food on the table by whatever means they can, but shit like this just kills my soul, one tiny cut at a time.
Big Thick Rivers, in map form!
A gorgeous overlay for OpenStreetMap.
The more upstreams a river has, the thicker the line.
I’m a little obsessed with the watershed south/west of Birmingham and it looks great here.
TIL the word lettuce is derived from lac, the Latin for “milk”, due to the milky fluid found in its stem. (via University Challenge or Only Connect, I forget which)
The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won.
About the USA, but it’s notable none of his counter-examples are Britain. Poverty and homelessness are essential the economic system working as it is designed to work, and we who benefit really need to start taking responsibility for that. (via)
Bit torn on the Observer/Guardian strike this week. On the one hand, always support striking workers, no question. On the other, I never liked the Obs as a print newspaper and resent its editorial presence on the G website. They should have retired it years ago. I’ll be glad to see it go.
I’d been hearing that the kids were all into vintage digital cameras these days because they covet the noise and imperfect colours. Back when those cameras were being released (circa 2005 I’d say) the big trend was for expired film. The colours were off and the processing was unpredictable. My friend Gareth even buried his film in the garden for a year to see what would happen to it.
A photo I took in 2007 on a point-and-shoot camera with “very expired Kodak PJ400 film”.
As I traded up my point-and-shoot digital cameras to a decent Nikon DSLR I realised that taking a “perfect” photo was now really easy. The camera would lock in a decent focus, exposure and white balance and the new Adobe Lightroom would finish the job. These weren’t necessarily good photos, of course. But they were technically spot on.
And so I found myself pointing my perfect digital camera through the dirty distorted viewfinder of a cheap 1950s camera for about five years, making digital photos that frankly looked like shit and were all the more interesting for it.
I never did it for nostalgic reasons (I hate nostalgia - it’s a disease that should always be fought). I did it for the same reason I like to put a 1970s manual lens on my current DSLR. It slows me down, forces me to work with the machine, and produces images that can surprise me.
Does it amuse me that the crappy digital camera in my attic are now coveted items? Yes, hugely. But I totally get it. Stuff is too perfect and that makes it boring. Broken, imperfect things are where it’s at.
What does Werner Herzog’s nihilist penguin teach us about life?
The natural world, as we learnt from the horrors of Grizzly Man, is not easily compared with ours. The structures we adopt for our stories – be they tragic, romantic or comedic – do not fit nature quite so tightly.
I rewatched Encounters the other week and this scene remains chilling. (via)
A delightfully rambling interview with Craig Thompson, author of Blankets, about, amongst other things, his new book Ginseng Roots.
The Imminence of the Destruction of the Space Program
Runaway orbital pollution is increasing the likelihood of catastrophic collisions destroying communications infrastructure and making space travel too dangerous to contemplate. Well done everyone.
The computer got quickly took the lead in Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe last night and I resolved to keep playing until I caught up. 160 games later…
(First to 100?)
The “random” flickering of an LED tea light is generated by sound chips from musical gift cards. You can hear them by wiring a speaker to your tea light. (via)
Endocrine management of transgender adolescents
A report from the French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology that appears (I’m no expert, clearly) to draw markedly different conclusions to the UK’s benighted Cass report, and strikes a much calmer and even tone. Fingers crossed it gets media coverage (lol).
I do not believe long-term illness necessarily makes me uninteresting as a writer, but I worry that a life of fatigue does. I worry it strips me of colour, movement, interaction, humanity. It isn’t just energy or activity that abandons me when I’m particularly fatigued, it’s words, it’s stories. Oh, thoughts remain, plenty of them, but they’re just footprints walked round and round in circles, overlapping, muddied, obsessive, no real use to anyone. I know not to dedicate too much time to them anymore.
100% all of this. Especially the thoughts.
Matt McGorry on having long Covid
As many of you will know, long Covid has fucked me over the last year, both physically and mentally, to the point where even writing about my condition is impossible. So yeah, I’m going to share testimonies from those who can.
After discovering the Prodigy’s Firestarter is built on a Breeders riff I’ve been revisiting the Last Splash album and I’m kinda astonished at how out there it is. Time has softened a lot of 90s stuff - even Big Black is comfort listening now - but Cannonball aside, it’s a very weird album.
This plan to pipe electricity from Morocco to the UK is actually fairly plausible and will probably become the norm for renewables (cf Iceland), but the route is kinda weird when you remember there’s a grid across the EU that already feeds into the UK. Maybe a sea cable is cheaper than upgrading?
An epic rant I could quote at length because it me actually.
But you know what, I shouldn’t have to understand the business models of every little icon on my stupid pocket supercomputer to get through life!
I feel the bit on jumping read-later and bookmarking services.
(via)
The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win
I have a bias, when understanding our current traumas, of looking to the 1970s for when it all went wrong, but as to why, this theory of wage stagnation plus elite overproduction looks interesting. Also has the LOL of Tucker Carlson = Lenin.
Nearly two decades of my online life, for better and worse, was defined by Twitter. That time is mercifully over, and this piece by someone with an intimate knowledge of how it dominated is an essential part of that closure, with some cutting words for the successors.
This crossword calendar, in which each month grid is filled with intersecting words, is fun and cool and all but, OMFG if it doesn’t start each week on Sunday. NOOOOO! Sunday is the second day of the weekEND. Weeks start on Monday! Jesus! (via)
Two thousand years ago a conceptual artist was making bone art.
(via)
Anil Dash’s lessons learned from burning things
One thing I like to do is make fires. It’s often considered a less socially-acceptable pastime than my other wood-destruction hobbies like writing and woodworking, but each of these ways of killing trees teaches me something vital,
I’m about a quarter through listening to the audiobook of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow. Graeber you may know as the author of Bullshit Jobs amongst other anarchist tomes, and this was a ten year project with Wengrow completed just before he died.
It looks like it might be a daunting dry tome but it’s surprisingly light and fun, helped in no small part by Malk Williams’s reading, reminiscent of Peter Jones’s performance of The Book in Hitchhikers.
The vibe is mostly “everything you’ve been told about the history of western civilisation is mostly wrong, or at best a bit more complicated”. There’s some lovely insights into the nature of pre-colonial civilisations but mostly it’s a gentle but damning teardown of anthropological assumptions about the superiority of western European culture and the inevitability of our systems of governance.
Their left-anarchist anti-capitalist hearts are clearly on their sleeves but there’s no stern hectoring, nor is there any sense of “well actually…” which would quickly get annoying. It’s fun!
Today’s photos taken in an attempt to achieve mindfulness, or whatever. www.flickr.com/photos/pe…
And so we enter the Cold War Steve jigsaw endgame - the traditional monochromatic sky where every piece is the same colour. This is where the sunken cost fallacy really bites one in the arse. You gotta respect his artistic integrity, I guess.
