Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Why yes, I did just spend £10 plus shipping on an empty box.

Essential tools to make the modern web more bearable

Always good to keep up to date on the latest developments in blocking and bypassing corporate nonsense. Big win for me is the SocialFocus plugin for taming YouTube’s clickbait.

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Melville to Bannon: How We Got Here (Truth Isn’t Truth)

A 30 minute accounting of the intellectual steps that led to our post-truth reality (if reality is even the right word). I never know if I find this stuff reassuring or terrifying. Bit of both.

It’s made from selections from David Shields' feature film How We Got Here, which I’m looking forward to getting hold of, and there’s also a book. (via)

Ben Teitelbaum on Traditionalism

Since its birth in the early 20th century, Traditionalism has defined itself against modernity and Enlightenment values. Traditionalist thinkers celebrated hierarchy, denounced the idea of progress, and regarded liberal secularism, capitalism, and communism as aligned forces working to replace social, cultural and political norms. Ethnographer Benjamin Teitelbaum had been studying Traditionalism for years as a sort of novelty, associated with a restless subsection of the right — too antisocial for activism and largely without influence. And yet when Steve Bannon entered the White House in 2017, reports suggested he was an avid reader of Traditionalist teachings.

A Dance to Jules Feiffer at 95

A brief (he is 95 after all!) interview with the master by Peter Kuper.

I was there because I fucking wanted to change everything, and I was trying to figure out how best to do that.

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Solar Analemma 2024

This year-spanning series of images reveals a pattern in the seasonal drift of the Sun’s daily motion through planet Earth’s sky. The figure-eight curve was captured in exposures taken only at 1pm local time on clear days from Kayseri, Turkiye.

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A mention in the Spiegelman interview made me realise I’d not looked at the Garbage Pail Kids since they were all over my school circa 1985-6, so I dug out some scans and went down memory lane. Like a lot of kids things they’re simultaneously tamer and edgier than I remembered, as befits the fever-dreams of weirdo cartoonists filtered through a corporate card company. A bit confused that Fiona, only four years my senior, has no memory of them, but 13 and 17 are very different ages…

Revelations in the Wink of an Eye

Jeffrey Lewis has published a 144 page book about Watchmen. Not sure if I’m intrigued enough to order a copy but I am certainly fascinated by its very existence and what, if anything, he can add to the discourse.

An interview with Joe Sacco

Includes a deep dive into the importance of underground comics (along with the news-to-me that he edited an 80s anthology called Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy)

Those underground artists, what they were doing was really going far to the boundaries of the acceptable, then crossing over into unacceptable territory and going even further and planting all these flags. That was incredibly useful for those who followed. They showed what was possible, whatever you might think of their work.

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All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky

If Bluesky were like a physical mail delivery service, the way it operates is like dumping all the mail at the post office.

The freedom to move between corporate behemoths - yay.

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

“I feel there’s a 5,000-pound mouse breathing down my neck.”

35 years after Maus, a documentary is out soon and he’s working on a comic about Gaza with Joe Sacco. Still as spiky as ever.

Jonathan Chandler interviewed by Hayley Campbell

As a teen I would go into the Ipswich comic shop and was trying to get into superhero comics but was really just forcing myself. Then I gravitated to the dark bit at the back of the shop where the alt stuff was kept. After the miles of surface you’d get in the X-Men books I fell down this other world like a really deep well.

Why are all social networks structured around being either loosely public to the entire world, or only a coven of your blood oath relatives?

a.wholelottanothing.org/meet-mozi…

Mastodon kinda fits this niche for me - there’s enough barriers-to-entry to keep it obfuscated from the wider world - but it’d be nice to have something similar for my normie friends too.

Boo-yay!

Don’t Bleed on the Artwork

A beautiful piece of writing, ostensibly about working in a picture framing shop, but about so much more. People bring in their treasures and Wendy carefully puts them behind glass, marvelling all the while. A delight.

I love the art so much I sometimes weep.

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Molly Soda’s .gif guide

An antidote to the shopping bollocks, internet archaeologist Molly Soda pulls out some of her favourite animated gifs from the sublime to the ridiculous. I loved how she hunts through online archives like they’re charity shops and flea markets, looking for perfect lost gems.

Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome

Not really news, but of note as it starts with a thorough and insightful analysis of the Judge Dredd comics in the Atlantic. If you’d told me that would happen when I was a kid in the 80s… I never know if this is a good or bad thing. (via)

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.