* * * The weather this last few days has been notable. It’s not been hot exactly but it certainly hasn’t been October-typical. I did put a thick jumper on the other day but then today I was in a t-shirt. It’s that transitional thing where a snapshot is misleading and a trend will be clear in hindsight, but it’s still quite odd. Today there was _no wind_. The trees were still and the clouds (pictured) were static. I watched them for a good 10 minutes and nothing moved. Psychotherapy was good today. Getting into the nitty gritty on some stuff. Lavender is still digging her hole. * * * I’ve continued to scour the Internet Archive for my otherwise vanished weblogs of yore and today came across 13,500 words I wrote in 2011 about what we then called hyperlocal media. It’s certainly something and I’m going to be intrigued to see what, if anything, people think of it when I bring it back. Around that time I was trading as a blogging and then a social media consultant and it’s very discombobulating looking back at my output. I was so confident! So sure of myself! A bit of prick at times! Wrong about a lot of things, of course, but then we all were, and in places I was pretty on the money. I need to write a final newsletter on 72 Pete to tell the people subscribed there that they’re no longer going to be subscribed. Then I can make the replacement site live and start backfilling it with my writing archive. I keep remembering stuff I wrote that will need to be found and reformatted. So many words… * * * ## Today’s links * Pirating the Pirates - A deep dive into the underground film restoration networks who work to make illegal digital copies of films close to their original quality (which the studios are either unwilling or unable to do) and how that work is now feeding back into official licensed archive releases by boutique BlueRay labels. * The medieval Voynich manuscript has confounded scholars for centuries. Have they been reading it wrong all this time? — Always nice to come across a weird old book I hadn’t seen before, and this is quite the doozy with _“pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text”_. Once thought to have been written by a mad old man it’s likely a collection of folk knowledge and remedies, but no-one really knows because the language is lost. You can download the whole thing here and it’s really quite beautiful. * We are going to kill “unalive” — Good rant from Anil Dash on the chilling effect algorithmic filtering is having on language, where terms like “unalive” have become common due to the perceived visibility penalty of writing “dead”. The perception is the thing. Because no-one really knows what the corporate platforms do and don’t punish, people play it safe and self-censor probably unnecessarily, reducing their expression further. A great read with some useful advice for pushing back. * Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges — Rare to have a petition come my way that isn’t fuelled by bile and fury. This is simply a very good idea that I don’t think has been articulated before. And given that gov.uk websites are incredibly efficiently designed this shouldn’t cost too much to implement.

Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a social crisis playing out behind closed doors, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

* * * Didn’t sleep too well, pretty tired today. This has definitely been a recovery week. * * * **What ME/CFS is, and how it’s wrecking me** _‌(30:36)_ Of all the people talking about their chronic fatigue this is probably the closest to my experience, though everyone has it different and there are plenty of things that don’t match. Definitely worth watching if you want a sense of what I’m going through. The biggest issue for me has always been how boring it is. I decided a year ago I wouldn’t let that stop me recording my CFS life here because it’s too easy for people in my situation to become invisible (the total silence from politicians about Long Covid has been somewhat horrifying) but I am very aware that those bits at the top of each entry can get a bit relentless. I’m slightly intrigued by this notion that I might have always had it in a mild form and it just recently became disabling thanks to the triple whammy of Covid, stress and grief, but I’m taking that with a pinch of salt because so little is known about CFS that it’s a fertile ground for speculation and straw-grasping. That said, I remember in my 20s someone asking me how I was and I replied “tired” to which he snapped back “you’re always tired” implying he was sick of hearing it. I hadn’t realised I did this and have made a concerted effort not to tell the truth when people ask how I am (this overlaps with autism, of course!) but yeah, now I think about it I’ve always been tired. And it’s always been boring. * * * ### Linky links * Pearl: The new new wave of anti-heroes _‌(15:08)_ — Grace Lee is back with her first video essay in ages, and it’s a good one, using Mia Goth’s horror movie to unpick 50 years of anti-heroes. * Her back catalogue is well worth exploring but I think my favourite quintessential Grace Lee video would be Car Parks: What do they mean? Do they mean things?! Let’s find out! * British journalism and polling are both utterly implicated in the Farage funding scandal — Dunt goes deep with some interesting insights into how the polling industry works. * The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism — “ _The Battle of Legitimate Concerns."_ * The cartographers who took on centuries of western bias — The story of how the UN accepted the Equal Earth projection. The lesson here to me is that there’s no perfect flat map and each projection has specific uses. I’m sure people who actually depend on flat maps switch between them all the time. Do scroll to the end for Hao Xiaoguang’s wonderful projection which looks to me like an exploded Pangea. I’d love a poster of that. * Tom Watson joins Palantir — I try not to get too wound up by this sort of thing but I used to like Watson. He was one of the first politicians to blog back in the day and as a local MP would come to various tech meetups. His work on Digial Economy Act and the Murdoch phone hacking scandal was admirable and it felt like he was one of us. I even voted for him as deputy leader, in the vain and idiotic hope that a Corbyn/Watson led party could unite the Labour party. Never making that mistake again. I guess that period ground out whatever I liked about him as he’s been turning to the dark side ever since. A shame. * W/ Dude — Following links during a Wikitok scroll I found myself wondering about the origin of the term “dude” and it’s pretty fascinating. A dude was a fancy guy from the city with great clothes, which makes me wonder if it’s also the origin of the word duds. * 🎶 Before and Afterlife by Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang and David Sylvian — Came up on Night Tracks and totally sucked me in. Delicious mix of trumpet, samples and spoken word. Found a nice long blog post about it. * 🎶 Sugar on Blackstone by Kristin Hersh — New solo album just dropped. We’re going to see her play at All Saint’s Church, Kings Heath next Saturday so best swot up on these tracks.

* * * Rest day, and much needed. Lots of sleeping, not much doing. * * * **The end times fascists are plotting their escape from our world. Our mission is clear.** An excerpt from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book which is out tomorrow. I’ll be getting the audiobook. I was pleased to see this excerpt is not just outlining all the terrible things but touches on some of what we can do about it. This has been my big thing as we face up to these forces of darkness — what can we do to resist and ultimately defeat it? > Start from love of place, then conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives, embrace common goals across difference, get outside and gather offline and in person, take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul. This fits with everything I’ve been reading and is, I think, why the fascist flaggers hit their first real resistance in Birmingham when they came through my home of Stirchley where we’ve been doing this sort of work for years now. It’s not going to be easy but it can be done. * Guardian review of the book * * * **A reading of the Bayeux Tapestry** Like most things that are incredibly familiar I realised I couldn’t tell you exactly what the Bayeux Tapestry depicted so this hour long account was welcome. What’s particularly striking to this comics-head is how much it obeys what we now call comic book grammar to the point where chronological flow can be reversed and still make sense. The video uses a 19th century copy of the tapestry by Charles Stothard rather than photographs of the tapestry as it currently it, which might seem odd as high resolution images are on Wikimedia in the public domain (in two parts), but this has some real value as it shows how it was before the restoration, which I didn’t realise was quite substantial. The story itself is actually surprisingly short on details, given the scale of the thing, and I imagine it would have accompanied an aural storytelling tradition, like slides with a presentation. You can picture someone moving around the room spending a decent amount of time beneath each scene fleshing it out with colourful facts that got stretched with each telling. On a personal note, I’ve actually seen the tapestry in the flesh, albeit as a child when we went on holiday to France on the 1980s and stopped off at Bayeux. I remember it being hung behind glass in a room half its length so it doubled back something they’re not doing in the London display due to fragility. I don’t remember much more but we did take home a fold-out reproduction which I still have upstairs somewhere. Because it’s a comic, and I collected comics. I should dig it out really.

Banana time is when the rabbits show they love me. * * * Very much a rest day today. Was hoping to pop along to the Woodland Games but nope, no energy available. * * * **Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’** New book (written with Astra Taylor) incoming. Ever since No Logo, Klein has had this uncanny ability to take the disparate threads of whatever I’ve been thinking about and arrange them in a coherent manner, something that my brain is very grateful for. This book is titled _End Times Fascism_ and looks like it follows the seemingly bonkers shit Peter Thiel believes and ties it in to long-term authoritarian trends. > In End Times Fascism, Klein and Taylor raise Walter Benjamin’s concept “jetztzeit”, literally “now time”, a moment so pregnant with the spirit, the urgency of revolution that it marshals the energy of all movements that went before it. Again, it’s poetic, but it’s also literal, observable. If we want to oppose this new fascist strain, we really have to get a move on. “I don’t tend to use this language, I try to be measured, but I think I’ve earned the right to escalate,” she says. “The moment we’re in, people are really mad and however mad you are, it’s not enough. Because there is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They’re traitors to creation.” * * * * Adam Savage experiences anatomically correct wings — These are quite spectacular, particularly they way they open when she pushes her arms back. I’m also really appreciative of how Savage has established his ‘elder’ role in the maker scene, being actively supportive of the next generations and never weird or creepy about it. Obviously someone’s screen persona is not who they are, and we’ve been milkshake ducked many times before, but I get a real sense he’s a good person and in many ways a role model for those of us oldies that want to help those following us. * Unsung: Behind the scenes — I’m a sucker for how people manage their blogging so I enjoyed this insight into how Marcin Wichary finds and choses subjects, drafts posts and publishes them. Fascinating to see he does most it in Apple Notes which I wrote off as a piece of fluff years ago but which has presumably gotten more powerful. * Running a personal website is not fun anymore — I’ve been through this a few times over the years but I always come back to wanting to control the whole means of production. Must be a zinester thing.

At the Medicine Bar, Birmingham, November 9th 2005 Gig review.

* * * Nope, nothing happening today. Still crashed. Recovery in progress. * * * After the government announced that citizens of the UK should start stocking up on food and water for emergencies, like that’s a normal thing to announce, a couple of people I follow posted level headed guides on what to do with this information: * Disaster prep for people who aren’t gun-obsessed misanthropes — Jules focusses mostly on water treatment. * Household food resilience (UK plant-based edition) — Paul looks at food you can hold in deep stock and how to manage that. Obviously this stuff is best done as a community with many hands, etc, rather than lone people in bunkers, but you have to start somewhere. * * * **Nekh sow - a collection of Senegalese cow murals** A delightful thing to wake up to this morning. This one is clearly my favourite, for reasons that I shouldn’t need to go into with anyone who knows me.