Weeknotes 1463

Hi folks! Hope you're all doing well!

Weeknotes

• The week began with a bank holiday! I spent it delivering leaflets and catching up on saved articles. Party hard.
• Both CM and I were in Lewes on Tuesday so we went to the Roundhill Needlemakers for lunch, which I can strongly recommend if you ever happen to find yourself in Lewes.
• Clients continue to appear as if from nowhere. All continues to go well on the work front, which is reassuring.
• I went to the gym for the first time in maybe six months on Friday and I'm still aching. I was able to bench more than I could squat, it was absolutely ridiculous.
• I've started playing Apex Legends with some friends and it's great fun! The system where you can 'tag' things, in particular is extremely useful.
• CM and I are getting through the first series of LOST. It's been hard to bite my tongue whenever she asks questions, though I have had to reassure her that nothing happens to the dog.
• My mum has been cleaning out the attic at home, and while going through a bunch of my old school work she found this:

Posts

My posts this week included a couple of highlights from old blogs on the time the cops took my sword and Ivor The Engine; a documentary from 1980 that sparked an interest in a Brighton character; Eugene Debs' speech to the court before his sentencing for sedition and some sad results in the local elections.

Links

I put links I find interesting on my Pinboard; here are the highlights. (N.B. this week I've started clearing through a lot of stuff in my Pocket saved articles so it might be a bit more full than usual).

• From listening to QAA I'm familiar with the overlap between QAnon and wellness culture, but I found this to be an interesting look at what animates that.
• This is an old edition of Matt Levine's excellent Money Stuff newsletter, but it does a very good job of explaining payment for order flow, something that I think I've got the wrong impression of elsewhere.
• I found this to be useful in drawing out the contract between the inward-facing critical and outward-facing valorising rhetoric deployed by academic humanities.
• A review of a new biography of my boy Kierkegaard.
• An investigation into the origins of comics publisher Avatar Press.
• Peter Oborne is a really interesting figure to me; I rememember reading his books about political lying as a teenager after watching him on one of Charlie Brooker's shows. His new book on Boris Johnson sounds worth a look.
• owned
• It's always good to be reminded about the fragility and vulnerability of the digital systems in which we put our trust.
• As someone who's been a small churchgoer (on and off) since I was born, I find megachurches both fascinating and repellant. One of the most egregious things from this story about Hillsong is the way that unpaid labour seems to undergird a lot of their work—which is also true of small churches, but I can guarantee you no-one is getting rich there.
• A somewhat cringe alternative history but it's about Luddism and because I'm a certain sort of socialist on the internet I am up for it regardless.]
• "Illich illustrates why the internet feels so loud and claustrophobic: The technology that mediates it ensures that every sliver of the sonic spectrum is allocated to someone, and when softer voices aren’t speaking, the loud ones simply travel further."
• Alex H on forcing Trump to accept the election results—do read the Time link at the top of that, too.
• Chris D Corner: on choosing charlatans, it not being the 90s, and productivity.
• City pop! The videos of the mums dancing are all delightful.
• I remember my friends talking about this blog at the time (or at least using the phrase 'your fave is problematic'), and it's a useful reminder that I tend to see what gets put out into the world as the result of a complete fully-baked thought process when often it's just an angry teenager or something.
• "They wanted to know what I thought — or so they said. Believing myself to be rather enlightened and open-minded, I said, “Experimental pronouns have been tried without success for a very long time. I think the singular they will win out ultimately. It’ll be interesting to see how the language sorts things out.”
• This is about why the Canadian tech scene doesn't work; tech scenes apparently rely on more than just the North American Mindset (a thing I identified in my visits there that I might try and unwind more in future).
• I'm going to spend an evening sometime just digging through the archive of videos from the Spider-Man musical.
• this garden in the countryside is so beautiful
• On Johnson as a clown (actually good).
• love the slow convergence unto monopoly
• Lofi Corner: Kush O'Clock by Trommel Tobi
• For those who liked the Jack Tinker documentary, this segment of Peter York talking about television idents (another thing my friends and I are obsessed with) is great.
• For those who find Epic playlists a bit too gauche, these "19th Century Villain" playlists are great for injecting a bit of energy into your day.
• Gradations, a... video with a load of gradations? I don't know what to tell you, it's really pretty.
• Finally, Poetry Corner: Darkness, by Lord Byron

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Look after yourselves. Over and out.