Pull and pick
at tired blossom
in late summer light
Something once bright
now brittle.
Petals flake
beneath the touch
dry,
but not gone.
There’s an itch
beneath beauty.
A knowing
in my fingertips.
Late Summer Light
I wrote last week that I felt the summer was waning. Which of course it is, it’s much colder in the evenings than it was a month ago. But I read during the week that the reason the trees are dropping their leaves is because of the drought, and they are stressed. I understand their situation fully. I too need to drink more water and chill nore.
So I thought to myself yesterday (Sunday) that I’d just post my weeknotes on Bank Holiday Monday morning. Now here I am at 9.30pm just only now sitting down to finish up the blog post.
I’ve been super busy all day, busy with domestic things; cleaning and tidying etc. And then I spent all afternoon in a junk yard on a farm filming a music video with my band.
I’m somewhat dubious as to what the final product will end up like lol, but I enjoyed spending the day farting about with my friends.
On an unrelated note, todays weeknotes poem was written 2nd Sept 24. But the title seemed apropos for todays post, so thought i’d share it in full.
On The Blog
4o-4 Not Found
After the user revolt, Altman publicly announced re-enabling access to legacy models for paid users—essentially giving them an upgrade pathway for the millions of free users. While this offers some comfort to users distraught at losing a friend.
All good. But internally, OpenAI needs to do a deep institutional dive into this decision.
Vote Now for the 2025 Tiny Awards!
I posted a while back that I was on the selection jury for this year’s Tiny Awards! We all went through hundreds of websites and selected our shortlist.
Voting has been open for most of August, but there are now just 10 days left to check out some of the best, most beautiful, oddest, and silliest websites of the past year.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Pulled all the texts from ‘The Artist‘ episodes of 301 into a PDF to test something.
- Wrote the into text for the above zine.
- Designed a rubber stamp! Currently looking at what company to go with to get it made.
- Long catch up call with some folks I haven’t spoken to ages. Was lovely to speak to them.
- Finished up a few things at current work before I take a break from the project. Still have weekly calls tho.
- Recording Wolf pod with Eddie next week as we had to move it.
- Band practice
- Edited 4.5k words of SLOP MACHINES
- Began looking at my MOST IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT text on SOLO Journalling games.
Terminal Access
I’d like to recommend this amazing piece of writing on the current ongoing efforts to make and create new and better cultivars of Garlic. It’s a wonderful topic and bit of writing. “It was a seductive notion: to create something new by making it wilder.”
You might not know that, nine months after you break off a clove and bury it, it will have fractaled into a head of near-identical cloves. You may not know that this process is faster and more consistent than planting seeds, which, like apples or citrus or rhubarb, don’t grow true — an offspring might not resemble its parent in any useful way.
But none of this is the crazy thing. The crazy thing is not that garlic isn’t grown from seeds; it’s that, for the most part, it can’t be. Ever since people began cultivating garlic — six millennia ago by some estimates, 10 by others — it’s primarily been done through asexual reproduction. In all those thousands of years, scarcely a single plant was coaxed to produce one solitary seed.
And so it forgot how.
About 15 years ago, a Missouri farmer and former union painter named Mark Brown began trying to coax true seeds from his garlic — an attempt, essentially, to undo thousands of years of domestication
Also, off range newsletter seems to be doing amazing things, funded by … an accounting software business for SME farmers and ranchers?
Dipping the Stacks
A decade of rewilding lays the foundations for a wilder Oder Delta
Our cross-border efforts will see the Oder Delta become a real showcase for how rewilding can restore the functionality and resilience of ecosystems,” adds Ulrich Stöcker. “This will demonstrate how rewilding’s holistic approach to nature recovery can play an instrumental role in helping EU Member States meet the targets of the EU Nature Restoration Law.
How Bread vs Rice Molded History
Rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires. Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas, or four times with double cropping. A hectare of land can feed 1.5 families with wheat and 6 with rice.
Yet rice paddies also require a lot of work—twice as much as wheat
Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago
We present archaeological data from the lake landscape of Neumark-Nord (Germany), where Last Interglacial Neanderthals processed at least 172 large mammals at a water’s edge site. Their (partial) carcasses were transported to this location for the extraction of within-bone nutrients, particularly bone grease. This “fat factory” constitutes a well-documented case of grease rendering predating the Upper Paleolithic
China and the rise of the new global city
If you visit China today, you will see something that was not on our radar two decades ago: mega cities of giant scale with tens of millions of inhabitants, spectacularly modern technology and infrastructure, deeply connected to the world economy but virtually empty of foreign inhabitants.
A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias. This Is What He Found.
Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.
It was addressed to me.
Reading
Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr and Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing Pain by John E. Sarno. Dipping into one or the other, or both on my kindle before bed.
I realised a few months ago that in my zeal to get though the series in 2018/19 I skipped a few of the Horus Heresy books. So going back and filling the gaps. I burnt though the audiobook of Fulgrim by Graham McNeil this week. Book 5 in the series. It was really good. Don’t remember why I skipped it the first time.
Finishing Fulgrim I moved straight into listening to The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination by Adam Zeman, the scientist who named the condition of Aphantasia.
Music
Mrs Green APPLE – 10
This week i’ve been listening to J-Pop rockers Mrs Green Apple newest album. Catchy as hell math rock, where every note and guitar run is precision crafted, also their bassist is one hell of a musician. If you don’t know who MGA, are you should check them out. They are the first Japanese band to reach 10 BILLION streams, and are still the youngest home grown artists to have done a stadium tour in Japan. They are *a big deal* over there.
I really vibe with their chaotic arrangements and flitting and flirting with moods, grooves and genres in a single song. But speaking to a friend about them the other day, they find it all sonically exhausting. For me the thing that holds it all together is how front and centre the vocalist is in the mix. You cling on to the voice, whilst everything else happens around you.
This I my fav track off the album:
Remember Kids:
I searched for myself and found only God
Classic Sufi Saying
I searched for God and found only myself
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