Heavy limbs, autumn fever.
Hot takes burn bright.
A need for
media fasting,
and a silent room.
Wait for clear sky.
Give The Dust a Chance To Settle
I got my winter/autumn jabs on Saturday and spent most of Sunday and Monday feeling very sorry for myself as the jabs hit me like a lorry at high speed. I’m only just feeling myself again now.
After last weeks post, a friend messaged to ask what I meant when I said I “didn’t feel like I had anything to say”. It’s a fair question, because I’m not known for being short on ideas or a distinct point of view lol. It’s not as if the well is dry! If anything, my cup runneth over with opinions! The issue is that everything sitting right at the very front mind right now, is just immediate, reactive noise.
Frustration with the news and goings on in the world, annoyance with internet culture, and blisteringly hot takes that would just annoy stupid people if I put them on the internet. In an online environment engineered to reward friction and outrage, I really do make the effort to not to add to add to it. Posting negative shit on the Internet just isn’t the sort of person I want to be.
So when when I apply this filter to the things that are at the top of head, it quickly feels like there’s nothing to say. Losing the weekly cadence of the podcast has made me realise what that practice was actually doing for me creatively. Producing something on a tight, regular schedule, and not wanting to post negative things on the internet acts as a kind of forcing function. It pushes you past that knee-jerk surface layer and you have to dig up something genuinely constructive instead. Live streamers could never. lol.
Without that regular practice, the immediate noise just sits at the top of your mind and blocks the door. Even if you are still brain dumping it all out every morning into your daily dairy. Sometimes you really want the things that grind your gears to have an audience, I think that makes you feel better, but not wider discourse.
When I mentioned all this to said friend, they suggested framing my negative takes as “observations,” as a kind of workaround. But that really seems like cheating. The goal/rule is to not feed the outrage engine, avoiding imperial entanglement. No dunking at allowed at all!
Paul Graham Raven over at Worldbuilding.Agency wrote this week about how he’s doing the full Artist’s Way programme for the first time in several years. He just passed through Week Four, which is going on a Word Diet. No reading, or consuming any media of any kind for an entire week.
I’m wondering if this isn’t something I need to do right now, or at least in the near future. Starve out the negativity, by not putting other peoples opinions to react to in my head in the first place?
On The Blog
Sep 2026 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 9. Photo-a-day for the month of Sept 2026.
Photo 365
Terminal Access
Over on his Substack, Eddie wrote about the US live-streamed execution: my first viral tiktok at the public execution
For who doesn’t love a parade? Who doesn’t love a live band and steaming hot meat and roasting nuts? The sun beats down but you smile anyway because there’s no work today, what with the whole killing of criminals and heretics of it all.
But now?
A livestream.
How pathetic. How absurd.
Dipping the Stacks
Were these ancient rock images painted with human blood? | Science | AAAS
In a study that will be published in next month’s issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, researchers report that the paint used to create the images was made with blood, including blood from human childbirth. The proteins in the blood helped fuse the pigment particles onto the rock, the team says, shielding them from rain and heat. If true, the study would be the first to show the presence of human childbirth blood in ancient rock art.
Declaude routes your text through other models and checks the result before it comes back. Facts and length are kept by instruction and verified in our eval harness, but read the diff before you use the text anywhere that matters.
We study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medieval period. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 medieval towns. During the Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), many merchant towns obtained Farm Grants: the right of self-governed tax collection and law enforcement. Self-governance, in turn, was a stepping stone for parliamentary representation: Farm Grant towns were much more likely to be summoned directly to the medieval English Parliament than otherwise similar towns.
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
It is what is odd about you that is interesting. If you work hard, you will be able to write like everyone else in your genre, but the result will never be rich as the texture of your own personality. So, don’t think too much about how you are supposed to write, how others do it, or what the conventions demand. Just try to amuse yourself.
How ‘Stacks’ Went From Bodybuilding and Computing to Describing Everything
But a lot of people talk about stacks now. It’s the jargon of choice whenever someone is selecting and combining things, strategizing about how each choice can amplify the others.
Description
Reading
Oh boy have I read a lot in the last few weeks. Last week I mentioned I finished The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. But that was right at the beginning of August. Since then I’ve read:
- The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides
- Real Presences by George Steiner
- The Postman by David Brin
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1 by Taiki Kawakami
- Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
- Bjorn: The Fell-Handed by Justin D. Hill
- Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader by Bayo Akomolafe
- Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom
I’m currently reading:
- Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jeremie Koering, Nicholas Martyn Huckle (translator)
- Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura
- Master of Rites by Rob Young
Lots of stuff on the pot!
Music
Grimes – Accelerando (Single)
This first single off the new album seems like a mood setting single, a statement of intent for the psy-opera/psy-op-era(?) project. It’s not a quite the RAXy Banger like Artificial Angels. But i’ll take it. Looking forward to the album drop!
Remember Kids:
one must go alone and every day.
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
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