Off-grid geodesic dome cabin in Jujuy, Argentina
I love that little space station.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Forgive the big quote, but this whole piece from Venkatesh Rao is good and useful and I want to preserve this bit for myself:
We increasingly respond practically to the world without even attempting to make sense of it.
One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis…
I think this is a valid observation. I’ve seen it in others, and I’ve seen it in myself. If there’s any difference in my state, perhaps it’s that I spent a couple of decades hyperconnected and processing large amounts of global information streams, and now, to preserve my ability to think and create, I’m rebuilding my garden instead. Maybe that’s no difference at all. Maybe I don’t care.
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here over the last month and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward. This is a thing I’ve forgotten to do since like June, which in itself is a sign that I’m not keeping up.
Cutting Wood For A Chariot: On Trying To Build A New Project
The Only Good Notebook and Five Hundred Words – jottings on work/writing practise.
A General Landing Off The Unwrapped Cliff: On Architecture And Radio
30 Notes On THE TURIN HORSE (1 – 3) – really need to consolidate my notes and add more to this chain.
It’s Not TV, It’s TikTok
Fiddleheads And The Melancholy Thistle – “…ancient native plants have great names, resonant of folklore and the old times.”
They Caught And Drowned God: PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES, Olga Tokarczuk – “This world went on for a very long time, and bored God to death.“
The Bastards Of Old England – ROBIN HOOD: A TRUE LEGEND, Sean McGlynn – “Eustace the Farting, Foul-Mouthed, Cross-Dressing Monk and Notorious Medieval Pirate...”
CAT CALL, Kristen Sollée’s New Book About Cats, Myth & Magic – “…feminine feline archetypes reveal the ways in which women have been revered and reviled around the world—in Greek and Egyptian mythology, the European witch trials, Japanese folklore, and contemporary film.”
random collection morningcomputer 21mar22 – “It is too often accepted that during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the male writers who developed and pushed the boundaries of the weird tale, with women writers following in their wake—but this is far from the truth.”
I haven’t quite succumbed to the urge to add a “garden” or “horticultural therapy” category to LTD yet, but this was a nice surprise worth noting. I don’t do the social media, but I can link to countrygardenuk.com right here as a thank you for the free seeds thrown in with my order of yarrow seeds for the pollinator/wildlife-corridor section I’m planning to plant up. Autumn is set to kick in on Friday, so these will go in the ground at the weekend.
Oulipo: Perverb
Perverbs are obtained by crossing proverbs. If we join the first part of “All roads lead to Rome” to the second part of “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” we obtain the perverb “All roads gather no moss.” The remaining parts yield a second perverb, “A rolling stone leads to Rome.” Perverbs have two main Oulipian uses, here exemplified: they can be organized into strophic poems; they can be “interpreted” as narratives.
In East Anglia people suffering from ague, a form of malaria characterised by fits of shivering, used to call on the ‘Quake doctors’. If the doctor couldn’t charm away the fever with a magic wand, the patient was required to wear shoes lined with tansy leaves, or take pills made of compressed spider’s webs before breakfast. A locally famous Essex ‘Quake doctor’ in the 19th century was Thomas Bedloe of Rawreth. A sign outside his cottage said, “Thomas Bedloe, hog, dog and cattle doctor. Immediate relief and perfect cure for persons in the Dropsy, also eating cancer” !
A spirited young man journeys into the mountains of China in search of a Buddhist hermit master. Along the trail he meets an unexpected cast of dedicated recluses; the gaunt ascetic, the persevering nun, a wise old master and his disciples, all who, despite living far from the world, teach him all about how to live within it.
Filtered for hermits.
The ancient settlement was accompanied by 2,807 graves from different time periods. The ground in this area was adorned with devotional rock inscriptions, one of which addressed to the ancient god Khaal.
