11nov26

We’re into the grey days of autumn/winter transition, now. I’m still too sick with this cold/ throat/ chest thing to get out into the garden, which is annoying, as I need to level the site and get bulbs in the ground. Right now, I am just watching the rain recharge the garden, and looking at taking a few days next week to attack it with implements of destruction. The weather forecast seems to be against me, but it’s so changeable right now that I may get lucky.

I like this part of life. Matched to the seasons.

TODAY:

• deep dive on the author of the Wisting novels using AI to “assist” and how that changed his prose
• Nazca infant had rare, fatal birth defect that left her with one central eye 1,600 years ago
• Cold health alert issued for UK
• gorgeous photos of an autumn walk along the river Mosel

• One (well, me) cannot click past a headline reading Our sun’s undiscovered stellar nemesis is still out there, says physicist
• OUR SUN’S UNDISCOVERED STELLAR NEMESIS. Come ON.
• Content-maxxing, or why it’s time to break back to using the internet as a utility because you need to protect your brain from “neural exchange value”
• “Is micro-blogging the next big art movement?” Quote: “My gripe with Substack is the saturation of content and slop on the platform, a reflection of culture’s chronic need to document, or have a take on, everything.”

OPERATIONS: I have been buying domain names, which is never a good idea.
STATUS: Still sick, skipped an afternoon gig so I don’t infect a room full of people.
READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)

Don’t try your schoolmarm shit on me I’ve been intimidated by more arch than you, what do you think, you’re some Jean Brodie of the returned? All my ghouls are the crème de la crème ha ha.

Jack Self talking to James Bridle in issue 18 of the Real Review:

JS: You said that many people feel they lack agency; and that this subconscious disenfranchisement, or helpless-ness, is driving many contemporary pathologies. I used to teach at the Architectural Association, a masters studio called Deep Adaptation – after the Jem Bendell paper. The first year we asked students to collate the best existing data on the climate crisis: demographics, migration, geopolitics, ecology, extreme weather, and so on. They became so profoundly depressed we couldn’t get them to design, and had to get a grief counsellor. We were all grieving for futures we had assumed were possible, and then suddenly realised were not. Eventually, I came out the other side as a positive nihilist. All is lost but that is an opportunity. There’s nobility in the struggle.

Same issue, Guy Mackinnon-Little:

Each of the roughly eight billion upright spines on Earth invents scenarios at a rate exceeding their ability to make sense of them. We are condemned by a surplus of reality. An unceasing lie we dig ourselves deeper into.

Most of us are familiar with the crises of neuroticism, delusion or derealisation this oversupply of reality causes for the meat silo storing and sorting it.

Let’s hear it for taking photos with our phones, being able to swipe the print and paste it as plain text. Now that is an innovation I enjoy.

LISTENING: MURMURATIONS, Ruby Colley

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Find me at Orbital Operations every Sunday.