George Floyd Protester Relief Resources

Static place for links to bail relief funds etc.

I’ve been struggling to keep track of links to the relief funds established for Black Lives Matter activists across the USA who’ve been arrested, injured, or killed by the police. I’m throwing them up here, with sources linked at the end, to keep track of them for myself and for others who are struggling to pull them out of Twitter. For now, I’ve donated to the Brooklyn Bail Fund. Update (2nd June 2020) There’s now an even easier way to donate to a wider range of organisations fighting for this cause.

Getting off of Netlify

Self-hosting the website, logs, and analytics

I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. Why the change I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of “build minutes” on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages.

How this site works

A quick tour of my personal infrastructure

Note: There’s a follow up to this because I’ve since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: Develop and run my personal website Cross-post certain types of content from my website to Twitter Periodically scrape a couple of proprietary services I use, to keep track of the media I’m consuming Store and serve that data along with some other personal data in an API Regularly update my personal website with the latest in my media consumption Personal website My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go.

The bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?

I’m reading the epic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, at the moment. At the moment it’s the 1920s and Moses is trying to wrestle swathes of land off the robber barons who’ve built their manor houses on Long Island, so that he can build extensive park systems and a parkway to connect them to the city. It’s a mammoth book but I’m really enjoying it. The 1920s is an interesting era in American history not just because of my teenage obsession with The Great Gatsby and the associated milieu, but because it’s also a period when the Klan were incredibly active in white, Protestant communities all over the country, and because it’s when the robber barons of the Gilded Age were really trying to hand onto their wealth.

Flights

I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I really enjoyed it without really knowing what to make of it. It’s structured in a stream-of-consciousness way, with distinct sections (which aren’t quite chapters) that sometimes relate to what’s come before with a dream logic. Here are some of my favourite sections, or at least a couple that got me thinking. There are countries where people speak English. But not like us — we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people.

Reading Difficult Books

I’ve always just ploughed (or slogged) through particularly long and challenging books in one go, the same as I would for anything. I’d love to have a better “active reading” strategy though, and one that I actually stick to. “Steelmanning” an argument sounds like a great tool for that. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.

PearShaped Magazine Archive

When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed. I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exporting the magazine’s content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn’t lost forever.

The List of 2010 Lists

This guy has been collecting all the “Best x of the 2010s” lists that have been appearing in the past few weeks into an impressive list of lists. Here are some of my highlights: The Most Important Artworks of the 2010s (ARTnews) Top 25 Film Scores of the 2010s (CoS) The 20 Best Video Games Of The Decade, Ranked (BuzzFeed) The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade (LitHub) The Worst Takes of The 2010s (The Outline)

My Top Books of 2019

These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2019, compiled from my Goodreads Reading Challenge. Fiction A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimar McBride Catch-22 by Joseph Heller A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré Enigma Variations by André Aciman The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai Non-Fiction The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples by Bede The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks Queer City by Peter Ackroyd

Tech Sabbath

This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It’s come along just at the right time for me, as I’m generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more. I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch, a pen, and a little notebook containing some emergency phone numbers.

Wasps

I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It’s a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what’s happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition.

Eugenics & Statistics

There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here’s something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection.

The Académie Française

I was vaguely aware that the French language is basically policed by the Académie Française, but I’d never seen this statistic that really shows how small the base French vocabulary is. Aptly enough I saw it in this article about the French propensity to say… no. there are 500,000 words in the English language, but only 70,000 in French — The Culture Map by Erin Meyer via BBC

Jacob Rees-Mogg Profile

James Meek (author of Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else) did a great profile of new Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mog. It sums up the argument incredibly well that the stuffy all-English persona he affects in Parliament is at odds with his source of income in a transnational investment firm. Meek goes deep on the problematic network of offshore financial instruments used to shroud Mogg’s investment firm in secrecy, which makes sense given his work on Private Island.

Madame Tussaud's Tall Tale

I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it’s a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the reader’s credulity.

The Sinking of the USS Fitzgerald

For some reason I feel really compelled by accounts of the crash involving the USS Fitzgerald that killed sseven crew members. It’s a really interesting case of how the build up of lots of little decisions, shortcuts, putting crew under pressure, can lead to something dreadful. I first heard about it in detail from this amazing This American Life segment by Stephanie Foo. More recently though, ProPublica published this incredibly detailed and moving account of the incident.

William Carlos Williams on love and cruelty

I’ve been reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson and there’s tons of great extracts and references. One that caught me in particular was this excerpt from The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams, which (I think) disputes the rosy typical notions about love but reaffirms it as a wilder, more brutal thing: The business of love iscruelty which,by our wills,we transform to live together. It’s a nice disputation of the oft-quoted 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

Bob Fosse, Joseph, and Rihanna

I was watching Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) the other day. It’s the height of camp, and I was trying to work out what the elements were and what they reminded me of. Then it came to the introductory Potiphar number and it clicked. The Rich Man’s Frug is a dance number that appears in Sweet Charity (1969), a musical comedy directed by the choreographer Bob Fosse. It typifies Bob Fosse’s style: absurdist elements, people-as-stage, and intense camp.

The Professor

A short story about an egotistical man and his wife

The emcee stood off to the side of the stage in darkness and in a rented tux. Standing in amongst the clutter of the backstage area he swallowed a choke as he tried to clear his throat quietly. Reaching into his jacket pocket he felt the thick stack of note cards there and shut his eyes for a moment, allowing the cool calm of their presence to wash through him. He turned to his side and gestured to the drama student stooped over the lighting board.

It’s Just You And Me And Everybody Else

A short story from the perspective of a cockpit voice recorder

If they’d given me a nose I think I’d have smelled the alcohol on your breath yesterday morning. I should give myself some credit; they didn’t give me the best ears but I could still hear that slight slurring in your speech. I could hear you being a little more abrupt with the rest of the crew. I could hear you being a little less clear with the tower in Prague.

Candlesticks

A short story fragment for autumn

1 Tonight, Kwame would clean the altar. He walked to the front of the chapel. He methodically clicked each in a row of switches and light soaked the altar. Standing next to the altar in the bright lights, Kwame couldn’t make out the first row of pews. His breathing slowed there in the warmth. He stood next to the altar and allowed his arms to hang by his sides. The very end of his middle fingertip brushed on the cotton tablecloth.

Confessions Of A News Addict

A Thank You

Hello. My name is Jack… [Group: Hello, Jack] …and I’m a news addict. In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I unplug my phone and open up the news.

That Accessibility Thing

About when the web accessibility issue clicked for me

Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly. My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he worked in a steel mill, he was a maintenance guy at hospitals.

Tinkering

A Thank You

I spend a lot of my time picking apart how things work, and a lot of time sticking things together to see if they work in the way that I hope. That’s tinkering. I’ve been thinking about how I first started working this way. I remember when I was a kid, I spent long days in my dad’s office. His office was actually a garage, a separate building from the house, across the back yard.

@fat - Internet Historian

We should be doing more to write our history

Rives TED Talk If you take a listen to Rives’ great TED talk from 2006 today, it’s pretty easy to see it as a little time capsule. Here he is talking (eloquently and entertainingly) about Napster and Friendster. What was, at the time, a piece of pop culture criticism and entertainment, is just as easily viewed as artefact of an era in the internet history. The internet moves fast, look at how quickly we moved from the bullshit-ly labelled Internet 1.

Is The Internet A Rhizome?

An academic paper about the power structures inherent in the construction of the internet

How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet… Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism inherent in the root-tree structure.

Music Is Changing

The ways that we get our music has been shaped by hidden individuals for decades. This is era of the people.

At its most basic level, music is simply a series of amplitudes and frequencies that make human beings move and vocalise in diverse and strange ways. However, like all other forms of human expression and entertainment, it is now a commodity. This commodity is now packaged to be sold, streamed, licensed and advertised to us. The people who distribute the music define our experience with this basic human commodity. These days there’s very little you can do to hear music without interacting with a third party of some kind, short of listening to a friend play guitar in your living room (as long as he’s lot playing from sheet music, royalties abound).