Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

This linkdump is algorithm-free, hand-rolled and made with love. And yes, you might discover some sort of theme in this collection…

So after Robb pointed out that Perplexity AI wasn’t using the correct User Agent I had a thought about how else you could prevent your pages from at least being summarised.

Thanks for the mention, Joe!

Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.

James, one option is a Tag Cloud (as popular in the early-2000s) - for example, mine: The Artist’s Notebook: Blogposts by Tag

Every year, on the first Monday of May, the people of Hastings parade a man made of leaves through the streets of their town. The leaf-man spins and dances all day, wearing a crown of flowers and followed by his drummers and musicians. The people all wear green. They put garlands of leaves and flowers in their hair. Eventually, the leaf-man is taken to the top of a hill overlooking the sea, where he is slaughtered in front of the townsfolk. This ritual is a piece of hoary old seasonal magic, rooted deep in the green fields of England, and it’s been going on for a very long time. Longer than I’ve been alive, in fact. It dates back all the way to 1983.

This got me thinking that I should document some of the design patterns on my blog, noting how they work and why I have designed things in the way that they are. Herein begins a new series on that topic, starting with blockquotes.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

New blog post called About my studio.

It’s possible that we as individuals read too much into what we like, that we invest too much of our identity into corporate properties or even art by individuals, and that part of the harm we feel on discovery of harm is associative: that by enjoying something made by someone who did bad things, some of that badness must rub off on us.

begin to remake who we are and how we live

It is true that I am a sucker for goth-flavoured radical left hot takes on pretty much any subject, but I think it works particulary well in Greenaway's book as it is an outlook well-placed to grapple with how utopia necessarily needs to walk hand in hand with the bleakness of our current plight. Because utopian thinking is not about escapism, it is not naive and it is not blind to how bad things actually are. It is the other interlocutor in dialectical opposition to the abyss we're on the precipice of and without it, we'd be lost.

Moreover, the kind of activism that mixes a deep affinity with the landscape with a hardened political edge is more visible than ever. The two things have an obvious symbiotic relationship: the worse environmental destruction gets, the more precious nature seems and the louder people get.

They’re slightly different concepts - mutual aid is more about people directly helping each other, whereas charity is more about donating to a centralised organisation which then decides how to distribute the funds it has collected.

Great tip! It’s a far less common use-case, but I’d also advise adding the output element to the list of elements where hanging-punctuation is re-set to none.

I suspect there’s a high probability that a coffee version of this will appear on James’ blog…

No matter where you are -- treading grounds of knowledge decades old, or breaking new ground -- you are on a journey of learning. What is known to others is new to you. In this feeling, I find delight.

In the indie economy, creators build their own platforms, whether that's a website, an app, or a subscription service. They have complete control over their content, their audience, and their monetization strategies. They are not beholden to anyone else's algorithms or policies, and they have the freedom to experiment and innovate without fear of reprisal.

This resonates strongly with me, as was probably apparent from my answer to the “why do you write online?” topic we were all discussing at last night’s HWC. My website exists primarily for my artwork. I may write something about this in the next few days.