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

This archive is an open-source repository of anarchist or anarchy-adjacent science fiction. Featured on the site are books, movies, and other media which are either anarchist in their politics or of interest to anarchists.

Hi - just saw your post on IndieWeb chat - my blog is at https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook

TL;DR: You can now use a penguin avatar to navigate my website.

*Waves from another site that uses Webmentions*

We will be looking for essays on this theme for inclusion in the volume in the near future. We’ll also be hosting an Ethical Gothic Symposium to share ideas and develop papers for the issue. We look forward to finding out more about others whose research might address these concerns (including writers).

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That is why the second avenue of “doing something”, composed of “the rest of us”, is so important. Chaudhary advocates for “leftwing climate realism”, which accepts the science, not because it’s a discipline “beyond impugning” but because it’s quite clear that there are ecological limits on this planet. We need a slower life, he argues; a circular economic system, where firms compete for the same amount of finite profit and the state dominates certain sectors. This will be good for the planet and for people, producing “a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion”.

The parallels between the turbulent epochs preceding the medieval Renaissance and our present age verge on uncanny. Today, intersecting economic, political and environmental crises have incited widespread disorientation and despair reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Below these swirling surface breakdowns, advanced digital technologies are birthing new platforms for human creative participation that could see the dawn of a modern-day Renaissance 2.0.

When deprived of rituals, people are driven to create their own. Family rituals or daily rituals become sources of joy and stability. Even the simple aspects of our daily routine can serve as a kind of ritual—but we also need and deserve larger communal rituals.

New artwork in my Acid Renaissance series: Saints & Martyrs

Sancta Monica de Subterraneis and Sancta Lucretia de Catacumbis, patron saints of English folklore and myth.

View in my gallery.

How about “a more fun 404 page”?

Reframing my household as my workshop has helped rid me of the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. That repairing the stove, for example, is an annoying distraction from my “real work.” And, strangely, I was never quite able to articulate what that “real work” was meant to be. It was always just the vague feeling that it was something else, something more important. (Arrogance is a besetting sin of mine.) But if my household is my workshop, then my real work is here, now. My real work includes all of this, from accounting to building raised beds to helping my daughter navigate adult problems.

New blog post: Life-Drawing, February 2024

I can see the rel="me" on Instagram, but not on Threads - maybe they’ve removed it from Threads recently?

Ironically the first people who'll be made redundant from AI image generation are those who are currently feeding in prompts to create AI images and calling themselves artists. They're currently giving all the data to the AI with which it will replace them.

A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming:

https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/a-final-word-on-blogs

I really should have planned some drawing for this weekend, but I completely failed. However I do have a life-model booked for the weekend after, so it’s not all failure.

These portraits from the dark postwar years have been so reworked that the paper is often gouged through. The results feel as war-damaged as his family – yet still thrillingly alive

Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads is at The Courtauld Institute, London, until 27 May

New blog post about my piece in the forthcoming issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion: https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/the-journal-of-psychick-albion

Over the past decade, increasing evidence suggests artistic expression emerged much earlier in human evolution than scientists once thought, and it's reshaping our understanding of the cognitive abilities of archaic humans, such as Neanderthals and earlier hominins. For instance, there's archaeological evidence that Neanderthals made abstract designs on cave walls long before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe and may have made pendants from eagle talons up to 130,000 years ago.