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

I’m finally resuming the life-drawing thread of my artistic practice this afternoon (with a second session planned for tomorrow).

I’ve decided to concentrate on a long pose drawing (3 hours in total, with the pose being held for 30 minute instances followed by 5-10 minute breaks for the model to stretch).

If living in a new weird ontology is the only way for people to keep living, what do we want to keep of ourselves? What does coexistence look like when coexistence requires deconstructing the self on a cellular level? Is it possible to consent to, and then claim agency over one’s own dissolution?

From this perspective, VanderMeer’s New Weird is to science fiction what mysticism is to theology. Like mystical texts throughout the ages, his Weird does not explain; it attempts to get at something beyond the explainable.

It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

It seems ironic that even as smart phones have made photography accessible to most people, allowing the average person to take more photos in a week than they might have in a year with film cameras, as well as access to huge free, attribution-licensed photo libraries from all those other photographers on Flickr, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, etc, people still “need” to generate AI graphics for their email newsletter or blog 🙄 Bottomless photos weren’t enough; now everything else must be bottomless too.

I've finally launched the initial version of my Posts feed (along with RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds), as part of an effort to take control of my short-form posts away from social media silos.

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

Home of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion and various other zines

Limited-run zine published quarterly until Spring 2022.

Founded in 2019 by writer and editor Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, with art direction by Nathaniel Hébert, HELLEBORE is a small press devoted to British folk horror and the occult.

The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression, and an overwhelming anxiety at the rise of new fascisms, we communicate. Because we must. Because, for the time being at least, we are human.

England is a country in which every last space where conviviality might flourish has been colonised by a commercial imperative …. supermarket check-out operatives replaced by crap robots… unexpected item in bagging area… every surface plastered with corporate graffiti and haranguing hashtags … no trick missed to screw every last penny out of people… exorbitant parking charges in NHS hospitals (exact amount only, no change given), all the profits going to private providers …

What Surrender does offer, though, is an engaged and full-on exploration of pretty hardcore re-wilding and pro-wilderness groups, as well as a personal discussion of menopause, ageing and the fallacy and emptiness at the heart of the nuclear family model and its absence of viability when confronted with the reality of irrevocable environmental collapse.

Acid communism? Psychedelic Corbynism? Freak left? Call it what you will – but re-infuse endeavours with a spirit of radical collectivism and unselfing to revivify co-opted countercultures for a world that would be free.

IndieWebCamp Brighton … 2024-03-09…10

Taken all this into account, it is possible that the emissions from a ChatGPT query are more than a hundred times that of a conventional search query. But as I don't have enough data to back this up, I will keep the conservative estimates from above (50x - 90x; 60x most likely).

The output of generative tools based on large language models gives me the ick.

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

The Mycelium Parish News is a collection of things that have happened in our particular corner of UK counter-culture over the last year. It features a list of podcasts, books, websites and more.

In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can’t return to that level of simplicity, we’re seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas.