[A Pleasurable Headache] Wildly Imperfect
What an exhausting two weeks. We are currently having to syringe feed a very sick Guinea Pig every 3-4 hours throughout the day. It has been an ordeal. On top of that we continue to prep for the arrival of baby. Furniture is now all assembled. Her room is painted.
The day job continues to test me with a perfect storm of illness and holidays meaning I am doing 2-3 people’s jobs whilst still trying to do my own.
My ToDo list, as a consequence, has taken a hit. I have, instead, defaulted back to a habit tracker most days to ensure I end the day feeling sane - exercise every day, write every day, that sort of thing. It’s held my in good stead. Notes and lists are living as scribbles in a pocket notebook that I carry everywhere. I go on about them all the time, but pocket notebooks are great.
Links
How to Plant a Meme
https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-plant-64821014
In 2018, Joshua Citarella began a secret 18 month long project to positively influence Gen Z communities through the injection and propagation of memes. Here’s how it went. There is a lot of Mark Fisher here.
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About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors
https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8
Cory Doctorow on that recent news story about Russian looters stealing a load of John Deere tractors only to have them remain inactive due to an in-built kill switch. Whilst the story was floated as a bit of ‘feel good’ fluff post-invasion, the events point to a larger, profit-orientated motive within the wider corporate agriculture (and tech) sector.
“John Deere seems to have no clue as to how bad it is at security. In the company’s entire history it has never once submitted a single bug to the US government’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. As far as Deere knows, its security is literally perfect.
John Deere is wildly imperfect.
That means that the tool that Deere used to brick all those stolen tractors in Chechnya is potentially available to even moderately skilled hackers who exploit Deere’s reckless decision to build kill-switches into its equipment and its negligent security.”
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The Dutch city testing the future of urban life
Almere looks like a swell place to live.
“The initial template for Almere was laid down by the world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, via his award-winning practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas began by creating a distinctive three-tier city centre. This concentrated car parking underground, complemented by ground-level shopping and leisure facilities now rendered free from traffic. The triple stack design was completed by an upper layer of planted green spaces on the rooftops of the ground-level buildings, on which houses and small blocks of apartments sit.”
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Peter Kalmus: ‘As a species, we’re on autopilot, not making the right decisions’
The Guardian interview climate scientist Peter Kalmus. Kalmus recently made the news by chaining himself to the entrance doors of a branch of JP Morgan in Los Angeles.
“People need to understand that all degrowth really is, is a switch in the goal of the economic system. We need to change the goal of the system from the accumulation of capital to the flourishing of all people, not just people in the global north, also people in the global south, and the flourishing of all life on this planet, because our economic system is embedded in the biosphere. If we take down the biosphere, we lose everything, and we don’t have an economic system any more. That’s why we desperately need to change the goal of the system to the flourishing of everyone and all life on the planet.”
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Operation Surprise: leaked emails expose secret intelligence coup to install Boris Johnson
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/05/15/operation-leaked-emails-intelligence-coup-boris-johnson/
I am not shocked in the slightest. Interesting to note the leaked emails here are all screenshots of Protonmail accounts. If it’s good enough for a right-leaning shadowy cabal then it’s good enough for the rest of us.
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Why the Internet Hates Amber Heard
The above link and this one are the only two links I’m going to post about this whole messy shit show.
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Tade Thompson: Finding What Works
<https://litreactor.com/interviews/tade-thompson-finding-what-works>
Tade Thompson is a great writer and I sorely miss his presence on Twitter. Anyway, this recent interview with him over at LitReactor gives us a real insight into his current process.
“There are many aspects to my process. In the morning, I generally wake up and do three pages of first draft stuff. And I do this no matter what. My goal is to just let it flow without stopping. And if I can’t, if I run out of ideas for the story I’m writing, I just write stream of consciousness until an hour is up. That usually ends up being around 1,000 words.
When I complete a first draft of anything, I schedule revisions for three months later. So, every afternoon I’m revising what the calendar tells me to revise from three months ago. I’m a person of routine, I write and then revise, revise, revise.
And then every Wednesday, I think of twenty ideas for stories. They don’t have to be good ideas, but after I do my morning pages, I sit down and think up twenty ideas. And I can’t stop until I do all twenty. That’s the nuts and bolts of my daily routine.”
I really like the notion of having a conscious set aside amount of time for just listing ideas and working that side of the brain in an effort to stop it intruding on the day to day process of getting words down on the page.
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Okay, I am off to hope I can salvage some of this forthcoming loooong weekend. I need it. We all do. See you in two!