nothing here but painted skulls and Femi-queer commons

issue 201 - 27th November, 2022

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CJW: Welcome welcome. To go along with the 200th issue historical recap we decided to ask newsletter OG Austin to come back for this issue to share some bits and pieces. It’s an eclectic one, and I’m sure everyone will find something here to spark the ol’ neurons.

If you like what we do and want to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

• $5 monthly subscription.
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Both give you access to the bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email far and wide.

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The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer, apocalypse witch, goth aunt.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

• Austin Armatys (AA) - Creeper/Teacher/Wretched Creature (logged off)

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Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Fighting a War on the Wrong Planet - Rajan Menon at Tom’s Dispatch (via Foreign Exchanges)

U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres characterized this dash toward yet more hydrocarbon energy use as “madness.” Using a phrase long reserved for nuclear war, he suggested that such an unceasing addiction to fossil fuels could end in “mutually assured destruction.” He has a point: the U.N. Environment Program’s 2022 “Emissions Gap Report” released last month concluded that, in light of the emissions targets of so many states, Earth’s warming in the post-Industrial Revolution era could be in the range of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s nowhere near the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious benchmark of 1.5 degrees on a planet where the average temperature has already risen by 1.2 degrees.

On the impact of the War in Ukraine on climate change. I’ve definitely shared pieces along these same lines before, but this one has all the info in the one place.

Lately, any time I read about limiting to “1.5 degrees of warming” I just replace that with 2 degrees in my mind because, as outlined here, we’re already at 1.2, with more baked in warming to come, plus the continuing increase in emissions. Well worth the read.

Related: Thanks for the timely link, Cosmos - Australia is already at 1.47 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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CJW: The big takeaway from Cop27? These climate conferences just aren’t working - Bill McGuire at The Guardian

It really does beggar belief, that in the course of 27 Cops, there has never been a formal agreement to reduce the world’s fossil fuel use. Not only has the elephant been in the room all this time, but over the last quarter of a century it has taken on gargantuan proportions – and still its presence goes unheeded. It is no surprise, then, that from Cop1 in Berlin in 1995, to Egypt this year, emissions have continued – barring a small downward blip at the height of the pandemic – to head remorselessly upwards.

On the pointlessness of these COP gatherings. Considering the below, they’re probably actively counter-productive…

And there is another huge and growing problem too. The all-encompassing nature of the annual Cop climate conference provides one enormous open goal for fossil fuel representatives; an unprecedented opportunity to kettle ministers and heads of state from every corner of the planet, but particularly the majority world, to browbeat them into handing over their untouched fossil fuel reserves for exploitation. At Cop27, the sharks were circling around African nations, desperate to persuade them of the urgent need for a “dash for gas” and looking for a very large piece of the action.

Related: Countries agree to create climate damage fund in historic COP27 deal - Madeleine Cuff at New Scientist

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CJW: Silence of the Lambs - George Monbiot

The call to stop farming animals should be as familiar as the call to leave fossil fuels in the ground. But it is seldom heard. Livestock farming, a recent paper in the journal Sustainability estimates, accounts for between 16.5% and 28% of all greenhouse gas pollution. The wide range of these figures is an indication of how badly this issue has been neglected. As the same paper shows, the official figure (14.5%), published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, is clearly wrong. Everyone in the field knows it, yet few attempts have been made to update it.

Even if the minimum number (16.5%) applies, this is greater than all the world’s transport emissions. And it is growing fast. In the 20 years to 2018, global meat consumption rose by 58%. A paper in Climate Policy estimates that, by 2030, greenhouse gases from livestock farming could use half the world’s entire carbon budget, if we want to avoid more than 1.5C of global heating.

Look, I don’t even go looking for pieces about meat consumption and livestock emissions, but when they come across my “desk” I’m going to share them here.

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• Best-Selling Author Jeff VanderMeer Finds That Nature Is Stranger Than Fiction - Jessica Bruder at Audubon (via APH?) - CJW: A great piece on author Jeff Vandermeer’s rewilding projects.

• What does water want? Most humans seem to have forgotten - Erica Gies at Psyche

• How the rich are driving climate change by Laura Paddison, bbc

• How Nepal Grew Back Its Forests by Bhadra Sharma and Karan Deep Singh, nytimes

• Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View by David Wallace-Wells, nytimes

• Opinion: What Opioid Lawsuits Can Teach Us About Climate Courtroom Battles by Rachael Lyle, undark

• The climate case against Elon Musk by Emily Atkin, heated.world

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Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: World at dangerous crossroads, only two paths forward: anti-imperialist socialism or fascist barbarism - Ben Norton at Multipolarista

One Year On: Ben Norton - YouTube

On Oct. 16, 2022, Ben Norton spoke on a panel discussion entitled “Through Pluripolarity to Socialism: A Manifesto One Year On.” You can watch the entire eve…

Now that China and Russia are no longer subordinated, now that they are independent powers – and by the way, now that they are strategic partners, and building a new Eurasian bloc – we see this fundamental crisis within the capitalist world system and within the imperialist bloc led by the United States and Europe.

And what is their response to that? Their response to that is a drive toward global war, the US and Europe pushing the world toward World War Three and the brink of nuclear apocalypse.

And we also see a move toward fascism.

Transcript of a recent talk given by “Preacher” Ben on the current state of geopolitics.

Related-ish: Goodbye G20, hello BRICS+ - Pepe Escobar at The Cradle

On the increasing irrelevance of G20 and the growing collaboration between nations in the Global South.

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DCH: The Public Has Never Seen the U.S. Government Force-Feed Someone — Until Now by Travis Mannon and José Olivares, theintercept

The video, nearly one hour long, shows five detention guards in riot gear, employed by Global Precision Systems, introduce themselves to the camera in preparation for their “calculated use of force” on Kumar. The guards enter the facility infirmary, where medical personnel explain the procedure to the asylum-seeker through a translator and begin their attempts to insert a nasogastric tube. Medical officials failed to correctly insert the tube two times before successfully beginning the force-feeding.

Many Americans are stuffing themselves for Thanksgiving this week. Meanwhile somewhere in America’s vast detention network there are asylum-seekers being tortured via force-feeding by ICE.

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• The Sacrifice Zone by Angela Vergara, Phenomenal World

• The Clash Of ‘Civilizational States’ by Nathan Gardels, noema

• U.S. intelligence report says key gulf ally meddled in American politics by John Hudson, The Washington Post

• Inside the Saudi Strategy to Keep the World Hooked on Oil by Hiroko Tabuchi, nytimes

• French ambassador: US ‘rules-based order’ means Western domination, violating international law - Benjamin Norton at Multipolarista

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Science & Space

AA: Slime Mold!

Slime Mold is cool, but you probably already knew that. Check out this Wired video for a primer and some fun facts. (NOTE: There is a particular variety called Dog Vomit Slime Mold, pic below, which is also a good name for a song IMO). Here’s a pic, you can see why it’s aptly named:

I’ve been interested in building a terrarium, so I wondered – what about a slime mold terrarium? My own pet slime! Well it turns out I’m not the only one who has this desire, so please enjoy this guide from Warwick University about how to nurture a slimy friend of your very own.

Also on my recent slime reading list: this essay on Plasmodial Improprieties: Octavia E. Butler, Slime Molds, and Imagining a Femi-Queer Commons by Aimee Bahng.

Unsettling scientific classification, the slime mold even belies strict adherence to grammatical rules. In writing about slime mold, one can slip between singular and plural forms at every reference with due cause, as both cellular and plasmodial slime molds exist alternately as singular and plural, depending on how and when you’re counting. Wondering whether slime mold is best characterized as an aggregate of individuals, a mating group, a swarm, or a single organism, Butler meets the question of pronouns with an admirable openness, queering and querying the limiting politics of either individualism or collective action. Describing the fruiting body as “a ‘tower’ of its own cells—of itselves,” Butler bends grammar to accommodate this alien ontology, asserting the organism’s nonconforming, decentralized organization. Butler’s methods constitute queer science studies approaches. By fully recognizing the alien possibilities of this life-form—by insisting that not all unicellular life is always unicellular, and by meeting slime mold morphology in between singular and plural in its grammar—Butler demonstrates a remarkable openness to non-normative biological organization. She does not look to figure the slime mold out. She seems excited to follow it off the script of 1980s evolutionary biology to other possibilities. In slime, she looks for a model of life that could be, rather than life that already is. It is a speculative fabulation, drawn from life unruly.

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AA: Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders

You’ve probably heard of Conway’s Game of Life. Here is a good primer video and here is the game if you want to tinker. Recently I was alerted to interesting developments in the game by Twitter user Tom aka @attentive. Here’s a tweet of his that explains the significance of the above article in terms we can all understand (Goatse):

It takes a while (if you’re me) to understand this stuff, but watching videos of the more complex Life synthesis is almost psychedelic in its complexity.

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• These are our top space images of all time - Science News

• Honey bee life spans are 50% shorter today than they were 50 years ago by University of Maryland

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Tech & Design

DCH: Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned | Jaron Lanier, New York Times

“What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning? There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.”

Jaron Lanier can be a divisive figure but when he’s right he’s right. His polemics on social media are always very good and accurate.

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DCH: Are You Outraged Yet? Carl Miller, Literary Review

This is a story not only of technology but also of what happens when it commingles with fragile psychologies and vulnerable societies. The algorithms learned how to nourish dark and dangerous human impulses. People were pulled in as much by anomie as by hate – by ‘content’, Fisher writes, ‘that spoke to feelings of alienation, of purposelessness’.

Another good read on big tech’s outrage economy.

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DCH: The Underlying Technology Shibboleth by Stephen Diehl

There is a strange half-baked awareness to Gensler’s comments here in that he recognizes that the crypto industry exists to hawk investments wrapped in techno-obscurantism but not enough self-awareness to recognize himself as the principal agent enabling this obscurantism to direct public policy. Regulators don’t want to be seen as stifling innovation, even when they can’t demarcate the innovation from fraud or even describe the shape of the innovation or what it’s to be used to do. Gensler indeed gave a lecture at MIT outlining his dated 2017-era views about the “underlying technology” to build solutions for trade finance, clearing systems, straight-through processing, and digital identity, all of which have been tried repeatedly, with the same uniform result: failure. The only innovation we’ve seen from blockchain technology is for defrauding investors, facilitating capital destruction, and creating transient, unfair, chaotic dark markets for speculating on hot air. The literal antithesis of the mandate of the agency he chairs.

A great takedown of the inability of most crypto-skeptics to tell it like it is by the only crytpo-skeptic who does. It’s scams all the way down. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to scam you and is unintentionally providing cover for scammers. There’s no real unmet need here. No true value to the tech.

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CJW: Bring back forums - Gaby Del Valle at Dirt

The beautiful thing about the internet, at least in theory, is its ability to connect people across time and space and cultures. In practice, though, we have stan Twitter, esoteric coquette pro-ana TikTok, horny Twitch streamers, and other affronts to God’s creation. The subcultures aren’t the problem; the fact that I know about them is. It wasn’t always this way. You used to have to seek out a scene, even online. Now everything is offered up for your consumption whether you want it or not.

I’ve been thinking this for a while, largely related to how the whole rest of the (English-speaking online) world is constantly inundated with US domestic politics. But the author’s broader point is true - the form and ubiquity of social media platforms, and the ways they try and increase engagement means we have little control over what we actually see online.

For example, a while ago Twitter added topics and are constantly trying to shove these down your throat. Now, the fact that they can recognise the topics of tweets in order to add them to your timeline (should you so choose) means that they could also remove a topic from your timeline. Maybe I follow an artist to hear about her work and her cultural criticism but have no interest in her opinions on major league baseball - in theory Twitter could let me filter out sports as a topic, but they want to show it to me so it looks like I’ve “engaged” with that tweet when all I’ve actually done is read enough of it to figure out that it’s not anything I’m interested in and then scrolled past. And we’re all constantly expending time and mental energy on these acts of deciding because the platforms are all trying to be The Everything Store.

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• Ways to think about a metaverse - Benedict Evans (via Sentiers) - CJW: I almost didn’t share this because it opens with a Dilbert comic and fuck that guy (yes, Dilbert is autobiographical now), but there’s some interesting stuff in here.

• Elon Musk’s “Free Speech” Twitter Still Censoring DDoSecrets by Micah Lee at The Intercept & Twitter’s Slow and Painful End by Charlie Warzel, the atlantic

• Investigating YouTube’s Ideological “Rabbit Hole” - Julia Angwin, The Markup

• Hyperintelligence: Art, AI, and the Limits of Cognition - Jochen Szangolies, 3quarksdaily

• Apple Is Tracking You Even When Its Own Privacy Settings Say It’s Not, New Research Says - Thomas Germain, gizmodo

• How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet - Matthew Crain, Boston Review

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Society & The Culture

DCH: Sam Bankman-Fried and the Moral Emptiness of Effective Altruism by Timothy Noah, The New Republic + The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad? by Linda Kinstler, economist

Hard-core utilitarians tend not to concern themselves very much with the problem of economic inequality, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised to find little discussion of the topic within the E.A. sphere. I located five economic-inequality posts in an online forum hosted by the Centre for Effective Altruism, which MacAskill co-founded, compared to 39 posts on blockchain technology and 205 on wild animal welfare. “Inequality is a problem for EA and economic growth,” read the title of an essay posted on the E.A. forum last August by Karthik Tadepalli, a doctoral candidate in economics at Berkeley. But Alexander Berger (a global health expert at Open Philanthropy) pointed out an error in Tadepalli’s spreadsheet, so Tadepalli revised his essay with a new title: “Inequality is a (small) problem for EA and economic growth.”

Nick Beckstead, the chief executive of the FTX Foundation, wrote in a PhD dissertation completed in 2013 that “It now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.” Why? The former has the potential to create more long-term value and therefore save more lives. (Beckstead did not respond to an interview request. He resigned from the FTX Foundation last week.) On his personal blog, Holden Karnofsky, chief executive of Open Philanthropy, compared such reasoning to avant-garde jazz – appreciated by the cognoscenti but a cacophony to untrained ears.

EA and Longtermism are just morality-washing for billionaire philanthropy. Income inequality and global poverty are constantly downgraded on their weird little idea exchanges. What constantly gets upgraded? AI fictions that help line the pockets of their wealthy donors. Funny how that all works out.

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DCH: The Spectacular Life of Octavia E. Butler by E. Alex Jung, vulture

She found a refuge at the Pasadena Public Library, where she leaped into science fiction. She especially liked Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Zenna Henderson, whose book Pilgrimage she would buy for her friends to read. She was a comic-book nerd: first DC and then Marvel. When she was 12 years old, she watched Devil Girl From Mars, a black-and-white British science-fiction movie about a female alien commander named Nyah who has mind-control powers, a vaporizing ray gun, and a tight leather outfit with a cape that touches the floor. Butler thought she could come up with a better story than that, so she began to write her own: temporary escape hatches from a life of “boredom, calluses, humiliation, and not enough money,” as she saw it. “I needed my fantasies to shield me from the world.”

<3 Butler. Great biography with useful cross-links. Any creative kid who grew up poor can relate.

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CJW: Club Q shooting: it’s no surprise that gay bars are under attack - James Greig at Dazed

If the gay bar is a space of sanctuary, it’s one which has been violated repeatedly throughout history. The modern gay rights movement owes its beginning to a violent intrusion, when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back against a police raid in 1979. Since then, queer spaces have continued to be a target: in New Orleans, in 1973, an arsonist set fire to a gay bar, killing thirty two people. In 1997, a bomb exploded at a lesbian bar in Atlanta, killing five people. A couple of years later in London, a far-right extremist set off a nail bomb in Soho’s Admiral Duncan (after targeting Brixton and Brick Lane), killing three people and wounding 97. More recently, in Orlando, in 2016, 49 people were killed at gay nightclub Pulse, in what remains one of America’s deadliest mass shootings.

But queer history is more than just a litany of atrocities; it’s also one of resilience, endurance and resistance. As well as being a terrible tragedy, what happened at Club Q is also a story of heroism: unarmed patrons tackled the assailant, hitting him with his own gun and preventing him from hurting anyone else, in a marked contrast to the sluggish police response to mass shootings in Uvalde or Orlando. It seems that LGBTQ+ people can rely on one another for protection, even if no-one else is willing to provide it.

An essay on the recent gay club shooting on Colorado Springs. Every right-wing politician and pundit who has been pushing the transphobic (and generally anti-queer) “grooming” bullshit have blood on their hands.

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CJW: The Serviceberry - Robin Wall Kimmerer at Emergence

This “problem” of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.

“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.

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A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.

Emphases mine. On the gift economy versus the capitalist one. A lot of interesting and thought-/hope-provoking ideas here.

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• Privacy as a Common Good in the Age of Big Data by Fabio Tollon, 3quarksdaily

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Health, Cooking, and Related

• DNA is providing new clues to why COVID-19 hits people differently - Tina Hesman Saey at Science News

• What Does It Mean to Care About COVID Anymore? by Yasmin Tayag, theatlantic

• AARP Is Welcoming the Privatization of Medicare by Matthew Cunningham-Cook, jacobin

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Labour & Economics

CJW: How To Protect The Economy From Climate Change - Justin H. Vassallo at Noema

Echoing climate activists, Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an economist at the Levy Institute, proposes a job guarantee “can be designed as a ‘National Care Act’ that addresses the environmental and care needs of communities.” It would cover a range “of ‘invisible’ environmental work that is labor-intensive and can be done by people of various skill levels”— more routine upkeep of municipal infrastructure, for instance, but also an array of projects that can amplify efforts by less wealthy cities and towns to achieve decarbonization. This permanent program would have a degree of elasticity to accommodate labor market fluctuations that are likely to be directly influenced by the climate.

An interesting piece on ways labour could/should change in the face of increased temperatures and other climate disruptions. The above is something I’ve thought a lot about. My main issue with this essay is the assumption of a political situation not unlike the present day. “How to protect the economy?” I care about protecting people and our communities, and put little faith in our current economics when it comes to that. The economy is the system we have, but it’s not the only option.

That’s probably not a fair complaint - the author chose to work with what we’ve got. But, throughout the piece I could see both far better and far darker alternatives on the cards, depending on where things go in the next few years (see above RE: socialism vs barbarism). I’m personally hoping for global socialist revolution (GSR). Anyway, that’s not really a fault of this piece, just a reflection on what I read elsewhere and what I hope/fear.

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DCH: FTX: Greed, Grift and Grandiosity by Stephen Diehl

The history of corporate scandals is littered with quasi-messianic figures, and Sam-Bankman Fried (often denoted by the initialism SBF) is simply the latest in the long line of financiers so drunk on their egos and self-perceived intelligence to be blind to the portents of their inevitable downfall. Sam is unique in that his grandiosity stems not purely from unrestrained greed and narcissism—although there is plenty of that—but his philosophical north star of Effective Altruism, an extreme form of Benthamite utilitarianism which espouses the belief that we should extend our ethical locus of concern to all possible sentient beings that may exist in the future. The philosophy attempts to derive, from first principles, an ethical calculus by which we should optimize our actions according to some suppositional fitness function that maximizes the scope and happiness of all future minds. Its adherents believe themselves as ordained prophets sent by the future to guide the progress of humanity according to their oracular pronouncements.

The Effective Altruism philosophy is, in one word: insane. It is a philosophy of unbounded narcissism wrapped in a bizarre, autistically hyperrational framework concerning human existence that gives rise to hubris of cosmic proportions. And, of course, this plays out exactly like in Greek tragedy, as acolytes like SBF fancy themselves as agents of the future supposedly single-handedly able to steer humanity’s path through the future Great Filters of existential risk, all while his Bahamanian bucket shop couldn’t do effective risk management of their dog-themed money. His company’s downfall may have arisen from liquidity problems of the Ponzi finance operations they were running and the hilariously lax governance they were allowed to get away with, but the root problem of this business lies in the folly of one man.

Another great recent piece from Diehl. And as he says in the opener, yes we can enjoy seeing this asshole burn, we shouldn’t forget the normal people who got burned worse with him.

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• Jeff Bezos’s Charitable Giving Is Another Billionaire Scam - Jamie Medwell at Jacobin

• Transatlantic Ties by Jeremy Green, Phenomenal World

• Don’t Make Taylor Swift Fans Angry by Matt Stoller

• Britain Has Rediscovered the Workplace as a Battleground by Marcus Barnett, jacobin

• Federal Judge Orders Amazon to Stop Firing People for Organizing by Jules Roscoe, vice

• Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich? asterisk

• The yacht, the wedding and £29m: Michelle Mone’s life during the Covid crisis by David Conn, theguardian (DCH: some fine investigative journalism on display here.)

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Books

LZ: Paul Koudonaries - The Empire of Death

I mentioned in a previous newsletter another of Koudonarie’s books, Heavenly Bodies, which was about relics. While I didn’t really love that work, this one is fascinating. It’s a big book with beautiful images of charnels and bone churches spread across Europe, but there are also some nods to Asian and Latin American cases. Fascinating stories about cults that were developed around the bones of the dead in charnel houses, and how the Catholic church needed to close some places down because people were making offerings and adopting skulls as their “guardians” who could provide objective benefits like better weather or marriage. It goes well as a complement of Philippe Ariès’ works on death (Western attitudes towards death and Men and Death), as it is more visual and more anecdotal.

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LZ: Carlo Ginzburg - The Cheese and the Worms

Several people told me it would be important to read Ginzburg’s Ecstasies before this one, but I don’t think this is really mandatory. Ecstasies will give more context to the story that Ginzburg is telling in The Cheese, but it’s not like you won’t understand the book without reading the other one.

That said, this is a work of micro-history, supposedly one of the best or at least most well known. It tells the story of a miller who, unlike his peasant peers, was able to read and write. By having contact with some books, he kind of freestyled his interpretation of Catholicism and added some bits and pieces of the Koran into it by the end of the sixteenth century.

You would think he would just be burned as a witch and that’s all, but the fact is that the inquisitors grew interested in his hypotheses to the point that, even after being jailed for two years and almost dying, the dude was back again with all his heresy and they gave him a second chance, but he just couldn’t avoid.

The thing is that he was just a very poor miller, not someone initiated and integrated in the intellectual elite or the nobility, or even inside the church itself, so he wasn’t able to properly write his ideas as books and philosophical essays (even though he considered himself a philosopher and prophet). This made me wonder how many people, even these days, might have bright ideas that never reach us because they don’t have the same resources and influence. Or sometimes they could even reach us, but someone just appropriated that for themselves (like Kepler did to Brahe centuries ago).

It’s a kind of exhaustive book if you’re not into history books, but it’s interesting to see how Ginzburg tries to tell a story like a regular fiction book using documents and how the inquisitors weren’t really that effective or fast as some of us (like me) are used to think it was. You might even think they weren’t as bad or completely cruel, but this is of course micro-history, meaning one of the few examples that survived the passage of time and reached our days, so it’s totally not a source you would use to describe what the inquisition was or wasn’t.

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Movies + TV

MJW: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

“Your father and I had a long talk and we agreed it would be best for all of us if you just stop being who you are and doing the things you love.”

Daniel Radcliffe is a delight as Al Yankovic on this almost entirely fictional biopic. It owes a lot to Dewey Cox in terms of humour, and at times gets a little too silly, but it’s definitely worth your time. Evan Rachel Wood’s power-hungry Madonna has a hilarious and surprising trajectory.

CJW: I actually liked how silly it was, but I can see how it could have been too much for some. Less silly and maybe it would have been too similar to Walk Hard.

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AA: The North Water

I feel like this 5-part miniseries didn’t land with as much impact as it should have. A brutal, nightmarish, homerotic, tense and (at times) psychedelic period piece. I’d say there are tones of Blood Meridian in here, if that’s your vibe. The performance by Colin Farrel as a psychotic harpooner called Drax is incredible, and if you can stomach the darkness and grime you’re in for a treat.

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IRL

AA: “Media Watch” Discussion Group

I’ve been in a discussion group with friends recently and it’s working out really well. It’s a great way to keep in touch, have a laugh, and share interests/ideas in a structured manner. Here’s how it works if you want to give it a crack:

• Get your group together (we currently have 5). Each week one person chooses a piece of media (or multiple pieces) that would take less than half-an-hour to read/watch/listen to. In our group, the sort of media has included podcasts, articles, YouTube videos, short stories etc. If you’re choosing multiple shorter pieces of media, it makes sense to have a unifying theme (even if it’s oblique – and that can sometimes be more fun).

• Arrange a time to meet. We use Jitsi and meet at 8pm every Wednesday. If a group member can’t make it, that’s fine – we found it easier to not even try to accommodate everyone’s busy schedules, it just happens when it happens, and if you miss it, you can always catch the next one.

• Take turns to talk. One at a time. We’re not super strict on “rules” but the whole thing works better if everyone gets a chance to share their thoughts and connections without interruption. No cross talk or challenging ideas or even affirming good points… just sit there! It’s a good opportunity to practise mindful listening.

• Often we ask new people to choose the week’s watching for us, and then join us for the conversation. Recently we’ve asked our dads, and it was interesting to hear some different perspectives and see the topics they were thinking about (which almost across the board seemed to be the state of democracy and shifting geopolitical landscapes).

• If you want to check out some of the recent “playlists” we’ve discussed check out this one (which covers bees/slime mold/computation/communication) and this one (with a loose theme of “places people shouldn’t go”).

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Music

LZ: Twilight Fauna ft. Evergreen Refuge - Procession of the Equinox

This was really a finding. You know those bands that are on Spotify, but like just one track in an obscure compilation? That’s Evergreen Refuge. While their compositions are more like dark folk or neofolk, in this specific album with Twilight Fauna there’s an absolutely beautiful combination with black metal. Very atmospheric. If you like Panopticon you will also like Twilight Fauna’s work as they have a few tracks that are pretty much country music for metalheads (not my cup of tea though, I stick to the metal songs).

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LZ: Alsarath - Come to Daggers

Found them in the same compilation mentioned above. Some black metal with supposedly female vocals, a bit of experimentation with noise and a very dark atmosphere as well. Good for those who like moody instrumentals but enjoy a bit of guttural screams now and then.

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Art

LZ: Painted skulls (Totenschädel) and bones. Beinhaus (‘bone house’, ossuary) Roman Catholic chapel, Hallstatt, Salzkammergut, Austria.

Learned this from the book mentioned above, The Empire of Death. These skulls had inscriptions of the name of the dead, but also traditional vanitas/memento mori themes that included phrases such as “Was I beautiful or ugly?”, “Was I rich or poor?”, “Was I loved or not?” – when it’s all bones, none of this matters. While in some cases the gravedigger was also responsible for painting/writing in the skulls, rich families could afford painters who travel throughout Europe to do that kind of work. Here’s the excerpt about it:

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The Self-Promotion

LZ: Emerging and complex, biohacking is a practice that requires collective pondering

Here is a translation of an article that I recently wrote, about biohacking. It features an interview with a researcher on the topic and some thoughts about the dichotomy between experimentation and the delegation of State responsibility to individuals.

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The Memes