Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

This is my notebook. Stuff I’m doing, stuff I’m thinking about, stuff I’ve seen online and feel is worth sharing. Any patterns or themes are in hindsight. Typos are fixed eventually.

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Notes and links from 19 Oct

Oct 20, 2026

The last few days of computer action have been spent on the big blog archive project. I've been knocking the Art Pete blog into shape, fixing image links and reminding myself what happened during a transformative period. I spun this blog off around 2009 when I started selling my weird photos at market stalls and it's a nice accounting of how my idea of what "an artist" is changed over subsequent years. So much of my learning was done in public back then, which lends to a fair amount of cringe as I publicly get things wrong, but it's all learning that got me where I am today, and that's good! I'm not sure when all this is going to go public possibly sometime early December at this rate. Otherwise I feel like my mood and energies have been in a bit of a holding pattern. I've not felt bad but I'd struggle to say I've felt good. I turned down some work which would have involved doing some training to a small room of people, something I did last year and enjoyed but it cost me 10 days of recovery, and I don't think that's a good idea. I was hoping to run it by my occupational therapist last week but she had to cancel last minute, so we'll hopefully talk about it in December. I feel like I'm moving from "I can do that with a cost" to "I don't do that anymore" which might be the acceptance part of the [five stages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief), or it might be me being scared. I honestly don't know.

Notes and links from 16 Oct

Oct 16, 2026

## Item! ## My number finally came up on the bowel screening lottery and the vial with instructions appeared in the post this week. Pretty simple stuff, except I’ve can’t remember the last time I had to catch my poop before it hit the toilet water. A rather strange experience I’m not keen to repeat any time soon.

Notes and links from 15 Oct

Oct 15, 2026

Mostly a rest day today. After posting last night I was overcome with brain fog, which hopefully explains any dullness in my prose and the fact that I didn't correct typos til this afternoon. Visibility has a cost. Wally was off his food today, hiding in the corners of the run like a sad little sack. As I've said many times before, we know not to panic at a change in behaviour but to monitor and be ready for an intervention if it continues. So we carried him out to the garden to force him to move and kept an eye on him. Eventually he had a nibble on some carrot leaves and by late afternoon he was back to normal. Probably just a bit of wind. On the plus side I managed to get a great picture of him looking really sad and pathetic. Like all great photographs it's a lie — he was actually making good progress recovering at this point and was in the middle of cleaning his face. Good job he doesn't read my blog.

Notes and links from 14 Oct

Oct 14, 2026

One of the original functions of Notes & Links was to make the most of my sofa-bound internet surfing by making it into a writing exercise, and that is dependent on me doing that, hence some days there's a lot and some days there's nothing at all. As I figure out how to do more things within my recently limited capacity I will probably do less blogging here, like over the last few days.

Notes and links from 10 Oct

Oct 10, 2026

Friday we had a visit from a couple of 11 year old girls and their mum to see the rabbits. I realised I haven't been in the company of 11 year old girls for quite a while and they're quite odd, giggling and whispering to each other. But they was also lovely and kind to the rabbits and that's what counts. Hopefully I impressed on them that rabbits are not easy pets so they won't be straight down the breeding centre (aka pet shop). After that I went to destroy an arm chair that Fi's sister can't get out of the house. It took taking the hinges off the front door to get it in and they've decided it's not worth it, so I offered to take it apart with my tools, a process not unlike skinning and boning a corpse. It should have been a low-effort job but I did get a little invested and probably overdid it. But it was fun! I miss being able to just let go, and later I paid the price. Saturday has been a rest day, after the previous misadventures. I didn't crash but I did have some very weird stress dreams that went all over the place, so something was not right.

Notes and links from 7 Oct

Oct 8, 2026

Yesterday I popped to the allotment with my sister for a bit. Had fun getting the scooter to go up the muddy hill — it’s really not an off-road vehicle, but it made it. Was a nice sunny afternoon after the morning rain. We talked about her plans for it now it’s all set up to her liking (due in part to my condition she’s pretty much taken it all on from Fi and myself) it’s probably time to let it mature and see what works and doesn’t work. That said, I’m wondering about a geodesic dome fruit cage and better water harvesting. Of course. The weather app reported 8mm of rain that morning and which increased the level in the water butts by 11.4cm. This means I can do some fun maths using the surface area of the roof and/or the butts and see, well, something I guess. I should probably get my own water gauge to get an accurate reading for the garden rather than rely on the apps. Oh hell, I’m going to have a weather station at this rate, aren’t I… Today was a relatively lazy day. I did have a very pleasant visit from an old internet friend I hadn’t see since being homebound. She’s one of those people who happily talks about random shit with no prompting, like being in a pub, something I don’t get to do any more. Tinnitus levels were within reasonable limits although I did need to rest afterwards, as expected, and decided to watch a movie to stop my brain racing.

Notes and links from 6 Oct

Oct 6, 2026

The weather this last few days has been notable. It's not been hot exactly but it certainly hasn't been October-typical. I did put a thick jumper on the other day but then today I was in a t-shirt. It's that transitional thing where a snapshot is misleading and a trend will be clear in hindsight, but it's still quite odd. Today there was *no wind*. The trees were still and the clouds (pictured) were static. I watched them for a good 10 minutes and nothing moved. Psychotherapy was good today. Getting into the nitty gritty on some stuff. Lavender is still digging her hole.

Notes from 4 Oct

Oct 5, 2026

I didn’t really feel like blogging yesterday, so I didn’t. Not much caught my eye in the feeds and I didn’t do much of note (although I did briefly pop out on the scooter) so when it came to the end of the day and my text document was empty I figured, fuck it. What I had been doing was building a new home for the 72 Pete blog which I want to move off Ghost before the next billing cycle. I like Ghost but I really can’t justify the cost so I’m switching to Hugo and hosting it on the cheap.

Notes and links from 3 Oct

Oct 3, 2026

Went to visit my sister briefly today on the scooter, thus normalising the whole “going out on the scooter” thing, and when I returned Fiona informed me that Lav had been furiously digging out Wally’s flop-hole and diligently spreading the soil across the lawn. We let her continue until she seemed done and then brushed it all back in. Happy to say the soil down there looks pretty healthy, as you’d hope having been pooped on my multiple rabbits for over a decade. In other news I had a look at Hugo, one of the static website generators, and it looks like it might be at just the level I need. Gonna have a deeper dive this weekend I reckon.

Notes and links from 2 Oct

Oct 2, 2026

A fairly nondescript day. Pottered around a bit and didn’t accidentally start a project, so that’s good. Conserving energy and resting properly. Bit bored though. Trying not to get wound up about the Zionism is racism stuff at the Green conference. I have no idea if Zionism is or isn’t racism but I’ve had a look at who’s pushing it and they seem to be exactly the sort of wankers who make progressive and community organising such a fucking ballache to be involved with. In my experience they’re incapable of actually doing anything useful and so hide behind ideological purity tests that drain energy and distract from the real work of bringing people together to make a difference. I dearly hope the Greens’ policy processes are robust enough to get them to fuck off. Other than that, feeling OK.

Notes and links from 30 Sept

Sep 30, 2026

A quiet day, although I did finally receive a couple of widgets I’d accidentally ordered from China on eBay (hate it when that happens, not so much for the shipping time as for the wrongness feeling of getting something so cheaply from the other side of the fucking world) so I could finish the second stage of the shed water conservation system, connecting the rear butt to the three side butts so all the butts flow into each other. Now I just need a few days of heavy rain… We watched Once Upon a Time in Space which, as a childhood space nut, I found fascinating as it covered the space stuff that came after my obsession. I was always an Apollo-head and while the Shuttle was cool I wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening through the 90s. This is basically about the space stations, from Mir to the ISS, right up to the present day deterioration of US/Russian collaboration. My biggest takehome was how those involved in the space programmes had to buy into the idealism and utterly suspend any cynicism about why their governments were funding these trips to space, and their disappointment when Realpolitik kicks in is palpable. But before that their accounts of floating in a tin can spinning around the earth are beautiful to behold.

Clearing the tabs

Sep 30, 2026

I need to declare browser bankruptcy so to mark the end of September here is bundle of links I haven't read in full but think might be of interest to what passes for my readership demographic. Click with caution and trepidation!