Christopher James

Happy publication day
@www.johnbleasdale.com

Nobody would read my rambling shite

Nothing. I just read

“I just read it for the articles”

“Why aren’t the oxo cubes next to the gravy???”

Nobody knows

I have a medium account so let me know what your thing is called and I will subscribe- the app gives notifications when a new article drops, like sub stack

It’s pretty cool isn’t it?

That’s a good idea- I’m getting really pissed off by the Google AI summary, and Bing isn’t worth the hassle. Will give this a go

All the right moves, just not necessarily in the right order

I did not know that Owl wings contain porphoryn which fluoresces hot pink under UV light.
The ultimate 80s synth wave bird.

Pic: Wild Bird Research Group

So it’s a good real world example I think

NP. There’s a lot of good (and infuriating) stuff out there but as I came across this I thought it would be useful.
And it’s so enmeshed in people’s lives that they’ll have seen it deteriorate in real time- I know I have.

YouTube video by Phil Edwards Why Amazon is full of crap

This is a very good explainer on how Amazon became enshittified- in the interests of your students. Couple of good book recommendations at the beginning of the vid too

youtu.be/BGuOpzDqWhw

CONNERY – A Novel by John Bleasdale (PRE-ORDER – OUT 23 FEB 2026) CONNERY – A Novel by John Bleasdale "The strangest thing about killing someone was how easy it was to forget I had done it. Of course, once I recalled it, I could relive it in intense granular detail....

Connery will be published tomorrow
Get your copy here
plumeriapics.co.uk/shop/ols/pro...

This from @www.johnbleasdale.com is released tomorrow.

All the cool kids will be going to school on Tuesday with it under their arm.

www.plumeriapics.co.uk/shop

You see the influence of William Eggleston everywhere. It's in every photograph of the mundane, the off-kilter, the slightly weird.
It's in the folk weirdness, eroticism and sickly lighting of Robert Darch’s 'Vale', who picks up the baton and runs with it, directly referencing Eggleston in this set.

I’m not sure how I discovered William Eggleston but I did so by accident, and for the longest time he felt like my own secret because nobody referenced him. Of course everybody did because he was so influential.
The last record I made in 2009 had a WE cover

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Perfectly Boring William Eggleston first tried peyote one summer in the early 1960s while visiting a friend in …

oxfordamerican.org/magazine/iss...

This. This is my big issue with age verification.
Get a VPN. Don’t use AV companies. Protect your interests.

The UK government completely dropped the ball on this.

YouTube video by Nic Sentient A bona compilation of Julian & Sandy

Kenneth Williams. How best to mark his centenary today? Here are all the 'Julian and Sandy' sketches from BBC radio's 'Round the Horne,' written by Marty Feldman and Barry Took, and co-starring High Paddick and Kenneth Horne. Nothing funnier has ever been broadcast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l-3...

I think that’s certainly true, but this isn’t that exactly- this is digital makers appropriating our craft and its associated language to legitimise something that lacks credibility as a form, and requires an Nth of the time, work and effort to become proficient in.

Cheap, low effort commodification of other people’s greatness. Squeezed is the word.

How do you misjudge them?

Funnily enough I’ve just bust my best glasses tonight so have been ordering new ones….

This is exactly what I mean. Obvs there are some excellent documentaries on YouTube, and not all of them have a terrestrial television origin. But mostly it’s shit. It’s not a documentary, it’s 48 minutes of you atonally reading a chatGPT script over clips and photos. Fuck off.

That’s a good drop of plonk mind.

All part of a calorie controlled diet.

See also YouTubers who call their videos ‘documentaries’. And so on.

I should probably let it go but calling digital work ‘painting’ really annoys the shit out of me.
It’s symptomatic of the way in which those existing within the digital space are willing to purloin- and in doing so cheapen- the credibility of those who spend decades honing their craft.