In 2014 there was a transit strike when London’s mayor threatened to close perhaps a hundred London Underground ticket offices, leaving only machines. This sparked an online debate among certain local Marxists about whether the workers threatened with redundancy had “bullshit jobs” […] Asked to respond, I eventually referred my interlocutors to a circular put out by the strikers themselves, called “Advice to Passengers Using the Future London Underground.” It included lines like these:

Please ensure you are thoroughly familiar with London Underground’s 11 lines and 270 stations before traveling . . . Please ensure that there are no delays in your journey, or any accidents, emergencies, incidents, or evacuations. Please do not be disabled. Or poor. Or new to London. Please avoid being too young or too old. Please do not be harassed or assaulted while traveling. Please do not lose your property or your children. Please do not require assistance in any way.

[…] What tube workers actually do, then, is something much closer to what feminists have termed “caring labor.” It has more in common with a nurse’s work than a bricklayer’s. It’s just that, in the same way as women’s unpaid caring labor is made to disappear from our accounts of “the economy,” so are the caring aspects of other working-class jobs made to disappear as well.

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

Decided to move away from a third-party platform (Tumblr) into a self-hosted static solution (Hugo). I tried to match the old theme I had. All links should still work (Cool URIs don’t change). RSS is still available. Hope everything is working fine.

Now, some particular books I want to read are hard to get. Sometimes they are no longer for sale, or don’t work well on eReaders. Niche ones like art books, which can get quite expensive too. Then I remembered to search to see if my local library had its catalog online, and of course it has. So I got a library card for the first time in my life, and now I’m borrowing 3-4 books per month. For some of those books, I’m the first person taking them home. So in a small part, I’m also preventing those particular books of being decommissioned in the future. So here’s my praise for public libraries. Great for keeping your book budget lower, and getting access to hard-to-find or out-of-sale books. Plus, one of the few remaining places where you can spend time indoors without having to buy anything.

My Internet life started when blogs were at their peak. Now not so much. But I never stop enjoying following personal blogs, or maintaining mine. I still check my RSS feed reader every day.

To spread the word, here’s the list of friends I follow:

• Alcides Fonseca
• Ana “meia de leite”
• António Lima
• Bruno Pedro
• David Francisco
• David Gomes
• Fred Oliveira
• Fred Rocha
• Gonçalo Valério
• Humberto Alves
• Maria Margarida
• Rafaela Ferro
• Ricardo Lafuente
• Winnie Lim

I had my first experience organizing an art exhibition. I invited, together with Coimbr'a Pedal, the artist Xavier Almeida to exhibit on a bike repair shop in downtown Coimbra. It’s part of the convergent event of Coimbra’s Art Bienal.

The full description:

An exhibition focusing on one of the objects of study of the artist Xavier Almeida; the use of the bicycle as a socio-political enabler and transformer.

Not as a “romanticisation” of the bicycle, but as an exercise in implosive revolutionary symbolism in the organisation of cities, as well as its capacity for “decapitalisation” and anti-hygienisation of bodies and urban space.
The exhibition is spread across various media, such as comics, video, sound and installation.

Xavier Almeida (Ovar, Portugal, 1980) lives and works in Lisbon. Transdisciplinary artist, focusing on installation, painting, comics, publishing, sound, performance and social architecture.

Founder of the Estrela Decadente collective, with which he mainly produces fanzines, concerts and actions. Xavier Almeida’s work is linked to the underground and counter-culture side of cities, collaboration with spaces of resistance and an anti-form aesthetic as capitalist and classist dissolution.