October 9, 2021

I couldn't keep my eyes open last night, so went to bed early without blogging (10pm is early - almost mid-afternoon - for me). This is a Sunday morning catch up.

Spent most of Saturday trying to study. There's a 3000 word essay due in; I have a one-week extension to the deadline which, no matter how hard I try and convince it otherwise, my brain translates as: Pressure's off - kick back and relax, kid!

So textbooks and academic papers were liberally sprinkled with Twitter and Graun. Which generated some amazing non-academic stuff, mind:

Finally got round to Bad Art Friend and loved the million thorny issues it raised.

A very different, very human kind of piece about where we're at and how we got here: A late phase reflection on global oil.

A jolly tale about life-coaching that hit hard. 

Austin Kleon reminding everyone not to lose the magic.

Somebody mentioned the Fermi Paradox - I had to google it to find out what that was and, as ever, Tim Urban explained it best.

Then there was this wonderful thing: What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation by Clive Thompson.

That's Frankenstein followed by The Old Man And The Sea (they look way more beautiful, and surrender more information, as large images on the actual webpage by the way). He's made a widget where you can paste your own writing, too.

Someone also tweeted the work of Katerina Kamprani, whose collection, The Uncomfortable, remakes everyday items as deliberately awkward/impossible to use.

Chain Fork by Katerina Kamprani

I wonder if Katerina's spent time in New Zealand, because I have a deconstructed fork like this that I bought in Wellington in the early 2000s. I remember someone had made a whole range of delicately mangled cutlery and it was genius - jointed and hinged spoons, forks and knives, teaspoons with perforations drilled into them, etc.

Managed to get out for a walk in the evening, where I found something amiss with the bowling green, and the lighthouse lit up pink and blue:

Very pretty but I wish they'd expend the same amount of effort on getting the clocks to tell the correct time.

Today's Photo: Suspended