the medium is the massage
I just threw some support at The Hyena by David Quantick on Kickstarter.
Looks like:
Anyway. It sounds like a humpin’ good read. Good books don’t go obsolete, do they?
Observed a chain of Starlink satellites from a dark patch of rural North Essex on the evening of October 19. Posted a wee video on Bluesky. It’s just a grainy closeup, but still captures something of the uncanniness of moving lines of uniformly-spaced lights in the night sky.
Saving for posterity, as I’ve fished it out anyway today:
That was a good day at the office.
The Pukka Pad A5 Metallic Jotta Squared Notebook is my Countdown notebook of choice. I’m not saying we watch a lot of Countdown, but I need to order a new multipack.
I can recommend regular Countdown. If you’re like me, you see marked improvement on the numbers round over time as you pick up techniques and shortcuts (there is good YouTube on this subject), and gain confidence with speedy arithmetic. (I think I can remember going to school once upon a time.)
I think I’d do OK if I went on. My numbers are still average but I do well on the words rounds (although less so conundrums). My strategy would be to favour several large numbers and get close, if not the exact answer, in the time.
Reckon I’d be odds-on for teapot, and have a fair crack at a run of two or three episodes. Very far from octochamp material, of course. That’s before factoring in anxiety, though. Odds of actually going on: nil.
Noticed this interesting feature over at Last.fm:
Reminded me of the one idea for a social network I’ve ever had — and decades ago. You’d get to pick two (and only ever two) current zeitgesit-y favourite things.
It could be anything. A person. A song. A flavour of KitKat. You’d be able to see your friends’s favourite things and, I guess, react. (But not comment, I reckon.)
But perhaps most tantalisingly you’d be able to see trends, local, regional and global.
Twitter trending topics kind of came to do that — that, but without any of the negativity. And I don’t know that that data has ever been properly tracked and visualised over time (although it looks like twitter-trending.com has had a go).
Anyway.
Two nights ago, the Aurora Borealis was visible unusually south. We could see a subtle glow from the garden, so decided to travel out to a nearby airfield to maximise sky and minimise light pollution.
We were lucky in that the first marked activity spike of the evening happened soon after we arrived.
We stayed for about an hour, and when we were home, the northern lights were still putting on a good show.
I took some photos — both at the airfield and when we got back, and put them on Instagram.
I also posted a timelapse reel. This was too short to capture the pulsations / fluctuations / undulations of the aurora, but you can see passing planes, car headlights coming and going, and, I fancy, a satellite.
I was lucky enough to travel into the Arctic Circle a few years ago. Though we did see the lights, they were dimmer, and green only. (Apparently red is rarer.) But we didn’t have the cameras to capture them well.
This was a welcome reminder of how good iPhone cameras are. After banking a few safe pictures, I got experimental in the settings. But nothing I tried did a better job than what the camera could figure out for itself — with the 1x lens especially.
The old of our two iPhones is an 11 Pro (I think) and still took excellent photos. Interestingly, the greens skewed bluer on the older iPhone. More beautiful, to my eyes.
I sometimes toy with the idea of binning off iPhones and getting a dumb phone with a camera. But I think iPhones are my cameras now. That’s not unusual, I know. But as someone whose main creative hobby is photography, perhaps it is?
I can make do with old ones — my vibe’s pretty lofi. It’s just a case of battery and attention management. Plenty of guides out there on how to dumb-phone-ify an iPhone.
Apologies for linking to Instagram photos directly. Not a good web experience — and an impossible one without an Insta account. I’m open to better solutions, but life is short.
Are.na is very nice, but not quite what I need from a scrapbook of the web.
So I’ve soft rebooted on Tumblr with a tumblelog now titled mclhuanism, described, tongue only half in cheek, as being about progressive and post-neoliberal art, media, design, communications and culture.
I appear to be scrobbling again. (Thanks, Tidal.) No earthly reason to follow. Although I suppose you could use my most-recently listened track as a Boards of Canada song randomiser.
Update: account deleted as I’m not using it — digital hygiene.
Casting around (again) for an alternative to Tumblr, Chazzer G suggested Are.na. So I have set up what I have today learned Are.na calls a channel: Heidegger’s surfboard.
I doubt this will stick, but going to give it a try.