In defence of Extinction Rebellion 🔗
The pundits of the various leftist movements have spent thousands of words telling us how much better their red climate movement would have been (more working class!, more intersectional!, more militant!) than XR if only they’d got round to doing it.
Watched: The Matrix Revolutions, 2003 - ★★★ 🎥
Just learned that this is called a Forest Bug, Pentatoma rufipes.
A living woodland crest, the forest bug is a shieldbug that loves nothing more than the sap of oak trees.
Also known as a red-legged shieldbug.
Distracted from distraction by distraction
I’ve just read this article in by Oliver Burkeman The Guardian:
It is an edited extract from his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, published on 26th August 2021.
I recognise and certainly experience a lot of the symptoms of being distracted that he is pointing out.
Social media is engineered to constantly adapt to our interests. No wonder the rest of reality seems unable to compete
We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly
When we succumb to distraction, we’re motivated by the desire to flee something painful about our experience of the present
What we think of as distractions aren’t the cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief
The title of this post comes from Burnt Norton the first of T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Watched: Night Moves, 2013 - ★★★½ 🎥
🎵 My Top weekly artists: clipping. (31), Bob Dylan (14), Field Music (12), Gary Kemp (11) & Laundromat (11) via tweekly.fm
Break in play
Like mother, like daughter 😉
Open air dance performance by NDC Wales at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.
Check in 🗺 — Chapter Arts Centre 🍺 — Drinking a Young’s Bitter by Eagle Brewery (formerly Charles Wells)
🔎 Zoom in
Lenten Spaghetti with Tahini.
A success!
You look around. A strong case could be made for it being heaven. A strong case could be made for it being hell. That is what IKEA is like.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am 📚
Friday night dinner recipe from Vefa’s Kitchen:
Lenten Spaghetti with Tahini
Gala - photography based social media
I’ve been trying out the photography based social media platform Gala. It was brought to my attention by @gr36 here on Micro.blog, in this conversation.
My username/profile there is (as expected!): thedimpause
I like the app they’re developing - although it does seem sluggish at times and I have experienced a few crashes whilst using it. Hopefully there’ll be a willingness and time allowed for improvement. It’s the style of app I wish Flickr had, a relatively simple photo browsing experience.
I don’t know yet whether the platform will succeed and prosper so I’m also publishing the photos I upload there to a Flickr album titled Gala. At the moment they’re mainly images from my archives which I’m revisiting with a little more post-processing.
Published 6 photos on my Flickr account 📷 🏷️ venice, gala
