I had another walk round the Finlas Water Loop on Monday. Beautiful November day.
Map, photos & notes: walkmap
Read: I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan ★★★ 📚
We had witnessed all of this unfold, quiet onlookers, none of us stepping in to teach him a lesson or reaching out to help the pregnant woman. At most there were some words of comfort offered to her. We each had our own pressures to deal with in the end, our own issues at home. No one had anything left over to give. A work environment like that squeezes all life from a person. You wind up emotionally overdrawn, and numb and indifferent, without even noticing.
The moral of this story: When disgruntled, the lowly among us only have each other to pick on, because going after the powerful will only cost us in the end. And if that’s too much, there are always animals. Love is blind, people like to say. But if you ask me, love sees clearest of all; it is the least interested in personal gain, and the most true to itself. What’s blind is hatred.
China doesn’t seem very socialist as the author runs through many gig economy jobs, working long hours. At one point going round different medical practices to find the cheapest. Quite repetitive as it goes through the daily grind. Didn’t love it, glad I read it.
Over the last few years, my blogging has slowly became less social. I thought I might reboot that by responding to Knowember, get to know your blogger – Robert Birming. I’ve been enjoying visiting the sites of other blogs listed on Robert’s page. It is good to move outside your ‘local’ area and get some serendipity. Some great rabbit holes.
A photo
I take a lot of photos, but am no photographer. I think of them as notes of nice looking or interesting things, ways of telling a story, a memory. Recently I’ve been posting sightings of flora & fauna to iNaturalist where a not very good photo can still be useful. I also enjoy the #SilentSunday hashtag on Mastodon. I mostly post via this site: Silent Sunday.
Name or nickname
My name is John Johnston, mostly online as johnjohnston. Occasionally, when that is taken, I use troutcolor, but no one has ever called me that. I started on Flickr. I like trout; I used to love fishing. I usually spell colour colour.
Where in the world I blog from
I’ve lived in Glasgow for almost 50 years, apart from occasional posts from wee holidays or alway days, I post from home. One of the best things about Glasgow is how quickly you can get to some sort of quiet countryside.
The blog is WordPress and I like to type in TextMate & drafts.
What my blog is mostly about
It started off about my use of, what was then called, Web 2 technology in the primary school classroom. It developed to include some technologies I am interested in; walks, mostly short; photos, mostly butterflies in the summer; links I like and books I’ve read. Now I am mostly retired the classroom has dropped off. I still read some education sites. The bigger tags in my cloud are classroom, blogging & WordPress. I don’t write about family, feelings or politics very much at all.
#SilentSunday
Likes Somewhere between a luddite and a cyborg by .
Doing a masters in computer science and AI has been a surprisingly soul searching endeavour. My memories of enjoying tech as a kid were usurped by this ugly reality of spying and grasping and selling. I do still love technology, just not the industry it has become.
I enjoyed the list of the way she would like technology and our relationship to it to go.
Had a nice walk round the Finlas Water loop on Monday, sparkling day.
Notes & photos on the Finlas Loop walkmap
Exit Party
Read Exit Party Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★
“I think if you live long enough,” Nico said, “you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here. That’s what I mean.”
And
He locks the studio door behind her, thinking about the poem again. The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night. Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.
Following several characters across two alternative worlds, the story moves from voice to voice, places to place and back and forward in time. Sometimes written in the close third other sections in first person. I enjoyed all of this.
A Micropub client for iPhone, iPad and Mac. OutPost publishes notes and articles straight to your own website, signing in with IndieAuth. Your posts live on your domain, not on someone else’s platform.
#SilentSunday
Life in Links – 70
Links I’ve collected at Links and Notes recently.
Fun
Trailer Time Machine Watch random film trailers from a year of your choice!
I have clicke through a few from the year I was born (1958) and the year I went to university 1976, 58 seems a better year so far. Great fun.
I never got the wordle habit but I am finding these interesting:
MapTap.gg – Daily Geography Game I have been playing this for a week or two every day.
Birdle UK | Guess the Daily Bird
a fun way to encourage more people to learn about birds and bird conservation, no matter their experience level.
Facinating
The Right Words in the Right Order I posted about this earlier. LLMs, education, humanities & screens.
Timelapses of Earth powered by community science. Used by organizations worldwide to monitor the environment and inspire stewardship.
Via @dogtrax. There is a map: Map | Chronolog. This looks great. Crowd sourced timelapses. There are none in Scotland.
Nicola Turner | 1 October – 7 November 2026 – Overview | Annely Juda Fine Art
A site-responsive installation made mainly from dark wool and horsehair will fill the ground-floor galleries at 16 Hanover Square, extending in a procession-like manner that continues 12 metres up the façade of the Georgian townhouse. Inline with Turner’s practice, the installation will reference the fascinating history of the building, whilst touching on myriad issues such as shame associated with the female experience, secret-keeping and the inherent ‘memory’ of materials.
Frightening
End Salmon Farming – Project Slingshot
All Scottish salmon sold in supermarkets comes from overcrowded, filthy, underwater factory farms, where parasites and flesh-eating sea lice are endemic. Investigators have filmed fish with damaged and missing eyes and whole chunks of their flesh eaten away.
Years ago I had a wee picture of the colour chat fish farms used to choose the colour of the salmon flesh on my sidebar linking to attempts to clean up salmon farming. Looks like it i still a problem.
24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.
Finally
John @ Sandaig Primary John’s Feeds Some nostalgia from the internet archive, sites I followed via RSS in 2007. Not many still active.
These are the sites I read in my feedreader, I just exported them all and converted the export to html.
The only feeds that are missing are the useful to me but no one else ones, comments on my flickr stream, del.icio.us links for me etc.