Likes When rocks take a walk.
Nature waiting, I call it: just sitting there, waiting to see what comes along.
and
That would be cool. Inevitably, my former favourite rock will continue to erode: like us (and everything else) rocks wage an ongoing, ultimately futile war against entropy. But I’m sure my old rock will outlast me.
I’d like to develop some of that patience, I generally keep on the move. Maybe getting older will strengthen the ability to wait.
Victoria Park, drizzle them brightened, a couple of white butterflies over the flower beds. Went to investigate. Among the bright flowers were a few thistles. A couple of bees working over the thistles ignoring the other flowers. One butterfly came off a thistle too. Not sure which type of white.
Read: Land by Maggie O'Farrell ★★★★ 📚
A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irregularities. How radiant, how lovely is the land and yet how empty. It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where humans are unknown, where he is the only one, and will have to make the best of it.
A mix of history & myth which did not go down well with the reviewers but it did with me. I was fairly enthralled. Most of the tale set in post famine Ireland, but stretching back to prehistory and across to India & Canada.
#SilentSunday
Out to Greenside this morning, warm, close and sometimes sunny. Butterflies: Green-veined Whites, several spotted woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells & painted ladies on thistles.
I rather like this odd view of a painted lady. few more photos on flickr. My Butterflies by month continues to grow.
Likes Please let me interact with your blog post! by .
I love my RSS reader. It’s the first thing I reach for when I’m “catching up.” As I’m reading through my list of feed items, I often come across blog posts that do not give me any way to interact with the post!
Read: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout ★★★ 📚
As he steered the sailboat back to his wharf, it came to him how he had once, when he was a kid, said to his father, "I'm going to have a boat one day," and his father had smiled and said, "No, Artie, you're not ever going to have a boat." This did not hurt Artie to remember.
Rather melancholic novel. Older teacher Artie, goes through things in a Strout-ian way. Some rather dramatic twists, turns & happenings. Sadder than I expected, perhaps a little crammed with ideas, but the writing goes straight in.
#bloomstrolling for #bloomscrolling in Glen Douglas yesterday. Lots of sparkles on the ground. #flora.
The other day I was complimented, albeit in a jokey way, on the neat organisation of a word document I had produced.
I said nothing, I don’t have a working copy of word on my computer. I do have access, via glow, to the online version but I dislike browser based apps of this sort. I have never been a big fan or power user of word anyway.
My docx was not created with word but with TextMate, written in markdown. & converted with pandoc.
It occurred to me that it is a lot simpler to make a reasonable structured document with markdown than most other applications. Being limited to headings of different levels, paragraphs, lists and a few more formatting features could be seen as a good thing.
Might it be easier, in some alternative universe, for children to learn the basics of creating an organised document before opening word or other software behemoth.
I wrote the above yesterday, in drafts in Markdown. Today I read that Markdown had been added to Onedrive for iPhone.
I knew Onedrive in the browser would display Markdown as my planning for class before I retired was written in Markdown. I could write at home and read in school.
So I had a look in the desktop browser and there is a create Markdown file in the list there too. It opens a basic in-browser editor.
It then occurred to me that maybe you could paste Markdown into word, so I tried that, in the online version of word, and yes you can.
Seems that AI is driving Markdown take up.
Read: The End of Everything by M John Harrison ★★★★ 📚
'Summer. I stood in a long shallow chalk valley half a mile from the sea, listening to the sound of the waves – the sound waves! – amplified by acoustic lensing conditions in the absolutely still air, and came to the inescapable conclusion: the iGhetti are only a mirage. We wait for them to reveal them-selves, forgetting what has revealed itself daily since they came. They did not arrive from the astral plane: they arrived by reconfiguring it. They are only a refraction of something else in the universe, something we can't know about because it's the other side of some horizon. Perhaps we are too?'
Grabbed from the review pull quotes: 'baffling, confounding, haunting, dreamlike' all resonate. A strange book where noting is explained. The 'aliens', inexplicable & might not even know they are at war. Everything is falling apart but folk still go down to the coast for a break.
