📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 11: “gimcrack”
The very opposite of gimcrack: a Genroku (1688-1704) period plate from Kyushu Japan, displayed in the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne. I spotted six birds hiding in this design. Are there any more?
📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 10: “ritual”
My daughter goes surfing almost every day. She’s gradually accumulating more boards.
📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 9: “together”
Spotted during my regular bike ride: birds of a feather.
Micro.blog March Photo Challenge Week 2 Preview
Just thought I’d provide a preview1 of week 2 of the photoblog challenge.
Week 2 prompts: 🗓
- March 8: walk ([@lwdupont](https://micro.blog/lwdupont))
- March 9: together ([@sherif](https://micro.blog/sherif))
- March 10: ritual ([@drewbelf](https://micro.blog/drewbelf))
- March 11: gimcrack ([@jafish](https://micro.blog/jafish))
- March 12: shiny ([@odd](https://micro.blog/odd))
- March 13: connection ([@agilelisa](https://micro.blog/agilelisa))
- March 14: horizon ([@crossingthethreshold](https://micro.blog/crossingthethreshold))
We can use a few more suggestions! 💡 Email 1-3 to jean@micro.blog.
-
OK, day 8 has already been posted. ↩︎
📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 7: ‘Whole’
The leaves of my Swiss cheese plant, Monstera deliciosa, are whole, holes and all. Makes me wonder if this is factored in when we talk about becoming a whole person.
📷 Micro.blog March Photo Challenge, day 6 “Engineering”.
This time last year we were enjoying the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the Writers Festival and the wonderful Botanic Gardens. Maybe next year we’ll get there again 🤞
You don't build art, you grow it
Finished reading: Dancing with the Gods by Kent Nerburn 📚
This book is advice on the artistic life from an experienced sculptor and writer. I found one section particularly striking. It contrasted two approaches to making art: that of the architect and that of the gardener.
“The architect designs and builds; he [sic] knows the desired outcome before he begins. The gardener plants and cultivates, trusting the sun and weather and the vagaries of change to bring forth a bloom. As artists we must learn to be gardeners, not architects. We must seek to cultivate our art, not construct it, giving up our preconceptions and presuppositions to embrace accident and mystery. Let moments of darkness become the seedbed of growth, not occasions of fear.”
I remembered these words while visiting the new exhibition spaces at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. It’s hard to imagine an artwork that could have more clearly illustrated the cultivation approach to art that Nerburn wrote of.
In a huge, mysterious, and very dark underground space called The Tank, Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas was exhibiting a series of extraordinary sculptures entitled The End of Imagination. These pieces, apparently four years in the making, seemed really ancient, but of the deep future, organic, not constructed, more biological than artificial, and they appeared to be growing there in the darkness.
Rojas undertook an exhaustive computer simulation of deep-time environmental processes in imagined extraterrestrial contexts, to shape and weather each piece, prior to creating their physical representation. So the outcome was not so much sculpted as weathered and sedimented into existence - yet not by any kind of earthly processes.
Earlier thoughts on Dancing with the Gods.
📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, Day 5: Tile.
A home renovation uncovered these original hearth tiles. c.1898. They’re quite worn but we’re keeping them.
📷 March Micro.blog photo challenge day 4: Zip
I imagine commuting by zip-line to my office in the treetops. @Miraz, you might recognise this
I woke before dawn to find someone had left a beach campfire alight through the night.
As the sun rose over Barrenjoey Headland I was completely alone, but haunted somehow.
The flames kept trying to name the person who had lit them.
📷 March Micro.blog photo challenge day 3: Solitude
📷 March Micro.blog photo challenge day 2: Weather
The view from the train window this morning neatly obliged. Though you can hardly see it through the rain, this is Spectacle Island.
📷 March Micro.blog photo challenge, day 1: Secure
Well, that’s what the cat’s feeling, curled up in a shoe box. I’ve tested just marking a rectangle with string on the floor and he sits happily in that too.
Can AI give me ham off a knee?
Last night I lay awake thinking about how AI-automated writing is about to change our entire language.
Since AI can easily write everything correctly with perfect spelling and punctuation, one way to show you’re human is to do the opposite. At the time of Shakespeare, spelling was wildly idiosyncratic and people just made it up as they went along. I think this free-for-all might return soon, since it’s a neat way of showing you’re not made of silicon.
But there’s another way we might change our speech and writing to subvert our digital overlords. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: ham off a knee! It’s something chatbots can’t provide, but that we humans can understand quite easily.
I lay awake last night thinking about cryptic crossword clues (I never do crosswords, but still, that’s rumination for you!). Here’s a clue I thought up. Not a very good clue, since I don’t know what I’m doing:
“For Joyce, recovery leads to pain, we hear (15).”
The answer? “Fine again so ache”.
Doesn’t make sense to you? Well, Finnegans Wake was James Joyce’s fourth and last major work of fiction. I was thinking of it because it’s packed full of homophony (ham off a knee - get it?).
So what’s homophony? Glad you asked. Homophony is simply when you use a word that sounds like another word. But Joyce used homophones in a complex way. His sentences read one way on the page, but when spoken out loud they often mean something else, subverting the original meaning. That’s why he was a genius and I’m not.
But it also struck me that we could start doing this and AI wouldn’t be able to keep up. Admittedly it took Joyce years to finish Finnegans Wake. It’s certainly complicated to come up with whole paragraphs of homophonic writing or speech. But I suspect young people, who are always the instigators of new slang, will be quite up to the challenge.
Alternatively, it’s the new AI frontier. Imagine if you could command something like: “ChatGPT: give me a written account of a 16th Century tourist visit to Venice, which warns of impending alien attack when read out loud.”
Now that would impress me.
When someone believes they have no expertise, that doesn’t mean they have nothing useful to say. We often learn best from those who are just one step ahead of us on the learning journey, so telling others, “Here’s what I learned today” may well be really helpful.
Share what you know
Free books! 📚
TIL: A search on Amazon Kindle produces loads of free academic book titles, many of which are high quality and really interesting. Just search for publisher (e.g. Routledge), or “University Press”, or “open access”, then order the results by price: low to high. The lowest ones are $0.
Hat tip: @aus.social@joannaholman
Putting yourself out there attracts people who are likeminded.
That’s one benefit of making it personal
Despite AI, the Internet is still personal
Blogging is great and it will never die. That’s why I keep coming back to it and you do too.
Dave Winer, the blogfather, once said:
“A blog is the unedited voice of a person.”
That’s a concept worth reconsidering in this age of AI ventriloquism. If I went in for tattoos, I’d have it inked in cursive writing on the back of my neck1.
Because online, in spite of everything, despite all the cynicism and exploitation, advertising and automation, I’m still looking for genuine communication. I’m seeking some kind of connection, some marker that says:
“I was here, and so were you.”
It’s the voice of a person connecting to another person. Not a machine, not an algorithm, but a person. A person with a body, not a corpus, not a pretence but a real presence.
But why keep doing it?
Here I present two good reasons that will cover many use-cases.
Publish to find your people
First, I keep coming back to it because blogging is a long-winded search query to find your tribe. It’s a calling card, many words long. The tldr; version of the message is:
Hardly anyone likes what I like, but that’s OK because now there’s two of us.
Austin Kleon drew my attention to this, so it must be true.
There might be a bit more to this, though. By publishing, you make something that never existed before. It’s not impossible that through it people might find themselves. I’m not saying every post is going to be a revelation. But in my experience the right word at the right time can work wonders. There are a few writers I feel like that about. Perhaps you know of some too.
Publish or be damned
Secondly, it’s a miracle that you can publish your unedited voice so easily. You’re a one person media company - and that’s amazing. When I think of all the functionality crammed into a blogging system like micro.blog, or Wordpress, or Substack, or even Blot or WriteAs, and how previous generations could hardly even dream of such publishing power, I almost feel a duty to make use of it. Imagine a time traveller recently arrived here from the past2 looking at us and saying, incredulously:
“So you can do all this at the press of a button, and what? Right now you can’t be bothered?”
That’s right. Sometimes I can’t be bothered.
And then the feeling passes.
A home to endangered pied oystercatchers. The city is just visible in the distance.
What I saw on my bike ride this moring - a view through the bird-hide window.
