I had a lovely morning reading The Living Mountain while a wren sang on our balcony. Described by the Guardian as “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain”, it details Nan Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorms and her philosophy of life:
“So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”
I get that this door hanger is meant to be playful, but some of these are downright creepy — I suspect most room service staff have had sleazy guys say some variant on “Care to join us?”
@kate I don’t understand what your supposed to do with it. “Come in let’s play” and “Come in gone shopping” are wildly different. “Come in, in need of help” is something very different again!
@kate whilst at Uni, I once cut through those gardens on the way home from a bar job in the early hours. I went as someone told me about the statue. In spite of knowing it was there, it scared the life out of me.
After getting over the fright of a perfectly still lifesized person at 3am, I noticed the apple and nearly cried.
British transphobia has now reached the stage of coercing young people into detransitioning using the threat of referrals to social services if they access treatment through private providers. The Good Law Project is crowdfunding for a possible legal challenge: https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/nhs-cyp-guidance/
@kate how long before we see the first accepted refugee from the UK somewhere? Because if this shit keeps up, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of it within 18 months…
If you’re designing a programming language, please consider allowing hyphens in identifiers. Hyphen-separated text (kebab-case) is more readable than camelCase, and doesn’t require use of the shift key like camelCase and snake_case. There’s no ambiguity with subtraction if you require spaces around binary operators (which every style guide I’ve ever used requires anyway).
On 7th June 2020 anti-racism protestors tore down a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston and threw it into Bristol harbour. The statue that once looked down on the people of Bristol now lies, graffiti-covered and surrounded by placards from the protest, in the M Shed museum. I found the exhibition to be a moving reminder of that brief period when it seemed Britain might finally start to acknowledge and address the legacy of its history of racism.
The mnemonic I use to remember Markdown link syntax is that the square brackets look a bit like a button and then the round brackets mention the URL as a note afterwards:
Brits ask “A penny for your thoughts?” and Americans respond with “Just my two cents”. At current exchange rates ($1.00 = £0.80) this means Brits are receiving 1.6p of American thoughts for just 1p. In this paper we propose an alternative asset pricing model for the marketplace of ideas, considering—
Last night I discovered my christening candle in a box of childhood items my parents gave me. This morning the bathroom lightbulb died while I was having a shower. So now, for the second time in my life, I’m getting washed by the light of a christening candle.
My wife and I went to a mermaid-painting watercolour workshop today. The other attendee, a retired woman, asked us “Are you two related, or just friends?”. Anyway, here’s my first attempt at painting since primary school 30 years ago:
I often see people here discussing the importance of forgiving our past selves for taking so long to realise who we really are. But forgiveness implies blame — that there’s something to forgive.
I believe gratitude is more powerful, and more cathartic, than forgiveness. I say to my past self:
Thank you for all you endured for so many years to keep me safe. Thank you for sacrificing yourself so that I could exist. I’ll make it worth it. I’ll make you proud.