A great adventure romp which immediately made we wonder why I haven’t read this before. I imagined a sort of steam punk alternative reality with a little magic sprinkled in. Everybody in this world has their own daemon an idea which Pullman explores really nicely, and overall the plot is a little sharper and more relevant than most in this category while really brings alive an alternative world. The ending felt really like it just pushed me towards immediately starting the next one in the series. A fun and recommended read. 📚 ★★★★

I have been enjoying setting up some palettes of colors for a few projects this autumn and have been finding Pastel really helpful so I bought it today! 💻

We went to the Helsinki Design Market for the first time since Covid. We were regular visitors before so it was a treat to be back. As usual in the cable factory main hall. 📷
⚲Location: 60°09'42.0"N 24°54'15.3"E

Insightful article by a renowned Sci-fi author into the differences between humans and A.I. Our use of language and art has intentionality and meaning that LLM’s don’t possess. 📝

Misty Morning outside the house. The kind of strange and captivating light that is so hard to photograph. 📷

In Toward Eternity Hur takes us on a journey where AI and nanobots take humanity through the next stage of evolution it’s at once personal and eon spanning. A philosophical and poetic look at the next phase of human evolution.

A world where reality exists balanced between instantiation and rapture, a passage travelled between the experience of existance an the act of recognition of it and of the difference between the act of creation and that of interpretation.

There is something of the Ship of Theseus paradox and something of the first words of the bible in the beginning was the word. But there is something beyond words, the taste of the ideas swirling around that this book left me with.

As one of the characters tells us about his favourite poem Rosetti’s Winter:My Secret. The secret is the thing preceeding the poem, it’s anticipation, the performance of the poem as part of the secret the part that brings it to life. ★★★★★ 📚

I wrote about why even airports that are designed sustainably are not in fact sustainable. 𝔡

The FT posted a pretty amazing graph

Americans basically die earlier than Brits by about 5 years, and it’s there along all income distributions. An average American lives the same length life as a Brit from the most deprived parts of the UK. The reason given is early death -One in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. 🧑‍⚕️

I took a look at Dormzilla a proposal for a student residence designed for UC Santa Barbara which bore much in common with chicken battery farms. The proposal was killed off about a year ago but was a fascinating and concerning look into possible enshittification of student accommodation. 𝔡

Watched The Skelton Twins (2014). The two central performances are captivating and much of the dialogue is strong. Yet somehow the plot doesn’t quite deliver. Was waiting for the final 30 mins when it finished. 🎥 ★★★

Just Watched The Holdovers (2023). Honestly looks like a film not only set in the 70’s but shot in the 70’s although it was released in 2023. No special effecs just great story and superb acting. I wish more films nowadays were like this. 🎥 ★★★★

📍 Hansa building, Visby.

For our family holiday this year we went to visit the Island of Gotland for a week, staying close to the island’s capital city Visby. The city is an old Hanseatic League town from medieval times and has a kind of haunted beauty. I wanted to get a better feeling for and understanding of the place before we went.

There doesn’t seem to be, at least in the english language, a much choice for books on the Hanseatic league. The one I found was by Helen Zimmern (1846-1934). It was first published under the title The Story of The Nations. The Hansa Towns in 1889. It’s in Public Domain now and can be downloaded on Project Gutenberg.

This is the magic of books when an author can speak to us from 125 years ago and be engaging, interesting and entertaining. Zimmern has written a higher opinionated and action packed short history of the League. It is a time and place in history which is often overlooked. While we rightly laud the rise of the Italian City States and their cultural heritage, the northern city states that rose at roughly the same time and which revolved around the Baltic and down the rivers of Germany are perhaps too much ignored.

Anyway I highly recommend this book if it’s something you think you may have some interest in. ★★★★ 📚

📍 From inside the Lummelunda cave in Gotland.

A gentle romance about two middle aged people who have had broken love lives coming together over a walk across the UK. The characters are believable, smart and a little guarded and bruised, they are well drawn by Nicholls and I liked them straight away.

The walking trip frames each day a set of chapters and gives the book structure and also provides a great way for two strangers to get to know each other better. From the writer of One Day it’s an engaging book that offers something a little different and dare I say better than the average romantic novel. ★★★★ 📚

📍 Hanging out in a square in Visby this Summer. 📷

we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.- Junichiro Tanizak in his Book In Praise of Shadows ❝

Finished reading Status and Culture by David W. Marx A riveting read full of insights into how culture changes over time and why. ★★★★★ 📚

📍 A beach near Visby, Sweden. 📷

I have been playing about a bit with search and tagmojis recently and realised that tagmojis can be used in search and you can link those to the search page directly on your site just by linking them.

A quick bit of editing later and I now have linked a few of my more used tagmojis to their search page.

See for example: ♻️ 🎵 🎥 ❝

So why would you want to do this you could just add a tag for that or even a #hastag term. Yes of course there are many ways to link posts and search for them. But this is a fun and direct way where you don’t have to copy/paste emojis into the search box or add tags you might not want in your tag/category organisation. With this method you just click the link.

I am wondering if anyone has done this before or if I am breaking something but have enjoyed doing this and it’s given me some fresh ideas going forward.

P.S. When I started playing with this I noticed that there is a really nice looking plugin called search space by @sod which I aim to test out soon.

P.P.S. For reference here is micro.blogs official page of tagmojis and here is @burk ’s page of additional tagmojis which i will be following as much as possible. 🔧

Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts - Friedrich Nietzsche ❝

The Father (2020) directed and co-written by Florian Zeller sees Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Coleman both give outstanding performances in a film about a pensioner who has dementia.

With the way the film is cut looping time and disorientating us as much as the protagonist, the use of the same actors to portray different people and the tricks of the apartment set, it’s just a tour de force of storytelling.

Not a feelgood movie but instead a poignant, beautiful sometime frightening and sad journey. It may provoke some wet eyes and a little soulsearching. 🎥★★★★★

Solar panels will soon have to be installed in all new buildings in Europe. Adding perhaps up to 200GW by 2030. ♻️

For the first time Renewables overtake Fossil fuels in power generated on a continent. This feels like a moment. ref ♻️

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism is a 2020 book by Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist who lives in Poland and is married to Radisłow Sikorski (in 2024 the Polish Foreign Minister). She started off writing in the UK for The Economist and for The Spectator.

She is from the centre-right with the emphasis on right but a liberal and believer in democracy and the rule of law. In the book she sketches out the outlines of a rift in politics not between left and right but between pro and anti-democratic political forces.

This book charts the rise of populism perhaps better described as authoritarianism in Europe and the USA. She is the perfect person for this role as she was there so to speak. With her journalistic connections and later with her husbands too she was often a witness to the events first hand, a confidant of someone who took part in it, or there in the room.

Indeed this point is beautifully put over at the beginning of the book where she tells about a new years party she put on celebrating the dawn of the millennium with the elite of the Polish right at the time.

At that moment, when Poland was on the cusp of joining the west, it felt as if we were all on the same team. We agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity, about the way things were going.

Now some of them would cross the street to avoid each other. Friends have become enemies and people who previously espoused democratic values have in practise reneged on them when their own careers could be furthered or their beliefs challenged or when the meritocracy worked against them.

Applebaum knows the players well and quickly and succinctly summarises the tragectory of Poland under the Party Law & Justice (Pis).

She then turns over a nest of bugs in Hungary, UK and Spain before turning to the USA.

She identifies key people or clercs who have betrayed the task of journalists or politicicans - to portray the truth - for their own ends.

Some key clercs profiled in the book are Rafael Bardají (Spain), Ania Bielecka(Poland), Simon Heffer (United Kingdom), Laura Ingraham(United States), and Mária Schmidt (Hungary).

AA also looks at why people might support authoritarianism and introduces (to me anyway) the idea of soft dictatorship and of the medium-sized lie.

The case of Dreyfus in 19thC France is also brought up as a kind of mirror of the political rift today, and indeed it seems to contain many of the same axels, anti-semitism & nationalism being just a couple of them.

I have read some reviews of the book that notes Annes friendship with many of these people and perhaps imply her at least partial guilt in not calling out these people earlier. Of this I couldn’t say but at least she is vocal and specific now.

The book is fairly short and succinct and a great starting point for anyone wishing for an overview of the first 20 years of Western political health from someone who was there. She gives good insight into these events up to 2020 when the book was published. ★★★★📚