Partial-eclipse day today and since I had a bit of energy I decided to get the camera out and take some photos. Our local park has a bit of a hill and a decent view of the sky so we headed over to meet some chums, along with a decent chunk of the local community.
Eclipses, even partial ones, retain their majesty and awe. Even though I was dicking about with the camera and explaining to people how to get a decent image with their colanders that magic was still palpable.
I’m still working on the images I took which aren’t that amazing but were fun to get, so look for that tomorrow.
Bill Paterson Remembers… The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
I could listen to Bill Patterson (the dour dad to both Prentice and Fleabag) talk for hours and this is a delightful reminiscence of his radical leftist theatre days as part of 7:84 and their 1973 touring performance of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil about the historic Highland clearances and the then contemporary exploitation of North Sea oil. via
Documentary filmmaker Sam Green on the saga of the Weather Underground
History has a way of distinguishing acts of political courage from acts of political suicide." A 2003 interview reprinted from Arthur magazine about a documentary I didn’t know existed and will now try to hunt down.
Bijan Stephen looks into recommendation algorithms, specifically the difference between TikTok and IG’s Reels, and notes that in order for them to be interesting they have to throw in the occasional wildcard. He references this piece by Lauren Leek which I’m saving to read in depth later where she says:
An algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average. The more uncertain it is, the harder it pulls you toward the crowd.
This is given as an explanation as to why everything looks the same right now, and they’re right, it does. But it kinda always has, at least in my lifetime. It’s one of the things that came up with the uni-context, that once you have access to ‘everything’ all those things trend towards similarity, and it’s been going on at least since the radio took off.
cf the annihilation of space and time, which I used to explain photography and have just learned is from Marx. It applies to loads of Victorian era inventions - telegraph, railways, etc - that defined the 20th.