cafes, communication, and more
Winner of the Academy Award for animation (2025) but made in Latvia using free animation software “Blender”.
Really enjoyed the experience of watching it with my son; he could explain just how clever this wordless animation was.
Learn more and watch the trailer on IMDB
The One Hundred Pages Strategy talks about how to adjust your day to create the greatest possible time for reading. It’s written in clear prose, but if you’d like it in pseudo-diagram form, I’ve made an attempt.
Noah Kalina is still taking photos of himself every day. He’s been doing that for 25 years.
For some reason I keep being drawn to movies that are seeking to tell stories of loss from WWII.
This humour-flecked story of a divorced 30-something journalist (Lena Dunham) and her Polish holocaust survivor father (Stephen Fry) who has invited himself along to her tour of key sites from their family history.
Fry does an impressive job with this story, and unusually for a cinematic outing, I chat briefly to a lady who was also in the screening, who tells me of how the film connected with her, and her own family story of loss.
A touching story, that leaves you continuing to think about loss and tragedy.
During the week where I finished listening to the audio book of the Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk (an experience that makes you wonder how to best use your time), and listening to the kids talking about maths homework, I’m reminded of the moment that Jeff Bezos decided not to pursue theoretical physics.
Already lost to me is the LinkedIn post that brought this to my attention, but searching for that story, I found an article that told some more of the background.
https://mindmatters.ai/2024/05/a-man-a-boat-and-a-goat-and-a-chatbot/
The link between the original post and the classic non-fiction work “Gödel Escher Bach” is the icing on the cake.
You’re familiar with the concept of the puzzle where a man has to cross a river with various things: perhaps a goat, a wolf and a cabbage; but only a certain number of items will fit in the boat.
Watching the different AI’s variously make a mess of this puzzle when asked to solve a much simpler version sparked no small amount of joy.
i recently signed up to try the Opal app for which I’d seen many ads on my Instagram feed. The app essentially puts your own smartphone into parental guidance mode, and lets you lock yourself out of social media (or any other) apps for blocks of time. I had found that I was spending more time scrolling on Instagram than I wanted to, and this seemed like a good way to slow down and think more deliberately about how I’m spending my time.
Today a friend linked to an article – the state of the culture in 2024 – its thesis was that increasingly fragmented attention spans have led to something called anhedonia (the inability to enjoy an experience designed for pleasure) that seems to have been caused by the level of lock-in that we have to our devices, and to our social media apps in particular.
Spent some time this week slowed down and trying to reset. It was good going to a retreat centre for a couple of nights to spend some slow time. I probably rate myself a B- for my efforts at slowing down; what should have been a season of silence and solitude was interrupted with podcasts and even pushing through for one work email in particular.
Learned some good lessons about what to do, and what not to do, when slowing down, so that’s a win.
If you haven’t tried being silent for half an hour, it is a fascinating exercise. The things you notice over that period of time. Try it!
Reading a blog post from danah boyd I realised I’d never read Fahrenheit 451, so I borrowed the audiobook from my local library using Libby and worked through it during my holiday downtime (mostly dog-walking) over the last couple of days.
The irony of listening to an audiobook while hearing about a world constantly distracted by screens and in-ear audio (and this written in the early 1950s) was not lost on me. The depiction of a world where people stay in a numbed state all the time, entertained by, but separated by, their ever-present sources of entertainment was a reminder to keep engaging with people in real life (even as that becomes more challenging).
I’m currently in the middle of some annual leave, in the perhaps unwise situation of having a work meeting in the middle of my leave. It’s a familiar journey from being in the midst of work-mindset to being able to relax, but I find myself trying to score the level of relaxation that I’m achieving, rather than being able to switch off entirely from the work mindset so that I’m able to “make the most of the downtime”, whatever that looks like.