Out West
The next batch of galleries at Detail looks closer to home, recording trips to the west of Scotland going back over a decade. It’s a beautiful part of the country, with plenty of out-of-the-way places little-known to tourists.
Rust in Peace
We lived in Edinburgh for nine years without a car, but when our son came along the merits of having one again became hard to resist, so in June 2010 we bought a second-hand 2002 Ford Focus.
To Helvetia and Back
One of the most significant gaps in Detail has been a series of trips I made at the beginning of the decade to Switzerland, mainly to Geneva but also to Zurich, St Gallen, and other towns around Lake Geneva. I had so many photos of the place building up so quickly, and so many thoughts about them, that I could never quite get them together.
I’ve finally dealt with the photos, at least, if not all of the thoughts. The result is a series of new galleries, only six to nine years late.
A few years ago I posted two galleries of Scottish Sand, with close-ups and wide shots from several different beaches. Here’s a third instalment, with photos from Gullane in East Lothian and Port William in Galloway last year.
Cracks
A new way to build tiny neural networks.
A guitar built out of epoxy resin.
Shredding the Game of Thrones theme.
The fight to be the real Lord Buckethead.
Russell T. Davies on Years and Years (with spoilers through episode 4). It’s the series of the year, and his best work.
We got a rocket stove five years ago, and over time it’s become our main barbecue and camping stove: so much quicker than charcoal, and so much more efficient than log fires. But sometimes you just can’t beat staring at the embers, especially after dark—as I enjoyed during an evening of camping in 2017. I’ve turned some photos of that evening into a second campfire gallery at Detail (to go with the first).
Eighteen months ago I spent a few days in Bilbao with my brother, enjoying its fine food, beverages and art. It was my second time in the Basque Country, after an unplanned visit to Donostia/San Sebastián in 2010, and it felt even more of a place apart from Castilian Spain, not least because the weather was cool and overcast, and the surrounding hills were a different shade of green than those down south. I saw some separatist stickers here and there, and a lot of Basque flags.
In between stops in bars and cafés we took in the Guggenheim and the local history museum, and while my brother was off on business I also visited the museums of archaeology and fine art. It was a great weekend, which I memorialised at the time in a limerick, and now at long last I’ve added a gallery at Detail to go with the panoramas I posted of it last year. Gozatu!
The kids’ February school holidays are an ideal opportunity to steal away for a city break, and this year there was every incentive to get over to the continent before Brexit threw everything into chaos (or didn’t, as it turned out, but at the start of the year it sure looked as if it would). I was surprised to find some good deals on flights and hotels to a city I’d long wanted to see, but which had always looked expensive, so grabbed the chance to go. A few weeks later we were on the plane to Venice.
Chch
Two months ago I gathered a handful of links to mark the massacre in Christchurch, but couldn’t collect my thoughts sufficiently to post them here. The city has been one of my favourite places ever since J. and I lived there for a few months in 1997, and as often happens with awful events in places I love, I found it hard to disentangle the events from my memories of the place.
Building Blocks
Western Europe’s tallest skyscraper will be visible from 60km away, unimpeded by much in the way of other buildings, because it’s going to be in the middle of the Danish countryside. Elsewhere in the land of Lego, buildings grow from fjords, resemble icebergs, recycle, out-lean Pisa, get wavey, look spiky, express themselves, and capture clouds. Danish architecture is on the rise: today, Copenhagen; yesterday, and tomorrow, the world.
Read More · 28 May 2019 · 1 Comment · Art
The End of May
The European Elections are out of the way, and soon Theresa May will be as well.
Pink Mist
Music consumption has unintended economic and environmental costs.
A new kind of metasurface uses the sun to clear foggy screens.
A hundred years of climate anomalies in thirty seconds.
How much ice has Greenland lost to climate change?
The Guardian changes the language it uses about the climate.
A new piece of climate change SF by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Ian McEwan displays his ignorance of SF while promoting his own. Sad.
“Violent attacks are winning, and infections are unchecked.”