UKIP, Hide Your Lion Eyes
UKIP have revealed their new logo (or, more accurately, the favourite of two options yet to be decided) to immediate derision. The letters reminded me of quite a different animal...
Omit Needless Words
Twitter has announced a shift from its longstanding 140-character limit to 280 characters, in management tweets which were twice as long as they needed to be. The move has brought criticism not just from fans of creative concision, but from those who point out that the company should focus more on their platform being used to harrass women, promote racism, and provoke nuclear war.
I went to the blood bank to make a withdrawal, and they handed me a black pudding.
The Wiley, Windy Moors
It’s a big ol’ links round-up. Exasperating political stuff below the fold.
Idyllic old postcards of the Catskills are now scenes of abandonment.
How our pictures can help reclaim lost history.
Dutch masterpieces with mechanics.
The Netherlands feeds the world.
A collection of deliberately inconvenient objects.
Shoegaze isn’t dead, it just moved east.
Aussie bloke sings “Wuthering Heights” in its original key. A Brazilian equivalent.
These videos about EnChroma glasses are a study in bottled-up male emotion. It’s like watching Field of Dreams.
Cliffhanger
If you’re chained to someone bigger running towards a cliff edge, you yell at them to stop, you don’t say “they’re the majority”. When you’re already feeling the effects of their mad dash for the edge, you don’t presume jumping will make things any better. You certainly don’t want to jump to prove a point about what a disaster jumping will be. It won’t help much if you survive the fall, you’ll still end up a mangled mess.
If you actually liked the firm ground you were on, talk of new horizons at the bottom of the cliff is no reassurance, especially when you’ve just spent years climbing from the bottom of the cliff to the top. If you can’t stop them from jumping, you at least want a hang glider for a soft landing, or to circle back to firm ground, because once they jump, they’re going to discover that neither of you can fly—while claiming that you haven’t been flapping your arms hard enough, and that both of your imminent deaths are your fault.
The Howling Wind
It’s fair to say that I’ve kept a low profile on Twitter for a while, after experimenting with tweeting in various different styles in its early years. Nowadays I spend my time there reading depressing news stories posted by far more prolific people. Occasionally I tweet something work-related, as many of my followers know me from work. Now and then I’ll tweet or retweet something that isn’t, but mostly I use the Like button to keep track of that, using them like bookmarks (or favorites, funnily enough).
Four Fairy Tales
A selection of limericks, two old and the rest new, inspired by years of bedtime stories.