August 24 round up
I’ve been attempting to get some momentum into those fun projects I promised myself I would undertake when I left the OU. It’s been a bit stop/start, I just seem to get going with one when something derails it. My planned running schedule has stalled but I have been taking Teilo on a weekly hike. I have combined this with another side project, which is to set up a vinyl Instagram account of photos of album covers in the wild in Wales (rather like podcasts, these are something that all men of a certain age seem to feel the world needs). It’s useful because it acts as an impetus to do the walks, and those in turn provide some inertia to get the account up and running. I had a lot of fun doing a session on the DS106Radio Summer Camp playing vinyl loosely connected to the 25 Years of Ed Tech. That whole week was a blast with people really taking the opportunity of the medium to do something different. If you have time it’s worth listening back to a few of the sessions. I’ve also been dabbling in some fiction writing, going to the cinema regularly for the first time in years, and developing a hockey analytics model for predicting Cardiff Devils results. So, yes, I am doing all the semi-retirement cliches, thank you very much. But, most importantly of all, this month Maren and I got engaged! See coastal path/beach pic above. Giving that whole marriage thing another go sometime next year.
Books
My reading has ticked along this month, with the usual mix of fiction, horror and non-fiction. The success of Madeline Miller’s fabulous retelling of the Circe myth has led to a glut of such books. One I read this month was Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, which recounts the Trojan war from the perspective of the various women involved. All of the different accounts work well, with her increasingly sarcastic letters from Penelope to Odysseus a delight. I finished the Three Body Problem trilogy with Death’s End. Last month I noted how poorly Cixin Liu wrote women, but even so I was not prepared for the moral of this book to be “don’t let women make decisions, we need strong men”. Sigh. The first two books work well as an allegory for climate change and are worth reading from that perspective. Pretend they finish at the end of the second book though. As I mentioned above, I’m playing with hockey analytics, so I read an insightful book on this. With relatively low scores, constantly changing lines, power plays and a fast pace, hockey is a very complex sport to apply analytics to (compared to baseball, for example). But there are areas of success, and I find the combination of human expertise and application of stats fascinating. There’s probably a learning analytics comparison post in my future.
Vinyl
I have not been purchasing as much vinyl this month, just photographing it. I did rather belatedly come to admire Raye. Her album My 21st Century Blues is a massive “f**k you” to the men in control of the music industry told with wit and rage. Plus she says wanker in an English accent which is always a plus. Also belatedly I came across Bartees Strange’s album of covers of The National songs (thanks to Daniel Lynds on the aforementioned DS106Radio). It’s an intriguing reimagining of their songs, inspired by Bartees attending a National gig and being “surprised by how few black people were there to watch, and he asked himself the questions: “Why was it so rare to see black people at shows like these, to see black musicians freed from reductive definitions of genre, to see black acts with this level of success in a genre that is deeply informed by legacies of black music in America?”
