There are two lighthouses in the old port area in La Rochelle, and when you are travelling into that port area, you need to line them up so that one light is above the other; then you are on the correct channel to come into La Rochelle. The channel is prone to silting up.
I find the ideas that go into this sort of planning/engineering fascinating. I wonder if we would think of these things if we were trying to resolve this problem today.
If you are looking for an interesting documentary channel, and you have a more than passing interesting in aviation, Mentour Pilot is pretty much the best channel you can look at.
But in particular, I found this one fascinating.
I have decided to pick up photography and photography processing again so I’ve bought a new camera. It’s a mirrorless Canon, and I have work to do to get fully au fait with the device. This is the first photograph I took with the new camera, which I replaced almost immediately as it had a small sensor issue from the first photograph.
I used to carry a DSLR every where with me, and because I did a lot of sports photography, my camera bag got very heavy in the end. I was carrying 20kg around. It’s just occurred to me that that extra weight carried around probably explained some of the unexplained weight loss I had around that time. Which is, frighteningly enough, coming up to 20 years ago.
Anyway, I’m not so interested in carrying 20kg around everywhere, especially as I no longer have a car and would have to carry it all around. I’m working with a kit lens for the time being and while I might pick up a slowish 200 or 300mm lens, and maybe a 50mm 1,8 as well. The camera is a Canon R8. It feels right in my hand.
I intend to write here more frequently than I used to because to be honest, I’m disillusioned with nearly all of the social media platforms at the moment. You’ll occasionally find me on BlueSky, and my photos and drawings are going back to Flickr.
The rest, I retain the accounts but I don’t update.
I had a lot holiday in 2024 – I don’t really recommend December but I spent a week in Grenoble and a week in La Rochelle. Also an eternity in trains but that’s a different question. Thing is, I didn’t really get around to dealing with the photographs so they only went up on Flick recently, straight from the phone. The skating photographs aren’t done yet (shortly, if I get my way).
For Grenoble, I went there for the ISU Grand Prix Final. I got to see a few skaters I really wanted to see in competition. Most of the sight seeing had to be worked around the competition schedule. I was lucky enough to go to the Bastille via the Telepherique on a sunny day and I got to see the mighty Mont Blanc. You couldn’t really see it for much of the rest of the week because the clouds came down so low. December.
It is 9am on a Sunday morning. I don’t feel like making my own breakfast so I open the maps app to find somewhere “new” to have breakfast preferably near the supermarket.
I hate wasting Sunday mornings bot I do it a lot lately. My phone returns a list of breakfast options. The first looks fairly crap so I choose the second one, Frank, which is near the end of the 71 bus route and not too far from the supermarket where I will want to get breakfast supplies for the week. I put on some shoes and socks, and get ready to leave. It’s only then that I notice the dusting of snow on the rooves of the building across the road. Wow. I had not expected that.
The world tells you no one sane is up early on a Sunday morning. I’ve always known this is a lie. A lot of people get off the bus near where I live. They are mostly on their way to the market near Gare du Midi. I went there once and I found it overwhelming. I get on the bus and I am on my way to Frank.
Frank is on the street along side the Theatre de la Monnaie. For me, it’s a short cut street, one I don’t pass through very often. Frank opened 5 minutes before I tumbled out of the bus, trying to orient myself. It’s still got a few tables free and it fills up as I peruse the menu. It’s a mostly youngish crowd, and maybe even a little hipsterish. The café is fronted by window which are maybe 4 metres high. Although the sparkling sun is still hidden behind the theatre, the windows and the corresponding high ceiling give the café a lovely airy feeling. It makes you happy to be in there.
There’s an art deco nouveau style feature ceiling glass decoration. The lighting is otherwise ultra modern. Most of the wait staff are young men. They are friendly and welcoming. There is, at ground level, a communal table and a good few small circular tables for two. While I am there, however, I don’t see one single laptop. I’m writing in notebooks. I guess I am hipsterish too.
There is retro pop playing in the background. I’ve recognised Fleetwood Mac and some Bob Dylan. Is Bob Dylan pop? My sisters had 45rpm singles by him when they were teenagers. I guess that makes him pop.
Gradually, the sound of more and ore voices drown out all but the basslines.
Frank has a good menu. I order sourdough toast. You can customise the toast, so I add a poached egg. A fully naked Eggs Benedict, I guess. I like it simple. I also ask for a guest roaster espresso. A cinnamon and cardamom roll, purely because of the cardamom. Oh, and a fruit juice. It’s not a bad breakfast at all.
The sound of chattering voices is intermittently pierced by a Ding from the kitchen at the back of the dining area. It opens on to us. Soon, one of those Dings will hearld the arrival of my poached egg and toast. In the meantime, everything else arrives to my table without too much fuss, accompanied also by a jug of water. I like that touch. The espresso is less than a mouthful – I think it’s a bean from Ecuador at the moment, I cared enough to order it, not enough to note it. It is fantastic. But I order another hot drink, this time, a hot chocolate which should last me longer.
For the first time ever, my hot chocolate arrives with latte art. A swan. I surreptitiously star at the cappuccino delivered to the woman at the next table to see what she got. Did she get a swan too? Is today’s barista an expert in swans? I don’t know. I don’t have my glasses on, and I really can’t discern what the top of her coffee actually looks like.
The language of choice here seems to be English. Brussels is a melting pot, English comes in many accents, Spanish, Irish, Flemish, you name it. I love that around the place. When the waiters turn away, guests return to their language of choice. Next to me, it’s Flemish.
When the poached egg on sourdough toast arrives, it’s perfect. The toast is still warm. The egg is perfectly poached, and better than I have ever managed to do it myself. I eat it and then turn to the sweet stuff. The cinnamon roll is lovely. It’s slightly stickly and of course, it has that touch of cardamom. I finish the hot chocolate but I’m not really read to leave so I order a pot of tea.
Someone knocks over the overburdened coat stand. I can hear an Irish accent two tables away. I don’t know what he is discussing. Occasionally, a waiter comes and clears away empty dishes from the table. The word “empty” makes me think of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Miserables. It’s not a happy song and it is totally at odds with the gloriously relaxed ambiance in Frank on a Sunday morning.
But it’s 11.30 and I really need to go and get groceries. Sunday may be half over, but I am glad I came, and I will come again.
It’s Sunday and I am frustrated. There must be tonnes and tonnes of interesting stuff to read on the likes of Threads, Instagram, Reddit…and I can’t find any of it. YouTube’s recommender has been really crap lately and I liked 10 minute videos but now it’s either those difficult to escape Shorts, or mad long videos about crap I’m not interested in.
Threads defaults to the algorithmic engine which for me is just a total traincrash. For one thing, it is utterly America-centric talking about problems America has (and exports because hey, someone will make money from it). I have very specific interests on Instagram but I don’t get them very much. Even search results are disappointing.
I don’t know. Conversations aren’t happening they way they used to. So while it’s an online presence, it’s not very social any more I think. On the media side well yeah, the historians will look back, perplexed.
This is a minor little rant, I guess.
I went to see Mathilda in London about a year ago. I’m not about to say I loved it – I did really enjoy it but I’ve never read the book because it was published at a time when it just didn’t quite hit my age appropriate reading levels.
But I bought a Mathilda tote bag in London last week for two reasons: a) it’s illustrated by Quentin Blake (hero) and b) I was probably every bit as insufferable as Mathilda as a child. I Read Books. Lots of books.
I bought a lot of books during Covid but somehow, I never read them. Covid was a time o worry and not much to do for some people but I worked the whole way through the pandemic and there was no time for {re]learning Python, learning Japanese, At a point, because the bookshops in Brussels were the only things that were open, my book buying exceeded my bookreading by a substantial amount. My TBR is, at current rates, unworkable. Nevertheless, I am now working through it. There is a hell of a lot of non-fiction there.
Something like eight of them are lined up.
In fairness, I do still read a lot of stuff on social media, but I’ve found that there is never much closure to that. Reddit goes on forever. You cannot finish things on Reddit. I think this is, in a sense, one of the problems with Social Media reading. There is no end. And when we didn’t have online advertising, we didn’t need clickbait titles on news coverage as well. Things have changed, changed utterly, to quote an old man I never really liked all that much.
I’m middle aged now (young according to my mother but old according to the twenty year olds) and some of my time, now that I have some, is spent in reflection about who I am, who I used to be, who people think I am. I spend a lot of time in bookshops. When I go travelling I always want to go to bookshops. I still somehow wind up buying books despite having a monumental amount of books to read.
When I was a child, I used to plough through books. I used to read a lot of children’s fiction until well into my twenties, but also a lot of non-fiction, especially around history. I borrowed books from libraries by the new time and I do have a library card now. But I find actual books are not always practical for me. Those last two words are important because, for example, I see people reading on the metro. I don’t – and have never – really read in 5 minute blocks of time. It’s too short. I’ll happily read on 3 hour train journeys (but it’s been a while since that I have to do those regularly).
Middle aged me would like to go back to ploughing through books. I’m not all that interested in BookTok or Bookstagram per se. There are some booktubers who are fun. I’m just not sure I’ve found my own community. I have friends in bookclubs but that hasn’t really been anything I wanted to do – I was a solitary kid growing up, surrounded by books. I don’t really need help here in terms of access to books as I already have a substantial collection of my own thanks to Covid.
It’s aligned with something else that happened: I used to write stories. I’m not sure how or when that stopped. I know there were notes for two kids novels somewhere in my boxes of notebooks when I was backing up after Dublin. Most of the writing I’ve done in the last 20 years have not been “writing” as in “writing a book, or trying”. I have:
When I was 8, I bought a notebook in the local stationery shop and started working on what was to be a girl detective series called Barbara Nash. I kind of liked Nancy Drew a lot, and the Blyton detective stuff, but I was a kid in rural Ireland, and I absolutely could not relate to a 16 year old in America with her own convertible car. I never wrote that series in the end.
I want to write again. I’m not sure I care about getting a book published but I’d like to get it written anyway. I’m struggling a lot with time management so that’s not helping. Nevertheless, I’ve read two books [at least] this month, and there are a few I am considering finishing that were started further back in the past.
One of the books I read was Diana Wynn-Jones wonderful Howl’s Moving Castle. The most recent one is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. What stands out is that both are fiction – I haven’t read two fiction books in a row in an awfully long time, aside from some romance, which I consider to be pure escapism in a way that Howls Moving Castle is not.
One of the things I’ve toyed with doing over the years is buying some key books from my childhood = a couple I read from the library when I was a young teenager – from AbeBooks. I’m still considering it but in one way I’m afraid. Reading books at different stages in your life can be challenging, particularly if those books were written for children. In particular the books I am interested are the hardback editions of Lorna Hills Sadlers Wells books because they have truly beautiful dustjackets illustrated by Eve Guthrie. I’ve never forgotten them.
Much of my reflections lately have centred on how much I may have left my younger self down by wandering away from who I was then. It isn’t helpd in certain respects by seeing some of the book reading accounts where I’m clearly not really a reader in comparison to some of the high profile bookfluencers. But they are reading books I don’t necessarily want to read. There’s a whole industry around YA books which just don’t talk to me. In the way I felt outside, reading as a child, I feel outside reading as an adult too. I’ve a lot more to think about here, I suspect.
One of the things I found “great” about Reddit was how there was a place for just about every interest going and today I want to talk about fountain pens.
I own a lot of fountain pens. You could call me a collector (or hoarder) of fountain pens, in particular Lamy AL-Star/Safaris, Pelikan M20x and Kaweco sport shaped pens. I have two of the art sports (the one I wanted I really can’t find any more).
I’ve mixed feelings about all this because I buy pens to write with. Sure there are FOMO colour issues there (man, there is a light pink M200 that I love in my possession now.
When you hang around the online fountain pen community, they are all very friendly. But I’ve realised that not many of them write as much as I do (and I use ballpoints a lot too) and their interest is less in writing and more in owning and trading. Sure, they will speak about grail pens.
But equally, they will trade to and from pens. And for that reason they keep boxes/packaging. Somehow this idea infected me. I am swiming in boxes for pens.
I own a couple of vintage pens too – bought in fleamarkets because I recognised that they represented good gambles (so I pay max 20E for a flea market pen). I understand that in 80 years time, having the packaging will matter.
But they don’t spark joy. I’ve realised with both the fountain pens and the journaling things that I although I have used fountain pens since I was about 9 years old, and I have been writing a journal since I was 19 years old, I don’t actually really feel at home in either community on Reddit. I cannot be too precious about pens – yes they get lost and I’ve lost about six Caran d’Ache Ecridor ballpoints over the course of my life (all of them replaced at one point or another). These things – at the end of the day – are tools. I might spend 114E on a Kaweco Artsport but I expect to be able to write with it too. I’m not interested in trading it/selling it at a profit in a few years’ time. Someone is going to clean up when I am dead because they’ll get a substantial collection of Ecridors in a job lot, probably.
Anyway…all this to say I’m not sure I really fit in online any more.
Instagram announced new updates to their algorithm again. I have a couple of accounts on Instagram, so I suppose I have some skin in the game.
It’s just mostly I consume. I don’t use Instagram professionally; and I don’t want to. I use it to a) share some photos and art with my friends and b) see what they share with me.
This type of user doesn’t matter. I mean, what I would like is to see the accounts I follow in reverse chronological order. But Meta have not wanted to give me this for years. Lately they have been giving me insane quantities of sponsored posts both in Stories and in the main feed.
There was a time I loved the idea of recommender systems. The idea is that the recommend accounts, posts, whatever, that I would really be interested in. But this isn’t really happening. When every second sponsored post is from Temu….is this really that personalised? I don’t think so.
From what I can see, recommender systems have moved from being what is most interesting for me to what is most interesting to the social media provider, mostly Meta in this case.
I’d like to say that somewhere, the tech giants have lost their way; but I think they haven’t. I think that everything they do is specifically so they can fleece money out of somewhere, be it me or an advertiser. Just for a short while, their interests and mine as a media consumer aligned.
Now though, most of the time I spend scrolling Instagram is time spent frustrated. My main objective is to look at excellent photography and drawing/painting which I find interesting. I’ve a special interest in water colour and travel photography and these form the bulk of what I post myself. Some time ago, I wound up seeing more short videos rather than single shots. I’m really not interested in moving photographs – if I was, I’d go to actual travel documentaries on Youtube (which I do) – and what the artists did to deal with this was start making reels which are close ups of fineliners moving around a centimetre, dabs of paint so detailed I get a headache trying to process them visually. All of this sucks to high hell as a consumer; and I can’t imagine it suits the average illustrator either.
I understand the problem is that the likes of Meta can’t make a huge amount of money out of delivering what I want. I’m not someone they can get to pay them for business services. I’m not going to pay 35E a month for services getting my posts in front of more eyes. I’m not buying stuff from their advertisers. But their ability to offer their professional users access to attention depends on a critical mass of people like me.
I recognise companies need to make money to survive. But the social media companies do not have a guaranteed right to my attention and lately, Instagram are heavily wasting it. I feel sorry for those who use it as a business platform. I’m not interested in the latest lot of algorithmic changes because again, it focuses not on me deciding what accounts I want to see = it focuses on them deciding what accounts they will promote to my timeline. And if god forbid on mobile I want to switch to the accounts I follow, well then I still can’t set that as a default.