Weeknote 47/2023
“In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.”
- Sam Anderson, Inside one of America’s Last Pencil Factories (NYT)
Verbs
Writing: Back on the graphic design bike and Notebooks
This week on the blog I wrote about getting back in to graphic design, and trying to figure out the best software and tools to make use of. I toyed with Figma for a while, and really enjoyed using it but quickly came to see, as cool as it is, it’s really not the right tool for focused graphics work. Now I’m going back and forth between Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer and seeing which is going to work best for me (and my wallet) for the sorts of things I’m interested in doing. I did make a lovely poster for SWUX though! If anyone has any advice on this I’d love to hear it.
I also wrote about notebooks and how it is that I use four notebooks at a time after posting a picture on Instagram of my current stack. My notebooks are a big part of how I work and how I live my life and in writing about them I realised just how much of a core aspect of the way I go through the world they really are. I’ve had some great messages from other notebook fanatics since posting and I’m always happy to hear from anyone else that has a love affair with pencils, pens, and paper.
Watching: One Piece, Netflix
After a lot of suggesting and cajoling my wife finally agree to watch One Piece on Netflix and we were both completely captivated by it. We blew through the 8 episodes pretty quickly and had such a blast. The show is bright, fresh, creative and such a different experience from the endless roll-call of true crime, noir crime, crime thriller, historical crime, and true-thriller-historical-noir-crime that seems to be the primary content of Netflix these days. I’m super excited for a second season and even had a tentative peek at the manga series it’s based on. 1000+ issues and counting might keep me busy for a while though.
Reading: One Billion Years Until the End of the World, Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky
Books by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky have been recommended to me on Amazon, on my Kindle, on Goodreads, and on Instagram for a long, long time. I’ve picked up two or three in Kindle sales in the past but hadn’t read any of them before this week. I really don’t know why I’d not given them a shot before now. One Billion Years is a sort of sci-fi infused, anarchic Russian yarn that packs a huge amount in its 160ish pages. The book is so far up my alley that it’s basically hopped the garden fence and is knocking on the back door with a bottle of Vodka in hand. The plot that hums with the same sort of existential absurdity as one of my favourite plays - Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and is steeped in irony, bleak humour, and the ludicrous. I’ll definitely be giving the other couple of books I’ve got by the Strugatsky’s a read soon.
Using: Threads by Meta
I used Twitter/X on and off over the years but it never really grabbed me as a social media platform. When Threads launched 2 months or so ago I signed up through my Instagram account and I’ve been really enjoying the experience so far. The app is clean, pleasing to use, and has a neat, focused feature set and I’ve been having a good time connecting with people, following conversations, and picking up new ideas and new things to explore. It’s frustrating that it isn’t available in the EU yet as I think a lot of voices are missing, and I hope that changes soon, but I think that it has the potential to be more than and different to Twitter/X and that can only be a good thing.
Listening: Christine De Luca, on YouTube.
I came across this video on YouTube a while ago, but it’s on my favourites list and I love going back to it from time to time. Christine is a Scottish poet, born and raised in Shetland, and she writes and performs poetry in English and in Shetlandic dialect and its incredible, beautiful, and mesmerising. She has a wonderful speaking voice that lends the words a beautiful timbre and the language slides around between the sounds of English, Norwegian, Icelandic, and German to resolve in this amazing dialect that is almost as if it was crafted especially for poetry.
Words
Teddy reclines like a prince in my office.
This week has been a bit of a slow one with most of my time spent on tinkering, fixing, emailing, and admin-ing. I’ve had some great conversations with friends and colleagues in the education space, and we’ve been talking a lot about the biggest and most pressing needs and wants amongst teachers. Having set up a number of courses for teachers and educators via SWUX I am now looking at potentially swapping out one or two of those offerings in order to better address the challenges we’ve been talking about this week. In particular, I kept coming across real concerns around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and community building - two things which I think I could certainly help schools and educational institutions with using some of the techniques we use in design thinking, backcasting, and human-centred design.
Along with all of this, we’ve been having some freezing cold weather here but, so far at least, it’s been pretty dry which has meant long walks with Teddy and visits to the dog park. Obviously, the dog park is pretty much his favourite imaginable place, although he spends most of his time running as fast as he can to catch up with all of the much larger dogs that hang out there. Size has never, ever deterred him. I also took the car to the dealership for a quick tweak at the service centre after it had it’s first little knock when a sneaky, column in a car park managed to collide (gently!) with the front number plate - so I had to get that sorted out.
Next week I will be heading to Berlin so I’ve also been prepping for that workshop. That’s meant reviewing the materials, setting up resources for participants, and figuring out travel logistics and arrangements too. I’m hoping to catch up with some friends and acquaintances whilst I’m in town to really make the most of things, and will try and get out and about a little as well, if the itinerary allows for it. I’m really looking forward to running my first face to face workshop in quite some time and it will be particularly good to be back in the philosophy world with other teachers and educators all working in the IB programme.