Creative 2017

C17: Day 132 – The anxiety of information

May 12, 2017

Yesterday, I wrote about how having more information can make things less stressful, specifically, how I find modern buses much easier to deal with, simply because you always know where you are and what the next stop is. But unfortunately, the opposite is also true. We have access to more information now than we ever have […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 131 – The comfort of information

May 11, 2017

When I first moved to London, in the mid-90s, I hated taking buses. I didn’t know the city well, and it was far too easy to get on the wrong bus, or miss your stop. I would end up sitting by the window, looking out for street names so that I could check where I was […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 130 – How do we combat mass manipulation?

May 10, 2017

I started trying to read The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked by Carole Cadwalladr on the plane yesterday, but had to give up because it was too depressing. Political campaigns, says Cadwalladr, are paying vast sums of money to a company called Cambridge Analytica to do psychological profiling of voters in the UK and […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 129 – Where has all the magic gone?

May 9, 2017

One upon a time, a long long time ago, I used to work for BAA, the British Airports Authority. At the time, they operated most of the big airports in the UK, and I worked in the Retail Finance department, out by Heathrow. I was only there, as a temp, for I think about nine […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 128 – The bucket

May 8, 2017

Sometimes, you’re just too tired to actually write a blog post, so you just embed a YouTube video. (I suspect the small birds at the beginning are house finches. We have them here, and the male has that lovely raspberry chest.)

Read the full article →

C17: Day 127 – The problem with DIY gel nails

May 7, 2017

As I’ve already confessed mentioned, I recently started using the Gelish “soak-off” gel nail polish system, and overall I’m happy with it. There is just one massive downside though: It’s a bastard to get the polish off. Although I’ve only been doing this a few months, and I’m only changing colour about every 1-2 weeks, I’ve already spotted a […]

Read the full article →

C17: Days 125 & 126 – Consultative democracy

May 6, 2017

So, yes, I slightly forgot to blog yesterday, but I did talk about writing this blog post, so I’m counting that as, well, “pre-blogging”.  There are, I think, several commonalities between the election of Trump last November and the vote to Brexit the European Union nearly a year ago. But the one commonality that I have been […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 124 – Inspirational Ouroboros

May 4, 2017

I started blogging in 2002, tentatively at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm. There was something very liberating about writing a blog, one that people read and commented on. A group of us bloggers met up, and became friends, and I still know almost all of them to this day. But somewhere in the melee of work […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 123 – Sorry, Grabbity

May 3, 2017

Last summer, we noticed that Grabbity was having a problem with her waterworks. She was peeing blood, peeing outside the box, washing herself a lot and had little to no control over the bladder. We whipped her off to the vet, who did a urine analysis and discovered she had a slight infection and crystals […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 122 – What Teen Vogue taught me

May 2, 2017

If Teen Vogue has taught me anything, it’s that girls and women can care about politics and having nice nails. Enjoying dying your hair or fashion or having nice nails is not a sign of intellectual poverty, it’s a sign of being a normal human being. Now, last year, for Ada Lovelace Day, I wanted […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 121 – How disc-binding made me want to write again

May 1, 2017

April was a quiet month on the blog, because my creative task for the month was to work on my novel and thus was not for daily blogging. And what a productive month it was: I reorganised my notes completely, using a disc binder system which allows me to remove and add pages, and my ideas just […]

Read the full article →

C17: April (Days 90-120) – World-building and novel planning

April 2, 2017

Yesterday, I decided that this month’s creative act would be to learn napkin folding. Unfortunately for me, all of our napkins are rectangular and thus unsuitable for folding techniques that rely on a square napkin. I have taken this as a sign that this month I ought to do something else, and that other thing […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 90 – Peekaboo

March 31, 2017

Peeking kittehs! This is the last day of cat pictures, and I confess I’ve had a glass or two of wine and these probably aren’t my best. Overall, I’ve enjoyed this month, especially once I let myself draw from reference pictures when the cats were not playing along. I did have a bit of a […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 89 – Stalking and pouncing

March 30, 2017

Google Images is great! Bottom cat is a wee bit elongated though. I know that part of the point if this exercise was to draw from life, but the last few days I’ve not had quite the amount of time to devote to it, but still there’s much to learn just from drawing from photos.

Read the full article →

C17: Day 88 – Moar jumpz

March 29, 2017

Because Google Images is easier and more interesting than sleeping moggies.

Read the full article →