#SilentSunday

Read: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray ★★★★☆ 📚
Irish private boy’s school. Some laugh out loud teenage dialogue, some horrible teenage drama. Multiple voices & pov weave towards a messy ending that didn’t quite pay off for me, although that might be the point. Still kept me reading for nearly 700 pages.

#SilentSunday

July Noted, One thing a day noticed and noted. Rather late on recording again.

@the another interesting list thanks. On the fruit washing, I was always taught that a lot of the goodness of veg & fruit was in the skin and just under it. Seems not.

@jean lovely waves. I can almost hear them. The movement of water.

#SilentSunday

@fahrni a handsome dragonfly!

Comma Butterfly, recent arrival or re-arrival to Scotland. #Butterfly

I’ve noticed a few follows & folk to follow appearing on Bluesky today. I wonder if they have been driven from X by the latest mess. I’ve been exploring Bluesky, more so Mastodon & less Threads. Treating them as distribution for my blog. Micro.blog is excellent glue for Posse & a nice place.

@BestofTimes lovely, like hills islanded by cloud inversion.

@otak Her wall hangings and Charles Poulsen's large 'drawings' shared a room. Powerful.

#SilentSunday

Wandering round the Pittenweem Art Festival yesterday. The village is fascinating, a jumble of twists & turns. I particularly enjoyed the work of Pauline Burbidge, Charles Poulsen & Sophie Demery.

@frank Happy belated birthday Frank, Love the timeline, mine is not so long but I share some waypoints, pivot! posterous! I loved both of those for different reasons. Also, 'Frankopedia' marvellous. Manny happy returns.

Read: The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore ★★★★☆ 📚
Short but engaging fiction based on a real life memoir. Settlers & Sioux clash in 1855. The narrator, Sarah, has no self pity despite a troubled life. Felt like a realistic picture of the times both filthy & surprising. Characters are complex.

I’ve be doing something similar with a lot less rigour since I added my on this day page. Some great ideas here for improving my process.

@jarrod

I suggest campaigns post to their own websites first and then share the link.

100% it has always seemed madness for governments, schools, charities and other organisations to use Twitter ( or other places they do not own as much as possible) as their primary place for posting news.

@manton 👍 looking forward to reading some results. The micro.blog story is a fascinating one.

@jean that is lovely. Great sound.

#SilentSunday

Doune Hill & Beinn Eich via Glen Mollochan
Overcast day with a threat of rain later.
Clouds low, on the top of the hill a few times. Quite a breeze higher up.
Quiet, no one else on the hill.
Not much in the way of wildlife, a few deer & the odd raven croak.
Notes & photos: walkmap

@the maybe I marked a bit hard. I do enjoy them. @jean unfortunately for me, I’ve read them in the order I’ve found them in charity shops and 99p kindle sales. Edinburgh is a fascinating place & I say that as a Glaswegian;-)

Read: Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin ★★★☆☆ 📚
I am reading more Rankin, not necessarily in the right order. This early Rebus is a wee bit different than the later versions. A nicely tangled plot woven across Edinburgh society from junkies to the higher reaches. Corruption all the way.

We saw few Common Ringed Plover chicks yesterday on Barassie Beech. Given the numbers of dogs being walked along the beech I am surprised that they survive. The parent birds seem to try and draw us off, buy running along or down the shore, while the wee ones head in the other direction.

@annarama.net lovely, put this in my head:

I believe I'll go walking by the railroad with my cherry cherry wine If I pass the rumbling station where the lonesome engine drivers pine

Cyprus Avenue, Van Morrison

I had a walk round Ardmore Yesterday. From the top left: Red-tailed bee on knapweed, robin, heron, osprey, map of where whotos were taken, white butterfly, two little egrets, two little egrets again, meadow brown butterfly. I got to watch the osprey and egrets fishing for a while.

I was watching this green-veined white fluttering across the path and into the birch leaves. It closed its wings and vanished. Scanning with the zoom lens I could not find it until I notice this shield bug then the butterfly behind it. #butterfly

Read: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ★★★☆☆ 📚
Dystopia, prisoners fight to the death. Illuminating prisons & racism. Parallels with sport, advertising & reality TV. Quite a page turner, too much on weapons, technical details etc. great footnotes mix fact & fiction.

#silentSunday

@alongtheray a lovely picture and a lovely thought.

@manton I love that too. Finding something I'd mostly forgotten about in the depth of my site.

@ChrisJWilson @joshuapsteele the markdown block is a Jetpack one, at least here. Its icon is green in the block inserter.

@Denny that is a lovely creature. I love watching dragonflies jinking in the air.

@KimberlyHirsh as a fairly regular discoverer I can say I am continuing to enjoy the process. Thanks for the work and the explanation.

@hollyhoneychurch lovely, I will pay more attention to clovers now. Usually just checking for bees.

@withers 🤣 I was there for a wee holiday a few year back, beautiful despite the steps.

@Miraz thanks, I was very excited. They were extinct in the uk until they reintroduced themselves in the 1950s. I’ve only seen them a couple of times over 40 years ago. The numbers nesting seem to be rising now.

@MrHenko that is really lovely.

@herself micro.blog would be a good pick. My class of 9-11 year olds use WordPress. The mostly use it for words and pictures. We find it fine. Takes the younger ones a while to get confident.

@ronkjeffries I use AppleScript to run some shell scripts. I usually do 3x3, on flickr. I duplicated & edited the script to do 5x3 today as a lot of flowers about. The Script, need ImageMagick, exiftool and an api key for geoapify. I did use mapquest but they started needing credit card.

@Miraz that was nice to scroll into, thanks!

@manton there was, or maybe still is, a WordPress plugin that would prompt the archive to archive any links you posted. AFAIR it was meant to point to the archive if links broke. Not sure that it fully worked. I remove it at some point. A great idea though. I’ve got some, probably klunky, JavaScript on my site that changes links to my old school site to ones on the archive.

@SimonWoods now listened, really powerful podcast. As a primary teacher who is keen on some technology it game me a lot to think about.