Lush

I've been working on lots of small personal projects lately, nothing really finished, mostly just getting started. Lots of potential but I haven't been posting much here either. The garden is so ridiculously lush right now it's amazing. We had to cut back some plants because they were overwhelming everything else, which felt sad, but also yay for gardening successes.

Images of summer abundance

I'd bought some refillable Molotow acrylic markers and then felt nervous about actually using them. The usual thing of 'buying the nice paper' and then not using it because it's the nice paper and you don't want to waste it. I'm really trying to get over that and just do things and make things. So I've done a few things with the markers:

Lettering using a Molotow acrylic marker, based on an Albrecht Durer alphabet.
I was feeling overwhelmed and the first line of this poem came into my head. The rest of the poem doesn't apply to my situation, but sometimes, just can we just… stop.

I've taken photos in the garden of course, and gone for a few walks and taken photos in various places too.

I went to check I'd shut the gate and took some photos in the dark.
Pink and green! These plants are right next to each other in the garden.
A dredger at the harbour
It rained heavily and somewhere up the road a car was leaking oil.
Two screens, one round and one rectangular showing the same image of a rose, both are connected to a Raspberry Pi
They work!

I've been planning a few computery projects. One is a bit of fun and will use the round screen above, the other is to create a writing computer, something with limited functionality and possibly no internet or network connection. I've been getting increasingly frustrated by every app and every device popping up and interrupting me demanding updates.

We create the need for constant security updates by hanging the bare arses of our computers out in public on the internet all the time (ha, sorry). If we don't connect a computer to the network, it's a lot less exposed. If I was only ever to use it to write on, and never introduce anything from outside, well, so much the better. I remember my Dad editing his club magazine on a computer that didn't have a hard drive, it booted from one floppy disk and saved files to another. Then he printed it out. It never changed. No updates, ever. Once you learned how it worked, that was it. Wonderful. Speaking as a software designer whose career has been built on changing and updating software this might seem a bit rich, but minimising that disruption is a big part of my design job now. Maybe I can make up for some of the annoyance I must have caused over the years.

Anyway, I'm going to build a limited computer.