Well, first, it’s now broken. Secondly, it broke because I’d done the fool thing of attaching it magnetically to the side of the iPad – you know, the way it’s designed – but my 6-year-old son picking it up was enough to jolt the Pencil off the side of the iPad so that it fell … More The Apple Pencil: An Honest Review
J.R.R. Tolkien, writing to his son Christopher, commenting on how long and sprawling The Lord of the Rings was becoming, compared with The Hobbit: ‘It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits!’ And to think that he wrote this in 1944, not 2024… but perhaps the sons … More Tolkien and the curse of the epic temperament
Hot tip: Don’t use your phone, tablet or computer as a glanceable timepiece. Well, maybe your computer taskbar/menubar is allowable while you’re working. But don’t be getting your phone out of your pocket to ‘check the time’… you’ll never be knowing where the time went after you’re done ‘just checking’. ‘Okay, but couldn’t I try … More Dispatch from the Digital Detox: Use an analogue watch
The promise of digital technologies is the ultimate kind of ‘distributed cognition’ – the ability to use different digital environments in order to help our thinking be streamlined – focused on one thing or another: on writing a report, or planning a project, or communicating with co-workers or loved ones. The fact is, though, that … More The Digital Era: Distributed vs. Fragmented Cognition
Great writers show, don’t tell, and Conrad is one of the great writers. Take just the Author’s Note that prefaces The Rescue, in which he recounts coming back to finish the book after a 20 year pause: ‘The years passed and the pages grew in number, and the long reveries of which they were the … More Joseph Conrad exemplifying the rule ‘show don’t tell’
Some days I have to remind myself, ‘There’s always tomorrow.’ Those days when I’m cranky and sleepy and worn ragged and I just have to slow down and not take myself too seriously; I just have to make a list and do the essential things, enjoy the little things, chill out, give thanks, read a … More Tomorrow
The Grand Scheme of Things.The Grand Scheme of Things!Everybody talks aboutThe Grand Scheme of Things.As if they’ve read it through and scannedit page by page to understandthe content and the message ofThe Grand Scheme of Things. ‘Everything is fine,’ they say,Or ‘It’ll turn out right,’ they say,‘It doesn’t matter,’ – so blasé –‘in The Grand … More The Grand Scheme of Things (a poem)
I’ve been running into a mantra that emerges from the forest leaves of my everyday experience like an exotic bird, a flash of colour that then darts again out of view, only to reappear once more later on in a clearing, and again in the fronds of a bush, then again flashing across the sky … More Show, Don’t Tell
Back in July, just after I’d finished reading Flow by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, I wrote this in my journal: ‘Read more fiction and ancient wisdom, and less critical theory. Theory emerges from post-scientific-revolution enlightenment rationalism, aiming to distill life to purely scientific concepts. Ancient wisdom writers and artists know that knowledge is best absorbed like nutrients … More The way of wisdom
[A fairly unedited journal entry from this day in 2021. I was onto something then; thought I’d better post it.] So, sure, the ancients counted the number of years of one’s life – just think of Methuselah. But in an agrarian society what was perhaps more important was not what year it was but what … More Is time linear…or circular?
Ben David Trigg 