Assorted bits and bobs from the week and the things banging around in my head. I know – this is probably better with pictures…I’ll work on it.
- Camping with the Dogs – a few months ago D and I picked up a little trailer camper and have committed to using it this year. Mainly, it’s an excuse to get us up and out of the quiet house. On Saturday, we headed up to Cunningham Falls State Park in Maryland for some hiking and campfires with a few friends.
- Creativity. I lost some momentum on a few creative projects last month and have looking for ways to recharge the batteries. Mainly this has consisted of surfing some blogs and talking with friends over on Slack. Found some advice from Ray Bradbury over on Austin Kleon’s blog to read a poem, a short story and an essay, each day for 1,000 days (!!). The whole thing is really about inputs and outputs. That you need to keep your your inspiration fed enough to keep stoking the fires of your creative drive. This is something I have thought about a lot over the years, before I committed to a regular drawing practice. I used to read comics or look at other artists and dream about drawing and feel like I was bursting with inspiration. Now, I find I’m in a little rut creatively and like the idea of increasing the input side to rev-up the creative engines again. Anyway, I chatted with a friend about this we have picked up the challenge. Will we last 1000 days? Probably not, but we started and that’s fine for now. Also, I think Ill be adapting this to comics and drawing somehow…maybe sometimes instead reading a short story a poem and an essay, I”l swap out comics or something….I definitely want to provide my muse with the things she has a taste for.
- Reading. See above. Here are a few of my favorite selections from the Ray Bradbury assignment (so far) (thanks Kevin H):
- Short Story: “The Library of Babel”, By Jorge Luis Borges Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters. These are their collected works. Mind blowing (sort of).
- Essay: “The Losers Club”, by Michael Chabon. A great piece about making art when no one else really cares.
- Poem: “If—” by Rudyard Kipling A father explaining manliness to his son.
- Music. As the weather cools down I generally migrate toward dark beers and heavy music. This week I’ve been spending some quality time with “False Light” by White Ward. Ukrainian black metal with some great sounds (including some trumpet solos!) Standout tracks: “Leviathan”, “Phoenix”, &
“False Light” - Movies – “All is Quiet on the Western Front” (netflix) I guess I am moving into the, “history is cool” phase as I edge closer to my 50s, but I loved this. Sure, with most war movies you know what you’re going to get – especially one about a war as awful as WWI. And sure, it’s not exactly a revolutionary message, but it is always worth remembering just how mind numbingly, incredibly, awful war really is. Totally, pointless and horrible. A few years ago I listened to an eye opening, in-depth podcast about just how awful World War I was by Dan Carlin (“Blueprint for Armageddon”). Since then I’ve been really interested in WWI in film. “1917” from a few years ago was a great edition (streaming on amazon prime as of this writing). This remake of, “All is Quiet” is also great.
- Phone use – Screen time and pickups:
- Screen time 5h 19m – down 17% from last week. But over 5 hours has to be too much right? Honestly, I do use it for a lot of legit things – not just doom scrolling and games. But I still do grab it for absolutely no reason sometimes. It’s scary the how much I find the thing in my hand or my nose just going into twitter or reddit for really no reason. So, Im setting a limit of an hour a day for social and games. Let’s see where it goes.
- Pickups averaging about 50 last week with a high of 75. I don’t have a hard target here just…less
