My Word with Douglas E. Welch

From Dr. Aisha Ahmad, some advice for how to adapt to conditions of a long-term crisis like the pandemic we are currently facing. (This was written specifically for educators, but applies to anyone.) First, the necessary sobering bit (italics mine):

The answer to the question everyone is asking — “When will this be over?” — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never.

Global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened. And so, while it may feel good in the moment, it is foolish to dive into a frenzy of activity or obsess about your scholarly productivity right now. That is denial and delusion. The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.

Keig, Aberdeenshire. A gaggle of excited children are instructing community archaeologist Colin Shepherd when to drop a china mug on the floor so that they can see how it breaks on impact.

They will use the results of this experiment to better understand an archaeological find: the broken pieces of an old marmalade jar, last used for breakfast around 100 years ago. The children had recently excavated the jar from woodland in which they usually build dens and play hide and seek as part of an archaeological investigation.

MeFite malevolent trawled some lists of public domain movies (lots of great film noir) and put together a new, improved, or at least free version of Netflix. Behold: Voleflix! Includes films featuring Ed Wood, Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Vincent Price, Barbara Stanwyck, Cary Grant, Stanley Kubrick, Boris Karloff, Frank Sinatra and more… It also has daft Voleflix Originals and rates your taste in movies from your watchlist. [via mefi projects]

This party game sets you the task of talking to your Smart Speaker in just the right way to win this new quarantine game.
Hey Robot is a game that’s been building support on Kickstarter and is yet to launch in full. However it’s lovely creators saw everyone getting bored whilst stuck at home self-isolating and have launched a rough version early that is free to play.

You need either an Amazon Alexa or Google Home speaker, they say it doesn’t work so well with phones. You place that near to your computer and call your friends to bring them in and you’re off in one of the two game modes.

To play Hey Robot, you have to make your Smart Speaker say a word or certain phrase without saying it yourself. It’s like taboo with a robotic and sometimes nonsensical player who also happens to have a hell of a lot at their disposal.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, Evelyn Lambart, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

Stricken with hearing loss from an early age, Lambart flourished at the National Film Board, where she became the first woman animator in Canada. She collaborated with esteemed animator Norman McLaren for many years, notably on the innovative, jazzy Begone Dull Care (1949).

Lambart’s first solo film was The Impossible Map (1947), a quirky, earnest experiment with grapefruit, knives and cartography. Making Movie History: Evelyn Lambart is an excellent 5-minute doc about her career.

Lambart also used her distinctive black-background animation style in The Story of Christmas (1973). Her meticulous cutout process is shown in the NFB documentaries Eleven Moving Moments with Evelyn Lambart (see 32:00) and The Light Fantastick (see 47:00). She died in 1999.

An interesting link found among my daily reading