The Salem witch trials are a modern touchstone for US culture and, by extension, anywhere influenced by it. The stuff of notable allegories it is as easy to reach for as 1984 or Animal Farm when seeking to sum up something one does not like; one of the main things that I learned from Schiff’s excellent book, though, is how little I know about what actually went on.
The King in the North is an opportunistic title, riffing on a certain popular TV series to sell the subhead: The life and times of Oswald of Northumbria. The northern king at the centre of the book is presented as a pivot in the history of Dark Age Britain, as it moved from a post-Roman, largely post-Christian1 place of small, warring factions, with limited continuity of leadership, to one where standard, Catholic Christianity became the norm, the monastic institutions took root, and the idea of governance beyond the whims and lives of individual kings could take hold.
Fresh from a nice dinner last night and a run along the waterfront and through the bush this morning, I’m ready to tackle another day. The number of little bush walkways and river cuttings in this part of Hobart makes for some very pleasant mornings.
I am living in the future; while there’s a lack of jetpacks, while I was running down the hill from the University accommodation I took a video call from Ada and Rosa as they drove into town, in another country.
(Slightly less awesome: dropping my room key while I took my phone out. Happily the University dorm staff were delightfully friendly about replacing it.)
A good start to the day with the announcement of the commutation of the bulk of Chelsea Manning’s sentance, which is a nicely positive story from the States. It’s been a few days of having good luck photographing wildlife.
Another lovely morning in Hobart, with a delightful sunrise, blue-winged green parrots flying past my window, and fucking crows cawing at 5 in the morning. But that’s OK, because I’d already been awake for hours, because I couldn’t stop thinking about ideas from some of yesterday’s talks. Yes, speakers, your content gave me insomnia. For good reasons.
Continuing on from the theme of “visiting parts of Australia I probably wouldn’t otherwise see”, this year LCA has come to Hobart the second time Hobart has hosted an LCA.
If you like Terry Pratchett’s watch novels, wuxia, and The Seven Samurai, there’s a good chance you’ll love this.
Rogue One, as numerous reviewers have noted, opens in a way which is disconcerting to fans of the Star Wars universe; there is no opening crawl to set the scene - reviewers cleverer than me are quick to make the point that this is perhaps because Rogue One is the opening Crawl from A New Hope - and the music is quite different (and, to be honest, not really as good). But that is merely the beginning of the divergence.
After some hemming and hawing, I came to a decision: converting my RAW files to DNG was not The Right Thing to do, for a number of reasons:
So for those reasons, pulling my library back into RAWs seems like the way to go. Problem is, it ain’t as easy as you’d hope.
(But it is possible.)