To be blunt, Claire I didn’t ask you to email me in the first place so I don’t quite understand the passive aggressive tone here.
Also that amazing article you found was a two sentence Mastodon post about the battery level in my car. If that’s what you consider amazing… yeah maybe hire some decent writers.
And if this is supposedly a personal email to entice me into doing something with you, why’s it got an unsubscribe link? 🤔
“What did you do in the cold dark winter of 2022/23?”
“Oh I took up cross stitch”
Yeah so my partner likes making crafty things, and she does cross stitch. Although it’s a certain style of it. This isn’t doilies and pretty houses with quotes and nonsense under it. This is slightly more NSFW.
I was idly watching her make one and curiosity got the better of me – there was very little to watch on TV – after 30 seconds of explaining I was off making an equally NSFW picture of my own…
This is a bit like those arty YouTube channels where they try a new skill, fart around for a bit, then try some large project to show off. Sure, there’s a certain amusement from stitching a dainty little creature that’s shouting obscenities but once you’ve done one the fun wears off a bit.
Then I had a thought. During Christmas I was helping out at a local Christmas activities club, and one of the distraction activities was Hama beads. Those little cylindrical pellets of plastic waste you arrange into a picture, iron and have a wonky looking thing that passes as a bad coaster.
There’s something quite nice about having to concentrate really hard on such a simple task. Copying a design takes zero effort, but getting adult sausage fingers to manipulate tiny bits of plastic requires conscious efforts. Patiently re-starting because you sneeze and flick your design onto the floor, knowing that’s the only option is also quite relaxing.
Makes a 100% total opposite difference to trying to think really hard about programming, or teaching kids how to program. There’s nothing to compile, nothing to debug. And unlike drawing, there’s no real skill involved so you can’t do it badly.
It appears cross stitch is the same, just without the slightly worrying contribution to increased plastic waste. The needle goes in the hole, it doesn’t stab your finger. Maybe you stitch away for half an hour, and realise you started from the wrong hole and now have to patiently unpick it and start over without getting upset and giving up.
I decided I’d do a loading screen from my favourite ZX Spectrum game Rick Dangerous. Here’s the screen
It’s 256×192 pixels. That’s 49,152 pixels. A cross stitch cross is made from two stitches. It’s a lot of poking a needle through a hole. I’ve got this far after a month.
I’ll finish it eventually, it’s a nice alternative to staring at social media. I dipped into Facebook the other day, nothing exciting is going on. I have a new phone, I set up the wrong account in Twitter and just uninstalled the app.
Take up weird obscure hobbies, the complete opposite to your normal activities. It is quite refreshing.
I’ve been putting random stuff online since sometime in 2000. The online world was different back then, it hadn’t turned into this API driven walled garden mess. It was a non-API driven walled garden mess instead!
Did you join LiveJournal for blogging, or subscribe to a mailing list instead? Maybe you were on AOL or Compuserve as they gasped their last. Failing that you could enrol on a forum or live chat on IRC.
I decided I’d start my own blog, on my own site and put my thoughts and opinions on that instead. Then, like most people as social media took off I went where my friends went, and slowly switched from long-form posts to short random thoughts.
Facebook likes to remind me of past content. Some of the really early stuff is a mixture of entertaining and “why the hell did you write that?” as I figured out what this new social media thing even was. Was it a blog? Was it chat? what do we say here?
So I’m going back to blogging again, and being able to write longer and (hopefully) more thoughtful content. If you’ve been here in the past, you might notice it’s a bit blank. This is a reset, I’ve kept my old blog safe but nobody but me needs to read content written in a time where online security was less of an issue, and where “let’s stick your name in Google to see what comes out” wasn’t a thing.
I’d tell you to follow me on an RSS reader of your choice, but do we even do that any more?
