I tell myself that writing is not hard work. Bending over in a field picking potatoes all day in the wind and rain, that’s hard work. Trying to sell altruistic ideas to tired commuters outside the tube at rush hour, that’s hard work. Washing, cleaning up, caring and providing for two young children on your own, that’s hard work. Catering for a hundred or so hungry souls with the sun beating down on the marquee and eight gas burners roaring at full throttle, that’s hard work. But sitting down at a keyboard in a warm room with coffee, and a blank screen – that’s just telling stories. Being comfortable with the notion that just maybe, nobody is going to be at all interested in what you have to say – that’s not hard work. It’s just blowing smoke rings at ghosts.
Category Archives: Randomness
Randomness
| Contents |
| If Writing seems Hard Work |
| Lego Sculpture |
| Queen Elizabeth 2nd |
| Pictures of stuff on shelves |
| There is a Mole |
| Facebook Scams |
| Video: World’s Luckiest Man |
If Writing seems Hard Work
Lego Sculpture
I woke up after dreaming about a life sized lego house. It all started when somebody wanted to include see-through bricks, a bit like real glass bricks that are used to let light in, but plastic. “No” I said. They make look trendy now, but in few years time they will just look brash and urban. Angry. The problem is the plastic surfaces. The only way to get a bit of texture out of this medium is by mixing up the colours. And so I laid down the following stipulation:
Rules for building the life size lego house:
The last two words “and size” are a refinement, a slight relaxation of the original rules, to allow for the occasional small continuous pool of monochrome when it is of irregular shape and scale. So a single large green brick may be entirely surrounded by small bricks of mixed colours, one or two of which may also be green without breaking the intent of randomness.
Queen Elizabeth 2nd
Queen Elizabeth 2nd, a photo by AndyRobertsPhotos on Flickr.
I must have been in a funny mood when I stopped to photograph this damp patch on the pavement just because the shape of it jumped out at me for looking a bit like the Queen’s head. It’s a phenomenon called “Pareidolia” which I’ve written about before in evidence-of-life-on-mars-and-figures-found-in-rocks Pareidolia is when a vague or random image is perceived as recognisable. The old ink blot phenomenon beloved of psychologists in old films and comedy. Maybe you can’t see the face at all? It’s not quite as obvious as the previous example, the face in the rock:
Pictures of stuff on shelves
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There is a Mole
There is a mole in the garden, Hotel Sully, Paris, Marais.
Andy Roberts
http://distributedresearch.net/blog
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Facebook Scams
look like in the future. You won’t know what that man saw when he
walked in on his daughter. There are no free IPads. And you can’t see
the video of Osama’s death… Not on Facebook. Please stop clicking
the spam links and exposing yourself and friends to virus risks.via posterous
Video: World’s Luckiest Man
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Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter





