Bernard Pivot Questionnaire

Question postcards
Question postcards flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

This post is an answer to Roger’s Blaugust post. I also like quizzes and questionnaires, so here’s my answers to the Bernard Pivot Questionnaire (the post byRoger omits question 4, but I’ve answered all 10 here).

Q1: What is your favourite word?

There’s lots of Scots words that I like – dreich is one that I use a lot as it describes so many Glasgow days.

Q2: What is your least favourite word?

Any word that describes dead animals. Steak, yuck!

Q3: What turns you on?

Any creative challenges, like the Daily Create and anything else inspired by the DS106 community, or the annual calendar that we do as CLMOOC.  Talking about remix and bricolage, and writing about it.

Q4: What turns you off?

Selfish behaviour of any type. Arrogant arses taking others for granted. Competitive games. All sport.

Q5: What sound do you love?

The sound of a cat curled up in an Amaxon box licking a paw. It expresses safety and comfort.

Q6: What sound do you hate?

Any song by Dido. She’s awful.

Q7: What is your favourite curse word?

I like the phrase ‘hell’s bells and buckets of blood’. Dad used to say it when I as young, and I still hear it in his voice.

Q8: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?

I’d quite like to have been a politician. Not one of the self-serving ones that are the majority at the moment, one that actually believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Actually, I’d really have preferred to live in a real anarchist society, or a direct democracy, but that’s a thought to another post.

Q9: What profession would you not like to participate in?

Anything to do with sales or marketing. I did some sales jobs when I was young – I wasn’t very good at them.

Q10: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear god say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Well, I could quip here about god being a woman. But given all of the evil in this world I’d be too busy shouting at her to hear what she was saying. I used to really enjoy teaching philosophy of religion, and I do think the problem of evil is proof that the theistic god does not exist.

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Biodiversity Heritage Library

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC says:

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a huge treasure trove for fans of the natural world (not my words, the Guardian told me so). Visit its web pages and look around. Make some art about what you find, or look through the Flickr library for something to inspire you.

I headed over to its Flickr library and chose a pic of a tsetse fly. I cropped it into a square and headed over to Lunapic to add some filters. I chose the ‘illusion’ filter and then added the smoke cloud animation. Here’s the result.

I could have spent hours browsing the whole library, but it’s Saturday and the cats are asking to go out into the garden.

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Mandala Madness

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

A lovely TDC today:

Mandala designs — a sort of mirrored gathering of lines in circular patterns — are interesting and rather relaxing to create and to view. Use the Mandala Maker (or some other site or draw one on paper) and share out your artwork.

Here’s mine

mandala
mandala flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

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Inner monologue

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC asks us to:

Tell us about your inner monologue. Bonus points for recording it.

224/365 Non Eclipse
224/365 Non Eclipse flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Work’s tricky at the moment, so a lot of my inner monologue is best kept to myself, but there’s one thing on my mind today. Yesterday was the day of a solar eclipse, with a pretty good partial eclipse in Glasgow. We were prepared with pinhole cameras, but the day was cloudy. Above is the picture I took at about 7pm, the time of the maximum eclipse. It’s a dramatic picture, but no sign of the eclipse itself (pinhole cameras were also no good).

I woke up this morning to a hot summer day(though it is getting more cloudy again now). So my inner monologue is all about f***ing clouds and Scottish weather.

I hope you all managed to see it where you are.

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Summoning Words

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Magic Wand
Magic Wand flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Today’s TDC links to a toot to ask us

Which words make you prick your ears up and get your attention? What do others know to call out to make you respond? Tell us what your real name is, and why.

For a long time we only called Cagney by her name when she was being naughty, so when she heard her name her ears would go down and she would slink away. Even now when I call her name when she’s in the garden she races to the door because she assumes she’s being told off. So there’s that …

But the words that get my attention and make me prick up my ears are numerous. Anything to do with DS106 or the Daily Create will grab my attention, likewise just mention remix or bricolage and you’ve got me hooked. Indeed, my online handle of NomadWarMachine is so much a part of who I am that I’ll happily answer to that, or the more usual abbreviation to Nomad.

And other words that will work are anything to do with knitting – say ‘yarn shop’ and I’ll follow you wherever you are going!

Pizza and real ale also work really well.

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Make (expensive) art yourself

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC asks us to

Since we know 1 taped banana can be sold for lots of US $, let’s make some money by making our own masterpieces.

Ron tapes some bananas to his wall and takes a pic of it for us. I was just about to pack my saandwich lunch into my bag, so here’s part of it. Feel free to make me an offer for a copy!

Modern Art
Modern Art flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

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My super power

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

There’s two apps on my phone that I really like, and use a lot. The first is Merlin, the app from Cornell that helps people to identify birds. The second is Pl@ntNet, a free app that helps people to identify plants. They are both great, and thanks to Merlin I am getting better at guessing which bird I am hearing as I am out walking with my OH. I’m better at plants, but still appreciate having something to check when I’m not quite sure, and again it’s adding to my enjoyment of my walks. The problem is that both depend on having an internet connection, and quite often I don’t have one while out and about in rural Scotland.

So the super power that I’d like is the power to identify any flora or fauna, by sight and sound for birds, and to always be right. Here’s a coot I saw earlier – no need for Merlin to help me to know what this is, but I wish I’d had my phone out to record it shouting as it swam towards me.

Coot
Coot flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

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Image the Alt Text

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC asks us to:

For this Daily Create, you are tasked with imagining the image that is described by the alternative text below.

Close-up of a chain-link fence with metal wires, set against a cloudy blue sky and distant green fields.

What do you “see” in these words and given context? Create it as an photo you might find, draw as a sketch, as a short poem, or just write a longer narrative description. If this is your jam, use it in a prompt to feed a GenAI image creator, maybe add a few more elements to go beyond the literal.

I like to use my own images for stuff like this where I can, but a quick search through my Flickr albums didn’t bring up anything that matched. So I headed over to NightCafe and dropped in the prompt. The result was pretty good:

Close-up of a chain-link fence with metal wires, set against a cloudy blue sky and distant green fields
Close-up of a chain-link fence with metal wires, set against a cloudy blue sky and distant green fields flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

However, as I am not working today and therefore have a bit of time to play, I decided to search through some of my photos for partial matches. Here’s some fences from Strontian and Ross Priory, with added birds.

Fences
Fences flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

 

Posted in AI Art, Blaugust, DailyCreate, DS106, Photos, Scotland | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

3-30-300 rule

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Glasgow is called Dear Green Place, and looking around where I live in the suburbs you can see why. Today’s TDC says that:

3-30-300 is an urban forestry concept which states that every resident should be able to see at least 3 mature trees from their home, live in a neighbourhood with at least 30% tree canopy cover, and be within 300 metres of a high-quality green space. Make a version of this rule for an online community, or show us an example of it from where you live.

Here’s the view from my bedroom window this morning – so many trees – apple, plum, lilac, rowan. Yesterday I counted 14 sparrows sitting on a branch on one of them. Sitting here in my study on a drizzly day I everything looks green through the window and the berries on the rowans are gleaming.

Garden trees
Garden trees flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

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Silent Sunday

214/365 Heron
214/365 Heron flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

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