Delete Your Account
We had a seminar on social media use at work last week, prompting the question why use Twitter, etc? There were a variety of answers offered, but as someone who uses social media quite a lot, I found it really quite hard to answer. In the end I think I use SM (chiefly Twitter and Instagram) because it’s there, rather than any instrumental further objective. They’re forums which foster creativity just like any other, and so they’re a chance for self-expression.
That said, I’ve a growing sense of unease – Facebook has long been a bit sketchy in my mind, so I should really think more about Instagram (a FB subsidiary, but one I would really be reluctant to give up), then I listened to this podcast last week, which was pretty horrifying, and yesterday someone was telling me that Google records snippets of sound from your phone in addition to tracking your movements. Fab.
Video Games
Helen Lewis, and John Lanchester (two of my favourite writers) were bemoaning their view that video games have failed to develop really deep games in recent years. I can’t really speak to that, since I’ve played so few recently, but since we got the boy a Nintendo over Christmas, he and I have been playing Zelda, Breath Of The Wild, and it’s both a really beautiful game and at least a little bit thought provoking. There is nowhere you go in the massive world that isn’t teeming with wildlife – wild horses, goats, birds of myriad forms; moose, snow foxes and others in the snowfields; waterfowl, fish and others in the rivers and ponds; fireflies in the night, eagles wheeling over the peaks, deer springing away as you approach them in the woods. It’s hard not to stop and think a bit about biodiversity as you play.
Sheep Update
We had the sheep scanned at the end of last month – we’re having one set of twins, one single, and one of the ewes wasn’t in lamb. That last is a shame because she (a yearling, so a first timer) is a really good looking ewe, big and alert. We scanned three alongside my friend Mike’s 500 odd. We spent the morning feeding them through the race one by one, where a NZer named Rochelle sat under an umbrella, working the ultrasound machine, spraying different colours for singles/twins/triples, and different places along the sheep’s back to indicate roughly how far along they were. The weather wasn’t good, but we were active enough to keep warm. Somehow it was easier to handle sheep in their hundreds than it was getting my 3 into the trailer the night before. Then, I chased them around in the teeming rain until I had to call for the boy as an assistant, and even then we struggled. Lambing is going to be in May for us this year, quite late – I’ve already seen a few lambs in the fields. Around us they’re mostly accidental pregnancies, I think, but lower down people start earlier, so I saw a decent number of lambs in some of the fields I passed this weekend driving through the Wye Valley.
Fireflies 