Welcome to five things this week featuring things online and offline I’ve been enjoying…
1 Shot and Forgot
This is such a fun TikTok channel, animated by an enthusiastic host, Dan Rodo, who, by using the visual media of pictures, compressing hours of historical sleuthing into a fast-paced trail of crumbs, one-clue to the next, puts the excitement of research on display. Kudos to him!
2 About writing
Perhaps it is true for most writers, that seeing someone else braving the usual impediments to writing inspires their own writing... A post on Marginal Revolution lead to Jake Seliger's blog and then to Bess Stillman's substack which is the kind of thing that can happen now in this online world. (I remember once visiting a local cemetery where a woman's gravestone had a Youtube link. It was an oddly satisfying way of scratching the itch of a "who was this person?" question, even if only superficially.) I particularly appreciated Bess Stillman's three-part series on writing, the first of which is here.
3 Halfways (Bubble tea places list)
Before summer had even started and the kids had come out of a place with a disappointing experience of bubble tea, my daughter declared that we had to have an "authentic" bubble tea experience. I embraced this project idea, made a list of 20 bubble-tea-offering businesses in Winnipeg, put them on a map, and made a booklet for evaluations. We are halfway through, and even though the summer is winding down, we'll likely continue these random visits. I feel as though the focus on a single experience is both unexpectedly fun and surprisingly educational. Our stops are included among other summer activities and memorialized on the fridge, we've learned a lot about bubble tea, tracked down addresses in the city in areas we wouldn't normally visit, and discussed drink quality and tea place ambiances we wouldn't otherwise, were it not for this mini-project.
A list of places we've tried so far: On Tap Frozen Dessert Bar, Xing Fu Tang, Panda Crepe, The Alley, Icey Snow, Khab Tapioca, Boba Paw, Chatime, Happy Lemon, Dynasty Café.
Christian and I have been to KHAB Tapioca on Pembina three more times, just by ourselves and even invited visiting family members to try out bubble tea there. A close second, ambiance and taste-wise, is the nearby Panda Crepe. The kids were unanimous in liking the drinks from Dynasty Café which offers a small menu of basics. And Xing Fu Tang had a cool fortune-telling cabinet that entertained us as we waited for our orders.
4 Double Fine PsychodYssEy
My siblings turned me on to this Youtube series which Tom Faber describes in the Financial Times this way:
You might expect a documentary of this length to be exhausting or indulgent, particularly when it’s about something so technical, but it is a riveting watch. [...] Here are the mechanics of human creativity, the brutal realities of the gaming industry and the passion and heart of the people who choose to do it anyway.
Recently, watching episodes 12 and 13, I especially liked Tim Schafer's thoughts on how creativity is about momentum (around the 4 minute mark on episode 13). It's not that it's especially insightful but that you get to see what it looks like to put an idea like "creativity is an endless process you should do everyday of your life" into an exercise called "Amnesia Fortnight".
5 Summer’s progress here
There’s this particular tangle of thistles that I like to photograph against the sun after supper and they’ve been a steady marker of the season’s progress… (taken July 26th, August 2nd, August 16th)
The plants going to seed, and those seedheads emptying and turning brown are the visual aid helping me along this ever-forward thrust of time. Summer’s early exuberance gives way now to days gathered like last-minute berries plucked and put into over-full baskets as we leave the field behind, taking a store of fine memories.
Happy Friday!