Issue #121 - The Spaces in Between

Summer Micro Edition #1 - Drips

Just like last year, I’ll be taking a break over the next four or five issues, so this is a shorter issue than would normally drop into your inbox. I hope that you enjoy this selection of links and pics, feel free to get in touch, and look forward to catching up later in the summer.

School’s out and we’re looking forward to a few family days, imagine we won’t want to do too much but enjoy some good weather and wind down. We’re excited about our trip home to the UK, so making final preparations. I’m still teaching, and that’s going well, and I’m enjoying the conversations with my students. I’m knee-deep in a couple of papers at the moment and panicking slightly about the talks that I need to prepare for conferences that are coming up.

Coffee outside..so PGH with the drips - Photo by Stephan

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Here we go:

1. After 18 years of writing in my Typepad blog I’ve decided to sunset and archive it on a new WordPress instance. http://dotsandspaces.uk/dots
   I’m afraid I just can’t justify paying the 80 bucks it costs every year and feel it’s better to consolidate. It has been a fun ride though and although the old site will stay up, I’ve downgraded and won’t add any more writing to it.

2. Google announce a one-more thing prototype of glasses that display translated text in AR. There’s no release date or even much proof that this works, but Google’s translation tools are pretty good already, even adding Quechua this week. Watch the video below and a nice follow-up article in The Verge.

3. Unity Learn is a platform for getting to grips with Unity, the application for building 3D environments, games, AR, and VR tools. There are a ton of updates and new content up there and access to templates, and other resources for you, your students, or anyone interested in making new content.

4. Are you living in a society without a counterculture?

5. I finally stumbled on a scan of the paper where Simon Nicholson introduces the loose-parts theory that we talked about in previous issues of this newsletter. Also, a nice entry in a fabulous website from 2018 by Louise Penfold, where she discusses the theory.

6. France bans English gaming tech jargon in the push to preserve language purity.

7. Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast presented by the Toronto Writing Project and includes interviews with educators, community leaders, and researchers on writing as a vehicle for change.

8. The National Gallery invites you to play Artle.

9. Gwenno’s new album is almost entirely written in the Cornish language Kernewek. Love this song, it’s like a Francoise Hardy and Stereolab collaboration.

10. You can now embed TikTok videos into substack, like this one below, I’m finding it a wonderful platform for discovering artists, animators, and designers, and it is making me think about some of the digital storytelling possibilities we might explore in my new course.

@kellyemmrichTo the places I used to know

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Thank you

Thank you for all your kind words following last week’s issue, so many of us are sharing similar thoughts, I hope that we hold onto some of the anger we are feeling and channel our energies towards affirmative action, what we sense that may be.

Okay, let me know if you have any links that you want to share. Safe travels to all those heading off. I have colleagues in London, Seattle, and Paris, all left this week and it won’t be too soon before we’re traveling too.