Replied to Goodbye 2019 (Oh Hello Ana – Blog)

Ana’s personal blog

Sorry it’s been a tough year for you Ana 🙁

Though I think you’re being hard on yourself (we are always our toughest critics) – it sounds like you did a lot! And I enjoyed hanging out with you at HWC.

Here’s to 2020 being a good one 🙂

Replied to https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/12/new-boymans-depot/ by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

The new Depot of the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam is becoming an amazing building.
I visited the ThingsCon conference recently in the Nieuwe Instituut across the road from the building site of the depot. Walking towards it I saw the entire Rotterdam skyline with high rises reflected in …

I saw this building while on the way back to the UK from IWC Utrecht! Very interesting – I didn’t know it was to house items from a museum, that’s even cooler. I really liked what I saw of Rotterdam.
Took a trip out to Salford today.  Started off at the People’s History Museum, then walked along the River Irwell to Salford Quays.

Quite a lot of graffiti and street art along the way.

I went to The Lowry and the Imperial War Museum.  Really good exhibition called The State of Us at The Lowry, about the interface between biology and technology.

Also really liked Lowry’s paintings – I hadn’t realised that he did a lot more than just iconic paintings of factory life.  I really liked ‘Portrait of Ann’.  The graphic style.  And it’s very enigmatic.

There was a factory one of my hometown, Wigan, looking pretty industrial back in the 30s or so.

There was a particularly depressing exhibition about Yemen in the IWM.

Very grim stuff – so much suffering.

You get some nice views over the river around Salford Quays.

 

 

 

 

 

Read Arise, Sir Food Bank by Frances Ryan (tribunemag.co.uk)

Knighting Iain Duncan Smith – the man responsible for Universal Credit, the bedroom tax and ‘fit for work’ tests – shows just how much contempt the establishment has for ordinary people.

What a stitch-up. Man who has presided over the significant worsening of many people’s lives – here, have a knighthood.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/arise-sir-food-bank

#shitesoftherealm

Read In Defence of Salford by Ronan Burtenshaw and Marcus Barnett (tribunemag.co.uk)

The Murdoch press has started its attacks on Rebecca Long Bailey and her Salford ‘mafia’. It’s not hard to figure out why – Salford is a proud and radical working-class community that points the way forward for the Labour Left in 2020.

Nice little article about Salford, socialism and Rebecca Long Bailey – obviously Tribune’s pick for next Labour leader. She’s already being hammered by the right-wing press.

Interesting description of Salford as “somewhere between the Manchester metropolis and the surrounding Lancashire towns” – obviously geographically, but politically too, hadn’t really thought about it like that before.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/in-defence-of-salford/

Read Autonomous by Annalee Newitz ( )
I finished the book Autonomous by Annalee Newitz a couple of weeks back.

It was pretty good. Fun and easy to read and keeps you turning the pages. Interesting themes of free culture, here focused on open sourcing / reverse engineering pharmaceuticals. And the lengths to which those in control of intellectual property rights will go to enforce them.

Interesting side story of human / robot romance and gender identity.