“Spending hours waiting for a flight at the Cologne-Bonn Airport, Eno became frustrated with the airport’s uninspiring atmosphere. At that moment, Eno conceived an album of music “designed for airports” In his original 1978 liner notes, he explained: “Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Listening to “Kubur”, a piece for strings, part of the album Maryam Pagi Ke Malam - an original score. Found via Steve Smith’s For the Record newsletter.
Today’s word count: 3343. I don’t expect to get to 50k words by Nov 30, but I wrote and recorded an album with this daily method. I know something will come out of this, if not when.
A dystopian near-future comedy about an heiress trying to right the wrongs of her deceased father’s empire. A good time all the way through, and I’d like to read the other book in the series.
Some really neat climate data. This interactive Surging Seas Risk Zone Map forecasts timing for sea level rise in many places - even our little coastal village. With a projection of 2200 as the median estimated year for 5 feet of rise; 2090 for one foot, assuming unchecked pollution.
I collect climate solutions small and large. Here’s one that came across my desk today.
Are airships due for a comeback?
I forgot these existed outside of steampunk stories and photos of the Hindenburg, but these floating air tankers are a piece of carbon-emission-reducing transport technology that make an inspiring kind of sense. Are they feasible? Will thery spark a new wave of luxury slow travel? Some people are building airships right now.
“The Solutions Journalism Network is leading a global shift in journalism, focused on what the news misses most often: how people are trying to solve problems and what we can learn from their successes or failures.”
The UNWTO has developed a Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism. To skim through later. Is it being used yet, in practice? Are there case studies?
A fun, disturbing, existential-philosophy-thriller novel about what happens when you meet yourself and what the world really, like is.
“And at the very heart of this fire that has always consumed America, with this war waged by darkness over enlightenment, a war in which reason gradually backs down in the face of ignorance and the irrational, Jacob Evans puts on the dark breastplate of his own primitive and uncompromising hopes. Religion is a carnivorous fish in the abyssal depths. It emits the feeblest of light and needs a vast darkness around it to attract its prey.”
Hello, if you’ve just stumbled across this blog. 👋🏻 This is where I keep things that have held my attention. I’m a composer, podcast producer, writer, avid reader, web enthusiast, sci-fi fan, climate crisis try-and-solver, bookshop co-owner, and guy living in a remote place. I’ve got a lot of overlapping interests and will likely add fragments about a lot of them. This is my attention collection.
