My animation tutor from Bournemouth and all-round legend, Peter Parr, has been blogging his sketches on Tumblr for a couple of years now. It's been fascinating seeing him take to sketching on an iPad, but for me there's still something very special about what happens when he takes a brush pen to a sketchbook. This drawing of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, from a small series posted yesterday, is a particular delight. It's been 14 years since he taught me directly, but thanks to his blog he remains an inspiration.
For those bemoaning the conclusion of this year's Great British Bake Off, fear not! According to the Daily Mash, "Bake-Off will last as long as the recession, says BBC"
The Corporation assured a tense, angry Britain that while it toils in the midst of economic gloom it will provide a desperate country with lingering images of sugary comfort food.
Emma Bradford, from Hatfield, said: “I must be able to eat brownies all day and then come home to a programme about enthusiastic amateurs making brownies that, somehow, seem even more delicious.
“Otherwise I will paint the office walls with the blood of my enemies.”
[...] Tom Logan, a perfectly moist upside-down cake enthusiast, added: “Need it. Need it. Need it. Never stop doing this.
“Don’t fuck with me. I can make a bomb in my shed.”
Elsewhere, there's a fascinating article by Alan White in the New Statesman that takes the idea of being the subject of a Twitterstorm and uses it to consider what the Internet has done to our sense of ourselves and others:
[...] No – we don’t want to live in a fantasy world. What we want to do is sell our own narrative, augment it, share it. Again and again – Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest – we are encouraged to share our tastes. What are we doing? What are we listening to? Eating? We’re under a self-imposed, dull form of surveillance – useful for business, and usually boring for our peers.
[...] We have placed ourselves under an extreme form of surveillance. A bar-room joke becomes a statement of intent, viewable by anyone, anywhere. Our every error is now catalogued, easily searchable, impossible to forget.
The article includes the following quote from a piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker that particularly resonates:
Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.
