Great Use of Screen Time: Study With Merve

See Merve's entire channel here.

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by Laurie Allee

Must-watch...studying?!

Let's say you're at a film pitch meeting and you're trying to convince producers that you've got a workable idea:

"There's this Scottish student, okay?  And they have this YouTube Channel where all they do is point an HD camera at a desk and out of the window where they, like, study alone for up to 7 hours.  You never see anything except their hands as they write in notebooks and check a laptop. They've got over 201,000 subscribers and people join the live streams from all over the world to study with the videos and everyone has developed a camaraderie in the comment section..." 

Yeah, I don't think you're getting that movie funded.

But here's where truth really is stranger than fiction...

Instead of Social Media: Log Into Nature Livestreams...

 

Hang out at the Banzai Pipeline surf break on the north shore of Oahu

Livestream hours: dawn to just after sunset, Hawaii time

by Laurie Allee

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Seeing the World Despite Travel Restrictions

     Finding the analog in the digital 

Readers of this blog know that I have a love/hate relationship with technology.  Before COVID-19, I felt like I was living in some kind of Matrix where everyone was willingly plugged into devices, ignoring each other while staring hour after hour into endlessly scrolling screens.  I basically started this blog as a kind of rebellion against my phone.  I dedicated myself a life more tactile and less digital. I unplugged to get my hands dirty and "sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" -- or to at least avoid the toxic political howling on Twitter. 

Analog Things: Building a Cabin by Hand

Meet Erik Grankvist...modern Viking builder

by Laurie Allee

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No Power Tools (or Nails) Allowed.

Covid-19 restrictions have given people inspiration to do things they might not have had the time or inclination to do before lockdowns.  I was feeling pretty great about my own self-isolation activities:  learning the dulcimer, experimenting with Prismacolor art pencils and tackling the classic books I'd never gotten around to reading.  Not bad, right?  No mega-scrolling, no Twitter ranting, just good old-fashioned analog activities, even in the midst of a pandemic...

Then I found out about Erik Grankvist.