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.

Analog Things: The Mountain Dulcimer

 

Jeff Hames rocks the mountain dulcimer 

by Laurie Allee

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Are you looking for an acoustic instrument that is highly portable, easy-to-learn, inexpensive and capable of creating absolutely beautiful music?  Look no further than the mountain dulcimer.  This unassuming little instrument has been known by a variety of names: lap dulcimer, Appalachian dulcimer, Kentucky dulcimer, "dulcymore," harmonium, harmony box and (my favorite) hog fiddle.  Traditional to the southern Appalachian mountains of the US, this stringed instrument is one of the easiest to play.  Essentially a fretted zither, it commonly has three or four strings and can be played by plucking or strumming with a pick.

And it sounds AMAZING.

 

Unplugging as a Political Act

by Laurie Allee

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Doomscrolling

As I write this, the president of the United States is probably adding another tweet to his ongoing, stream-of-consciousness tone poem in a frenzy that makes Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" look downright mellow by comparison.

For your sanity's sake, don't be like the president.

When Real Life is Virtual...

by Laurie Allee

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Together Apart
     Finding the analog in the digital

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have a love/hate relationship with technology.  The last few years have made me feel like I'm living inside a dystopian technocracy, where people have been mindlessly sucked into screens, where tech billionaires determine what we see and how we see it, where real life is superseded by social media with everyone corralled into digital echo chambers, crouched behind their highly-filtered avatars.