Work is a little slack with so many colleagues on holiday at the moment, so yesterday I decided to take the day off and go shopping.
It’s been a while since I last visited Henley-on-Thames, so that was my main destination, but as it turned out this was just one of many places that I visited.
A year ago I posted about popping over to Thruxton Race Circuit for a track day. Gold Track were back there again this year, so I popped over to see the guys and girls.
I wasn’t planning on driving on the track this time, not least because I’m still running the same tyres which are now starting to look rather worn, and also because I didn’t fancy getting up super-early.
Well, having stated in my post yesterday that I seldom go out, I decided to go out today. 🙂
I’m not entirely sure how many people actually read my blog, or follow me. When I moved to self-hosting, very few people have re-followed me and I’m not sure if my followers from wordpress.com still get notifications for posts made here or not.
But, regardless of whether or not anyone reads this blog, I thought it was about time I posted an update
Sorry about the lack of posts and new pics lately.
Back in January I developed a cyst on my eyelid that progressively got worse. In the end it was felt that minor surgery was needed, which was done under local anaesthetic as an out patient at my local hospital.
It was an unpleasant procedure, and they had to cauterise it which was a horrid smell and rather distressing.
I had quite a lot of post-operative swelling, and it took quite a while to heal up. During this time I was unable to wear any eye makeup, so photos were rather out of the question.
I’m all healed up now, so hopefully I can get back to regularly posting pics on Flickr.
I never thought, when I joined Flickr in February 2009, that 10 years later I would be seeing peaks of hundreds of thousands of views per day, nor that I would see 20 million views.
20 million views
I wish it were possible to see the lifetimes stats, but Flickr doesn’t retain these. But I think the growth has been exponential. Even as recently as 2014, I was only celebrating 2 million views and daily peak views of a few thousand rather than a few hundred thousand. It’s been quite a growth.
It’s just nice that people like to look at my pics, and leave such nice comments about them. Thank you!
Someone sent me a link to this short TED talk by Paula Stone Williams
It’s very good.
The key quote I took from it was “What do any of us really know about the shoes in which we have never walked?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrYx7HaUlMY
I’ve been a long time fan of the manga Battle Angel Alita, known in Japan as Gunnm (銃夢 Ganmu, literally “gun dream”), by Yukito Kishiro.
Alita’s search for identity has been something extremely special and personal to me, and it is probably my favourite manga.
I have been aware of James Cameron’s love project to turn this into a live action film, and have followed its progress through Development Hell with interest.
So when the film finally hit cinemas, I approached it with some trepidation.
Here are my thoughts on it, now that I have seen it.
In this post, I buy a reproduction of a painting by Gil Elvgren, and trace some of the history behind it. I also have to modify the painting in order to be able to hang it.
This article was published a year ago, and is still utterly superb.
The fight for transgender rights is an urgent battle against what some have called the last bastion of socially acceptable bigotry. If we take the notion seriously that all humans are due equal rights, as many of us do, we must care about the rights of transgender people. We are currently in a situation where transgender rights are so far behind other groups in society that it should be considered a crisis.
Read on…
tomsimsblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/what-you-need-to-know-about-transgender-rights/
