Hello petal, hope you’re having a peaceful Twixtmas. There’s been a little snow here; not enough for all-out tea-tray tobogganing but enough to make the neighbourhood seem sparkly and serene for a little while.
🗓 Public Domain Day 2021: copyright is finite, so every 1st of January a selection of works drops into the public domain. This time around it’s works from 1925, including The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway, silent films featuring Buster Keaton and a wide range of music.
🌳 Tune Into Forests From Around The World: tree.fm is Spotify for forests. People around the world recorded the sounds of forests near them, so you can escape into nature, while unable to travel.
🗣 Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking: Self-talk is deemed legitimate only when done in private, by children, by people with intellectual disabilities, or in Shakespearean soliloquies. This article argues that speaking out loud to ourselves encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.
⤵️ The halfway underground homes of ‘Parasite’ are real spaces of desperation and dreams: The halfway-underground banjiha home figures prominently in South Korean dark comedy Parasite. Many were built in the 1970s as bunkers for a potential North Korean attack and later haphazardly modified to meet a surging demand for housing. By 2015, more than 360,000 households lived in semi-basement homes.
📲 Teens Lead the Way in Adapting to Online Public Space: The growing popularity of platforms like Discord and Roblox is changing attitudes about screen time for teens, who found refuge online long before the pandemic. See also: Smartphone apps you should delete.
‽ Why this forgotten punctuation mark should be revived for 2021: Why a piece of punctuation proposed in the 1960s was adored, ignored, and should be brought back.
💐 Seeing Beauty in Everything: Eckhart Tolle discusses the shift in consciousness from our ordinary perspective to a deeper awareness that transcends the personal sense of identity.
🙄 Boredom Is Spreading the Coronavirus: People who are rarely bored seem to have an easier time sticking to social distancing behaviours, new research suggests.