The origin of the phrase “up sticks”:

”Instead they used Gypsy tents of the traditional style, a tarpaulin thrown over a platform of bent wooden rods. If moved on by the keepers, they could simply ‘up sticks’ in a matter of minutes, and disappear into the trees and on to their next encampment.”

— from The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell 📚


We’re coming back into the light. The sun was rising as we drove to the pool this morning, after months of doing this trip in the dark.

Spring’s a-coming.

A 7.20am sunrise over the South Downs.

Beware: killer clowns and hangry bears.


My kind of diversion.

A sign reading "coffee diversion".

I declared RSS bankruptcy last night, marked the 5,000+ articles which were unread in NetNewsWire as read, and revelled in the manageable flow of new posts.

Such a great decision.


Great post by Matt Genmell on why we should give ourselves permission to write shorter, less weighty posts in blogs.

Some of this is down to platform design: micro.blog and Tumblr encourage short posts in a way that, say, Wordpress doesn’t.


Visiting.

A house in Wandsworth, London.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes of City’s Creatives in Residence scheme.


This is an interesting read: it appears that a seratonin deficiency might not be the key cause of depression after all.


I have 300 open tabs on my iPad. Tonight, I wage war on them.

(By “wage war” I mean “read and decide if I’m going to blog about them”, of course.)


Home learning on teachers’ strike day, thanks to BBC Bitesize.

A girl doing home learning on a Mac

Took me too many years - but I finally got that last elusive micro.blog badge…


Lovely sunrise over Hassocks station this morning.

A winter sunrise over Hassocks Station in the UK's South Downs.

This morning’s wisdom from the crack-of-dawn trip to the pool for my daughter:

A whiteboard reading "motivation is what gets you started. habit is what keeps you going"

SUPpers and swans.

Stand-up paddle-boarders and swans on the Adur.

On the D&D OGL mess:

“This is a community that literally invented the term “rules lawyer.” WotC simply didn’t realize how literally that would be taken.”

🔥


I know their days are numbered, but nothing quite beats a free charge at the station while you’re up in London.


Lovely to see some blue sky again today. It’s been a hard January, and this was the lift I needed this afternoon.

Blue sky with the edge of a treer in one corner

Ivory has won promotion to my iPad dock…

The Ivory app icon in an iPad dock.

So, this post proved more controversial than I expected.

I expected pushback on my warning about TikTok. What I didn’t expect was how attached some people are to their spreadsheets of SEO keywords…