Those Who Like The Grooves Of Your Mind

The most popular link last week was Seb Emina's new terms for social media user typologies (number three on this digest), with this photo essay about the British Museum second.

1. Put the world's forests on shuffle and enjoy a random tree-based soundscape.
2. I have never set foot on the Isle of Wight, but I have sailed around it, and perhaps this is partly why I am oddly fixated on it. This essay on how this small island in the English Channel has been the setting for generations of utopian dreams really justifies all the time I have spent daydreaming about it.
3. A love letter to the personal website.

4. A wonderful tour of London as it has been reproduced in scenery form on studio soundstages for filming purposes. Even the title of this piece — "the imagined city of the backlots" — is evocative.
5. A new vibe just dropped, and I already hate it: boom boom.
6. I cut a long section about the trend for obsessive personal health and fitness tracking and quantification out of A Body Made of Glass because, although interesting, it didn't illuminate my central subject of hypochondria that much. I might repurpose that into an essay at some point, because I do think it's a pattern of behaviour we ought to scrutinise more than we do. This is a good overview of how useless most of the consumer tracking stuff is:

"If you look at my Oura smart ring app on the night of the 12 January, you will see my heart rate spike dramatically at 11pm, then flatline completely. You would have to assume that I’d had a heart attack and died. In fact, I was running a fever and, frustrated by the weight of the ring on my finger, tore it off and threw it across the room."

7. Why do certain poems go viral? An investigative close reading.

8. A visualisation that lets you rotate the pool, move the sphere around, splash the water... It's very calming to fiddle with.
9. Meet the cloistered nuns of Tyburn.
10. This is written as "advice for a friend who wants to start a blog", but I think it would be instructive to anyone embarking on a public creative project who needs some encouragement to be authentic and weird in their own personal way:

"What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind."

11. A poem I enjoyed: "Walking with the Weather" by Medbh McGuckian.

12. Interviews with gallery attendants about what it's like to look at people who are looking at art.
13. Tips for good mathematical handwriting. As someone with some quite peculiar features in my writing (self-consciously adopted when I was about 13 because I wanted to seem eccentric and now unavoidable habits), I appreciated the post-hoc justification for looping the letter l, crossing z and putting a slash through 7. Otherwise somebody might not be able to read my equations!