Pupil Barrister

Category: Diary (Page 55 of 300)

Things that happen to me, or things I do

Photography Imbued with Sadness

A while ago I posted on The Darker Side of Selfies, and the way in which the mainstream media illustrate the news of tragic young deaths with images from the victims’ social media accounts.

Whether it is a car accident, a drug overdose, a gang murder, or a bullying related suicide, the photo editors turn to the victim’s Facebook page or Twitter stream to harvest images. … Used in this new, unintended context, these images strike a discordant note.  The carefree narcissism inherent in any selfie jars with the fact of the artist/subject’s untimely death.

The death of Terrie Lynch and Alexandra Binns this week is a good example. Continue reading

We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal

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Update: PDF of my story here.

I’m delighted to have a story featured in the anthology We Need to Talk, launched yesterday.  The publisher is Jurassic London—here’s the blurb from their website:

All of us, at some point, are involved in difficult conversations. Whether that’s tough talks with clients or bosses, or break-ups, or coming out, or telling someone you love them, or giving advice to that friend who just doesn’t want to hear it. Some conversations are even more difficult, as sufferers of any potentially serious illness will know.

But one thing’s for sure, these conversations are fascinating. So much so that we’ve teamed up with Kindred and The Eve Appeal, to launch a writing competition on the theme of difficult conversations.

My story is called ‘Frozen Out’, an awkward conversation between a husband and wife.  Its inclusion in the anthology is all the sweeter because the other eighteen stories are uniformly excellent.

All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to The Eve Appeal to help fund its important work fighting women’s cancers.  Hard copies of the book are available from Foyles, either in-store or via their online shop.  You can get an e-book version from Amazon.

We Need To Talk was launched yesterday at Foyles on the Southbank.  Jenny Aims has posted about it on the Kindred blog.  There’s a photo of me in it.

We Need To Talk is an awareness raising project, so let’s be aware.  The Eve Appeal chief executive Athena Lamnisos wrote the afterword for the book, and it was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, under the title ‘We Need To Talk About Vaginas‘.

Continue reading

On Iraq, we were right and they were wrong

This blog is ten years old this month.  I’ve written previously about the impetus for starting to write, and my reasons for persisting with it.
A key factor was the Iraq War of 2003.  The arguments about the decision to invade, the human rights abuses that followed and the obtuse behaviour of our leaders were a staple of the ‘blogosphere’ at that time, and I got stuck in.
Allow me to indulge in a little old-style blogging, i.e. web-logging, by quoting at length from Anthony Barnett’s recent essay on Jeremy Corbyn, where he summarises the meaning of the Iraq War: Continue reading

How can I force Picasa to rescan faces?

Picasa is Google’s free photo management application.  It appears to be an experimental project rather than a flagship product, but its extremely useful and versatile.  In particular, it allows management of photos without making a copy of each photograph inside the application.  This was the feature that prompted me to move my photo management into Picasa from Apple’s iPhoto (now discontinued) and why I have not moved on to its new ‘Photos’ offering.
Like those other programmes, Picasa has a powerful facial recognition feature.  Set it loose on your photos and it will recognise faces within them.  The software if powerful enough to identify blurred, grainy faces as well as in-focus portraits.  If you give a face a name, it will identify other similar faces and suggest that they are the same person.  I began tagging all my photographs like this.  Continue reading

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