Swing Test
Finally got a safe yet exciting launch system for high rope swings.
Not that this one is high or exciting.
Moon Hooch
Fuuuuuuuck!
JD Beck and DOMi
More greatness just stumbled upon.
She's No Slouch II
One year after this.
Limb Isolation Trick
Quite often, I’ll achieve a great throwline throw over the perfect limb, only to lose it when trying to isolate it because the throwbag snags on the far side and jumps clear of the limb I want. This alternative approach occurred to me this morning:
This might be old news to seasoned climbers, but it only occurred to me today…
When a Cover Goes Beyond - Purple Rain
Cor! What a great voice!
Tal Wilkenfeld
My favourite musician of the moment, and at last there’s a decent introduction to her online. Enjoy. She’s prodigal.
Late-Stage Capitalism Will Eat Itself
Part 1 of Destin’s disturbing documentary. Well worth a watch.
Nice Slender Pine
Climbed this in the sun this afternoon…
On setting up I learned two things: 1) My big shot will just shoot a 14oz bag to the highest point my throwline will go over and still reach the ground. 2) My throwline is exactly the same length as my rope. Thus, my rig looked like this as I clipped in…..
After that, though it was just a lovely ascent through the void… well, through the holly bush and creepers mucking up the bottom of the tree, and the many pine cones wanting to get into my t-shirt.
Surprisingly Tricky Beech
Too many limbs! And too many little pinch-point throwline-traps - one of which we found. Then just throwing turned out to be problematic as the bag kept bouncing into the TOO MANY limbs! Once up, just navigating a route is a challenge. But at the top - mmm-hmm - sunny views!
Postmodern Jukebox
Shamefully late to the PMJ party…
Emma Thompson Still Wonderful
“When Skydance Media Chief Executive David Ellison announced this year that he was hiring John Lasseter to head Skydance Animation, many in and outside the company were shocked and deeply unhappy. Only months earlier, Lasseter had ended his relationship with Pixar — where he had worked since the early ’80s — and parent company Disney after multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior and the creation of a frat house-like work environment. Lasseter had admitted to inappropriate hugging and “other missteps.”
After announcing the hire, Ellison sent a long email to staff, noting that Lasseter was contractually obligated to behave professionally, and convened a series of town halls in which Lasseter apologized for past behavior and asked to be given the chance to prove himself to his new staff. Meanwhile, Mireille Soria, president of Paramount Animation, with which Skydance has a distribution deal, took the highly unusual step of meeting with female employees to tell them that they could decline to work with Lasseter.”
Emma walks.
U-Bass Sounding Good Shocker
>35m Sprydon Sequoia
This is properly tricky as the first fifteen metres comprise only downward-sloping limbs… You can see Jos in the first picture having slid his anchor down the limb to the first fork during his ascent. The heavy rain in the morning and moss on the limbs made it ridiculously slippery. This needed some quite tricky re-jigging and it did feel a teeny bit precarious during that corrective operation.
Once that was done, though, the view - and the wind - was absolutely tremendous!
I climbed down to what I estimated was half-way and set a doubled-rope anchor with my 45m rope, which at the ground left me six inches spare….. I give it a conservative estimate of at least 35m high.
Blue Sunday
Most of it. Again - thanks to Tony Price for filming and editing.
filmed by Tony Price at Blue Sunday 2019
Red Right Hand
Heh. ‘Twas a lot of fun.
Tigran Hamasyan's with the Berklee Middle Eastern Fusion Ensemble
Song for Bilbao - with Bona!
One of my favourite Metheny Group songs - with unexpected Richard Bona, whose solo is magnificent!
The Robot Uprising
This article in the New York Times today is an excellent read.
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
It’s a well-written, if sobering, reality-check on the internet and web-content.
What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust .