I’m pretty sure that Playdate, the brand new bright yellow game console from Portland’s Panic, is an inane frivolity, the kind of thing the world doesn’t really need.

But it certainly begat an interesting promotional audio documentary that’s worth a listen to learn about modern hardware and software engineering, and how it’s possible at a modest independent scale.

And perhaps that’s why Playdate is worthwhile: as a case study of a general approach we might use to, say, rebuild our energy and transportation systems.

Earlier this summer Grace Kimpinski, the Executive Director of Island Fringe, got in touch with an idea for a new award for this year’s edition of the festival, and asked if I’d be willing to sponsor it. I said yes immediately, and together Grace and I cooked up the name of the award and the spirit in which it will be awarded.

Longtime readers will recall that in October 1882 Oscar Wilde paid a visit to Charlottetown as part of his speaking tour of North America:

Since I first learned of that visit, from Catherine Hennessey, it has stuck in my head as something we should celebrate, if only because the very idea of Oscar Wilde in Charlottetown’s Market Hall, speaking about “Decorative Arts” is just too amazing a vision to not celebrate.

Wilde was just 28 years old when he visited; he died at 46, spending two of the years between imprisoned for being gay (a crime for which he was posthumously pardoned only in 2017).

It seemed only right, given that Island Fringe celebrates “boundary-pushing theatre and live performance,” that the award should be named in Wilde’s honour, and given out to the show that “most effectively celebrates non-conformity.”

Come to the closing party and awards night on August 1, 2021 at the Charlottetown Beer Garden at 8:00 p.m. to find out the show that is so-celebrated.

During my year at Trent University I took a course in “natural language understanding by computers” from Stephen Regoczei, a course that we conjured up as a reading course so as to free me from the shackles of needing to take Computer Studies 101. And a course that, in the end, was far more free-ranging than the title suggested.

One day Stephen held up an object and asked me to sketch it from his perspective. I failed: my brain simply didn’t have the horsepower to do such a complicated reprojection.

And the third dimension has continued to be my arch nemesis in the years since.

But I’m trying to overcome that, and sketching coffee cups is good practice. I’m nowhere near there yet, but I’m making some progress.

My friend Elmine blogs about her book purchases.

I’ve found that if Elmine is interested in a book, I’m also interested in it.

To the point where I’m thinking I should simply ask Dan at The Bookmark to subscribe to Elmine’s blog and order me a copy of anything she purchases.

Whoever sent us an anonymous gift from état de choc: thank you; you are aces.

For many years Donna Glass and her capable team have been running a kayak and paddleboard rental operation out of the riverside park in Morell; construction of a new bridge in Morell, with the resulting noise and chaos, has pushed them up the shore one watershed to a new base in Midgell.

Which turns out to be not such a bad thing: the Midgell River turns out to be just as nice a river to paddle on, and is perhaps even better for the new paddler, as it’s a little gentler and more compact (Kingfisher will still shuttle you up to the headwaters of the Morell River for their longstanding bridge-to-bridge paddle, which is a trip I recommend everyone do at least once).

From Kingfisher’s base at the bridge over the river, you can paddle upriver, which quickly takes you from the noise of the highway around the bend into pleasant silence, or you can paddle downriver, under the Confederation Trail bridge and into St. Peters Bay, where you’ll find what we are told is a pleasant beach.

Olivia and I went out to Midgell yesterday afternoon–a warm, sunny, windless day–for the Pride Paddle, an event Kingfisher holds annually, with all proceeds going to Pride PEI and Peers Alliance. We’d booked a double kayak, and as we pulled into the parking lot it arrived back from its previous trip, so we were right on time.

We were paddling at low tide, so ran aground heading downriver; we levered ourselves out and went upriver instead. Unlike previous trips, where Olivia was more passenger than paddler, she figured out the mechanics of paddling and did as much of the work moving us forward as I did.

We were out on the water for about 90 minutes. It was a gentle, relaxing way to spend time on the water; it’s something that anyone can do, and especially if you’ve never explored the Island’s river systems from a kayak, I highly recommend you take advantage of the opportunity, especially this year when we’re all sticking closer to home.

From Be interested, be curious, hear what’s not said: how I learned to really listen to people by Annalisa Barbieri in The Guardian:

Listening, I discovered, wasn’t just about waiting for the other person to stop talking, or asking good questions, or even not interrupting. It was about really hearing what the other person was saying, and why they were saying it. Being interested, but also curious. Sometimes that means looking for what’s not said, what’s left out, which words are used to mask emotions that are hard to acknowledge. Likewise, good listening is about approaching what has been said as if you’ve never heard it before. Put simply, it’s about paying attention.

For the first time in more than a year our monthly Pen Night met face to face. To allow us to socially distance, and to try out a hybrid format with far-aways coming in on Zoom, we gathered in the carriage house at Beaconsfield.

The hybrid experiment failed: the latency introduced by the wireless connection to the projector meant Zoom’s echo cancellation broke down completely. We’ll try again next time with a hard-wired connection to see if that improves things.

But the face to face was a rousing success, with a dozen of us gathering to immerse ourselves in fountain pen nerdiness.

Highlights included special guest star Art, a summer resident, who brought some lovely heavy pens with intriguing nibs, an Aurora 88 passed around by Stephen, a bookbinding gift from Chantal, and a good assortment of notebooks and letters circulated for inspection. There were also some very good refreshments: Tolkien-inspired cookies and rhubarb-strawberry crumble squares.

Being back in the room with my pen friends reminded me how important the monthly pen respite was during the summer of 2019 while Catherine was sick: just being able to get away for a few hours and not think about matters of life, cancer, and death was enormously helpful for my mental health.

We’ll meet again in August.

I love this interview of Alicia Kennedy by Sarah Miller, which starts as a discussion about a pair of silver platform clogs, and migrates into an exploration of hyper-performant femininity and how “an interesting pair of shoes can throw the straight male mind into helpless orbit.”