Hello, world. I’m MacDara Conroy, and this is my blog.


Date: March 2011

Blogfodder linkdump part 5

In lieu of weeknotes (late again, I know), here’s the first of three – three! – batches of links from 2006. I saved a lot of stuff that year:

  • Come home and make this place poor again / Written five years ago, but far more relevant now, I think.
  • Erasing the need for sleep / The idea of drugs like modafinil being used to facilitate a lifestyle really unsettles me.
  • Doane Paper / “Combines the benefits of lined and grid paper onto a single sheet.” Saved for when I’ve filled up my remaining square-ruled Moleskines.
  • The Tumblelist / This site’s still listed! (Even though I mostly gave up the tumblelog thing when I redesigned.)
  • Where He-Man came from / Don’t know why I was under the impression the Masters of the Universe line was a hasty replacement for a failed Conan toy line; this clears the whole matter up.

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After the quake

These photos of the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami tell a remarkable story. But maybe a more remarkable one is that of Japan’s resilience in the face of disaster. Even amid all the shocking imagery – roads split down the middle, cars and houses washed away and disintegrated in the surge – I’m not left with the same sense of hopelessness that followed the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The fact is, with an earthquake of that sheer magnitude (now thought to be 9.0), and as bad as things are right now, the situation could’ve been far worse. It’s a testament to good forward planning that they aren’t.

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Weeknotes #484-487

In the middle of February, Bee and I paid a visit to IMMA to catch the last day of The Moderns. It was portrayed as an exploration of “the development of modernity in Ireland through the visual arts”, but the resulting exhibition was a bit of a hodge-podge of whatever it seemed the curators could shoehorn into it, and it didn’t cohere as a whole.

Why, for instance, was work by French artists in France (who merely happened to influence a handful of Irish painters) displayed next to photographs evoking the changing character of Ireland and Irish society? There’s no context! If juxtaposition was the intention, they missed the trick by a mile.

These conceptual problems aside, there were some gems to discover, particularly in photography.

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