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In celebration of the lunar new year, many people release a lantern into the night sky on the last day of festivities. Taiwan Data Stories made a fun interactive that lets you customize and release your own lantern.
One of the festival’s most iconic traditions is the release of sky lanterns (天燈), especially in Pingxi (平溪) in New Taipei City. As evening falls, thousands of glowing lanterns drift into the night sky, each inscribed with handwritten wishes for the year ahead. In the Year of the Horse, many lanterns feature the character 「馬」, reflecting the horse’s cultural associations with vitality, speed, endurance, and forward momentum.
I hope next year they turn this into a community interactive that shows everyone’s lanterns and hopes floating around.
A decade and a half ago, there used to be a site called 43 Things where people listed their goals in life. I made a now defunct interactive that showed goals floating by as people entered new items. It was calming to watch so much hope move across the screen.
Tags: lantern, Lunar New Year, Taiwan Data Stories
His credits range from Men Behaving Badly to Wuthering Heights, and now he’s playing Huw Edwards. What would you dearly love to know about the actor and documentary presenter?
It’s delightful that Martin Clunes has won so many plaudits for his performance in this year’s Wuthering Heights, alongside Margot Robbie’s Cathy and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff. He plays Cathy’s drunk but generous, cruel yet humorous father in a part that could easily have drifted into the background. But he makes such an impression that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw reckons he “pretty much pinches the whole film”.
It’s not as if Clunes hasn’t brushed shoulders with the Hollywood A-list before. You might remember him as Richard Burbage, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes and Judi Dench, in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love – a role with added resonance given that his father, Alec Clunes, who died when Clunes was eight, was a distinguished Shakespearean actor. Other roles include 1992’s Carry On Columbus (the last ever Carry On); 1994’s Staggered (which he also directed), in which he wakes up naked on a remote Scottish island after a stag do gone wrong; and 1999’s Hunting Venus, where he reunites with his former on-screen flatmate Neil Morrissey, as a washed-up 80s New Romantic, sporting a flopped quiff that puts even A Flock of Seagulls to shame.
Continue reading...Have just been reading a very odd book - sortes ereader, something it appears I bought when you could still convert Kindle books to Kobo epub, cannot recall if it was something someone had recommended or what.
LH Johnson, Tell Me of a Girl (2018) - independently published, a retelling of The Secret Garden.
I am not sure why. Because usually if people are doing a retelling they are remixing or shaking up in some way? Okay, this did do some kind of vaguely different backstory of Mary's relationship with her mother, but otherwise it followed the story pretty exactly though leaving stuff out, and much of what was actually in the original seemed terribly washed out.
Characters who are vivid presences in the original seemed muted (Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, Dickon, the robin) - and devoid of Yorkshire speech to boot.
One might have expected that maybe a retelling might do what that recent reworking of Katy did and be a bit more disability positive, but no.
Mary Lennox is already a stroppy young person who doesn't exactly need to grab more agency, hmmm?
It's also done in a rather annoying typographical style.
At the end the author indicates that it's not only in dialogue with Burnett's original but with a whole swathe of scholarship on Golden Age children's lit. Maybe it came out of the project for a course???
I could see it sort of working as the basis of a rather moody atmospheric movie version?
Has anyone else come across this? I'm really not sure what to make of it.


A reader writes:
My workload is mostly comprised of overflow tasks from other departments. I generally like this because it gives me a variety of things to do. I regularly deal with four managers. Three of them are good to work with. One, Alex, is … not.
While the others always do a capacity check-in with me (asking if I have the bandwidth to take new work on), Alex regularly assigns me things without asking at all. It is not unusual that I will go on lunch and come back to a bunch of new tasks waiting for me with no discussion prior to assignment.
The things Alex assigns me have exceptionally short deadlines, are often missing key pieces of information, and are often assigned to me and then she suddenly becomes unreachable. For example, she assigned a task midday and then didn’t respond to my questions to fill in any of the blanks for hours. It feels like she assigns me things and then runs away from the computer for the rest of the day.
She also will regularly start a task, decide she doesn’t have the bandwidth to complete it, and then toss the half completed task at me with a “complete this for me, will you?” and little else. This means I have to stop everything else I am doing to try and figure out where she left off/how important it is because there is no documentation. Most of the time, I just end up redoing her work because the pieces they “completed” were rushed and done incorrectly.
Then, when I kill myself to meet her incredibly short deadlines, I have to chase her for approval. Recently I was assigned something she wanted in two days, which I did, and when I asked her to approve it, she said she wouldn’t have any time to review it for five days. To me, if the project can just sit there for five days with nobody looking at it, then it wasn’t the rush I was led to believe.
I like Alex as a person and I know she has a busy life outside of work, so I try to give her grace and understanding. When this started happening, I explained politely why these issues make my job harder and we talked about how to keep it from happening in the future. At the time, she seemed understanding and apologetic and I felt good about where we left things. But it feels like the conversation went in one ear and out the other, because again I just got three new things assigned to me without a heads-up, missing information and with incredibly short deadlines.
I understand things happen and sometimes things happen last minute or information gets delayed, but this feels constant and I am trying to manage workflows from four people.
I previously flagged this situation with my direct manager, but at the time said I was just mentioning the issue for transparency and that she didn’t need to take action because I was dealing with it myself. However, since it keeps happening, I am not sure what to do or how to articulate my issues in a productive way.
I don’t want to be a tattletale and rat anybody out and I also don’t want to seem like I am just bitching to my boss about people having a different work ethic than me. I will fully admit, I am pretty type A and super organized, which is part of the reason I have the job I have. But this legitimately sucks and my hair is falling out from stress! What should I do?
You can read my answer to this letter at New York Magazine today. Head over there to read it.
The post my coworker gives me rush projects, then disappears appeared first on Ask a Manager.
‘I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.’ [p. 27]
Baghdad, 2005: after the American invasion and occupation, just as the sectarian civil war is kicking off. Antique (junk) dealer Hadi, trying to retrieve a friend's remains after a car bomb, finds that body parts at the mortuary are all jumbled together, with little effort to reconstruct each corpse. He begins to assemble a body, picking and choosing from the scraps of anatomy that are in plentiful supply on the streets of Baghdad. ( Read more... )