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Outschool class 2

This morning I taught my second class on Outschool. It was another session of the class on Human Vision. Again I had only one student, but I don’t mind that as it’s good to get comfortable with small numbers of students before having to handle multiple all at the same time. This time it was a boy, and he seemed to to enjoy the class.

I spent much of the rest of the day assembling the batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed yesterday. I’ve also been helping my friend with his Bisecting History Twitter project, by finding interesting events for different dates. We’re putting in quite a bit of research for this thing. And I’m incidentally learning the relative timing sequence of various events that you don’t normally think of as related to one another, such as certain books being published in the same year as certain wars or scientific discoveries, and so on.

Not much more to report. I’m pretty much racing to get everything done that I need to before heading out on a road trip holiday with my wife next week.

New content today:

Refilling the buffer

Today I dedicated to making new Darths & Droids comic. The buffer of completed strips got pretty empty over the past week as I spent a lot of time working on my Outschool class material for yesterday’s class. But now that’s done, I can get back into the comic production pipeline.

In other news, a friend and one of the the co-authors of Darths & Droids has launched a new Twitter account, called Bisecting History. The concept is to find pairs of historical events such that one is exactly twice as old as the other, to the day. For example, the launch fact, posted yesterday on 1 March:

Today, The Office (US) is as old as the Dilbert comic strip was on the day that The Office first aired. Down to the day, each span exactly 5821 days.

Here at BisectingHistory, we find all the crazy coincidences that arise from folding history back upon itself.

And today’s tweet for 2 March:

Today, one of the most influential video games of all time, Doom, is as old as colour TV was when Doom was first released. A span of 9944 days ago, and 9944 days before that – each just over 27 years. Who else feels old armed with this knowledge?

He has some really interesting ones lined up for the next month, so take a look!

New content today:

Long weekend Sunday

It’s a long weekend here in Sydney! So tomorrow is a holiday Monday, but that means Sunday also feels special somehow, because you don’t have to get up early on Monday.

My wife and I did our usual morning long walk with Scully. We took a different route home, through some bushland, which we’ve been avoiding for the past few weeks because of COVID, and the large number of walkers out taking that route along narrow walking tracks. But today it felt like the right time to be ale to do it again, and it was nice.

I did more rewriting of photo walks to convert into web pages, completing walks 11. North Sydney and St Leonards Park and 12. Greenwich Baths. While researching historical details for the first one of those, I found out something amazing about St Mary’s Catholic Church in North Sydney. It looks like this:

Now, it looks like it’s built of sandstone, and I’d always assumed that was the case. But not quite!

There’s been a church on this site since 1855, when services were first held in a tent. The first church building was built in 1856 of wooden boards, supported by tree trunks, with an earthen floor. In 1868 a church was built of sandstone, which was then enlarged in 1896.

In 1938 they rebuilt the church, demolishing the old sandstone one, to create a larger church building. But they reused all of the sandstone blocks, the roofing slates, the marble interior decorations, and the stained glass. To make the new church bigger they built it of brick, and then they cut each sandstone block of the original stone church in half, and used the thinner stones as a veneer over the brick structure, to make it look as though it’s solid sandstone!

It’s amazing the stuff you can learn by researching local history.

New content today:

Some comic sketching

This morning I had to make an expedition to the hardware store to buy a replacement fluorescent tube for the kitchen light. It dies a couple of days ago, and last night I had to cook dinner in the dark. Well, not complete darkness, but darker than I would have liked.

On the way back, I popped into my local art supply shop to get some new felt tip markers and drawing paper, because I planned to spend today doing some drawing. This is for a secret project which should be completed tomorrow, and which I’ll announce in the next few days. And drawing was pretty much what I did for the rest of the day.

I also walked past this interesting historical plaque embedded in the footpath near the Royal North Shore Hospital.

I’ve waked past this dozens of times, but only stopped to read it today. The area where this is located is still an industrial zone, but no more brickworks.

New content today: