Thursday, March 8

 

 

I woke up twice in the night having the same dream, or experiencing what felt like different parts of the same dream. It seemed like a narrative somewhere between The Walking Dead and Twin Peaks, and it varied between something I took part in and something that I watched. I think it may have arisen from a lengthy conversation I had about Westworld at dinner on Tuesday evening. I woke up holding a plate with a two-word Latin inscription. I remember thinking that I must write it down and look it up in the morning but, of course, I didn’t do the first until later and so I have no way of verifying what I remembered of the inscription in the morning.

I saw it inscribed on the plate and I remembered it as matrum lacrimas, not an expression I recall hearing before, and not one I felt certain counted as genuine Latin. As soon as I got to work I looked it up and, somewhat to my surprise, I found that it did form a grammatical Latin phrase, and that phrase meant “the tears of mothers”.

Hmm, I thought, as fragments of the dream, too small to hold onto, flashed through my mind.

After that I booked a guest house in Dublin for three nights, collected a copy of my new work contract, and printed out some tickets for this evening.

I had woken up a third time in the night and at that point I had thoughts about my courses at Arcada running through my mind. I woke up realising that I do not need to write scripts for the online lectures that I need to record and, in fact, I do not need to record the online lectures at all. I have Powerpoint presentation and I could more usefully spend the time perfecting these. I could then simply narrate a soundtrack over them directly into Powerpoint, and export the result as an mp4. I could then record five improvised introductory lectures, once for each block of the course, so that I appeared visually at the start of each block. I checked this with Mirko to see what he thought and he agreed. He thought it would prove more effective pedagogically too.

I spent the rest of the morning going through the eight existing Powerpoint decks and making notes for two more. I gathered together some reading material for the remaining slideshows and loaded it onto my iPad, for reading on the plane.

Oliver’s week has proved as overloaded as mine so we agreed mutually that we would meet over Skype this afternoon, rather than having lunch in Hakaniemi and then spending the afternoon at Kuusi Palaa. At 13:30 I called him and we talked for forty five minutes. We rescheduled the April meeting for Friday May 4; agreed a format we will refer to as R&D&D, and finalised the content. We talked about mobile data-boxes and their potential importance. We agreed a publicity schedule, and I wished Oliver an eventful and fun sojurn in Cuba.

In the afternoon Mats and I had a discussion about the significance of blockchain technology for Pokemon and vice versa, and I wrote up some notes. I then returned to looking at the content I need to deliver for the online Interactive Storytelling course that will begin on April 24th.

Before leaving I backed everything up and packed up my laptop. I will need it at home when we get back.

I got home at 17:00 after an adventure on the tram in which a young woman refused to move to let me get off because “its International Womens Day and you can’t order me around”.

We got ready and left for the airport.

We got through the security without even slowing down and now we walk up the slope to the intercontinental departures. We spot the all-blingy kiosk ahead shining and reflecting in the emptiness. We both stop to photograph it.

Five minutes later we will sit in “our usual seats” in the lounge phoning Naa and Irma’s mother. We will have almost two hours till take-off.