Time for the annual ‘student poster day’ where my charges are tasked with demonstrating what they might have learned over the last few weeks. Some even manage to do this: but I suppose they all try. This is happening nearly a week later than last year, and, definitively, marked my last professional engagement of 2025. As far as the University of Manchester are concerned I now do not exist until 5th January. Let there be celebrations, etc.
Stop one on a journey to the far north — Dundee. Seen a lot in recent years but with an apartment to use as a stopover, a sensible place to break the journey. I asked Clare about the possible identity of this face and she reckons maybe drag artist The Vivienne; it’s possible. I just liked the image.
It’s nice when my students can still impress me, and, currently, Keela’s dissertation project is certainly doing that — although I can’t tell you what it is, not for any sinister reasons but just because it’s not finished yet and not my business to tell you. But, yes, it involves virtual reality, she doesn’t wear a rig on a regular basis. I do not believe my office noticeboard has featured before so there you go, a chance to check out the randomly accumulated display of items upon it for the first, and who knows, perhaps the last time.
I don’t think the woodlouse is getting the best of this encounter. I’m no psychic but whatever thoughts might be going through its little brain at the moment, probably they could be summed up by the word on the poster behind.
The last taught class of the first semester, and of 2021. The students show off the ideas they’ve been working on in groups over the last few weeks — including, here, 3-D printing being used to create replicas of famous artworks that people can then touch and interact with, which seems a reasonable idea to me. It was an engaging, interesting class, and one that if I had listened to my paranoid employer, I should have hoiked online at 12 hours’ notice. But I didn’t listen, and the life of everyone involved was all the better for it.
A whole morning spent sitting in my office, talking to my Mac (with a vague assumption that there might be some people listening out there in Zoombie-land). This is what we call ‘teaching’, these days. Overseen by Mr. Jack Nicholson, whose image (or perhaps, more precisely, R. P. McMurphy’s) makes its third appearance on the blog (see also here and here) — as many as my mother, by now. Well, it is a very good movie. And book.
Being 42 