Triadic Autodidactic Polymorphism

Recently I have been pondering the nature of my existential creativity during the English lock-down. I am coming into my 19th week of voluntary self-isolation and as my external world shrinks, my in-house creative activity appears to be expanding in an exponential fashion. I have come up with a home-made syndrome that seems to cover my plight: Triadic Autodidactic Polymorphism (TAP, for short). I have attempted to provide a diagrammatic definition of this state of affairs. I started to do this with a pencil on the back of an envelope, as one does, but soon gravitated to a sheet of an A3  layout pad that I had lying around. I thought I would share the final outcome with y’all…

Triadic Creativity

If feels good to have got this out of my system but was it really just a displacement activity instead of getting on with the novel, the new songs, the artwork, bla, bla, bla! Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles!

Autocue for Vlogging

My friend Tony watched the first Vlog I made in the persona of Percival Bright. He gave me the feedback that his wife, Alison, has been making a conscious attempt to look directly into the webcam when speaking, as opposed to constantly glancing down at her notes. I can see, on reviewing my relatively newbie status as a vlogger that I have much to learn in that regard.

I therefore searched around online and discovered that this is a widespread problem for many vloggers. Professional autocue systems are expensive. As might be expected, many people have found inexpensive work-arounds. I tried using one which involved writing notes on a laptop, converting the text to white and the background page to black and then scrolling with the laptop’s mouse. It worked fine, except for the fact that I got an image reflection exactly where my eyes were on my spectacles. 

I have moved on to construct what might be regarded as a Heath Robinson frame from which to hang a sheet of pen on paper notes behind the webcam. It took some while messing about with rubber bands and scraps of wood I had laying about my little workshop. In the end I have built something which acts as an extension rising perpendicular to my desktop. I think it epitomises the meaning of the term ‘unstable equilibrium‘.