Some crayons to color your day
A whole lot of awful things have been happening so far as the beginning of 2020. The news continually showers us with on-going events. It doesn’t matter if there’s any change in their turn — you keep hearing about them even if the trends keep on going the same way.
Journalists tend to pick frightening word combinations to phrase themselves in front of the camera. “In this horrible Saturday”, “In that tragic Sunday”, etc. An ugly, in my opinion, way to express empathy and trigger your fear at the same time.
Based on some of my activities yesterday, I am going to offer you a different start of your day today!
Do you like history?
I never really enjoyed history classes at school mainly because I had to load my mind with so many event dates and twisted foreign and long-gone persons’ names that you first hear of as a student on top of it.
Yesterday I read History in An Hour’s World War One, by Rupert Colley. The author is very narrative and right to the point! The key conclusions I made to myself:
- An outstanding book author depicts the best reflection and take-aways of an awful and frightening period in history, such as The Great War.
- Poor journalism represents the worst parts of the on-going events so that you feel scared and/or angry, both of the cases which fog your clear reasoning.
Do you like data?
Have you heard of DataCamp? They have some awesome, fun projects for data-geeks!
I particularly enjoyed one of their free ones called “Visualizing COVID-19”, featuring the following tasks breakdown:
- From epidemic to pandemic
- Confirmed cases throughout the world
- China compared to the rest of the world
- Let’s annotate!
- Adding a trend line to China
- And the rest of the world?
- Adding a logarithmic scale
- Which countries outside of China have been hit hardest?
- Plotting hardest-hit countries as of Mid-March 2020
Again, the pandemic is something that we keep listening about, and probably will for a long time. But it’s your choice whether you want to listen to media digests or do your own research put into a fun project. I’ll give you a hint — the second choice will help you make the best out of a bad situation we’re all in by gaining some perspective insights.
Do you like music? (Duh, who doesn’t?)
How old are you? Do you remember music sampling? Or perhaps it was never a tangent to your way of living. It doesn’t matter, my brother and I used to be fascinated about it when we were kids. Yesterday the beautiful tune sampling made it’s way back into my life.
The software we used back then is pretty much unusable now, but I will show you a pretty discovery I made. Behold, the MilkyTracker:
https://milkytracker.titandemo.org/
At first, the interface may look scarier to you than the news broadcast. But actually, it turned out to be very friendly after watching a few YouTube videos about it. Especially if you have musical education or background.
These marvelous pieces of software are free and make simple tune composition accessible even to people who understand less about music, like me. If you feel like it — get some of the tunes expressing you out of your head to the open!
How could anyone’s day be so cool and refreshing, as to experience many things that don’t have anything in common?
You don’t prepare a delicious meal with just one ingredient. And you certainly don’t have to stew in the lousy turn of events around the world.
The best solutions to problems come within a clear and reasoned mind. So the start of every solution is to secure such a state.
Build something today! Embrace the world in all its beauty!