Our elementary school playground had a turtle-shaped climbing gym with a metal turtle head. The head had a hollow space inside, and you could fill it with mulch — as many uninspired children did — or fascinating rocks you found at the “rock factory,” which is what we called the hill next to the soccer field because we dug up rocks.

Sometimes, we placed notes inside and then informed someone on the playground that there was a note for them in the turtle head; an inefficient and frankly dangerous way of passing notes since it required the person to leave their game of kickball immediately to fetch it, lest it end up in the wrong hands.

This article made me weepy about a home for retired playground animals. Our turtle climbing gym is long gone; our elementary school became a community center many years ago. Moreover, I think a copy of that dolphin statue once upon a time was down here in Maryland outside the Loehmann’s in Loehmann’s Plaza on Rockville Pike, but the Internet fails me as I try to find photographic proof.

I love the idea of a playground animal cemetary you can visit.

Sometimes when we’re playing the New York Times Connections game, I’ll turn to Josh and say, “These categories are bullshit.” Like the one a few Saturdays ago where all of the choices were people’s names.

But then I found a Connections generator, and I realized how difficult it is to come up with categories and find four things that fit. Plus, come up with additional categories where things from the first category could potentially fit, and so on. I ended up giving up trying to make one.

It gave me a deep respect for Wyna Liu, who makes the NYT’s puzzles. Try it yourself.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I was fascinated by this experiment, putting two photos side-by-side: the actual photo and the AI-described photo. The person writes, “just to be super clear, at no point did I upload or share my original photographs with the AI software for this. I just attempted to describe the original shot with words alone.”

So they said what was in the photo, and this Adobe AI tool could generate a photo that looked similar (or sometimes more real) than the original photo. Super creepy. It seems to do better with inanimate objects than humans.

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I read about this idea earlier in the summer and saw the bookmark again. Instead of writing stories, the person challenged themselves to come up with five story ideas per day with an idea streak.

This appealed to me because coming up with an idea is easier than executing an idea, but you may have more energy to take the next step if you have a lot of good ideas.

For story ideas, you write down the plot you would like to read. What kind of story would really excite you if you were in the library, trying to choose a book? But this could also work for work ideas, packed lunches, or ways of letting someone know you care about them. You sit down and jot down five things every day, and at the end of the month, you have 150 – 155 ideas (except in February). Brilliant.

I have not been feeling great about my grey hair for a long time. I’m still not at the point where I would dye it, but I think about it as I look at myself on Zoom. Yes, I know I can adjust my settings so I don’t see myself, but I’d rather know what other people are seeing, such as something bizarre in my background.

Anyway.

This article was making the rounds about how we went from having no clue what we looked like before mirrors to seeing ourselves a few times per day to seeing ourselves all. the. time. And that action runs alongside the media/societal messages about beauty that we’ve always received all. the. time.

It’s unfortunate that I went completely grey at the same time when I had a massive uptick in Zoom meetings, though I assume I would have fixated on a different feature if it had happened at another point in time.