sigh.
May 12, 2007
The Rain IS back!
July 24, 2006
Graffiti in Bristol
July 23, 2006
New photos and nemo’s patent Sunday update
Well I haven’t written anything in a while mostly because there has been little to write so I will force myself now, lest I fall into bad ways! If you look down the right side of the page you might notice that I am listening to Amon Tobin right now, as I installed a nice little plugin that allows me to access audioscrobbler through wordpress. I wish I could understand php well enough to write things like that! Alas I know many an art, but am master of none; Thus it seems is my nature. It would be interesting to be able to stick to something for more than 5 minutes, I imagine the results might be amazing. However the gumption to do so is something that I don’t seem to have.
On the other hand, I have been doggedly tweaking, teasing and prying open this site for years now. It would be nice to make it into something others enjoyed coming to, but for that I need interesting content. I am unfortunately not interesting content. However, perhaps some new photographs are!? I particularly enjoyed photographing the Graffiti around Bristol but it almost feels like a form of plagiarism as I’m in essence copying someone’s work onto another medium, for my benefit. However on the other hand Graffiti photography is an art in itself, and I can’t imagine few places better in the UK than Bristol to practice it.
In other news my computer nearly went tits up again today. It seems to lurch from one crisis to another - hah, sounds familiar. I’m surprised the hard drives have lasted as long as they have done. I’ve been running 4 hard drives constantly for at least 2-3 years. It’s about time I backed them up and moved over to new ones, but there’s the rub. I can’t afford new ones. I can’t afford any of the stuff I would like to get for my ‘puter. Not that I need it but nonetheless I want! ME! in a non-organized list here we go:
- Acer 19" TFT Monitor
- New MOBO with support for PCI-Express GFX card
- 4 Gigs Ram - Crucial
- Latest Nvidia GFX Card. Jeez I gave up trying to keep up with the new models long time ago. I basically want a dual-head card which will play Farcry 2 at top settings, handle HD video and not blink. Screw Dual-SLI setups, I’m not a gamer any more.
- 2-4 x 300gig hard drives. I’m not desperate for space at the moment, but given the chance I would welcome more. Even if I just had one 300gig drive for mirroring my work partition.
- NAS. Network attached storage is the business. I would love to have NAS with some of those aforementioned HDD on it.
- A Nice, nice keyboard. I think this is more attainable but still when I say nice I mean $$$ expensive. However with keyboards you get what you pays for, and the action on my current keyboard sucks serious ass.
- Decent sound card. The next chance I get to buy a sound card it ain’t gonna be anything from Creative, that’s for fucking sure. I’ve put up with enough crackling and latency to last me a lifetime.
- It’s kinda tempting to put Dual layer DVD writer, but I write CDs/DVDs once in a blue moon and I hate them to boot, as they loose their cases and get everywhere. Screw media, anything I want will be on my HDD from now on.
Well I guess that little lot is around 800-1500 quid. So I guess I better get me a new job or I will just have to dream about it all. Oh ps santa:
- Macbook Pro PLZZZZZ
Well I guess this has been geekery porn corner. Stop looking at my Diodes like that Tony!
What else is new? Well I’ve been teaching myself how to do web 2.0 design, and hell if it isn’t the but ugliest stuff around. I can’t wait for people to realize what a pile of BS it is, and start being creative again. If I see another fuckin’ shiny aero/aqua button I will seriously start shooting people.
Wow, I must be really trawling the depths. I just wrote about three sentences complaining about modern media before realizing I was saying exactly the same as 3 posts ago. I guess I have so little interesting to report that I am just repeating myself. I wonder then why I keep writing, like a fart floating around a room with a close door I just keep on arcing past the coffee table, laid out neat with bone china and silver spoons, measured out in hours and minutes.
Oh, just in case you didn’t realize, Bruce Willis in ‘The Sixth Sense’ is FUCKING DEAD THE WHOLE TIME! Good film, but I bet you don’t want to watch it now. good. Soon we will be graced with a new M Night Shemenemenylahalyah film, ‘Lady in the water’. Now I am a fan of Shyam’s work and it seems as if this particular film introduces none other than The Big Bad Wolf, so being a bit of a fairytale enthusiast I am very excited. He seems to be the marmite of Directors these days, you either love or hate his films. I saw ‘The Village’ about 6 months ago and thought it both wonderful and entertaining. His quality of direction is quite unique. I just wish he would keep on one fucking side of the camera, you are not one of the greats dude. When you earn the right to do cameo’s in your own movies, you will receive a little note in an envelope, crimped with gold edging. It will say inside in beautiful fountain-penned ink "It’s on" and then you will know, ‘I am worthy to appear in cameos in my own films!’ Then and only then may you make annoying little one time appearances that distract from the meat of the plot.
On other filmic news, I happened to get hold of ‘Brick‘ today. A wonderful film Noir which I believe was first shown at the Sundance film festival. It tells the story of a young loner trying to solve the mystery of the death of his ex-girlfriend. All the characters are highschool age, but the dialogue reads like something from a black and white 40’s film Noir. At first the young characters dialogue seems decidedly stilted, but this is till you realize the intent. As you get into the film you begin to feel the rhythm and tempo, which is as unusual and unique as Soderbergh’s ‘Bubble‘. However you can get hold of it (I would suggest bittorrent, as there is an excellent version available on places like newtorrents.info) I would recommend checking this film out.
Well I really, really can’t think of much more to say. Perhaps time to finger me, pull out of. I will report back when nemo has been successfully entered into the English language as a verb. Remember Vote NO on 23!
July 2, 2006
Bristol is…
… hot.
… sweltering.
… sticky.
….. It’s baking in Bristol if you haven’t guessed yet! Well I at the very least am already par boiled and on the way to being a Sunday lunch. You could serve me up with roasties and gravy and I would go down very well, if you are still eating long pig like me; Of course there are alternatives if you’ve sworn off the red meat.
As I’ve surely mentioned recently I’ve moved to a new part of Bristol called Bedminster. Although I don’t remember being too young at the time, I used to live here when I was a child. I don’t know if it’s got better or worse since then but it’s definitely the hairy bum of Bristol. It’s filled with freak or uniques, lots of old dirty paedophile men like some grotesque from Monkey dust and lots of spitting, screaming youths. I make it sound terrible, and truly it isn’t all that terrible.
However I was thinking about what made Bedminster different from other parts of Bristol that are run down and it came to me quickly, this is a predominantly white lower class area, and there is very little diversity compared to the rest of Bristol. Walking past pubs going to the main drag in Beddie I happened to see the kind of people hanging outside pubs on Sunday afternoon, all pot bellied angry looking middle aged men.
I’m well known as a particularly uncharitable person so take everything I say with a pinch of salt, but the atmosphere in Bedminster suffers from it being a ghetto-ized white area. I might be romanticising St. Paul’s and Easton but they just feel much nicer than Bedminster. I lived in St. Paul’s in my first year in Bristol so I am at least able to make a reasonable comparison.
Of course there is also the fact that Bedminster is ‘over the river’ so to speak. Historically as Bristol is a port city, Bedminster must have always attracted the greatest poverty and atmosphere associated with it due to its location. It’s at the bottom of the pile, everything else literally above it as you head north towards the richest part of Bristol, Clifton. Strangely Clifton is the highest part of Bristol, what are the chances of that?
I guess this started off as a complaint about Bedminster, but has turned into a rant about geography and poverty. It frustrates me that things should be so unequal in two different parts of the same City.
Having said that, I have lived in Beddie for three days so maybe I should give it more of a chance!
in other news
I have added a "video" category to nemof.org, as I seem to find myself posting so many (ridiculous) videos. I’m thinking I might also remove them from the main page, there must be a way to stop certain categories showing up on the main blog page.
I am also currently beginning a new beta of nemof.org, it’s private at the moment but in the future will go live for testing. It will become part of my design portfolio, so I can wave shiny pretty things at prospective employers.
I just came across wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti while reading about street art, and as ever I’m extremely impressed by the amount of organization and dedication that goes into wikipedia. With simple common sense someone decided that if a given area in the wikipedia was a bit lacking in detail lets say, they should start a wikiproject for it, in this case Wikiproject Grafitti. This goes for many areas of Wikipedia, there are projects going on documenting art, culture and about everything under the sun you can think of. There’s even a wikipedia cookbook!
However, the friggin’ markup is still a nightmare and there is still no sign of a decent WYSIWYG wiki editor. I would dearly love to be able to edit an installation of mediawiki without having to deal with that nightmarish markup, I have enough trouble at the moment keeping up with CSS/JS/XML etc.
Well I did mention that I was adding a video section, so I guess I should include a video in this post. I can’t think of anything more appropriate to me at the moment than the Spiderman 3 teaser that recently came out. It actually inspired me to download (shock!) and watch Spiderman II again, a masterpiece of direction from Sam Raimi! without further ado:
March 20, 2006
My old steiner school
These are trees in Bristol next to my old Steiner school. Every year the blossom blooms until the floor looks like rumpled pink silk.