Sunday, 2nd April, 2006

How To Convince Someone You're Not A Stalker

random stalker

Deny emphatically in IM to them that you are a stalker. Emphasise profusely how much of a non-stalker you are. Whenever the word "stalker" appears in general conversation, punctuate it with the words "I am so not!". Then apologise for even bringing up the subject.

That'll work

(Do not read too much into this BTW. It's just one of my self-mocking posts. If you feel you might be the subject of this post, then don't take this as an admission of my over-affection — it's either (a) not about you, or (b) just a crush)

Damm You Photons

hangover

For most of the winter months, I lament the lack of light. Getting up in the morning to go to work in the pitch black darkness is Not A Fun Thing™, nor is coming home in exactly the same thing.

Around this time of year though, it all starts brightening up — mornings are light and sunny, evenings stretch out a lot longer, and the vague hint the summer's on it's way starts to tickle your brain in exactly the spot that's reserved for testosterone-based-culinary functions.

(barbeques)

So why am I grumpy this morning?

Because I wanted a sodding lie in, that's why

But no. The light streams in through my windows at 7am, the cats jump up and down excitedly on their mother's back thinking that the little grunty noises she's making are indicative of the imminent arrival of food, and the mouse that was brought into the fold at 4am and who has been leaving little pellets of shit all over my living room floor scuttles off to some unreachable crevice to die and rot and fill the house with the putrid stench of death.

...

I thought I was losing it last night "It" being my ability to knock back a bottle of red without a second thought.

Two glasses away from the bottle of a yummy Navarra I realised that I'd lost the ability to (a) think, and (b) type.

And then I remembered almost single-handedly poloshing off a bottle of Cava earlier in the evening, and my faith in myself was restored.

(Ir) Relevance

tranniefesto self

There's a gnawing concern that's gradually been manefesting itself more and more in my head as the days go on.

A long time ago, when I just starting all of this, I had a bucket of things I wanted to say — hundreds and hundreds of rants, and raves, and snippets of interestingness. Things that I wanted to shout from the rooftops, issues and ideas that I wanted to confirm, readdress, abolish.

I've mentioned before that one of the disadvantages of having a freeform weblog like this is that the moment a day closes and something else appears on the front, everything gets lost in an amorphous soup of the past, visible only to Googlebot, random stumblers, and die-hard archivists.

(And not, it would appear, Technofuckingratibot, who for some reason insists that I last wrote something 146 days ago depiste me pinging him every five minutes)

I could, I suppose, compile some kind of 'best of' list (like I did in the past) ((1) I hate linking to that page. (2) OMG I am totally about to prove my own point here in a second havng just read the opening paragraph of that)...

...but that takes time and organisation — two things that I never quite seem to have.

What I do seem to have, is an inbuilt ability to go over the same ground on a regular basis:

"OMG I'm drunk ... I love Macs ... 'passing' is pointless ... I'm drunk again ... people should take trannies seriously ... my cats are teh cute ... Mmmm, codey ... I am crap at [insert random thing] ... trannies should try and contextualise themselves a bit more ... repeat to fade"

Ack, I dunno. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here — or, more specifically, I do know, but I'm not sure how to say it.

...

I've been detecting a fair bit of 'soul-searching' going on in various places recently: Ms Everson was wondering about stuff yesterday; I vaguely got talking about a similar subject with Tom last night; Jon Oxton, whilst not actually touching on the same actual thing, put me in a contemplative head-state earlier; and I had an unconclusive Cava-fuelled ramble along similar lines with a friend yesterday evening.

The conclusion? "Directionless"

(Hmm. Put the keyboard down Siobhan. Stop trying to think out loud for a change. Go have yourself a few cups of coffee and tidy up the mouse-shit while you try and remember what it was that you were going to say when you fired up BBEdit half-an-hour ago)

Aliased

code bash

A minor diversion: Yesterday, fuelled by a newly-restored faith in my abilities to actually do stuff at the command line, and primed with a bit more understanding than usual (thanks to Learning the bash Shell), I wrote a couple of aliases — the best one being:

blog="clear; cat >> /path/to/secret_folder/$(date '+%Y/%m/%d')"

It's all about making things easy for yourself

Floe 87

work

This was the last film I made where the stripes were just a background, rather than the main focus of my work. At the time, I was still in a 'must make commercial work' kinda head-space, convinced that the Key To Success™ was through making short films to accompany music.

A year or two earlier, I'd made a film using a U2 track, even going so far as to get a limited license from the record company, and I thought that I could do the same again.

See, what used to drive me in making films, was the pre-ordained structure of audio. Making shorts was so much easier when I had a framework to fit things to. I'd done quite a few things with Will and Rog, and I thought I could venture out into the real world and try my luck.

I've always had an bit of a love of Philip Glass's work, ever since I first watched Koyaanisqatsi, and I was poking around online one day and discovered a few snippets of audio available for download at http://www.dunvagen.com/?cmd=dunvagen. One of them — Floe 87 — jumped out at me as something so wonderfully uplifting, that I fired up AfterEffects and got to work.

There's something about this piece, something celebratory. The more I listened to it, the more upbeat I felt about the human race in general. I wanted to make something that reflected this — something that celebrated us. So I started messing around with things that look a bit like DNA

I usually shy away from detailing how I make things, but part of the joy I get out of this film is knowing just how much work went into making things move and interract with each other. In this bit...

...there are two Particle Playground things happening — one (a cannon) to make the little lozenges move across the screen, and one (a grid) sitting over the top and responding to the luminosity of the layer underneath.

Neat huh?

As it progresses, things get more and more frantic. More layers unfold, more blobs take shape, more stripes take up the background.

At one point, a whole wave of amorphous blobby shapes flood the screen:

In a way, it's a little bit clichéd — all that's happening is I'm layering more and more things in response to the musical pace. It kinda all comes to a climax at the end when there's just so much going on, it becomes almost impossible to keep up.

And then it stops — just four letters hanging in space.

...

"Hey Siobhan, how come you haven't posted the film itself?"

Ah. See, I never did get around to asking permission to use the work I've dithered over this for about four years now — never actually quite plucking up the courage to get in touch with Philip Glass's publishers.

I noticed earlier, that on the page where you can download the mp3 files, it says:

For information about how you can use the music of these tracks, contact Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc. directly or the publisher representing them in your territory.

In other words, I really don't have an excuse — other than not really knowing how to phrase what I need to ask them.

If anyone's got any experience of stuff like this, I could really do with some help.

Ah, cheers for that hon I'll have a dig around...

TV ARK The Television Museum

link

Dripping in nostalgia.

Well, yes. Um. Hmm.

I was about to say "treat it like a conversation and go with the 'remember yesterday when you said...?'", but I'm not sure.

See, in as much as there's some kinda of "this is how blogs work" set of rules, I guess the thing to do would be to tack onto the previous stuff, and — if it was a really important thing — write about it in your own blog. The great thing about blogs is the conversations that happen between them (she says, once again referencing the little blog-spat that me and Becky had once — ah, great times...)

But then again, I'll be the first to admit that my thing doesn't play nice with other blogs, and doesn't always fit into that kind of model — it's too me-centric a conversation. Perhaps.

It all depends, I guess, on how this gets read. I read all the comments (Erin emails them to me, and I pipe them all — including the spam — into one big text file just for debugging), but I'm never quite sure if people go back and read pages (to see what's happened since they were last there ¹), or just the front one.

I should conduct a poll sometime. Maybe.

...

¹ You know, having finally sorted out the "remember me" thing, I could perhaps do some kind of "Recent Activity, comments you've made" thing. Potentially.

You read what you like into it Tiffany We're all postmodern now. Personally, I was just trying to make pretty shapes

Yes, we must.

Just a thought that occurred to me — if I take this notion I have of a 'conversation', or a 'life stream' to it's logical conclusion, I should only have the comment form at the bottom of the "today" page.

Hmm

Oh yeah, and the other thing I've been giving serious consideration to recently, is Guest Posts. Not sure — is anyone interested?

only certain people can do it

See, I was thinking people I ask to

!edit

random tranniefesto

You know what my problem is? I just don't know when to shut up.

A friend of mine was talking to me about my weblog yesterday, and voiced an opinion that rather shocked me:

"You write too much"

Sometimes I think I write too little, but whatever. Maybe he has a point.

The thing is though, I seriously believe I just don't have the ability to know when not to say something. A few moments ago, I was about to launch into a light-hearted "OMG WTF"-based post about something I just saw on telly ... and then my RSS feeds kicked in.

Granted, it was an old feed (For some reason, old posts keep showing up as new for me on several weblogs), but it jumed out of my screen and sad "Siobhan, that thing you were just about to write about, you know, maybe it's not such a good idea".

And d'ya know, I think it was right.

Did I write too much about it?

No! I'm drunk! And I just opened a second bottle! And I just watched an emotional Ray Mears Extreme Survival! And I'm thinking that my life is so fucking easy and chilled and unappreciative of people who are much older than me!

And I'm going to watch Derren Brown as an antidote!

Mr Mouse Fails to Appreciate The Monumental Nature of The Cake He Is Being Offered

photo mouse cake

Oi. I know it looks like it's just a cake. But that was the 33rd most interesting cake in the WORLD two days ago. I'll have you know. Eat it, or I'll set Tish on you.