My Life in Bulletpoint January 2014

Once again I have let this blog lapse – but in all honesty I think at this point it’s not so much an unfortunate habit but rather a stylistic element to the whole shebang. However I want to frame it… whatever you’ll get what you’re given and like it! (I read somewhere that abusing readers is the best way to get them to like you… or was it the other way around?)

Anyway! Time for a MY LIFE IN BULLETPOINT!

• Work did NOT send me to Australia in the end – massive sad! Serious disappointment there, but on the flip side it did make me reconsider the work I am doing and why I am doing it. Very much it seems that the perks of this job (regular holidays time, access to fun apps and gadgetry, regular, reliable income) are really what keep me in it. The work itself edges too close to salesmanship at time and while I have not done any direct sales, there are some elements of the publishing industry that I find massively uncomfortable. This of course has led me to reconsider my career and…
• I HAVE DECIDED TO BECOME A SOUND DESIGNER! At the moment I am thinking for film, but certainly I am interested in game sound design for its interactive element. Yes! It sort of came to me over a period of a couple of weeks. I have hosted radio programs before, loved the hell out of creative radio shows like RadioLab and This American Life. I thought “ooh that’s for me!” but then I also wasn’t terribly interested in doing the reporting as I was in the architecture of sound that held it together. So I went cruising and found a wonderful blog – The Foley Diaries – and got in touch with Louise, the author. She currently works for a production company out of London, and I got in touch with her, and voila! I was sitting in for a week seeing how they edited sound together for this particular sci-fi film. It was GREAT and I want MORE which leaves me…
• Currently practicing with software – Reaper (for the cheapness) – and scoping out useful handy recorders. At this stage I am all about reading and doing practice sound work – getting used to the editing software and getting my sense of my own workflow and best practice figured out. The idea being I’ll return to Australia in 7 months, get a full time job that I’m okay at, and then work on freelance sound design. Ideally it will hit a point where I can take on part time work and part time freelance sound, and then hopefully full-time freelancing and then YAY!
• I have thought about doing a degree, but I know that for me personally all that will do is delay the start of me getting my shit together and doing sound for real. Also, I think freelance would be a great option for me because I tend to find I become complacent if I have to work 9-5 on something. I resent when things come onto my place outside of those hours, and then the hours drag. I want more control, and this seems like a great option. Also – no two days will be the same! Which will also be wonderful!
• With the impending return to Australia will also come the impending switch of roller derby leagues – I have to say that I am quite nervous. Mainly because the comparison criteria will shift. I know the league I am involved with now are quite serious business, and I am bottom of the pile at this stage – but will I be better in 7 months? I’d love to start bouting properly and perhaps be able to justify an $800 set of skates!
• I BOUGHT A BIKE! Yes yes I did. It was a total impulse, 100% but I still have a chance to not regret it! Over the next 6 months I will spend upward of £800 on my monthly travelcard. The bike cost £50. Getting into good nick will cost maybe £50-£80 on top of that. If I can cut my travel costs by £50 a month, then that means I can save an extra £300 by the time I go to Vegas, and on top of that I will get really fit because I’ll be cycling over an hour a day, most days of the week. Wahoo! Also my bike is beautiful (photo is full of “ghosts” but you get the idea).

• This January, as well as riding my bike, going to training, and then going to derby-specific fitness sessions, I am also cranking the paleo lifestyle back on track. I am not drinking this month, and sticking to paleo is my goal! I have had a pretty good 2.5 days so far! As well as discovering a mean breakfast frittata recipe involving canned salmon and avocado. Absolutely nomtastic. Right now I am craving some jerky…
• Currently saving to get my butt to Iceland for a wonderful holiday with Jesse, and then saving to get my butt to Vegas and then on to Australia by early August.

I didn’t quite realise how much I had going on until I wrote it all down here: holy moly. I hope to share some of my go-to paleo recipes here soon, and fingers crossed the cycling gets on a roll. HA! Really… that was awful.

“LATERS!”

Happy Accidents in 3D Printing

When my family got our first digital camera way back in late 90s or so, I thought it was the coolest thing in the universe. Being able to view and delete and print pictures immediately? Wow! There couldn’t have been anything better! I was too young to have any real understanding of film cameras vs digital so I didn’t think much about the bigger, social or experiential changes that came with the shift from analogue to digital creation. One thing I do remember from those days, however, was my dad mentioning that with digital cameras it was the end of the “happy snap” – the accidental photo taken of a perfect moment by a friend or a child that just magically appeared in the stack of photos when you collected them from the printer.

Indeed the lack of “soul”, “personality” or just these little magic moments is what a lot of people bemoan as the real let down of digital technology. For all the songs we can cram onto our mp3 players, films on our hard drives, or the gigs and gigs of unmanageable digital photos we take, we can’t deny that digital formats are loss formats. I won’t go into any real technical detail but consider the analogy that you have drawn a line with pencil, and then had to make the same line but only with dots. The drawn line with pencil is lossless – the line will always be connected, no matter how far you “zoom” into it. To recreate it with dots there will always be gaps – losses. You can create the illusion of completeness by using lots and lots of dots but in the end you can zoom in and see gaps. Analogue is a line, digital is dots. This is why mp3s sound worse than CDs, and CDs sound worse than records. We’re going from a few dots, to plenty of dots, down to no dots… only a line.

I do have a point to make and that point is that despite the advent of digital technology, the happy accident is not lost. I just now discovered the flickr group – The Art of 3D Print Failure – and it contains some fantastic “happy snap” creations which have come about from attempts to wedge the digital back into an analogue shape. We’re all familiar with the experience of a printer just going rogue on us – well you can now get that experience (like everything) in 3D!

3D Print Fail by fredini – http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredini/

3D Print Fail by Fredini http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredini/9519585141/lightbox/

A lot of the images in the group are all rights reserved so I haven’t copied them in here – but do go check it out. I will always be fascinated in the dialogue between the analogue and digital media, and I see these fuck-ups as the collision of those two values entirely.

I’m out!

My Life in Bulletpoint August 2013 Edition

Like most blog people or people with blogs (sounds like a medical condition – it may as well be because it feels pretty chronic) I get well behind on my postings and hardly ever live up to the blog-related goals I set for myself. As a result I have gotten into the habit of following up every lapse with a “My Life in Bulletpoint” post… and here is the August 2013 installment!

• In about a week it will be the 1 year anniversary of my departure from Australia to come stay in England. I have one year left where I can live and work in this country. And holy hell has so much happened and time passed so quickly!
• My dad and brother came to visit at the end of June, we drank Scotch, played cribbage, ate some delicious sushi, had an amazing wankery afternoon tea at the Dorchester, drank wine, visited my aunt in Bicester, and then suddenly they were on the other side of the train door as we pulled out from the tube station and that was that. Weepy Liza.
• Thankfully that experience was quickly followed by GLASTONBURY 2013 which was the best thing I have ever decided to do ever! Best. Festival. Ever. That’s a blog post idea. Talk about that fo-shnizzle.
• I am now a full member of the London Rollergirls Recreational League! I’m waiting on my name to be approved and then I plan to score myself some sweet merch. I am having an amazing time working on my derby skillz, getting to know some of the best people I’d have ever hoped to meet, and – let’s not lie – getting a wicked thigh workout twice a week. It seems only yesterday that I signed up to the LRG intake.
• My job has turned out to be a fucking godsend. In the last year I have scored £6000 in raises, plus every three months I get a cool couple hundred in bonuses. Yay!
• As a result of the raises and such I can now afford my trip to Iceland in March! Also planning to go back to Australia via the United States at the end of July. Stopping – of course – in Las Vegas for ROLLERCON 2014!
• Speaking of Australia, my job involves working with a client based in Sydney who may need to be paid a visit soon and I may or may not have been asked to be that person (shh potential work-sponsored trips home cannot involve the getting up of too-high hopes).
• I am TRYING still to get on top of the diet thing. I posted earlier about paleo/primal and I love it though the effort involved to maintain it can be tiresome and I have – particularly when drunk – thought “fuck it, I NEED that frozen pizza from the convenient store around the corner”. Shoulda known though – I burned my hand getting it out of the oven which I took to be some sort of cosmic slap on the wrist for being so cheeky.
• I’ve discovered I won’t get better at derby without some outside gym work. So that’s starting again at the end of August. Yo free weights! Tempted to do a Cross Fit sesh near me but it’s so expensive. I really miss my Bikram Yoga!
• Jesse is working at a metal bar in Soho 3 nights a week which allows each of us some pretty awesome down time – and I get cheap drinks! Though when I go there I am pretty much guaranteed not to leave until 6am. Where the hell did this party animal come from?
• I am getting into zombies. Which is good because I had nightmares about them right up until May this year. Now I’m reading World War Z, and have also bought a ticket for 2.8 Hour Later in October. I see it as my version of holding a spider, or taking a bath in cockroaches. Except when the spiders bite you you turn into a spider.
• HOW HAVE I NOT GOTTEN MORE INTO ADVENTURE TIME? This song is stuck in my head… I think permanently now:

Oh and this one…

And I think that will do for now. Smooshes.