
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
bridge

Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Sunset
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Wednesday 28th of october
creating a new 3D model for the player's character using zbrush | TweetPhoto
Monday, 17 August 2009
Mile End
I don't think I've ever owned a suitcase where the wheels didn't come off. I moved one of my two suitcases yesterday from my old place in Oval to where I'm staying
with my polish flatmate from when I was living in Crouch End a few summers ago. The first tube I took I heard something snap and a lady was kind enough to pick up the debris and hand it to me. "Thanks..I hope that's not important." I said taking my suitcase rightwheel from her. It was quite a haul. Sunday afternoon, everyone and their family out for the day, trying to navigate the spiralling staircases when switching to the Central Line at Bank. I did buy the suitcases from that stall outside Warren station for 30 quid and they did last all of two journeys: made me wonder just how much better those really expensive samsonites are.
Ah well.. to the landfill with you. Now I need to find a home for the other one and get back into the grind which starts this eve: been at work the last week to chat with the managers and say hello to the many friends made over the years and introducing myself to some of the new faces while breezing through the hefty tome that is my new contract. Since I intended fully to emigrate to Spain I was no longer in the system. They gave me my new rota on thursday, tonight some bits and bobs of uniform and other standards and I'm back in business: N7 for those who know what that means.
Its tiring coming home from a journey and everyone wants a piece of you. I don't know how rockstars do it being the centre of attention. Where's my quiet cup of tea ? ha! The past few days have been a whirlwind of places and faces as I've met up with friends and colleagues for drinks and lunches and dinners, leaving do-s and home comings. I'm loving it, though its such a big break from the easy going lifestyle Andrea and I enjoyed in Barcelona, and I do miss my cafe con ponque listening to podcasts, this is like a shot in the arm. London has a rep for being hectic and its organised chaos within city-limits is a marvel to behold. Though most who come to dip their toes in this bigger pond do burn out within 5 years as much as I enjoy the country-side this is where I recharge my batteries.
Friday, 7 August 2009
Saterday august 8 2009.
Monday, 3 August 2009
Monday musings
But this time..
This was not supposed to be a trip. When I moved to spain three months ago it was to start a new chapter in my life. A fresh start somewhere far away, where I don´t speak the language and the culture is further removed from my own than that of the island dwellers I've lived amongst these past six years. Yet those instances of failures past percolated from a subconscious treasure chest left slightly ajar early sunday morning, while listening to the screams of an eastern european mother as she marshaled her troops for an impending visit of the in-laws. Instead of a fresh start it quickly deteriorated into a scramble for papers proving I was legit. Legal enough to be here with sufficient experience in my chosen trade. Proof of good behaviour, see ? Innocent enough to get married. As the temperature climbed towards an average of 32 I exclaimed my plight day in day out handing out cv's, posting them online, emailing them to any site offering any jobs in sight.. and here I am nearly three and a half months later, giving my notice to my Valencian flatmate, ready to pack my things before I completely run out of savings. I gave up most of my possessions as I always have before embarking on a quest, now I'm left with only enough to fill a big carry-on bag. Unemployed, still waiting for the wedding to be announced, going back to the last place I called home and hoping it will be for the better.
Yet oddly I don´t feel like I'm taking two steps back. Though I'm not sure wether I will return here to live as I intended I've relearned a great deal. Sometimes what seems like losing everything is merely the peeling back of the wrapping around your honest desire. When the tasks you complete everyday turn to routines you've forgotten how to enjoy its hard to see why once you coveted them over any other. After all, the paths we choose in life are not a given and what point is there to worry about direction when you live on a globe ? Upon my return I'm willing to take any job for the enjoyment of being able to provide for myself and a loved one once more. To be part of a little tribe again instead of wandering under a blistering sun. Ofcourse, I will not forego the opportunity to return to my old stomping grounds. There's no better start than a home coming. Shame there's won't be the shock of surprise. That's all..
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Wednesday 29th of July '09
Much like television before it, it has itself to thank for my thanklessness. Chipping away at my attention span as I try and take in as much as humanely possible in order to keep one step ahead of the many friends I've amassed over the years and never hear from except in the form of a fast-forward meant to tickle the funny bone: 'ah, seen it already.. thanks (:delete).' It reminds me of playground conversations about last night's tv. There was always one trying to one-up the other because he got to stay up later than anyone else because his single-parent was an alcoholic yet you feel envious because you got stuck with two parents who only knew the good cop /bad cop-routine and set boundaries. It took me years before I caught a glimpse of Jay Leno. Now he's gone.. But where before you could be cool simply by having been privvy to information no one else has because you had cable whereas they only had whatever the number of channels was taxes pay for.. or atleast having an opinion at the ready. Now the question is not so much Have you seen? as What do you want to see? Google and ye shall find.
I've been drilling it into Andrea whenever she wishes she knew something because her teachers have omitted to teach her you can find anything you want online. She wants to become better at making patterns for clothes: there's a torrent for an e-book. She wants to see the latest fashion but can't afford the magazines: I type in 'fashion' in iTunes and all the major stores and designers turn up with their own podcast for her to download for free. Its amazing what the breaking down of regions for DVDs and tv show rights-per-country means for education. I can't afford to go back to university but I can find anything I want to learn for free online. It makes me wonder about the maintaining of standards in education that we're already having so much trouble with in the UK. There, employers have been complaining to the government about the lack of basic arithmetics and spelling skills, never mind attitudes, of young employees. If our entertainment becomes a when and where ever you want how long before our education also becomes a whatever you want. I get bored downloading on youtube if a video doesn't grab me in the first how-ever-many seconds and go to the next topic that strikes my fancy. Following a few atheists on Twitter has lead me to see videos and read articles on sites where what I thought was a basic understanding of how things work is so lacking that it makes me worry what the future might hold. After all it is not the first time an invention liberated education and led to the demise of mental prowess at the same time.
When the printing press was invented it wasn't long before people started churning out books like nobodies business. This sharing of information led to a standardisation in everything that could be measured; weights, distance, to language: spelling. Before this invention there were only illiterate people now we have dyslexia. Small price to pay perhaps for a limited number of children failing primary school but another side effect from writing everything down is the belief memory is fallible. Before, when someone showed you how to do something you didn't write it down you remembered it. If you went to court to prove or disprove something that affected your legal status and dealt with a fact from many years ago, the village elder's memory was not doubted when questioned. Nowadays we live in a time where if the tree in the forest fell when someone was around: if it hasn't been written down such things happen who will believe him? Memory, and therefore experience, lost its value. When you can look things up why bother remembering it yourself? When everything has been written down and turned into a how-to video on youtube why bother learning how to write ? My handwriting may be terrible and I can only type using two fingers, one on each hand, but what a waste to live in a world where no one bothers. A world where no one makes it to the end of this blog because its too long by my own admission if it were a monologue dubbed over a video showing stupid people doing stupid things. Perhaps worshipping at the feet of priests who claim that everything in a book must be real because we've come to believe long after it was written that everything written holds more sway than whatever anyone may say. In an internet age where anything goes is googled, the question what is true once more becomes open to interpretation. Everything is true if you can find a user group that welcomes you and I'm affraid many of us can't be bothered because of boredom when we again must rise to the task of defining right from wrong, what is fact and what is fiction. I'm inclined to but armed only with Facebook and an iPod: one which defines copyright as anything you post belonging to it and the other a device which pretends to be portable television, a modern version of the book, but unlike the medium for literature is subject to the whims of its parent company when anyone tries to post anything as an app for the world to download through its store. A company named after the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil nonetheless but that's taking it too far. Though I do wonder who could've been on facebook at the time of the Garden of Eden: "Yeeey look at me I got one friend and I'm in a relationship with her.. and its complicated" only to be kicked out and blog about all the tribes you meet when you're supposed to be the first two, 4 counting the kids. Oh.. 3. Might want to tweet that.
Saturday, 18 July 2009
el Plan B
an early rise
random thoughts:
Jumbosquid attacksdivers +old video
Orcas moving into the med in larger numbers. +orca whale culture video
I am the Walrus in my head because of Dan Hsu's tweet he's playing
Beatles rockband. trailer
A went to bed at 6.. its 9:30
"leave the pornsite open I'm downloading a soap."
I've been teaching her the ways of the internet.
All the highlighted words are links to bits and pieces of digital flotsam to inform or entertain and make this blog interactive in a multi-media so last century kind of way. BLOG! sounds like vomit doesn't it ? If you're a mac addict.. hold command while clicking it to open the link in a new tab. I'm not adept in the ways of HTML just yet and am using code so you don't have to read an URL every other sentence. I hate it when you have to reload the page you were reading because you (accidentally) clicked on a Link.
I've become quite adapt at asking for work in Spanish. Its quite easy, actually: "necesitan personal ?" if they have an ad in the window and "Estoy buscando trabajo" if they don't. That's it. They'll mutter something about curriculum and you hand them your cv and try and have a conversation as you might they'll make it clear they're not interested by not looking at you and saying the manager will call you and acting surprised you are still there straight after saying so or point at the lack of customers in their establishment and hold their hands up. If you get the manager straight away they'll tell you it needs to processed by the head-office, even if its clearly not a chain. Every now and again you'll bump into a friendly bartender who has succeeded but if they haven't been there for over a year they're usually of the following variety: barely 18, blonde, female, and there only for the few months in summer allowing them to bypass stringent laws on hiring and firing staff while I had every intention of staying. Had because instead of pulling my hair out waiting for something to turn up last minute I've chosen to return before my funds run completely dry and there's two of us in need of a financial rescue plan. Best return and appreciate any sofa available while I work my way back up again, capable of supporting the two of us as I go along. There's still plenty that can go wrong with my original plan B. The economy can take a further nose-dive and actually become as bad as they've hyped it to be.
I met some of Andrea's Catalan flatmate's friends the other weekend: they are moving back in with their parents. Can't afford the rent anymore. Chatting with my own Valencian flatmate about maybe finding some work in a factory folding boxes: all his mates just outside Barcelona have been laid off. You read the news: British expats areleaving Spain en masse, the local governments are paying Latinos to go back home to make their unemployment rates look good. I don't use hype lightly.
I went to see Transformers 2and thought it was great! But online my fellow nerds all thought it was shit. When you go and see a movie about toy robots that had a cartoon 20 years ago and the first one didn't live up to your childhood dreams don't complain to me about the lack of character development when I'm not interested in Shakespeare. But guess what: the amount it did in its opening weekend is an apt metaphor for what happened in el Crisis. Once upon a time there was a toy that needed to be sold. So they made a cartoon about the toy and sold the cartoon to tv networks all over the world. What a clever way to by pass laws on advertising designed to protect children from large corporation. Without taking into account inflation some of these toys would still be considered expensive today: a person living off minimum wage would have to forego 2 days wages, 3 if you count the one day they used to pay for the GoBotsknock off their kid cried about (that's like receiving a Zune for christmas). Then they re-packaged the cartoon into a Marvel comic. We all hit upon Nirvana. He shot himself. We grew up. Got a job. They waited for nostalgia to kick in. They re-packaged the toys once more and sold the movie rights to the guy who gave you Indiana Jones4 (hint) who talked to the guy who brought you Pearl Harbor (HINT). A $112 million in its opening weekend. They'll be back in 2 years to turn it into a trilogy. Will it be like Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Carribean 3, XMen3, talking teddybears fighting for peace in Return of theJedi ?? What do you think ? Question is: will you go..? if the answer is no: thats what happened to all those sub-prime-mortgages and loans in a land far far away. At some point no amount of special effects will save your plot and you end up with a Waterworld or worse, Town & Country: a romantic comedy for the price of a Transformer movie. So why did I like Transformers Zwei and is the economy hyped both ways ? I wanted a movie about a plastic toy robot I used to have back in the day the wall came down in the country next door and we were winning a cold war with the help of 2 wise old men who promised to join forces and save us if aliens ever attacked our planet. Reminding me of a time before highschool basically. And I wanted it to be like WWII, bigger and with better explosions than the first one. Long enough to actually finish the largest bucket of popcorn they have in that empty mall just off the popcorn
olympic village they built for the Games in 1992, and forget about not getting a singlephonecall or email for a job interview after 6 weeks of handing out and sending off CVs. Hyping moneymaking schemes is what got us here. I know some like to point fingers across the pond
but If we weren't all in on it we wouldn't all be out of a job. Now they are playing up the end of the world because only the threat of eternal damnanation seems to motivate mankind to do anything about anything but mainly worrying together. That's why all the superlatives are on the front pages of newspapers that are still in business: "..blablabla worst since the Great Depression." You know its hype because during the Great Depression farmers were dying on the land of starvation. We're still subsidising farmers so they won't go on strike and dump fresh produce on the highways leading into our capitals are we not ? But we need that kind of angst nowadays even to maintain personal hygiene: "Global Pandemic of Swine Flu underway, UN says it can't be stopped: now will you wash your hands ?" Over 50 million died during the outbreak of Spanish Influenza. A pandemic is when you don't need to read about it in the papers, the ambulance is outside.. you're hoping its for no one you know. Today that is more likely than in the close knit communities of a 100 years ago, when there were only 1.7 billion of us and a lot more whales. If you can still afford to buy sushi from a supermarket, 6 pieces of a tiny amount of food for the equivalent of .. month's wages in ... , while complaining how bad the latest summer blockbuster was compared to the original, in a big plastic box that is not going to be recycled because you're eating it on the way as you're supposed to.. then things are looking up. I just chose a bad time to come to Spain and am fortunate enough to travel back to another country to hopefully pick up where I left off with a lot more appreciation for being able to buy coronas at Tescos and sneaking them into a pub which is shit anyway but then we're only there because its raining. Shame about the whales though. But you know what I mean. Chin up.
You're one out of 6 billion.. start acting like it.
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Wednesday 15 July ´09
I quit smoking about a month and a half ago and, and that doesn't really mean anything until it has been several years, and now my cheeks are thicker than they used to be and kind of white. Twittering about this I got a spate of new followers sending me messages of support. My lip tastes funny and my gums look weird after I brush my teeth. I got two mouthwashes, those vitamin pills you dissolve in a glass of bottled water and taste like Fanta, and it won´t go away. So, here's what you should not do when you have something weird, or are in a foreign place without insurance or a job: look up the symptoms online. Only in the extreme cases of abject boredom would I suggest you look up ailments online. You will not be bored but that´s the only thing that will be cured: you now have cancer. Yes, the internet gave me cancer. Its my own fault ofcourse, when I couldn´t find anything that sounded like what I thought were my symptons I should´ve given up and maybe see a docter. But no, I googled on and started looking for pictures. I know I need to go to a dentist and he or she is probably going to give me a hard time while wringing their hands thinking of all the things they can buy with the money I'll have to hand over but I do count myself fortunate they don't look anything like that though they probably could have done with braces but I'm from a generation before it became mandatory. Oh.. before we we're even advised to floss. I should tweet that.. just to see who responds. The scary thing about that is there are people whose job it is to follow certain topics and then befriend you in the hope one day l-like me- you will check out who they are and click on their homepage.. maybe an ad by accident.. and they get to make the 2 c per click as advertised on your Facebook page. But it probably sounded a bit more like "I made thousands in a few weeks from home while I was unemployed."
shit. I used to hate split-shifts on the terrace. Now, I get to do it in my spare-time. Even A. thought of it as lazy before summer got into full swing. Heat evaporates the ability to do anything but lounge. So you have to make the most of the mornings and evenings when its bearable. Around 7 am my neighbours start barging through the halls, disrupting my sleep enough to become aware in my dreams but not to get up. Having conversations in what sounds like arabic interspersed with 'valè' or portuguese.. so its probably Catalan. If only they spoke castellano I could learn in my sleep ! But it is not to be and neither is my refuge from the cell division of this living organism we call city: there's now construction on the floor above me here aswell. Skip to 54s of this youtube "Ren loses his cool" for my feelings on the matter.