I learned a new word today.
A cartomiser is a blend of “cartridge” and “atomiser”.
And each of these ones give you 200 puffs.
I have no idea how many puffs you need to feel like you’ve smoked a whole cigarette. If indeed that’s what people do.
I learned a new word today.
A cartomiser is a blend of “cartridge” and “atomiser”.
And each of these ones give you 200 puffs.
I have no idea how many puffs you need to feel like you’ve smoked a whole cigarette. If indeed that’s what people do.
Today I mark twelve years since I last had any alcohol.
To people who drink normally or excessively that sounds like an awfully long time and a great achievement. But it’s not, it doesn’t feel like that to me. I guess because I got to a point where I knew that what had formerly been an obsession, a compulsion for me, had lifted and that I would have to go out of my way to have a drink – that there’d need to be a really good reason for it, and I didn’t have any reasons left. It also doesn’t feel like *my* achievement, I did it together with some amazing, generous, funny, sometimes infuriating, but always loving friends.
I had my first drink at around 13 or 14. I had a traditionally blurry British teenhood and twenties but by my thirties it was becoming boring. My alcoholism wasn’t particularly spectacular or dramatic or obvious to everyone around me. Though I had my moments. It was more that I used it to deal with feeling uncomfortable in life, uncomfortable with people, uncomfortable being me. Also, I had a great physical capacity for drinking and thought that because I could drink right up till closing time, then I should. And when I tried to moderate it or stop completely on my own, I was horrified to find that I couldn’t. I had to find a way of living with and overcoming the discomfort rather than anaesthetising it with booze.
Early in 2002, I thought that being sober would make my life boring, but life actually got much bigger – most people reading this have only got to know me since that time. It would be nice to think that I was a pain in the neck to people when I was drinking but when I stopped that stopped too, but it hasn’t been quite that simple.
If you’re struggling with drinking too much or too often or you just don’t like the person you become when you drink, you might find that total abstinence is the best route for you too. I wasn’t able to do it alone. Living in London, it wasn’t hard to find help in the company of the fine men and women of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve seen the Twelve Steps work miracles for people who were otherwise hopeless, but there are lots of ways of achieving this, don’t let anyone tell you that there’s only one path to recovery.
Cheers!
I sat down to do some more tracing tonight and thought I’d talk to the voice recorder while I did it. Just a few reflections on what’s going on and how it all works for me. Beware of the false ending just before 33 minutes.
Download: Tracing (36MB)
Here’s the first frame that I refer to, I’ll post the animation when it’s finished.
I made a little timelapse this week and put it in my flickr stream because I found, to my chagrin, that it made instagram video barf.
Robert spotted it (see? he *is* looking, watching, lurking quietly after all) and kindly mentioned it in his newsletter this morning. He asked “How did he do that?”
Well here are a few ways of answering that:
Does that help? Anything else you want to know?
Footnote: While I drafted this post (and the previous one) in Fargo, it’s still easier to embed media (especially moving pictures) using the wordpress.com interface. Boo! (actually that’s not true, I made it up before actually trying it out – the flickr code is just a line of text which would fit nicely on a line in Fargo. I’ll try that next time)
I don’t know what I’m trying to do!
I’m just playing really, but I think there’s something in here – look at how current popular media gets scrunched into little animated GIFs – does that only work for stuff that’s around now or that we’ve some connection to? Isn’t there still some fun in seeing loops of little scenes that we’re not so familiar with? I’ve been looking through the stuff in the British Council Collection which is all BY-NC licenced
So far I’ve just picked out scenes that I think would look good as a loop. But there’s also that gifset thing where you can sum up a sequence made up of little bits (often with subtitles for the key dialogue) I may try that sometime.
Today I also had a go at making something else: a loop of tracings from a scene
I should write up a bit more about how I did that, but if you’re interested there’s more of this spilling out into my tumblr all the time.