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“Something’s going to happen”

knot-red4

I’m still playing with animations. There are a bunch directly from London Terminus and other British Council Films including some tracings.

Then there are the things like the one above which is a single image repeated several times with minor amendments and then looped. It’s called “boiling” apparently.

Iterations, circles, going round again just with a little difference.  If you haven’t seen “Inside Llewyn Davis” yet, please do.

I showed today’s batch to a friend and she said “It looks like something’s going to happen”. And yes it does, there’s a kind of constant winding up of potential. But nothing ever does. It just keeps going round in circles. Or something.

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Cartomiser

I learned a new word today.

600 Puffs

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.

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Twelve

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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!

london, What I think, What I've Been Doing

Some Hows of Timelapse

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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:

  • I shot it on my phone. It’s an “HTC One”, which accounts for the wide screen. There’s a free (with Pro version available) app called Droid Timelapse. The only real setting I use is to adjust the Frame Capture Rate – each frame here is a second apart. I did no other processing after shooting, just uploaded it.
  • I’d just tried out the new cafe in the newly extended Sainsbury’s in Garratt Lane, opposite the Southside Centre. It is nothing special, but for £1.95 I got a large mug of reasonable coffee that I enjoyed more than the sort they serve over the road in Caffe Nero for example. I came to the exit and realised it was raining (again) and saw in front of me a big window out onto the street. So I went and stood by it, propping my phone up against the glass, firing up Droid Timelapse, holding very still and pressing the button to make it start. Then I waited for the counter to reach 10 (I don’t know how long that took, I’d have to do some arithmetic with frame rates… but that makes 10 seconds of video) and I pressed the button again to make it stop. Then I went and bought some sausages in Sainsbury’s and went home.
  • While it was shooting, I was nervous. I expected at every moment to hear one of the security guards behind me say “I’m sorry sir, you can’t do that here” I couldn’t move because I was holding the camera still. I imagine that if anyone had actually paid any attention, they’d have thought I looked like I was waiting to take a picture for a very long time. While I was standing there a young (I dunno, late teens I guess) woman and a slightly older man came and stood nearby. They had a trolley full of groceries but I assumed they were either waiting for the rain to calm down or waiting for someone else to turn up. They were having that kind of conversation where you don’t get too deeply into anything because you know that you’re going to be interrupted at any moment by a change in the weather or the arrival of your friend. I zoned in and out of their conversation while wondering how the movie was going to turn out – would it be too fast? what would it look like when the traffic slowed down or stopped for the traffic lights? how many buses had gone past now? – the only thing I remember her saying was “I’ve been told by many people that they’ve had visions of me dying young.” When I turned around all I really clocked of her was that she had long hair and was wearing a light-coloured (creamy) woolen garment – I couldn’t say whether it was a cardigan or a pullover. It might have been Aran.

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)

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Playing with GIFs from archive film ( cc @time_image )

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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.

sparksshakes

Today I also had a go at making something else: a loop of tracings from a scene

traced30dive30

 

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.

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What I Like About Podcasts

As a listener

  • I like listening to other people’s conversations
    • and not having to contribute. That’s what I do at #tuttle, I sit and eavesdrop, with permission.
  • I like imagining that the person is talking directly to me
    • which they kind of are – it’s a bit like Stephen King saying that writing is a form of telepathy. Someone sits in their room or walks in the park, talking about their stuff, what they think, what they’ve seen and then somewhere else, some other time, I pick it up and listen and it’s like they’re talking to me.

As a podcaster

  • I like performing
    • Whether it’s impromptu and extemporized or planned and rehearsed, I love showing off… until someone starts throwing fruit – then I sulk.
  • I like explaining things
    • I’ve only just realised this. You know how people say “I saw Judy Garland when I was four years old and I knew…!”
    • Well, for me it was James Burke and Connections. But somehow it seemed safer and more rational for someone to say “I want to wear ruby slippers and make the whole world laugh and cry at the same time” than “I want to learn how the world works, how the world got like it is and and explain to people where it might be going”
    • But that’s what I really like doing. That’s who I want to be when I grow up.

So I’m slowly organising my co-conspirators, other people who are interested in how the world works. Some of them even understand bits of it. I’m going to be talking to them in the presence of a recording device and then sharing the conversation with you.

Keep listening.

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Getting started (again)

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I’m back at my “desk” after 9 days in Madeira and then 4 days trying to get back to my “desk”. And I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want to be writing a blogpost. I want to be lying on the couch browsing Netflix or YouTube or listening to another podcast by people who actually made something rather than actually making something myself.

Because I prefer (at least in the short-term) to live in my head, live in the fantasy of what my life is like: the *fantasy* of making cool stuff that people buy rather than the reality of sitting down and making cool stuff that people buy. It’s only short-term though, because I only have to think back a little way to remember that the reason I was able to stop and sit by a pool and soak up sun and go on a boat ride to look at whales was because a little while before that I sat down and made some cool stuff that people were willing to pay for.

Where I’m at with writing and making media and being a social artist and all that stuff reminds me of maybe 15 years ago when I grappled with the fact that I wasn’t playing any music. I had no instrument to play. But I’m a musician, that’s in me, deeply, it’s never going away. I sang, I sang loudly, I sang softly, I sang with other people, but it was never going to be enough. I needed either to find someone to play for me regularly or I needed to find an instrument I could play.

I found a guitar somewhere. I don’t remember where. It was on it’s last legs. It was strung but the strings wouldn’t last long and the neck had already needed to be glued back onto the body once. But it was an instrument and I had another go at playing guitar.

Like most young men in Western society I knew how to play guitar in my head. I had Bob Dylan and George Harrison and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and Eddie Lang and Django Rheinhardt in my head. And I knew what my music would sound like and what it would feel like to be sitting on a stool in a darkened bar playing to a hushed audience. But *all* of that was just in my head because when I sat down with this lump of wood with stretched nylon in my hands it just wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do, at least not straight away. And so I put it aside, again and went back to daydreaming. It just felt better that way, at least for the time being.

And then, a few years later, still feeling the same way, unfulfilled by the fantasy but unable to engage with the reality of how much I sucked, a ukulele banjo came into my life. And it didn’t even have any strings, but it was much more solid than the guitar. And after a few weeks of living in fantasy about it, I bought some strings and found out how to tune it and got it all ready. Waited a bit longer until a quiet Saturday morning when I had the house to myself and got it out again and made a start with some simple chords. Messed around with how to strike the strings right. It was loud and plunky, I couldn’t possibly do this when anyone else was in the house and the neighbours were probably pacing up and down waiting for it to just get too much so they could come round and complain. It was time to stop again but at least my daydreams were fuelled with some real playing.

After a few of these secretive sessions, it started to sound better than anything I’d managed on the guitar and I could get my fingers round the chords. And one day I stumbled over a pattern of chords that I’d soon find out were the basis of 80% of the songs I’d heard throughout my childhood – the circle of fifths (or fourths depending on your perspective) and I realised I could play some recognisable (to me!) tunes without looking at the sheet music and struggling with someone else’s arrangement. And I was away!

From there I bought my own (cheap) ukulele, which I played until it fell apart (it took a couple of years), by which time, I knew it was something I could do and so felt able to invest in a more upmarket model.

I have no idea what the timescale between trying out that old guitar and buying my first uke was but it was a long time. Much longer than it would have been if I’d been able to persevere, give up the daydreams and just play everyday.

Everyone knows how to get better at making stuff. Every writing expert will tell you to write every day. Every artist will tell you to draw something every day. And that’s fine, but… it’s hard and what I hadn’t heard until recently was that I also have to decide that I’m going to put up with the horrible reality of where I am today and let that be good enough even though the daydreams and fantasy in my head are so tempting. That’s the deal: live in warm fuzzy daydreams and deal with the occasional shocking pain from finding that nothing’s actually changed OR get back to work (it’s really not so bad once you start!) and make something real on which I and others can build.

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Getting Podcast suggestions

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We’re off on holiday for 10 days to Madeira. I’ve never been there. All I knew before we booked was it would be warm and it’s out in the Atlantic Ocean but north of the Canaries. Oh and it’s a wine and a cake – which is frustrating for someone who doesn’t drink wine or eat cake.

But warm, island, not London.

I asked Twitter for podcast suggestions as I need a bit of variety in my auditory diet and I expect to be lying around a lot just looking at the sea.

I said:

  • Looking for podcasts to binge on on holiday. Whatchagot? like talky stuff, philosophy of tech not “news” – ideas and laughter, not “comedy”

And Twitter said:

Mark Cotton @mcfontaine

lauren brown @sheseesred

Abbie Walker @Abstardeluxe

Kate AG @RadioKate

  • @LloydDavis have you tried the moth? Live storytelling, best stories picked, funny, sad, powerful, always a good listen..
  • @LloydDavis someone recently mentioned the night vale or something like that..tried first episodes and enjoyed…

Rob Dyson @RobmDyson

Paul Brewer @pdbrewer

Wow! Thank you all, that’s fantastic and will keep me going well beyond the next 10 days! (there’s a Desert Island Discs Archive!!!)

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.