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iWant. It's beautiful, functional and makes all other MP3 players look like worthless shit, and people are still bitching. I don't know, Steve, you spoil these people...
Been having a bit of a problem uploading this week, hence the hiatus. Sorry about that. Normal service has been resumed
I highly recommend you make the decision to 'own Shrek on DVD'. I think it is one of the finest works of art ever, period. And darn funny to boot. Oodles of extra features, particularly on the Region 1 disc. mmm, I love parfait!
New flash banner on left (if you have flash). Quite proud of this one!
Twenty2 Product make some amazing motion graphics. I saw some of their work on onedottv last night (Chris had recorded it) and it was inspirational stuff. AND they seem like nice, modest people AND they get to live in San Francisco. GrrrÖWave Twisters was also pretty spectacular.
Hexagons are the new 45° angle arrows.
…Ben Marcus
If it's Friday, it must be time for Photoshop Tennis. Which I love. If anyone wants to play a friendly, just let me know. Matt? Chris? Anyone? Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!
Tomorrow I am going to see the Contemporary Japanese Art exhibit at the Hayward Gallery, followed by a party at my friend Catharine's new house, which she is sharing with some German Artists. I hope they are nihilists ["we believe in nussing!"]. I feel so cultured. Catharine is a partner in the rather spiffy Robert Sandelson Gallery [which tends to crah Mac IE 5, so be warned].
And While I am in London, I will pick up the comic Johnny The Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez. Who, seguetastically, has a new cartoon airing in Nicktoons, entitled Invader Zim. It looks fabulously twisted, and sometimes I really wish we had cable tv.
Armando Ianucci was funny last night…
Always wanted to do a DJ set using just your laptop and a hard-drive packed full of banging choons? I know I have. Those lovely and clever Germans at Native Instruments come galloping to the rescue with the superb-looking Traktor. I say looking as there is no Mac version yet. Due in Spring 2002, so I am told.
Apple in Revolutionary Device intrigue. It's probably something to do with music, apparently. My interest is officially piqued.
Fellow geeks and Blue Blaze Irregulars will be delighted to learn of the imminent release [Jan 2002] of the special edition DVD of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. It's not every cheesy 80's sci-fi comedy which makesreferences to Thomas Pynchon, y'know?
“Eighth” is a funny word, isn’t it?
The ever-excellent Patrick Farley has a new and Afghanistan-themed story up at e-sheep.com, entitled The Spiders. Good stuff. Hang on, let me rephrase that: Patrick Farley is God! David Gaddis is also God. [in an "Eric Clapton is God", not literal, sense. get me?].
More Afghan stuff: Lost Sons of Afghanistan. [thanks Erik!]
Taliban offers to hand over Bin Laden. US says "no thanks". They are just having too much fun with their clever little bombs and heroic low-flying gunships, I guess. The fact that there is a massive quantity of oil under the 'Stans and the want the Taliban out of the way so they can install a moderate puppet government and line their fat, greedy oilbaron bastard pockets has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nope.
When I grow up, I want to be a motion graphics designer. I can't believe it took me so long to start playing with, I mean learning After Effects ["Photoshop with Wheels"]. It helps that I have the wonderful book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects. It's only a matter of time before you see my stuff on TV, reckon.
Speaking of incredibly cool software, I got my Reason t-shirt today. A bargain at only 12 quid, I am the envy of my peers. Reason is a software music studio, and is almost unbelievably cool. Never mind making songs, I can happily spend several hours just playing with different drum sounds...
Current feeling: I'm bored of web design. Bored of HTML, cross-browser coding, JavaScript, and so on. Still not quite bored of stylesheets yet, but I'm sure I'll get there. Digital video is just much more exciting, no?
Nice cartoons at spazzco.com. I feel like making cartoons again. My current great idea is Osama Bon Jovi. Make of that what you will.
Cute doggie: Oliver. Oliver's owner Dean is commentating on today's Photoshop tennis match over at coudal.com.
In other exciting news, I've just learned that Family Guy Series 1 is coming out on DVD. Rah! Funniest cartoon on TV, hands down. And if you want a real bargain, we have the Simpsons Series 1 DVD (Region 1) for a piffling £17.99. If only Duckman would make it onto DVD I would be a very happy bunny.
The other week, at an old friend's behest, I went to see a Led Zep tribute band rejoicing in the name Simply Led. To my considerable surprise they were really, really good. Granted, I was a tad stoned. And their drummer even looked a bit like John Bonham. And they are playing in cambridge again tonight. I am SO there! Maybe.
What am I listening to right now? Why bolivar.b by warmdesk, since you ask. I'm a big fan of bip-hop. I often enjoy a nice bit of datach'i with my cup of aluminium gallium arsenide tea.
DJ Phenolphthalein at your service. [that would be me]
It's not my fallt.
Introucing the worlds first plaster of paris dogshit unitard. With two-fisted exertion cups and suspiciously hardened lambskin rinse cycles!
In a world of clandestine appointments, sepia pecks and collusionist crotch-flags you know there's a keeper who's a keeper. With legs akimbo and a metallic aftertaste, we'll parley our latest windfall into your pre-nuptial foolhardy stink matt without missing a beat. NOW THAT'S A LESION WE CAN ALL LIVE WITH. Teen Heritage Exertion Cups.
Whereishere? Here.
Richie Hawtin is, in a sense, God. We saw him DJ a few months ago, my droogs and I, and he rocked the house. I found myself dancing like a loon atop a platform, waving my arms in the air and gurning wildly. And I wasn't even doing any 'E'. It was just the music baby. Just the music, and four pints of beer and some THC, to be entirely accurate. Anyway, he was using a piece of equipment called Final Scratch, which allowed him, via a specially indexed piece of vinyl, to select, mix and scratch MP3s from a huge library on his powerbook. It was really, really good. And now he has a new CD out, entitled DE9: Closer To The Edit, using the same methodology, more or less. It consists of 300-odd samples, eviscerated from some of his favourite tracks, and lovingly reassembled into something sleek, propulsive and utterly fantastic. Go buy it.
The first time I saw Richie Hawtin was at Glastonbury in 1995, and he was brilliant then as well. A couple of thousand people in a circus tent, going completely mental. The hairs on my neck standing up with the sheer gosh-darn genius of it all. Why he isn't better known and worshipped is frankly beyond me.
Normally spam email doesn't bother me, I just delete it and carry on. But in the last week I have been invited at least 15 times to 'See Buffy Riding Hard C**k!' [cork? calk? cook? I dunno]. Please stop asking me, you silly people.
I'm generally pretty good with personal grooming, but I do tend to forget to clip my toenails. Before I eventually got around to it last night I could probably have disemboweled an assailant with a single well-placed kick, just like a cassowary. Ewww. It's not my fault, my toenails are just so far away. I tend to forget about them.
 |
| a cassowary, yesterday |
The Cassowary is a large flightless bird. It can grow to almost two metres in height and can weigh up to 60kgs (130lbs).
The Cassowary has strong powerful legs with dagger-like claws on its toes. Its kick is powerful enough to rip open a person's stomach or even kill the person.
A cassowary is a bird with which you do not want to fuck.
So we have started bombing Afghanistan with special friendly taliban-seeking, civilian-avoiding cruise missiles, apparently. Sigh. The Taliban think it is God's work to destroy America, Bushmeister thinks he has been handpicked by the Lord to rid the world of 'evil'. Nostradamus is selling like hot cakes. Did I just wake up in the middle ages? 2001 and still no sign of shiny silver jumpsuits, foodpills and teleportation. Just ignorance and bigotry and hatred and vile distortions of religion. Ho hum.
I was really looking forward to teleportation as well.
Suggestions for the History of Masturbation are literally flooding in, I have been inundated with over two already. Here they are:
So I bit the bullet and installed OS X 10.1. It does seem faster, but I couldn't get the DVD player to play a disc, and Photoshop 6 crashed immediately upon launching. Poo. So back to trusty old 9.1 for the time being. It does seem a big improvement, though.
I've got another goddamn cold. I blame the toxic Cleanaway people next door to our office, from whose compound vile and noxious smells often emanate. I think they are breeding supergerms
Like bleepy, glitchy, geeky experimental music? Then head on over to fallt.com and download six hours worth of same. I did.
Self-censorship, American style. So it is now a sackable offence to point out that George W. Bush is as dumb as a sack of hammers? Suddenly he is a great leader, eh? For God sake, look into his eyes! There is nobody home.
And in The Onion: A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.
Across The Divide: Letter from Afghanistan by William T. Vollmann. An excellent read.
FUSE rocks, in a 3-D flash kinda way.
I know it will make me a pariah in trendy design circles, but…
Sorry Heather. Am I bad? ;)
The Taliban's bravest opponents @ salon.com
www.rawa.org. They really need a redesign, bless them.
Ah, October. My favourite month. That back to school feeling, the slow awakening of my summer-dulled noodle, never fails to amaze me. The flocks of freshers wandering the streets of Cambridge like bewildered fawns, albeit bewildered fawns wearing collegiate scarves, that I could do without. Nah, not really, they are quite sweet in all their youthful earnestness. If in doubt, smile at all strangers and ask what A-levels they took. Splendid, I remember it well. Enough reminiscence, onto matters of more immediate import!
Namely, is everything better “On Ice”? On sunday I saw posters in London for “Toy Story – On Ice!” I love Toy Story, and find it hard to see how it could be improved by adapting it into an ice-skating spectacular. But what do I know? How about “James Joyce’s Ulysses –On Ice!”; “Mein Kampf – On Ice!’?; I could go on…
In other news, a friend of a friend of Adrienne tells me her professor is writing a history of masturbation, and is looking for suggestions for a title. I’m being completely honest with you. The working title is “Onan’s Curse”, but we can come up with something better than that, can’t we? Sure we can! Come on, get yr thinking caps on and send in your grey matter emissions:
I would call a history of masturbation...
Speaking of doing compulsive things that give you stiff hands and make you go blind, I am getting badly addicted to Mario Kart Super Circuit on my new Game Boy Advance. Just another little way in which I am trying to make the world a better place. Titter. Oh, and I went to emulation.net and downloaded the SNES emulator, then I got a Mario Kart ROM (can't remember where, use google, I did) and now I can play Mario Kart in it's original incarnation on my powerbook. Suddenly the world seems just a little bit less totally fucked up.
Last night I had a dream that Apple had produced an extensive range of extremely cool hi-tech clothing, such as gore-tex snowboarding jackets etc, all with a discreet Apple logo. It amuses me to realise that I would probably buy such a thing, if it existed. And I’ve read No Logo. Well, some of it. It got too depressing.
The only thing that is stopping me from installing OS X 10.1, is waiting for Adobe to carbonise Photoshop. Oh and for Macromedia to carbonise Dreamweaver and Flash. Lazy buggers. Surely it can’t be too difficult? I want my vaseline-smeared interface, goddammit!
Meanwhile I will console myself with this cheesy retro spinning rainbow mac graphic I just found on a Russian website, using Google’s Apple-specific search:
I fucking love Google, me. Frighteningly, one can purchase a tie-dyed google t-shirt from the Google store. It is almost worth getting one, just to see the stunned looks of my colleagues.
Uvidemcia pozje!
[available now at play.com]
My
Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk
Creating
Motion Graphics with Adobe After Effects
Trish & Chris Meyer
All Is Dream
Mercury Rev
Solid Ether
Nils Petter Molvaer
Exile
Geoffrey Oryema
Pause
Four Tet
click above for andalusia photos.
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