photo credit: kevin dooley

I’ve been back

from my holiday and mired in the depths of unemployment for almost three weeks now. It’s often thought of as a paradise, but in reality it’s a little bit depressing, this not having anything to get you moving once you wake up. Or perhaps I’m just not the right person to appreciate large amounts of hours with nothing particularly pressing to fill them up with. For the first week or so, I had the task of getting my thesis resubmission process completed. Which I did, after spending a painstaking day re-jigging some images and chasing down signatures from various faculty members. So that kept me occupied. After I’d done that though, it’s been pretty much been a week or two of very little at all.

Wait, sorry. ‘After I’d done that’ is probably a little too glib for what it actually represents. I am now officially done with my thesis. It’s complete. Finished. Kaput. I never have to look upon its smug, papery face ever again if I don’t want to. Well, that’s a lie, I’m currently flicking through it for table scraps that I can try and mash together into some semblance of a meal that a journal editor might like to chow down on. But the main thing is that I have passed and I will never have to do something so incredibly hard ever again. So yay for that. Alright, back to the main point of the post.

In order to keep myself from going completely insane at home, I’ve been trying to make sure that I have goals to achieve each day. These range from the mundane (make sure I get the dishes out of the dishwasher and put on a load of washing) to the necessary (go for a run so that I at least leave the house once a day) to the creative. And strangely enough, the creative ones haven’t yet included writing. I have yet to write any new fiction since before I left for Sydney, back in September. This is probably the longest I’ve ever gone without writing something, anything, for a few years. And the urge still hasn’t taken me. I have no doubt it will come back eventually (and hopefully in time for my resolution to write a novel in 2012) but for the moment, I’ve got nothing going on in the writing department with the exception of a COSMOS article or two. Oh, yeah, I’m an occasional paid science journalist now (:.

Anyway, so instead of writing, I’ve been turning to other forms of creative output. One which has turned out to be surprisingly rewarding is that of programming. Now, I’ve tried to program before, and you’d think my background in disciplines that use logic as their main way o’ doin’ stuff would result in me being an apt pupil. But the language I chose to pop my “Hello world!” cherry was Fortran, and Fortran can be a little difficult for the newbie. So this time around I’ve been easing myself into it by adopting Python as my tutor. And so far, the results have closely resembled this xkcd comic. I’m following the excellent Python for Absolute Beginners book by Michael Dawson, which walks you through a number of game-based programs and teaches everything from basic programming workflow to more advanced techniques. It’s already got me dreaming of all kinds of text-based adventures that I could create.Of course, I’ll need to figure out a whole heck of a lot more stuff before I get that far, but the possibility is firmly embedded in my head now.

The other thing I’ve turned (or should that be tuned?) back to is playing around with sequencing. As previously mentioned, there’s a (FREE!) tracker known as Buzzmachines that offers a complete digital solution for making a song from beginning to end, with one of the most elegant graphical interfaces ever devised. And it’s been really fun to mess around with sounds and such. So far I’ve been playing around a lot and not making a whole heap of songs, but here are some little tunes that I’ve been happy enough with to upload to my Soundcloud:

Peachy keen — Trying to emulate the arpeggiated style and substance of chiptunes, though I did use a lot of sounds that are ‘illegal’ for the genre (i.e. delays, etc.). Still, I think it came out okay.

Shred test — I was linked by wauterboi to this excellent VST called Shred, which emulates guitars rather bloody well. So I ended up playing with that and a rhythm gate to make something a bit more driven.

Little mountain & Easte-reverb — These are part of an ongoing attempt to make some music that I can share with my fellow writers as songs that aren’t going to distract them. Kind of like the Ghostly ‘Music for creatives‘ album (which you should definitely get if you haven’t already).

So that’s a few of them. I’ll be trying to get maybe one per month done, as the mood takes me. But really its all about enjoying the process, rather than any kind of output.

And that brings me to another point I wanted to make in that, for me at least, I think it’s important to have multiple outlets for creativity. I don’t think I could exclusively stick to one way of bringing ideas into reality; I’d get either bored or stale in my methods. Even from just the two examples I’ve put here show how bringing learning into your life can result in new ways of expression: I now have the ideas of a text adventure and a themed album floating around my head. And who knows how those ideas will interact with the rest of the stuff that gets thrown in there? And before anyone gets any misconceptions, no, I’m not looking to make money out of these things. Of course I’m never going to get signed to a label or picked up by EA (not that I’d want to in the latter case), but it’s fun to try new things! And that’s what I’ve been feeling like doing lately, trying out new stuff.

Alright, well that’s enough rambling from me for the moment. I hope you’re all enjoying the lead up to the holiday season. Let me know your plans in the comments, or tell me some of your alternate creative hobbies, I’d love to hear whether your outlets have interacted with each other in unexpected ways.

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photo credit: el patojo

Another attempt at

automatic content generation I’m afraid. At the end of every (working) week I propose to list the top three songs I’ve listened to for that week and explain why I have that artist on my hard-drive and why I felt like I needed to listen to their song. So here we go:

Justice — D.A.N.C.E. :

This week hasn’t been that fantastic for me. I’ve had a lot of setbacks and a general malaise concerning the future of my research. Not only are Justice one of the few bands to interest me in dance music, they just make it so damn fun with this song. Crank it on any night when you need a pick me up; guaranteed party starter.

Elbow — Grounds for Divorce :

Got stuck in my head from a chance hearing on the JJJs and then I had to listen to the whole album a few times. I first heard Elbow on a flight on the way back from London. I was delirious and sick and it was due in most part to these guys that I had the most awful dreams I’ve ever had on an aeroplane. Which is a bit strange considering the harmlessness of most of the songs and their lyrics. Still, they didn’t win the Mercury prize for nothing, absolutely stellar song and album (Seldom Seen Kid).

Opeth — Lotus Eater :

Grabs you from the moment the drums start up and Akerfelt informs the listener that ‘Liquid is in your throat’. Very intense, very screwed up song that is a perfect example of some of the best that Opeth can do. Watershed is my album of choice if you’d like to get into the band, then work backwards through their catalogue.

Until next week! (:

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photo credit: Lorrie McClanahan

cars.

Where I live, cars are a necessary evil. Perth is just too bloody spaced out to make do with public transport only, especially if you live where I live, which is around twenty five kilometres out from the city centre. Public transport is a giant pain in the arse to get anywhere from that far out, and if you do manage to hook yourself onto the flailing snake trial of the buses you’ll find that a commute that would normally take you twenty minutes plus the time it takes to find a parking spot (not a trivial task by any means) will now cost you an hour and a half, four transfers, and a small sacrifice of a pigeon between bricks.

Which is why, when my car decided to bypass that tired cliche of cars being able to engage brakes, I needed to buy a new car. This isn’t something I wanted to do. On the contrary, I’d much rather have spent the money travelling to see Todd marry his lovely girlfriend fiance, and then used whatever was left to do something bold. Or in bold. Whichever. Unfortunately, like I said, it’s impossible to get around ye olde citie wihout ye olde automobile. So after much umming and ahhing, and with some help from the old man, I settled on a 2004 Hyundai Accent. It has 80,000 kilometres on the clock, doesn’t leak, has brakes and a working handbrake, doesn’t chew through oil, and has a back windscreen wiper. It even has an aerial that wasn’t made out of a maimed coathanger. It is metallic-ey blu-ey grey-ey in colour, which grants it +10 stamina and +30 camouflage when in the rain.

On a related note, if anyone wants a pristine condition Nissan Pintara with full (un)service history, a theoretical braking system, and the best party trick involving chugging oil you’ll ever see, leave a comment down the bottom.

words.

And lots of them. Strangely enough, since I’ve started being really casual about writing I’ve probably written more per day on average than I have before. Okay, so the statistics may be skewed by the five thousand word monstrosity that I’ve unleashed on a few interested (and a few not-so-interested) readers, but I do think that just letting the impulse to write come and go is what works for me. I’ll have the most horribly compelling feelings to spew forth words at inconvenient times like Just About To Fall Asleep O’Clock, or I’m Driving And Don’t Have a Pen On Me P.M. (though that’s been remedied lately with the advent of a pocket notebook & pen in my pocket at all times), or the most dreaded There’s People Around And I Don’t Want To Have To Explain Myself:00.

Projects being worked on right now include the Caketrain fiction chapbook competition, the refurbishment and dusting of Soundzine, and actually turning this site into something interesting by gathering up a bunch of interesting people to write interesting things in a big ol’ feeder blog. Hopefully if I limit myself to those three I’ll have them all done by their respective due dates (being October, July 15th, and the end of July respectively).

bands.

Newly spinning:

Future of the Left – Curses!

Fucking amazing album featuring two of the members of Welsh band mclusky, you may have heard ‘Small bones, small bodies’ being spun on triple j lately at relatively high rotation (thanks purely to The Doctor, who loves them). The rest of the album took me a couple of runs to get into but once I did it took permanent pride of place in my car stereo.

The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible (I’m slow, so sue me)

You all already know how great this album is, so I’ll skip the retread.

The Music – Strength in Numbers

Haven’t listened to this more than a couple of times, but from initial impressions it’s not anything to be incredibly excited about. It’s like a new Disturbed album, or a sequel to an FPS; they’re all pressed from roughly the same mould and that mould is still enjoyable. It’s just not anything revolutionary.

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photo credit: Mozambique – Moments

NaPoWriMo continues on its relentless course towards the implosion that will no doubt occur sometime around the three week mark. I’ve just about caught up after an indulgent weekend of not writing anything, and although they are of, uh, questionable quality, at least there are ideas present that I can pry out and try to polish. As long as I get some good ideas out of the exercise I’m going to take a win from it, and so far there’s been only a couple that I wouldn’t want to revisit. I’ve taken (in the absence of better prompts) to finding interesting news articles and rewriting them–with or without artistic license–in poetry form. It’s turned out some relatively good pieces, though as the month progresses I dare say that it will descend into tiny little ‘newsku’s; the haiku form being the last bastion of hope for those puffing and gasping for inspiration in the final days of April.

In exciting news, my good friend Tim has decided to host a steampunk themed party for his 21st celebrations. I found a very helpful and enthusiastic website in the form of the Steampunk Workshop, whose tutorials cater for those who are looking to get started producing their own steampunk-themed pieces. Of particular interest to me is the electrolytic etching of brass, a process which is remarkably simple for the results it achieves. My initial thought is to create some sort of face mask, that I can then adorn with various pieces of brass etched with the process. I have an idea involving jigsaw pieces, glass, the aforementioned brass, some zinc, and a willing compatriot, but we’ll see how it goes.

Nothing much else to report, I’m a bit put out about the recent Amazon move to block alternative print on demand (POD) books than those they support, but that’s been discussed more thoroughly in other places. I’m not really upset for myself personally, because I don’t yet have the confidence or the necessary thousands of words to begin thinking about self-publishing, but it’s a bit of a big blow for the thousands of people that rely on Amazon to get their books out to readers. From a business point of view it’s an understandable move, as the sale of other POD vendors’ books could be seen as a piggyback that uses Amazon’s resources without providing them with adequate recompense. However, it’s still a pretty crap situation.

Musical recommendations have ranged from Husky Rescue, to Birds of Tokyo (Perth boys represent, yo), bumping on Explosions in the Sky, before rolling over Low, through Rilo Kiley to finish up with Beirut. If there’s not enough quality in those names to satisfy you, then I guess you must be some kind of strange quality vacuum whose gaping maw devours stars with a small sigh and licking of lips.

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Sal has organised yet another project for us all to undertake; this time it’s an online radio show (or shoutcast, for those that prefer the term). I’m meant to be coming up with a geek-out show, which I want to rope Tim into. I think we’d work pretty well as a team–we have the same sense of humour, and are generally on the same wavelength. Should be fun.

That’s about it. Aberdeen City is the current musical recommendation. Go forth and obtain, especially ‘Pretty Pet’.

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