Above: the retro/Victoriana/steampunk video for “Flush”. I like the giga-Victoria.
I’ve been learning to juggle five balls recently. Four balls is pretty boring; essentially, it’s throwing two balls in one hand simultaneously – something that’s hard, but not impossible. Throwing five balls is something other entirely, requiring a serious amount of practice and training. Thankfully, I’ve got the internet to help out.
I don’t read all this stuff a lot, because it’s maddening to think about it at the same time as trying to do it. There’s a certain about of mindful meditation, but after a while I’ve just been listening to music. When not throwing balls into the air, I’ve been catching up with my reading or watching movies. It’s not all work work work, y’know.
Genevieve Valentine is a writer and essayist, working in the SF area. She also has an obsession with Catherine Cookson TV movies, where high levels of snark are to be found – although this mainly seems to come out on her Livejournal blog.
Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but more interestingly he’s a short-tempered essayist on elements of internet culture who has no truck with shibboleths. His blog might occasionally throw up a few nice pieces, but it’s his essays that are really interesting.
Mark Fisher has been linked to by a few people whom I enjoy reading, and I just finished his book. Thankfully, for a heavyweight leftist political tract, it was really short and kept referencing SF.
The Meat License Proposal by John O’Shea – imagine if you had to take the equivalent of a driving test to eat meat? One of the projects that, when I describe it, always has people volunteering to take a meat license test, where they would learn to kill and prepare their chosen meat.
The AV Festival is back again, with various installations and talks across the North-East. Some things are harder to locate than others on the sprawling website, and some feral trade coffee sounds good, but is this an open workshop or is it something else?
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=69832
I’ve just come back from Helsinki’s Pixelache festival. Rather than try and write some words about it right now, I’m just going to put up this slideshow from my Flickr set because I’m feeling a bit under the weather. I do have an idea for a longer written piece, but it’ll have to wait until I can get out of bed.
