I am so awesome.

Earlier this month I went to a sewing workshop organised by a university club that I've been a member of since, well... University. It was meant to be a cloak making workshop, but you could make anything you liked, really.  So, I made a lining for my front basket!

This is the view from above.

This is from the back. I used twho ribbons to attach it to the hooks that go over my handlebars. The drawstring is theaded through the lining which folds over the top. Because the basket is narrower on the bottom, this will help keep the lining in place all around.

You can see here what I mean about it folding over. The drawstring is at the base of this flap. The shoe in the background isn't mine, by the way.

Of course, this being Winter, there's the slight issue of rain. I don't particularly want the contents of my basket getting soaked, nor do I want to risk it filling up with water. So, I decided that I need a lid, and I made one a few days later:

This is the view from the top. How pretty is that fabric! Got it on sale at Spotlight.

This is from the front, and those are my knees at the bottom of the picture. As you can see, the lid is made from fabric that is slightly wider than the top of the basket so it wraps around. I also used a drawstring to hold this one on:

So I now have two drawstrings at the back, and both the lid and the lining tie onto the hooks of the basket.

This is the view from the top, with the lid up. I used the same yellow fabric for the underside of the lid as I did for the bottom and outside of the lining, so it all matches nicely!

It's also waterproof! I did that by sewing a layer of tarp between the blue and yellow fabrics.



I did this without a pattern; I just used a measuring tape and my own genius brain ;-) And I now have a much prettier basket! My next project will be to make a matching lining for the basket on the back of my bike. That one will be a little bit tricker because of the shape. And yes, I will put up pics of my bike with the basket at some point. Once I've taken them :-)

Getting to Know You

I posted last week about getting to know my new camera and getting used to all the wacky newness of having a Digital/SLR hybrid. I thought maybe I should give you some examples of the sorts of things I'm getting out of it:

This is the first photo I ever took with the new camera. It is underexposed, blurry, and kind of... Well, brown. I was horrified at it, but fortunately I know that adjusting settings is all that's really needed.

This is a picture of a flower. No, really. If you look really hard and squint a little, you can almost see it. This was taken in the shade, late afternoon, and with too short an exposure.

This is another flower in the same patch of grass, this time with a longer exposure. I still wasn't entirely happy with it, though. It was too dark and way too blue.

This is that same flower, with a fair amount of photoshopping. I brightened it up, changed the contrast, altered the hue of the picture, then I took the colour out of the flower because I couldn't figure out any other way of making it less blue.

So you can see why my first challenge is just getting to know the device. I think I've made reasonable progress as far as this goes, but I have a fair way to go. I realise that very few photos out there come out perfect the first time and that most have at least some post-production work done on them, so I won't beat myself up about that flower not coming out so nicely the first time. But that kind of result without using photoshop is what I'll continue to aim for :-)

A personal challenge

My housemate and I are involved in a mutual challenge. Every week, we try to cook a recipe we've never done before. It's pretty good because it's helped to reinvogorate my interest in cooking, and I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to do something like that with photography, now that I have my new DSLR. There are, however, a few modifications I would make:

Firstly, I think that it should be fortnightly or monthly. The recipe challenge can be weekly because I can afford to just pick a night of the week when I have a few hours free and spend maybe 10mins choosing a recipe before I go cooking. With photography, I need to give myself enough time to factor in changes in my workload, other scheduling and weather. So I think I'll make it monthly, and put up a few photos I'm particularly proud of for that month.

Secondly, I've realised that my first challenge has already started: getting to know the camera. So this month, I'm learning about how the camera handles light. My goal is to be able to consistently get photos where it's clear what the subject is. I need to learn how to balance the shutter speed, ISO, and the F-stop (how open the shutter starts off being).

It's not as easy as it sounds, mainly because a DSLR is a bizarre mix of the SLR film cameras I once used and the point-and-shoot cameras I've recently become used to. For instance, on this DSLR I can't see how the photo's turned out until I've taken it. I don't have to wait for it to be on the computer, but what I see through the view finder isn't exactly what I end up with.

With the SLR camera I once had, I'm used to controlling the shutter opening by rotating part of the lens casing and I can't do that here. I also have to push a button to see roughly how much light is getting in at that diameter. Of course, that won't tell me how the shutter speed will affect the image.

I'm also really not used to ISO, and I don't really want to use it if it can be avoided because it results in photos becoming noisy.  This means I have to focuse mostly on the other two, and on using the flash.

Hopefully I'll have fewer shocks when I go into Playback mode, like today when I went to look at my shots and saw nothing but black...

Yet another photo post

These were taken in Adelaide, and have been tinkered with :-)

Daydreaming

 I was originally going to make this one entirely black and white, but then I got creative :-p

A Leaf on the Wind

That leaf made my opinion of this picture change a lot. Before I saw it when I actually looked at the pic on my computer, I thought it was pretty good. Then I noticed the leaf and considered it flawed; a real shame and a waste of a good photo. Then I embraced the leaf, made it a feature, and am pleased with how it turned out. A metaphor for our own flaws, perhaps?

Concentric Circles

This photo was also intended to be in B&W, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I did some tinkering with brightness and contrast to make it look better and I'm quite happy with it over all.

This was originally just a picture of a pretty window, but then I noticed that the lights from the chandelier matched up really well with the patterns in the glass. I thought about different ways of showing this off and decided that desaturating everything else was the way to go.

So, here you have it! Me and Photoshop :-)

PHOTOS!!!!

Some photos of my adventure at Adelaide zoo, which I went to on my honeymoon. Enjoy!

Wang Wang, the male panda.

Fu Ni, the female panda.

An un-known red panda. Possibly the cutest creature in all creation!

A Wallaby with beautiful eyes.

A pretty bird.

These are mandarin ducks. How something this colourful survives without being eaten by EVERYTHING is beyond me, but my goodness they make me happy!!!

Meerkat!!! On sentry duty. Alert little fella, 'inne?

This is a dwarf mongoose.

Stand-off between a chicken and a magpie. The chicken won. I'm not kidding.

Photo fest!

These are some photos I took on a weekend away that Oolon and I took together last year:

Ducks!

It's like something out of a fantasy film.

Books I can't read

Recently, I blogged about what I look for in a film. Now lets have a look at some of the things that I find important in books.

Everyone has a style of book they like to read, and styles that they don’t. We all have books we love, and books we loathe.

When I’m reading a book, the main thing it needs is a good story that is comprehensive and moves along at a reasonable pace. This is why I never got through The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. It also needs a reasonably well-constructed and consistent world. On that note:

There is one series of books that I was never able to read: The Lord Of The Rings series. I just couldn’t do it, and it's not through lack of trying. I tried about 4 times. I mean that quite seriously - four attempts. Never got to the end of The Fellowship. I also tried The Hobbit a couple of times. Couldn’t get through that one, either.

Part of the problem is just how much descriptive writing there is. Some people love this style of writing; they love the thought and detail that the author put into their construction of the world; they appreciate being able to read the effort that went into designing all the aspects of the book before it was put together into a novel. Some people need that much detail to be able to construct images of what is going on. I'm not like that.

Unfortunately, I have an extremely visual brain.  If the author says “grassy hills”, my brain inserts that image for me. Saying “Grassy hills on a partly cloudy day”, my brain gives me hills with grass, clouds in the sky, and corresponding patches of shade. It'll even insert the breeze that makes the grass sway.

If an author tells me that there is a door, my brain immediately forms the image of the door, which is mostly complete. The colour of the wood, how it’s carved, the relative dimensions, and these will depend partly on the context and the location of the door.

If the author then starts giving more and more information on the door after said door has already been inserted (colour, grain, type of knob, etc etc), my brain has to rebuild the image it already has which causes me to overload on information, put the book away and avoid ever picking it up again.

I don’t care how many shades of green the grass is - I can handle that bit. Get on with the story, please. Let me construct my own doors.

Like with movies, this is a matter of balance. World-building, action scenes and social commentary (Hugo, Tolstoy; I’m glaring at both of you!) should not overpower the plot. This has caused me issues with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglass Adams (which I still got through and liked in general), and also with Ringworld by Larry Niven (which I read and kinda hated, despite falling in love with the idea of a Ringworld).

It’s also why I like the writing of Sarah Douglass (The Troy Game is my favourite series), as she writes for people like me.

So if I tell you that no, I have not read The Lord of the Rings but the movies were OK, and that I’ve only read the abridged version of Les Mis, but I loved the musical, don’t look at me like there’s something wrong with me. It’s entirely to do with the way my brain constructs images, and the way it overloads when it is given too many things to factor in at one time.

Or, to put it simply, I have a Powerful Imagination!

Photos!

I've been wanting to publish more photography, so here are some photos I took on the last weekend of my holidays:

A pier at St Kilda Beach

Walkies!

Keeping Cool

People after my own heart :-)

Film media and the moving image. Or something.

Having known a few “film buffs” in my time, I’ve been thinking lately about my attitude toward cinema and what I look for when I go there.

Quite simply, I go there to be entertained.

I don’t like films that I feel are trying too hard to be anything in particular. I don’t like films that try too hard to be thought-provoking or deep, and I don’t like films that try to hard to be amazing action flicks that BLOW YOU AWAY! It usually means that there is something important missing.

For me, a movie needs to have the right balance of three main things, plus an optional fourth:

1. Character development
2. Plot
3. Decent effects/costumes/cinematography (depending on the type of film)
4. Enough good moments to make it fun

The fourth is optional thanks to films such as Pan's Labyrinth, which isn't "fun" per se, but is AWESOME none the less. The characters rock, the effects are well done, the story is coherent. It meets the three most important points.


There are a lot of films which either excel in one or two of these while completely failing in the others, or fail at all of them either by trying too hard or not trying hard enough.

For example, the recent James Bond film, Casino Royal. It was mostly enjoyable - the plot wasn’t too bad, the characters seemed to flow well through out. But the action scenes left me confused. I wasn’t able to keep up with what was going on and actually had to have them explained to me because I was so lost.

It was similar with Transformers. Plot was thin, but some of the fun moments made up for it. The characters weren’t all that fascinating but, again, fun moments helped make up for it. Couldn’t keep up with the blurry action scenes.

Fight club was one which left me disappointed: Fight scenes were well-choreographed, characters developed well throughout the film. But I had no sense of plot. The person I was watching it with told me that the character development and the relationships between characters was the plot... For some reason that didn’t work for me (kind of like the Kushiel series of books by Jacqueline Carey; the politics is the plot and just had me bored; but this works really well for some people). Twice I paused the DVD and asked “Is this going anywhere?” because I was bored by the constant, repetitive fight scenes. I also couldn't keep track of the narration - the deadpan voice meant that I tuned out very quickly and didn't process most of what he was saying.

I’ve had a lot of criticism for expressing views like this - I’ve been called a “smart-arse” by someone who assumed I just took Fight Club at face value and was just objecting to the violence, rather than paying attention to the commentary on modern masculinity, or something like that. That really wasn't the case. I just thought it was over-done in a lot of ways, and under-done in too many others. It could have been better executed.

I watch films to be entertained. I do like them to have subtleties which can be analysed and poked at, but they need to be subtle or you lose entertainment value and you get something pretentious and annoying. In film, stuff like that should be explored later by the viewer, not in-film by the director and producer.


But that's just my take on it.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

We all have books which we love and which we hate. We all have reasons for that love or hate, be they related to the quality of the writing, the nature of the characters, or the progression of the plot. Here is a post on a specific book and why it is wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG, because it incorrectly portrays a world-view.



As part of English for my final year of secondary school, I had to study The Outsider (or The Stranger, depending on the translation) by Albert Camus. I hate that book. More than the book, I hate the standard interpretation of it, which is that this book is about Existentialism. It is not.

The lead character in this book (Meursault) is one who shows and feels little emotion and forms no attachments. He has no great ambition. Really, he just is. His emotional spectrum seems to range from neutral to this is nice.

The people who claim that this book is “Existentialist” only remember the first half of the definition of existentialism: That life has no intrinsic meaning. They forget the second, and most important part: Therefore, we must give it that meaning ourselves. Another cause for concern is that I have met English teachers who were unaware of this distinction, and they danm well should be if they are teaching this book! So, if you're an English teacher reading this and were not aware, go inform yourself! This is important. Camus himself rejected the "existentialist" label, because he considered this books to be on absurdism.

"Oh, the burden of human choice!"

That “life has no meaning” is a philosophy known as Nihilism, and at its deepest this book is about a nihilist character. I get extremely angry and peeved when people use this book in an attempt to illustrate existentialism, because I just happen to be an existentialist. Believe it or not, it was studying this book which made me realise that. But only because my English teacher was smart and informed enough to remember that second part of the definition for existentialism.

I would say that a much more accurate description of the character is that he is a psychopath (that is, has Antisocial Personality Disorder). Key characteristics include:

• Lack of remorse, shame or guilt
• Shallow emotions
• Lack of capacity to form attachments
• Callousness/Lack of empathy
• Poor behavioural controls/Impulsive nature
• Lack of realistic life plan
• Substance abuse

There are others, of course, but I would say that Meursault displays all of the above. I, on the other hand do not display any of these. Of the characteristics which are not on that list, the only one I have is "impulsivity", and I already have a diagnosis for that.

I am an existentialist. My life has meaning. The people in my life and the things I do hold meaning for me. I do not believe that this meaning is innate or predetermined by some more powerful being, but by me as they are mine. It is a liberating, empowering, wonderful thing because I have those choices, subject only to my biology (which is inescapable to a great degree, so I accept it where necessary).

I am not a nihilist. I am not a psychopath. Stop using this book to describe a worldview which it does not actually represent.

Common Sense: Knowing when to hold yourself back, even when there's nothing else to do the job.

The Adventures of Coolman!

It's amazing what your brain comes up with when you're sick and bored...

Coolman is too cool for mere frogs!

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Fires are HOT, and therefore Coolman is way out of their league!

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ICY  FAAAAACE!!!

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We'll see you all next time on:

The Adventures of COOLMAN!

Can't think of anything to blog about

So here are some drawings I did on my iPhone, with one of the drawing applications, and one that I did with Paintbrush:

Random Guy

Quincy does Social Commentary

Alien Cat wants Food.

Changes?

I don't feel entirely satisfied with the way my blog looks, so I'm going to be playing with the layout and colours a bit. Please bear with me as I do and try not to be too annoyed at anything I do with the overall look :-)