Today’s achievements:

1) A Trip To London In Maps. Highly recommended. You can see what it did to my head here.

2) Dead Air and Digitalia now fire a notification of to my Twitter stream whenever they are updated. This sort of thing is irrelevant bollocks to most of you, but I feel a certain professional obligation to play with web services like this, just to see how I wind up using them, so that I can point clients/employers at them when relevant.

3) In a similar vein, I have updated my aggregator site, so that it pulls in my myspace blog, althought naturally mpsacks don’t do anything so considerate as provide a full content feed, despite the fact that the content is mine…. I’ve also added some what we are apparently now pleased to call a “lifestream” to the site. It seems like a logical fit with the general purpose of having that site, and again, it may have possible professional uses.

4) I’ve made a start on the first serious post for my myspacks account, and will get on with more on Wednesday. In case any of you are wondering what I’m suddenly doing with all this myspacks nonsense, I’m over there for purely self-promotional purposes. I’ve got some plans for next year that will mean I want to try to build an audience for some work, and I think myspace may be useful in doing it. The blog there is going to be a load of waffle about Art, at least to start with.

5) I’ve gone through the few shots I’ve taken recently, and generally sodded about with photos.

This holiday business is all quite tiring, really.

I’m out all day tomorrow, so if you could all try not to do anything interesting that I’ll need to know about until Wednesday, that’d be ace.

Quicksilver Fires

Quicksilver Fires

I don’t really want to get into a discourse on the meaning of the various elements of the shot, and yes, I suppose they are some pretty old/traditional/obvious symbols, but still, the symbolism of this shot means a lot to me. I’ve been trying to find an image with these elements that I liked for a while – I’ve had another lined up as a “maybe” for about a month now that I might put up just to illustrate a completely different approach to the same idea

A few hours after I took this photo, the glass candle holder exploded. It was a bit unexpected, I have to say.

Testing

Sorry, just test an rss-related device, and I need to cause an RSS feed to update. Move along, nothing to see here.

Right then: next week:

Things I want to see next week:

All of the above are free, or one or two quid. (Assuming that you don’t make the suggest voluntary donation.)

I’ll be doing the above Monday, Tuesday and possibly Thursday, and yes, I expect to also spend time in the rest of the respective museums (where there is a “rest of the museum”) as well as the specific exhibitions.

Who’s interested in what, and free when?

Myspacks

So, I finally got around to a ten minute play with that myspacks account that I signed up for ages back, on a vaguely multimedia whim. I’ll say this: for a website that’s so clearly stalled in 1999, they do make the multimedia stuff easy…

Should any of you be so inclined, I’m at http://www.myspace.com/electricana – do please let me know where I can find you if you’re on there, so I look like a bit less of a billy no mates.

Secondly, and this one is important: why have I not seen it more widely shouted about that it *is* possible to stop other people’s tedious musical drivel from starting up just because you happen to stumble across their myspace page? anw and I were kvetching about this very thing the other night…

(You need to sign up for an account, and then it’s in the “Music settings” part of the “Account settings” system, should anyone not know about it, and be as annoyed as I am with the bloody stuff. Yeah, you do need to be logged in, but it’s not exactly a hardship…)

Matriarch

Matriarch

One from last Christmas, as it turns out. I’m in the process of working out what to archive of the last year’s photography, and what to just ditch, and I turned up this one, that I toyed with posting last year, but couldn’t find a version of it I liked. Having started to do these tinted B&W portraits a bit lately, I thought I’d see what this looked like, and lo and behold, I like it more.

This is, as those with good memories for faces might recall, my grandmother. The inamorata says that she things that this shot looks scary. I disagree, but then, this is a woman I grew up with, so I may be biased. What do you think?

Alien Country

Alien Country

Not my finest ever shot, but I do like the way that this might, at first glance, be mistaken for a landscape shot across a tree-covered valley. I’ve made sure the colours are a little over saturated, and deepened the shadows, trying to create a sense of unease, of something out of place and slightly unnatural.

I’ve been reading Lovecraft, lately.

Dad

Dad

And a return to something more conventional – a shot of my Dad. This is the first decent photo I’ve managed to get of him, because he has the same gift I do for looking bloody awful in photos. This one’s not perfect, either but it’s the closest I’ve ever manage to get to him looking like he actually looks.

On a slightly-related note, I ought to take a moment to thank [info]ewa for the new default icon for this journal, based on one of her photos of me and my camera.