Further displacement feelings: when I went out to see some bands at Spectrum last Friday (happy small venue; so-so bands and disappointing that the band I had gone to see didn’t turn up!) someone commented on my skewed accent and I said “I spent a few years in London recently.” 10 months ago isn’t exactly recently is it? Yet sometimes I forget that I’ve left. When I was sitting there watching all the indie kids I kept seeing people that looked exactly like those I used to see at gigs in London. Same style, same hair, same stances.
When I was younger I had a theory that everyone in the world had another self of sorts – someone who had the exact nose or eyes or thoughts. In your life you’d see this person atleast once, maybe walk past them on the street or meet them in a checkout queue, and you’d recognise yourself in them. That’s also why sometimes you meet people and think they remind you of someone else.
On that theory, maybe all the London kids have their doubles in Sydney. Or perhaps we just have a lot of travellers.
In other things.. due to lack of enthusiastic results (read: Kimi’s car failed again) I’ve not bothered to mention the last F1 race. Maybe next weekend in Shanghai things will go to plan.
This afternoon I received pre-release copies of the upcoming Planting Seeds Records compilation Sunsets and Silhouettes which has Sister Vanilla‘s Pastel Blue, an acoustic version of Freeheat‘s Back on the Water and lovely tracks by Fonda, Dakote Suite, and Camera Obscura amongst others. My name in print on the sleeve – I feel special.
Further messing about with Flash actionscript and various images I’ve made came up with this little thing.
Stopped in at Kinokuniya bookshop (with my 10% discount card and their fantastic selection I don’t think I’ve bought new books anywhere else in a long time) and picked up the latest adventures of Thursday Next – Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten. The fourth in the series, I can’t rave loud enough about how much I enjoy these novels about a literary detective named Thursday Next who lives in a kind of parallel world where Wales is a republic and people have Dodos as pets. It’s not taxing reading, more of a giggle with a good chunk of suspense wrapped up in make believe.
I’m disappointed in myself for not realising the novel was out and also finding out I’ve missed out by two days on an author talk by Jasper Fforde in Sydney. But atleast I know what I’ll be reading at bedtime for the next few nights!
Also picked up Alan Lightman’s Reunion and Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love both purely on blurb and a skim of the first page.
If anyone’s in Sheffield, UK, between the 27th and 30th of October go and check out Dan in a play called Marriage at the University of Sheffield Drama Studio. Report back.
🙂 thanks for the plug.
And… the London accent rubbed off? Must’ve happened after I knew you 😉
More theories: maybe indie kids are the same the world over, one big homogenous hetereogeneous race. Or maybe they have an exact replica only somehow inverted who lives on the (nearly) exact opposite side of the world from them. Or maybe your brain’s as munged as mine and you can’t tell the difference between two people.
I am sooooo jealous of your Flash skills… I’ve been building my own little image viewer this last… gawd, must be about two weeks now (if not full time), and it’s shit compared with yours. Is yours all in the Flash, or do you get the image data from an external source? I _finally_ got to grips with hooking Flash Remoting up to PHP, so that I can scan a directory on the fly and build an image library with thumbnails. But now I’m about to rebuild it, coz I realised I have a book with a better thumbnail viewer recipe, all I have to to do is add the remoting…
Oh, and that was a great race. Go Jenson!
The latest bit is all in Flash but my city lights one’s not – it loads up external images.
Kirupa.com has some well written tutorials and FLAs for using external files. Just remember that it’s important to show the process of loading when reading external text or image files or else you can get some quirky goings on when it’s on the live server.
In regards to reading a directory on the fly to create an image library – one thought would be to read the directory in to an array in the php page and pass that array as a variable in to the Flash.
wales isn’t a republic? when did that happen. go independent wales go…. er. get confused. always thought wales was a republic. well it should be. ramble.
Caught Fford’s author talk up here in Brisvegas, quite interesting to hear him talk about his creative process. I’ve only just finished the second book though.
I’ve found indie kids all look the same world over too. Hipster Bingo would work just as well in Sydney, London, New York, anywhere. Except perhaps the beer and cigarette brands.