2009

( lots of pretty things happened. )
For midnight I went up to the roof terrace and stood in the snow, watching fireworks burst all over London.

 

As part of my ongoing quest to prove as far as possible the proposition that peanut butter goes with everything, as long as you do it right, I recently took it into my head to try making a peanut butter and vodka drink. Another success!

I made a second batch of it on Saturday, because I thought I would go camping and it's a magnificently warming drink. This time round I heated it, but it's definitely good cold as well. Here's what I used today:

• 200 cc of vodka
• Juice of one lime
• Three tablespoons of peanut butter
• One spoonful of Mr Naga Hot Pepper Pickle (Very Hot)
• ~450 cc of water

The vodka and lime combination will dissolve the peanut butter so that you can stir it to a smooth, creamy consistency. Especially if you have a whisk, but a fork works too. Add the hot sauce and water (hot or cold, to taste) and keep stirring so that it stays smooth.

The Mr Naga sauce is really very hot, and unlike most hot sauces, it's not particularly salty. It's also a bit oily and has quite a distinctive flavour of its own, but you could probably get good results just using cayenne pepper or that Korean chilli paste.

It's got quite a kick to it, with the instant warmth of the vodka giving way to a slow-burning chilli heat. The flavour is rich and while it's certainly unusual, it's not nearly as bizarre as the idea of a peanut butter cocktail might first appear.

I found that it works well as a sauce, too, if you like alcoholic food. I tried some with a dish of methi (fenugreek) leaves because I was feeling too lazy to cook after sampling this as a drink - very tasty.

Hello! The 15th of March is the People's Premiere of The Age of Stupid, a dramatised documentary starring Pete Postlethwaite, looking back from 2055 at why we didn't do the things we needed to do to avert runaway climate change while we still had the chance.

It's said to be an extremely powerful (but quite entertaining) piece of cinema, and it may also help motivate the political will not to be so bloody stupid. The more people come and see it when it premieres (in Edinburgh that's at Vue, Ocean Terminal) or when it opens properly on the 20th (it's showing at the Filmhouse), the better chance it stands of getting picked up by more mainstream cinemas around the world, for longer. Here's a poster.

So, who's up for coming along on the 15th? It should be a fun event.

I also notice there's a series of related events going on in Scotland, which could be interesting.

On a related topic my brother's short film, 'Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip' now has French and German dubs available, as well as subtitles in Spanish, Dutch, Turkish and English. Does anyone have any good ideas for how to bring them to the attention of people who speak those languages? So far the film's been watched online more than 100,000 times, but of the translations, only the Turkish one has really caught on...

It's been quite a while since I made a picture post, and I saw some kind of a theme emerging, so here you go...

( Lots of photos )
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a quickr pickr post

When I moved into this flat I realised I was missing around half of the screws for my second- or third-hand Billy book-case, but recklessly I put it up and started using it anyway.

NB: DO NOT DO THIS.

Last night, as I was shelving a book, every shelf in the book-case collapsed, although thankfully the bottom ones were too tightly packed with books to get very far. The middle shelf had many of my sculptures on it, so quite a few of these were broken, some of them irreparably. C'est la vie.

Anyway, the point of this post is not so much to moan as to ask if anyone happens to have any Ikea Billy screws kicking around, that they could possibly spare? I think this is fixable with three or four more screws, but in the meantime I'm scared that the stuff on the remaining shelves, or possibly the stuff piled on top of the book-case, could also collapse! Crucially, the middle shelf is supposed to hold the whole thing together, and has abruptly abdicated this responsibility, so the outer panels are now able to bulge outward slightly, so that all the other shelves don't fit right any more.

Failing local help, I'll have to head to Ikea on Monday - which I should have done months ago I guess, it just always seemed so silly travelling 45 minutes each way to pick up half a dozen screws! Especially when I know Ikea will tempt me with pretty furniture and household goods that I can't afford and don't actually need.

Cheers folks - sorry to moan again.

I made a new applet, I'm calling it 'Shimmia' and it's based on distorting an image using trig functions.

I'll probably make it better later, there's loads of fun stuff you can do with distorted images and I haven't played with them for years.

This is my brother's film about positive feedback loops and tipping points in climate change. It's beautifully put together, alarming, highly informative and very accessible. What he's looking at are admittedly worst-case scenarios, but disturbingly likely ones. If you're not convinced, here's the script with extensive references, etc., and here's a broadly approving blog post about it on the Nature site.

If you like it, maybe pass it on. This stuff is important!

Usually I ignore memes, I think this one must have caught me off-guard or something.

"take a picture of yourself right now.
don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair... just take a picture.
post that picture with NO editing.
post these instructions with your picture."

Usually I would never put such a crap picture of my self on t'internet, but it seems like it would be against the spirit of the thing, whatever it is, to worry about that, so there you go.

I volunteered at Biz-Art today, the new little shop at the Forest. It was kind of fun, but we're not getting nearly enough people through there yet. Much more promotion required - hopefully they'll've hatched some good plans on this front at the meeting about it that took place just after I left. I was able to make six little sculptures out of air-drying clay during the day, and sold one, so that's pretty good really.

All in all, probably not as much fun as volunteering at the cafe, which I've done twice now - Monday and last Thursday. I feel like I've learnt a lot doing that, and you get to meet some cool people.

In other news, my brother's short film about feedback loops and climate change (which is really very good) has been doing well garnering internet fame, with more than 2,500 visitors yesterday, only a few days after it really launched. Though the flow slackened off today, I'm sure it'll pick up again.

I still don't have a job. This is bugging me.

Lately I've been feeling like writing a lot, mostly reviews. I start to feel weird when I haven't really been writing for a while, same as when I haven't been sculpting or taking pictures or maybe programming. I think life might be easier if I didn't have so many things I always want to do with it.

So anyway, I started writing a review of Dasavatharam a few weeks ago (it's fantastic; I caught it at a cinema in Glasgow) but I'm still only a paragraph in... and I fully intended to write a proper review of Footsbarn's wonderful Midsummer Night's Dream when I saw it, and maybe also the mostly-excellent but flawed Elizabeth and Raleigh with Simon Munnery, and perhaps I still will... and I'd like to do a review of Arkle's production of Wyrd Sisters (with diotina and eduard_green in it), which I enjoyed greatly, but maybe it's a bit hard for me to be objective there so I don't really know if I should. I wish I had more time for all this stuff, but mostly I need to keep working on my PhD.

I did manage to finish a review of Brazil today, though. I've been wanting to ever since I re-watched it last week. Actually I remember I wanted to when I watched it a year and a half ago, too, but I think I needed to see it again for it to really crystallise. If anyone's interested, here's the review on Everything2, and experimentally, here it is on Google Knol as well. Still not at all sure what to make of the latter...

lizzie_and_ari's wedding yesterday was just gorgeous. The brides, the setting, the weather... it was a privilege to photograph it.

More pictures when I have time!

24 hours ago:

• I had never seen this crazy flavour of JPG corruption where each file is mixed with bits of other pictures, with distorted colours, but the camera shows them as being fine until you zoom in... then they go all mad, and if you zoom out and then back in again, sometimes they go mad in a different way.


• I had never seen a policeman pull a bunny rabbit out of a letterbox.


• I had never sung karaoke. I got up at the Tollbooth Tavern last night and sang Minnie the Moocher; diotina did Me and Bobby McGee, then we both did Hallelujah, taking alternating verses and singing the chorus together. It was fun, and I'm almost sure we actually sounded pretty good - better than expected on both counts. Her dad then sang Annie's Song. We didn't know there would be karaoke when we went in.

Time spent in darkroom: 3h:20m
Total prints produced: 17
Negatives printed: 14
Pictures that seemed worth scanning: 9

I had my first full-on printing session with the enlarger at the Forest Darkroom yesterday, having previously only printed one photograph with an enlarger. It was quite slow going, but pretty productive really, all things considered. I picked up pace a lot at the end, as I started to get the hang of everything and realise various things I could do more quickly.

The roll I printed up is from my weekend at Faslane last year.

( photos under the cut )

On the down side:
When I got into Edinburgh at 11:20 last night I figured I should have enough time to drop in on the police station and pick up my stolen goods. So I went to Gayfield Square, rang their bell and waited patiently as instructed. Some time later I rang it again, and after I'd been there about quarter of an hour someone finally appeared. They then disappeared for another quarter of an hour to establish that they couldn't give me my stuff after all because inexplicably, it's marked 'for further enquiry', and the officer dealing with it wasn't around.

So I got out of the station at 11:55 to find that it was pissing down with rain and I'd missed all the buses that go to mine from Leith Walk. I rushed to North Bridge just in case there were any day buses still going, since I didn't have enough change for a night bus and there was no way I was walking with my laptop and my leaky shoes and my waterproof still sitting in the police station marked 'for further enquiry'.

That didn't work either, so I went and got cash out and then went to the chippy to get some change, where they sold me a portion of truly terrible chips, limp and undercooked. A night bus arrived almost immediately after that, so I jumped on before I realised it was one of the buses that goes a weird route and drops me a ten minute walk away from my flat.

I got off just after my normal turning and thought I'd walk to the next one, only to realise five minutes or so down the road that there really isn't another turning for about half a mile, and that the dark graveyard that looked like it might be a shortcut probably wasn't, after all. The chips got even worse as the rain poured down on them increasingly hard, but I finished them all the same, on principle.

On the up side:
I've always wanted to get a decent picture of North Bridge at night, in the rain, and for some reason I never quite managed it with my old camera, but I'm fairly happy with this one.
Also, I've established that my stolen property is still at the police station, and I can go and pick it up now. In fact I think that's what I'll do.

Soon I will be taking pictures with it which are in focus, and stuff. Soon.

I feel like there's been a lot of dying going on lately. I suppose it's probably only been happening at the usual rate really, a hundred people dying every minute of every day, but all the same... four friends or relatives of friends have gone down in the space of two weeks, and that's enough to make Death a presence in my life in a way that it hasn't been in a long, long time.

( In Tarot, Death stands for boundaries, transitions, changes. Out with the old, in with the new... )

I’ve been having great fun lately customising USB sticks using epoxy putty.

(cross-posted from my sculpture blog, where it probably looks much prettier)

After four years of living in Scotland, I finally head up to Aberdeen to visit my old friend Becka, to escape from Edinburgh life for a while.
( Much stuff is done. Pictures are taken. )
On Friday I take the train back to Edinburgh.