Skyekat

After waiting with baited breath for a couple of weeks, I finally got word on Thursday that my visa was approved and en route. It was delivered on Friday, and I was able to book my flight to Scotland! So I’m going to be leaving this Weds evening, to arrive in Glasgow at 8am BST on Thursday.

It will take me a little while to get settled, but school doesn’t begin until the 13th of September, so I have some time. I’ll have to get a flat, although I have some leads in that department. I’ve been bowled over already by the kindness of everyone I’ve talked to, and had plenty of help even before I’ve set foot in the country. I’m very much looking forward to getting settled and starting to explore!

Elaine4Queen posted a fun roundup of weird images on her tumblr t’other day, and it got me thinking about all the wonderfully weird things I have accumulated and decorated my office at work with. So here’s a little snapshot of what I keep around me to amuse and inspire while I work. I am sorely going to miss it all, as I’ve finally gotten it just so after 6 years. Maybe this will help me recreate it, or maybe I’ll make something better!

I have to start with the whiteboard.  It all started when one of our interns asked to use it to map her family tree for her thesis project.  It was up for months and months, and when it finally came down, a couple of us mocked up the family tree of fast food & children’s toys you see in the middle.  Then someone drew the gigantic Kiss Revolutionary War person (actually this drawing references a newspaper clipping I have of a kid who is dressed up to re-enact the Boston Massacre, which you will see later).  Then everything kinda spiraled from there.  Most of us have added something to this atrocity.  Note: I did not put my own name there.

This is what is directly facing you when you enter my office.  3 magnetic boards full of *stuff*  Plus one promotional Ted Leo & the Pharmacists poster, a printout of Mc Sweeney’s "I’m Comic Sans Asshole" and a thank you sketch from Ben Templesmith from when I let him borrow my power cord at the Boston Comic Con earlier this year.

Checking out the boards, here are some close-ups.

If you click through to the Flickr photo there’s more info on some of the stuff.  I kinda catalogued it all…..

If you turn to the left, you would see the sparsest of the 4 walls.  Near the door are my Brian Wood mini-prints

Then, in the middle of the wall, is the oddest feature of my office—the window.  Not a window outside.  No, I have one of those on the other side of the office.  This window opens into the main lobby.  So I can stick my head out and be 10 feet up and look directly down onto my co-workers’ desks.  I sometimes hurl things at them.  I mean, how could I not?

Above it is a Ben Templesmith Wormwood:Gentleman Corpse print.  In the window is my "health meter".  The number of Diet Coke’s in my window signifies how many more lives I have.  Or how many days since I’ve done recycling….

Getting further from the door, we have this fine poster, from the Andrew Bird show I saw last year.

Now, if you turn around, you’d be facing my desk.  On my desk are fun toys like these:

And the wall behind my desk looks like this. Note, those are Giant Microbes on the desk. I have HIV, flesh eating bacteria, the black death, syphilis, and the clap! These are my favorite things to hurl at my co-workers. I’ve also got an Emily the Strange Neechee cat, a skelanimal cat, Stitch [in handcuffs], a super-hero cutout with a client’s face pasted on [in a mocked-up nasa badge, don't ask], a puffer-fish someone found in the street, a rolling moose no one knows where it came from, and a hard hat we accidentally absconded with. Hanging are a set of fake keys, another nifty Templesmith print, and some very kick-ass letter press prints.

Lastly, to the right of my desk, we have more skelanimals (hard plastic this time), a glowing ghost, a Decemberists poster from a couple years back, a Decemberists The Crane Wife promo poster, and a Meg Hunt print I won this year.  (Yes, it’s a bit high, but I was running out of space!)

It’s going to be a sad day taking all this down!

Some big things are afoot in my life, so I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to re-start this little blog machine, and either introduce myself to those of you who might wander in, or give some context for those of you I know.

I’ve been neglectful of my blogging because I felt like I didn’t have anything really new to say, or anything unique that no-one else was already saying better. I felt stuck, and this feeling spilled over into my life as whole.

I’ve spent the last, oh 6 years or so, working at a video production company. I started there fresh out of school, with a degree in graphic design that focused primarily on print design. I kind of barreled my way through college. When I graduated high school in 2000, I actually attended college for one semester focusing on majoring in either computer science or physics. Yeah, not what you’d expect. After drifting for about a year and a half, I landed back in school and latched onto graphic design and somehow managed to work morning, noon, and night and graduate in August of 2004. I kinda like challenges, as you might have guessed.

Anyways, in my last year of school, I got really into photography and also took a class in video production. That class led to an internship, and then to a job. I liked the idea of stretching the concepts that I learned for print and applying them to videos. I built on my limited experience with Final Cut and After Effects until I became a pretty decent motion graphics creator and post-production art director. It’s been fun, but I’ve been picking it all up a I go, and I’m starting to get to the edge of where I can push myself.

I’ve also noticed this huge rift between the worlds of video and print. It’s really important in the videos we produce that the look and feel of the end product is an extension of the existing brand of the company we’re working with. A lot of time we have to do a fair bit of education on how video works, and what can and can not translate across the mediums. I’ve been really surprised by the segregation of the fields, when I feel like, to really produce and market anything in today’s milieu, you need to be able to translate your message across every channel available to you.

So when I came back from my trip to California this winter, and saw myself falling back into the same ruts, I decided it was time to do something about it. I just couldn’t see myself at the same job next January, but the question loomed large—what should I do next? For the past few years I have felt like I missed an opportunity at college. I could have gotten a lot more from the environment if I had taken my time, rather than rushing to tick boxes. I started looking for Masters programs in design that were interdisciplinary, and by the by, there are precious few. My timing was maybe not the best, as most schools had their applications due around the time I started looking. But I thrashed and over the course of about 6 weeks put together a portfolio and did manage to submit a couple of applications, thinking that if I didn’t get in, it would be good practice for next year. To my utter amazement, I got into the school I wanted to go to the most…

I got accepted to the Glasgow School of Art! Which is amazing in so many ways. Glasgow is one of the few cities I’ve visited where I felt instantly at home. The school itself is amazing; a landmark building which is incredibly inspiring in its own right. And how often do you get a chance to live in another country?! So yeah, of course I jumped at the opportunity.

For the next two years, minus breaks, I’ll be living in Glasgow, trying to push my boundaries design-wise and trying to soak up as much of Scotland (and anywhere else I manage to get to) while I have the chance. I figure that’s something I’ll want to keep a bit of a record of, and bore you all with my thoughts about design, craft, media and technology :-) So I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I’m sure I will!

One last day of Cali to write up. I had such an amazing time in California, and certain places had the same vibe as Glasgow for me. Hard to explain other than it just clicked more than visiting other places. There were places I’d love to live at some point, rather than just visit once.

I picked up a copy of Coilhouse purely by chance. My mother wanted some magazines to read while waiting in the airport to go home. Loved it. It’s simply an awesome magazine, and another good reason why print isn’t dead at all thankyouverymuch. The whole thing made me yearn to do more things. More weird things. Oddly, I was flipping through the small ads up front, and saw an ad for someone who used to live with a good friend of mine. Which cemented the longing into a need to do things that were my personal brand of odd.

So as I’m slowly (as always) sifting through the pictures I took I’m saving some of them to the side. They’re different in tone from my usual stuff. They’re more manipulated, and I’m more interested in the feeling from them, rather than pretty documentarian pictures that I tend to create more in bulk. It’s a step in the right direction, but is it a big enough one?

Age old dilemma then: how do you take all the things you love, and turn them into the thing that you do?

I’ve only been home a countable number of hours, and already I’m in a pattern where time has slipped away, and it’s far later than I thought and I haven’t written or read anything I wanted to today. Can I please go back on vacation? I haven’t even gone back to work yet! And god I miss the food. Such good food, and so much of it was local, in-season, sustainable, humane, organic, or otherwise good for your body & soul. I know I’m privileged to have seen and done the things I have in life, but coming back to reality is no fun at all.

Tonight brings a snow storm (10-12″ yuck) and we’ve already lost power once tonight. Hopefully once will be the only power outage, and that the snow will make me slow down again for a day & I can tell you all more about my trip, and upload some more pictures. I really want to read some of the books I picked up at Little Otsu, which I purposely didn’t read while I was away so I would have little treats for myself upon returning. And I should finish “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I’ve stalled out about half-way through…

But tonight I will shut the computer, maybe flip through a book and cuddle with my cat, who seems to be less mad at me, and more just incredibly happy that I’m home. Goodnight all.

So, obviously, I’m doing something wrong. I’ve posted all of 5 times this year, which has led me to question whether or not I should keep this up. Or if I should keep a website at all. I spend so much time on things like Facebook & Twitter that it seems silly or superfluous to keep my own website.

But then, I think about all the things I haven’t talked about… I never even mentioned that I went to Egypt in Jan. And this month alone has been totally awesome! I’ve seen a bunch of good concerts, and read a ton of good books. The other month a friend of mine bought me the best comic ever, Local, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly. I need to write a review about that like there’s no tomorrow. Then Brian Wood helped a an independent comic retailer from Arizona relaunch his online comic shop (which is totally awesome by the way) and I ended up winning a autographed iPod shuffle, with a kick-ass custom playlist. I mean, how much better can my month get? And I’ve been reading Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, which is so utterly good I can’t even tell you. Nevermind the five awesome webcomics I’ve started reading in the past six months. I really do want to go back and finish telling all the tales from my trips too. So what if it’s years later? I still had an amazing time and saw great things.

So what am I doing not telling the world about this awesome stuff I love?!

I guess I just didn’t know how to jump back in. Inertia can take hold sometimes. But, damn it all, I have things I want to share! Things I think are awesome and want everyone to know about. So I’m hoping the fresh new look will help motivate me to gather momentum. I’m cleaning house a bit as well, so things will be shuffling around and in flux for a bit, but here’s to a fresh look at things and starting anew!