Skyekat

There’s a post I wrote at various states of consciousness at various point along the plane ride from boston to San Francisco that is currently in purgatory on my iPod Touch. There’s internet, but no wifi in the rooms, so the first post may be last, but that’s no matter.

Overall the trip over was good, although an almost 7 hour flight with only beverage service? How cheap can you get? We already payed $40 to check 1 bag each, so no, I was not going to buy a $3 cookie to tide me over. But the ride was smooth and I finished Shivering Sands and got about 200 pages into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which is quite good so far).

But it was just so nice to start the descent into SF and see greenery! Yesterday had warmed up to a balmy 20 F (yes it has been in the low teens all this week with wicked winds) and we managed to escape between two winter storms. Not bad ones, mind, but a couple inches of snow each. As we crossed the country & I could see bits of land through the clouds, all I saw was snow, snow, and snow! So seeing plants, an unfrozen bay and temperatures in the high 50′s to low 60′s at the end of the journey made us quite happy.

Upon arrive I was reminded that, as much as I love traveling abroad, it’s nice to not have to clear customs, immigration and then worry that if you’ve forgotten something, that they won’t have it, or you’ll end up buying something you can’t use when you get home. We then got checked in, had a lovely lunch at the hotel restaurant, as our brains aren’t fully functional, and now I’m convinced it’s past dinner time when it’s not even 5pm here. The exhaustion of being up at 4:30 is starting to settle in as well. But we have some idea of what we’d like to do tomorrow, so that’s a good start. Right now I’m in a kind of, stare at things, click at things, stare some more state, but want to stay up to something resembling a normal time so I’m not completely twisted about for the next couple of weeks. We’ll see.

Anyways, I may poke at this thing a bit in the coming weeks, as I have internet for at least the next 6 evenings. Hope everyone had a joyful New Year!

(Pulled off of the iPod, written while on the plane to San Francisco, on very little sleep)

On our way to San Francisco now. Was indesisive about whether or not to bother with really waking ip until just now, when I opted for coffee to try to nudge the brain awake. 9 am est, 6 am in Cali. Today will be long.

Dug the iPod out & Shivering Sands. I’m thinking essays & shorts will be easier for me to wrap my head around at this point, but it’s Warren Ellis, so you never know. I’d read half of it already, so I’ll probably read the other half, then tuck into Girl with the Dragon Tatoo for the duration.

7 hour flight & only beverage service. Lovely. Glad we brought some protein bars on account of my being a vegetarian now. Although chances are I’ll breakdown and eat meat at some point in the next two weeks. San Francisco’s known for good vegi fair though, so maybe not.

Maybe I’ll poke at this over the next two weeks, maybe not. I’ll probably Twitter from time to time, as I’m a hopeless addict. I very much hope I will also be posting photos soon, as I realized I took next to no shots all year! Must fix that this year.

Now it’s 7 am SF time, as I’ve changed my clock over finally. Some clouds gave cleared a bit & I can see land, still covered with snow. Be very glad once we’re past that to. We flew over a large expanse of water just now. looked down and thought we were over the coast, but we can’t still be near the Atlantic. Maybe the great lakes?

Finished Shivering Sands. Had to contain laughter while reading a few bits. Which reminds me I also have 7 episodes of “The Thick of It” on my laptop, but perhaps howling with laughter like a crazy person is best confined to the ground. So, to dig out Girl with the Dragon Tatoo then. Let’s see if the brain’s up to dealing with a plot yet this morning.

(Just saw I wrote a shorter thing on the plane to Egypt last year, titles the same & never posted. But California has wifi, so hopefully this post won’t have the same fate)

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!

Currently doing some Photoshop work. Making impossible things as probable as I can. Meanwhile, The Decemberists are playing on iTunes, keeping me mellow as I work. “The Engine Driver” came on and reminds me of the tattoo I want.

There just isn’t quite enough time to get everything done is there? I think I’ll just give into the fact that I am bad at doing this right now. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, just not feel guilty about being sporadic and neglectful. This is supposed to be fun, after all…

Some links I’ve not posted here while I’m at it:

• If you have never read Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, you should. It’s been on my mind lately. It was the paper* I did my senior seminar talk on, and 5 years out of school, I find it more relevant than ever. (* It’s more a list than a paper really.)
• A beautiful book of prints from the filmaker of Style Wars (Not the highest quality, but Style Wars on Google)
• “I Can Read Movies” a gallery of covers for imaginary books.
• AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com If you haven’t been, just go there now! Check this one out for sure!
• SilhouetteMasterpieceTheatre is pretty punny
• I know it’s sorta older, but animated Quimby the Mouse rules!!!

Now back to work.

I’ve seen these a couple of times, but their second postcard pack just came out and I had to share. These are posters designed by graduates of University College Falmouth, originally intended to be given to first year students entering the program. For their second year, they seem to have now branched out, and other schools are participating. I think these little gems have advice and inspiration for just about anyone.

They have all the posters available for viewing on Flickr. Here’s a link to the Flickr set for Postcard pack #1, and Postcard pack #2

I have to include to a couple of my favorites:

Collaborate by Carys Williams	Hold Your Nerve by Luke Tonge
Br Yourself by Jane Laurie	Look Lively by Oliver Sutherland
Look Beyond Your Environment by Robert Evans	Everything is Possible by Lee Basford

If you’re interested in purchasing either of the packs:
Postcard pack #1 is available for £5.99, and Postcard pack #2 for £6.99. Prints of most of the posters are also available, most of them are £5 ea

I’d post this to FB as well, but it’s possibly NSFW, and definitely a little deranged… The most bizarre ads for home pregnancy tests…ever? Just… wow.

Not too much interesting to link to this week. Quickly:
1) deepleap.org. It’s like scrabble-tetris. Letters drop down every 3 seconds and you have to make words with them! Great fun.
2) Font Game from ilovetypography. I’ve managed a 17 out of 32, but only played the once. Damn this is hard!
3) CopyPasteCharacter is useful for all those odd characters you need and can never remember the key combo for.
4) Tweet Necklace. Want!

I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading and should be posting reviews on LibraryThing soon. I’ve plowed through AIR and Cairo by G. Willow Wilson and M. K. Perker, Channel Zero by Brian Wood, Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse (Vol 1) by Ben Templesmith, Fell by Warren Ellis, The Escapist by Brian K Vaughn, as well as a couple of short-form books, Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell out by Adam Koford and Notes Over Yonder by Scott Morse. I also bought Classics for my iPod and read The Metamorphosis by Kafka and am in the middle of Paradise Lost and The Hounds of Baskerville. And I still need to sit down with Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey (especially since it’s an early reviewers book! Bad Kat) and Local by Brian Wood. So yeah, lots of reading lately…

I’ve also been helping a friend out with a web project. I have to say, really re-learning website design is kinda breaking my brain. But it’s good, because I’m all too ready to make do with my own site, and this is pushing me to really learn what I’m doing. Hopefully it will be in a place I can share in a week or so. And once I’ve banged his site into some kind of order, maybe I’ll take a good look at my own and give it some more purpose… I really do love it when I’m in the thick of a project, when you start to see the form of it all appearing from the pieces you’ve pulled together. Beginnings are always a bit awkward, but once you’ve found your footing in something, everything just clicks.

Meanwhile this week should be an interesting one. Marathon Monday tomorrow, which means getting up at 4:30 am to work the 5K checkpoint. Mostly I’ll be watching two cameras that are set up there, and making sure they are running and no one bangs into them. It’s fun but a long day. Then Tues and Weds I’ll be going to Bruce Springsteen concerts, and hopefully I’ll see the Shepard Fairey exhibit at the ICA with a couple of friends on Thurs. I think I’m reserving Fri night for collapsing in a ball!

What’s the use of a blog you never update? So sorry to anyone who’s still kicking around here from time to time. Life intervenes as it will, and sometimes when you have the most to say, you have no time to say it. I’ve found I’m more likely to post a 140 char Twitter, or fire off a short FaceBook link than bother even attempting something as “long form” as a blog post. Yes, we have gotten to a point where two paragraphs is considered long form. My high school English teacher must be rolling in his grave as we speak!

I did a bit of housekeeping the other day and found that my biggest sin is starting posts and then abandoning them half-way through because I felt there wasn’t enough content to deserve posting just one or two things. Needless to say, months later half the links no longer work, and the ones that do seem pointlessly outdated. So I will try to post at least once a week, even if it’s a small post of a link or two. Just because I don’t have time for a novel doesn’t mean I shouldn’t share the bit and bobbins I find around the web.

So here are some things I posted on FaceBook that bear repeating here. Hopefully there will be more in the way of content soon!

(Time sensitive!) If you like Maurice Sendak and happen to be in the Philly area, there’s a great show of his work going on, and if you need a little motivation, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (one of my fav indie retailers) is having a competition to win tickets to the show, along with a copy of There’s A Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, the companion DVD documentary. But hurry, since the show is only around until May 3rd!

Bathtub IV is an amazing video that uses tilt-shift to make the footage look like it’s of dolls or toys. There are a few other good tilt-shift videos by the same user, but this one is particularly good.

Here’s a first look at the stamp Dave McKean created for the UK Post Office. They are, of course, hella cool.

Speaking of Dave McKean, Seven Impossible Things has a great interview with him. And it’s chock-full of amazing illustrations and graphics, so even if you’re familiar with his work, there are some great gems in there.

Lastly, to be filed under font geek, an amazing periodic table of typefaces. Damn!

More to come tomorrow, but we made it home!

So yes, that was the eye of the storm that we were experiencing the other night. Since then things took one heck of a turn for the worse. We had limited power and no water soon after I posted. Then night set in, and the winds picked up. Around 10:20pm I had to wake my mother up, since the winds were moving the patio set and I was worried they were going to blow through the sliding doors. Then we felt the doors straining inwards against the winds… Rain started to be pushed through the closed doors and winds, making the ground slippery. Then, bang, we lost all remaining power. We gathered our things, lit a candle and headed for the one room without windows. We spent the next 8 hours locked in the bathroom, with towels shoved under the door to keep the water out. It was stiflingly hot, and we barely slept, but we made it.

The next morning we were happy to find all doors and windows intact, but lots of puddles around. There was sand everywhere, broken branches, and gutters ripped from the roof. They told us there was a 60% chance we’d regain power and water, but they couldn’t promise, as we were at the end of the island, and 10 mn down a dirt road. We opted to head closer into town, where there was still power, to the Grace Bay area, where we could.

The roads were flooded pretty badly. The ground is mostly limestone, and the water doesn’t seem to go much of anywhere but pool into small lakes in the road. Our little car didn’t stall thankfully, and we made it safe and sound. There was a bit of a break in the storm, so we didn’t blow about too badly, and it only started to rain again once we were in the room. Of course, the power went off as soon as we got settled, but they managed to keep the water on. I don’t think I have ever been so excited to be able to take a shower in my life.

We’re a bit more protected from the wind it seems here. At least if feels that way. Last night we were able to sleep a lot better, although I did keep waking up. They kept the restaurant open last night and this morning. We’re in the eye of the storm (again) right now, and are contemplating a trip to the supermarket to stock up. We’re hoping that Hanna is starting it’s trip north finally, and that the airline decides to send more planes down once the airport re-opens. Right now we’re booked on a flight out on Monday… right after Ike is supposed to have hit. So we’re hopping we won’t be here to see him!!

I know we’re safe, and I know we will make it home, I just wish I was there now!