Autoblography

Starting Somewhere, Finishing Somewhere Else

2012-01-18T22:34:26Z

I wanted to post something...so here's a snapshot of right this second.

I'm sitting in the cafe carriage of an Amtrak train heading towards Boston, Massachusetts. It's about twenty to six, and it's dark outside. I'm set up with a laptop and phone and mouse and water bottle in a corner, with headphones on and a colleague on the other side of the table. It's getting a little cold in here, but the orange and white lights of stray roads and houses out in the darkness are wheeling and flowing past one another to the sound of Mr. Scruff's 'Jazz Potato' and the Cinematic Orchestra's 'Flite' and it's good train music.

I'm working, on and off at least. After working on the project for almost 7 years (on and off at least) I'm attending the public opening of the new Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum extension. My suit is in my bag and I'm excited, although the bag is in a luggage rack at the other end of the carriage behind me and I am worried someone has walked off with it. I will probably give in to the anxiety and check on it soon.

While I haven't missed the concern over blogging everything in my life, it's apparent when there are gaps on flickr or here that where there was an account or could have been an account of my life (autoblography, hello) there isn't one. And while I may not feel the urge to share as much as I used to, through age, apathy, prudence or all three, that record is something I love having. So whatever it is, however infrequent or pointless, I'm just going to keep doing this. Snapshots, or small moments, tiny aides-memoire, small links to what is a much more personal whole, anchored fragments in the greater stream of time slewing past in the real world like landscape past a cafe car window.

Hello. Sorry I was away - I was (partly) busy with this

2012-01-12T17:07:41Z

Like A Hundred Million Hotdogs, Sir

2011-05-05T16:07:28Z

8 minutes

11:49 AM me: My mind has just been totally blown

11:50 AM "The largest true-color photograph of the night sky ever created, shot by 28-year-old amateur astrophotographer Nick Risinger using six astronomical cameras. It�s not just the view of the sky from one location, but is instead a 360-panoramic view of the sky taken by trekking 60,000 miles across the western United States and South Africa starting in March 2010. The final image is composed of 37,000 separate photographs."

If you've ever wondered what the view is like if you are the earth

this is it

http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html

6 minutes

11:57 AM me: impressive, right? That's OUR GALAXY

plus, if you zoom in

thousands of other galaxies.

nuts.

11:58 AM ...or alternatively you could click on the i at the bottom and think about how it's a cool representation of information with a graphic index...

your call

12:02 PM Krissa: WHOAAAAA

whhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaattt

me: AWESOME, RIGHT

12:03 PM Krissa: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck thats cool

12:04 PM me: I am trying to figure out what all the black cloud shit is

Krissa: this is so cool

me: the KEY

is my favourite part

in the bottom left when the i is clicked

you are now looking at the center of the galaxy. you are now looking at the outer arm of the galaxy.

12:05 PM Krissa: ohhhhhhhhhhhh

yes

oh my go

me: you are near a source of magnetic interference. move your planet in a figure 8 motion to clear this

Krissa: this is quite literally the coolest thing i've ever seen

HAHAHHAHAHAH

NERD JOKE x2

me: WOOOO combo multiplier

Hardware Failure With George

2011-02-22T23:56:36Z

Getting George to perform is not always easy.

Although, according to my Mum, he's acquired a dislike for cameras since I moved to the US.

This becomes obvious.

Going To The Wall Street New York Sports Club

2011-02-04T15:44:28Z

10:38 AM Krissa: DID YOU KNOW.

(you probably did not)

that 222 years ago

TODAY

George Washington stood on the steps of the federal courthouse, right HERE (points at statue)

and became the first American president?

I'll bet you did NOT.

10:40 AM me: I see sweaty men's balls right by there!

10:41 AM Krissa: Correct!

me: I am a part of history.

10:42 AM Krissa: Not really.

10:43 AM me: >:(

Videogames As Time Travel

2011-01-22T02:00:00Z

Some people play for fun, others for diversion, competition, exploration or escape. Videogames may be many things to many people, but just lately I've realized they are scratching an itch I abandoned long ago - when I gave up the dream of inventing Time Travel.

I got hooked - and how- by Back To The Future,but after many viewings all I came away with was frustration - with all the great expanses of time to explore, Marty gets the time travel equivalent of a chore list.

TO DO: URGENT!!!

1. Ensure own existence
2. Bring Dad back from dead (secure socio-economic wellbeing of USA if time)
3. Rescue Doc from ravenous schoolteacher

PS: Do not, repeat DO NOT BOFF MOM

He doesn't get to DO anything. All he does is run around, a heaving mass of cultural paradoxes in his wake, luckily avoiding the catastrophic destruction of the timespace continuum...or his immediate family.

I could do so much more with Time Travel! Honestly. The movies were almost a waste of the entire concept.

It was settled.

This is what I would do with my life.

So as a youngster walking through the world I would occasionally wonder when my future self would appear. I had no idea what would happen if I met myself, grown-up and travelling in time...we would probably just stand there and be incredibly smug at each other.

I play games because they're fun, a relaxing diversion, occasionally artistically impressive and frequently engaging. Lately though, I've been feeling a hat-tip to those old desires to see other times and places and explore them. Now that a slew of recent games have made me realize this, it's obvious that I've always loved this about games.

Civilization

Hard to believe, but this is the first time I felt like I was exploring a world out of time; the sound effect snippets were enough with- of legionaries beating their swords on shields, or the creak of a sail rope on a trireme - were very evocative. Civilization II was addictive as balls regardless, and I remember starting an enormous map with one city, no technology and a cup of breakfast coffee, happy in the knowledge that I would be growing a nation there all day.

The next time I had that feeling was with Hidden and Dangerous. A shooter with tactics and supernaturally observant enemies, it was the first WW2 game I ever played, and it leapt around the theatres of that war and presented them with enough variety of detail and terrain that it sucked me in.

Hidden and Dangerous

It's at this time, game-wise, that the 'burden of proof' switched. From evoking times past to presenting them, my wannabe time-traveler was of course right there with all the other gamers cooing over the 'amazing graphics' and how it 'looks just like a film'. Let's just say that with any fantasy, be it a novel or a movie, there is a willingness to suspend belief in some measure, and that games of this era just required more than most other media, as they attempted to make this switch from the iconic and abstract to presenting an explorable alternate environment in three dimensions.

Then started the love affair with the Grand Theft Auto series...while GTA 3 was more geographical travel than time travel, Vice City mined that seam wide and of course the soundtrack didn't hurt...speeding around a neon-lit 1986 Miami in a sports care to Corey Hart's 'Sunglasses at Night'...this is exactly the sort of thing Marty McFly should have been doing, if he hadn't started out in 1985 in the first place.

You can say what you like about the Grand Theft Auto games (most people do) but they took a quantum leap over the competition in terms of sheer volume of environmental detail. Seagulls wheeled overhead, and behind them in a blue sky, a passenger jet came into land somewhere else in the city...when not being run over, the passersby stopped to chat amongst themselves and the radio kept up with events in the game. The plot had you tearing up the tarmac whizzing back and forth across the game map, guiding you through each district of the city, and yes, the world was amazing, but some missions felt like they existed only to show off how great the game world was (which was pretty great).

Amid the slew of Playstation 2 games I played, one, which seemed to walk and talk like a Grand Theft Auto clone, but took a traditional linear game and put it in a sandbox style context - not one filed with side missions, collectibles and sardonic media crammed with pop culture references, but one that was simply more complex, detailed and vibrant than it needed to be to fulfil its role as a background. It must have been the product of some serious effort by the developer, but it wasn't gaudily shown off or exploited. It gave a wonderful feeling of luxury to the game, and I fell in love with it.

Mafia was set in a fictional American city in the 1920s and 30s. Its cars were awfully slow with crappy suspension, and quelle horreur, they absolutely refused to bounce off each other if when you crashed. The amazing music of Django Reinhardt played on the in-car radios, which took a while to warm up, as though they had glass valves. Policemen fined you ever so politely. It was -just enough- like stepping into another era. I played it until I got stuck in the sadly absurd autosave system and the sound of seagulls around the harbor where I was stuck drove Krissa up the wall.

And now? It's just bananas. Titles on modern consoles scratching the Time Travel itch have more details, more environment activity and sounds, all of which are extremely gratifying. The sounds of a busy market in the Holy Land during the Crusades in the first Assassin's Creed game, or the canals of Renaissance Venice in the sequel throng with people going about their own business, talking about local bargains and gossip, along streets with great architectural detail and verisimilitude...and slightly over-amped weather and climate doesn't hurt.

Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption applied the latest facial and motion capture animation techniques to the faces of horses to ensure an uncanny accuracy of portrayal, and their reputation for quality control and period research means there's an extra layer of integrity to the gritty realism. Tip your hat to a policeman on a dusty street in the old west? Why not.

It may not be time travel, but maybe it counts when a certain environment doesn't exist any more...RDR is a game about place as well as time, and I love its weather, its cactus and wildlife (even if the appreciation is something along the lines of 'Wow would you look at the detail on that cougar! The bugger it's killed my horse')

Recently as well, a new Mafia game came out, set in the 50s. The gameplay may have been lacking, and it was criminally short, but for the time-travelling kid inside me, there were moments that had both him and me gawping at the screen.

And there was no Under The Sea Dance to get to. I had all the time in the world to explore.

Good Trip Home

2010-12-06T20:34:09Z

The Stuff Between The Ground And Space

2010-09-27T15:44:42Z

A shift in perspective of 200 miles...New York to Boston, or London to Manchester...and the sky is a sea below.

It's a thin wispy layer, turbulent and active, thronged with the light of cities.

I've heard the atmosphere described to me as the skin on an apple; against the bulk of the earth and the breathless absence of space, it's thinner than you might think.
It's infinity is deceptive; it is far from neverending, and merely big things can change.
Especially as those orange lights spread and burn in the night.

Audioblography: Bread and Milk

2010-09-27T15:40:02Z

Bread and Milk.mp3

Recent entry, read.

Marital Harmony

2010-09-20T22:12:27Z

Krissa: Okay, I love you! About pizza tonight...I defrosted the sauce and the dough and they're stored separately in the fridge. I'll keep you posted on when I leave class so you can start the pizzas while I'm traveling...I'll try and text from the bridge so you can preheat the oven and roll out the dough; if you decide to assemble it while I'm walking home that's fine, or we can assemble it together!
7 minutes
Stuart: I just ate a chicken foot

Bread and Milk

2010-09-13T12:12:49Z

"Apple."
"Eppool."

I try not to think about how I must sound.

"A."
"A."
"Pple."
"Pple.
"Apple.
"Arpool.

I am learning Portuguese - Brazilian Portuguese. Six years after marrying into a multilingual Brazilian based family I am going to upgrade from �gringo� status to �enthusiastic gringo�. In December there will be a big Brazilian family get together. I'm really looking forward to it, but I have three months to avoid sitting in the corner smiling politely with a Caipirinha for the entire week of Christmas.

I studied French and Spanish in school, and the Gallo-Irish nun who taught me French lambasted me for choosing Spanish over German for my second language. She thought very little of the romance languages. �Thee are all the seem!� She said. As a habitually lazy student, I saw this as a rare opportunity. Learning Spanish would get me Italian and Portuguese with very little effort, and by great coincidence, very little effort is my specialty.
Fourteen years on there are some linguistic dregs still sloshing about at the bottom of the memory glass, and while my remaining stock of Spanish phrases is starting to consolidate around the ones used to complain about late takeout, I still try to follow whenever conversations with Krissa's family completely accidentally slip into Portuguese even though I am sitting right there next to them at the dinner table. Sometimes the flow of the conversation is so obvious I join in and make a comment in English.

This never works.

When I am learning on the computer, this is what I must sound like to Krissa, who speaks both English and Portuguese.

"Yellow."
"Helloo."
"Yell"
"Hell"
"ow"
"oo"
"Yellow."
"Jello."

I sound so patently ridiculous the only person I am comfortable being in the room when I�m doing this is the dog. Portuguese is fucking hard. If you read it it looks like someone was typing Spanish really fast on a keyboard with no interest in correcting their mistakes. If you listen to it it sounds like someone is urgently recounting a fairytale to a child, perhaps one with attention deficit disorder; every sentence has exciting, looping high and low tones that dance giddily with in and out breaths, coming to an end with long drawn out zzzzzzzzh and oou sounds, giving the impression of skidding to an exhilarated halt. Don't get me wrong - it sounds amazing, but if you try to mimic it...well let me change that - when I try to mimic it, I fail. Deep vowels requiring lots of breath, like OOOOO, require sudden hand-brake turns into top-of-lung vowels sounds like OI with nary a consonant to bounce off, and the whole affair is sprinkled with Js that are alternately zhees or nonexistent but punctuated by breaths and/or disappointed looks from Krissa.
I worry that the computer takes pity on me after five or six attempts.

Earlier this summer Krissa ridiculed a British character on television for their accent, and attempted to mimic the way they said �milk�. There is no real L in the Cockney �milk�. It�s a dead vowel sound instead. We spent a while in conversation about the finer points of this.

"Miuhk," I said.
"Moiiik."
"Miuhk."
"Moiiik."

...and this carried on until she got annoyed and challenged me to say �bread� in portuguese. It is spelled P A O. Apparently the end of the word is not just O. It�s a dead vowel sound instead. We walked to the subway.

"Moiiik"
"No. Pow."
"No. Moiiiik."
"No. Powwoo."
"No. Moiiik."

This went on for some time. A young man who was clearly also walking to the subway crossed to the other side of the street, lengthening his journey time by one traffic light but ultimately relieving himself of the pressure of being too close to the cut and thrust of scholarly linguistic exchange.

"Pow."
"Moiiik."

Now I am learning Portuguese properly my vocabulary is expanding but my pronunciation is still terrible, and the fear I have, as my rough and ready skills expand, is that confidence and the delight in learning will lead me to completely ignore pronunciation because it�s insanely difficult. I am haunted by one of my childhood favourite TV characters - in �Allo Allo!�, a rompy sitcom set in Nazi occupied France over a garish laugh track. �Crabtree� was an undercover English spy whose French was perfect - apart from the vowels. He would walk into the cafe and draw the owner conspiratorially aside.

"Good moaning. I am the bronger of bod toadings. The Brootosh Air Farce have dropped their bums on the witterworks."

This is exactly how I currently sound in Portuguese, but I�m getting a little better here and there- I don�t have a completely inflexible accent.
When precisely drunk enough and in the company of not-too-many people I can do an English country bumpkin accent. When slightly drunker and in the company of just Krissa, I can apply my 6 years of living in these United States and do a passable American accent, as long as a gravelly 1980s movie announcement qualifies as an American accent.
I understand that the intricacies and myriad subtleties of human expression mean that the tiniest shift in tone can change a meaning and that any language student needs to be sensitive to this, and above all patient with themselves and the natives. For example! I once bought a train ticket from a window booth in the South of France without getting arrested.

�Good morning!� I said, in French. �I would like a ticket to Grenoble, please.�

The salesman looked at me, eyebrows raised and nostrils flared, as though I was urinating into the little ticket slot.

�Where?�

�Grenoble?�

�Again?�

�Grenoble.�
�I do not know this place.�
�Grenoble...it�s one of the largest cities in France, in the mountains-�
The salesman cut me off triumphantly.
�AH-HAH! You mean Grenobl!�

He grinned proudly at me as he printed off the tickets with a flourish, happy to have educated another visitor to mother France, and I restrained the sudden urge to urinate into the little ticket slot.

Still In Short Trousers

2010-08-12T20:01:02Z

This past weekend was BlogHer 2010 in New York and Krissa and I met up with the luminous Leah and Kristin and Corey for a wonderful brunch in Manhattan. Eggs were eaten, much coffee was drunk, and we talked about blogs more than I have in years.

Reading Leah's post here about how strange it is to have blog relationships that go back longer than other 'real world' ones (and it is), I looked back at my banner.

Bloody hell.

It's been eight years.

I may have been updating at a rate of a post a month or even less, but this here page is still ticking.

This was me making my entry into the blogosphere (do we still call it that?), on a sunny English summer day when I was newly graduated from university and had very little to do. The connection in my parents' house was so slow I used to surf the internet with a book to read while the pages loaded.

I picked a standard Blogger template. It had a lot of orange.

Eight years old.

If my blog was human, by now it would be asking awkward questions about where babies come from.

Almost Home

2010-08-12T15:52:00Z

I took this last night on the approach to La Guardia after a trip to DC. The stewardess only asked me to turn the phone off after I'd finished taking pictures. It's okay if you plunge everyone to death by avionics failure if you're in first class.

I don't really buy into the mindset that iPods and other non-broadcasting electronics are capable of electromagnetic leaping ninja kicks. The whole idea of turning off anything electronic during takeoff and landing is overkill. There has to be a good debunk of this somewhere online.

Found: A Memory

2010-08-05T17:56:48Z

I found this in a journal while rooting through a drawer looking for cufflinks. I remember sitting at one of the tables mentioned, writing as the day faded from dusk to dark, trying to capture the feeling of being there.

20th September, 2003. Refugio de Los Albergues, Pitres.

Let me bring you to this place.

There is no road that can being you here, no train. You can only reach this place yourself. On a sparsely wooded stretch of the valley slopes there is a small flat area of land, five minutes' walk from the village, along a dusty and rocky path that smells of goat droppings. There are trees all around. A terrace below supports apple trees and pine, beneath spiky-fruited chesnuts. The mountains surrounding this place are scrubby, gold and green and brown, grey-blue in the distance. The sun is warm and low, and the shadows are long. It is late summer and trodden-down yellow hay fills the gaps between grey stones. It is silent but for distant cocks crowing, the bells of a church at sunset, and the village dogs. There are tables, with metal chairs painted white that sit awkwardly on the uneven ground, and there is a long, low building here, its walls covered with piles of firewood. Off to one side of the terrace there is a swimming pool, five metres long and lined with black plastic tarpaulin with a rusting ladder at one end, lined with rough stones around its edge. It is slowly replenished with water from a garden hose, covered with pondweed, and full of fish. The old German woman who runs this place sits by the side of the pool smoking a rolled cigarette, staring into the water. She is wearing thick grey hiking socks under her plastic sandals, light blue and white three-quarter length trousers and a green t-shirt. Her name is Barbara.

A spinning column of midges dance in and out of the tall frame of plant-knotted steel that receives the telephone wire.

The building is made of stone, with irregular mortar; it has a roof of terracotta and bamboo. The window frames and wooden shutters are a deep maroon, and the fly-screens are green. The inside walls are white. The kitchen has two sinks and a gas stove run from round orange bottles. The wooden kitchen shelves are covered with packets of teas from countries all over Europe, and three-quarter empty plastic bottles of oil which give the room a rich musky smell. There is an wide open sitting room with a smooth concrete floor and a large fireplace bordered with woodpiles. Highbacked chairs surround a table in front of the fireplace. A hand-held griddle for making toast rests on the mantelpiece. There are two squat bookcases, with books in seven languages...literature, guidebooks, maps. A large chessboard rests against the wall next to the fireplace, beneath a German anti-war poster from 1924. There is a dartboard, a chalkboard and three paintings; abstract, bold lines; and a map of Andalucia on the door to the dormitory. There are 12 bunks, closely spaced, with thin mattresses. The washroom has two sinks and a shower where a tree from outside is growing through the wall.

The stars are amazing.

Is It Morning Already?

2010-07-16T16:55:38Z