Yes, it's all in my head....

Good afternoon!

I'm supposed to be doing homework right now but I keep getting distracted and start doing fun things with Photoshop and After Effects instead of the boring homework that has been assigned. I've just discovered how to make GIFs with AE and so now I'm going GIF crazy on my tumblr. Yay for procrastination!

I'm loving the confidence I've gained in Photoshop recently; we're not doing a lot of it in our classes but I have been using it a lot and so I'm doing new things that I haven't been able to do before. One thing I did was make a painting out of photographs for a story.

Keira and I have been doing a writing exercise together - we've each created a character and written letters back in forth as those characters, creating back stories and jobs and interests and friends for them. It's quite interesting what we're coming up with. I love it.

My character, Sophie, is a young artist living in New York. She's been corresponding with Jasper Clancy, a uni student living in Sydney who does acting in his spare time. Jasper found a collection of artworks that belonged to Sophie's grandmother that had been left behind in Sydney airport, and they've been writing back and forth to each other ever since.

Sophie told Jasper that she was going to paint her brother Alan, a cellist. In one of Jasper's recent letters he asked Sophie if he could see her artwork, and so I thought, why not?

I'd had an idea in my head since creating Sophie what her art would be like, and at first I started googling paintings of cellist to see if I could find something that would resemble her art, but I got nothing. Decided just to make my own 'painting' instead, and so I launched Photoshop and started googling for a cellist that looked like Alan.

I found these three images and got to work, turning them into this:

At least now it looks like a painting! I kind of would have liked it to look more like paint, with more thick drips and what-not but that's sort of hard to do ... for the half hour I spent in Photoshop I'm pretty happy with the outcome, especially because it's very close to how I'd pictured Sophie's art style and the cellist actually looks quite a bit like how I had pictured my character Alan.

Fun! Anyway, I've done more than my fair share of procrastinating today so I'd better get stuck into Flash.... Tata. :)

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their pefect readers." - Dawsey Adams, to Juliet Ashton

I was going to write a review about how much I enjoyed this darling book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but I think what I wrote to Jessie (and the comments that followed) about the book sums it up:

If there is any book in the world that will leave you with an overwhelming desire to tell others to read it, it's this one.

"The moon's an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun." ~ William Shakespeare

And my teacher just told me she's dactylic!

I love discovering new music. It's so exciting, don't you think? Well I had recently discovered Ben Folds and on a random impulse bought tickets with Hannah in the middle of Flash class back in April. We were surprised there were still some good seats left. Anyway, I nearly didn't go to the concert because I was starting to regret making such a big dent in my wallet for it, but in the end I wound up inside the State Theater drooling over the loveliness of the building.

My camera really doesn't do it justice....

Anyway, we got in there and from out seats we could see this:

Which looked like a pretty good view to us! Aside from the smokiness in the air from the crew obviously testing the smoke-machine before the audience came in.... It added significantly to the lighting later on :)

So first off Kate Miller-Heidke came out as support, and I wasn't really too keen on her performance because I'd never heard her before. Hannah told me she was pretty good, and she's a trained opera. Opera? I thought. Who listens to opera? No wonder she's turned to pop. So yeah, that was me initially being all skeptical and prepared to be bored, because I have had several bad experiences with support acts....

I short, I really loved her. I am no longer skeptical about the opera thing. Seeing her live, singing normally one moment and then bursting into this bit of vocal awesomeness in the middle of her songs was pretty rad. This song in particular that caused me to have a little spasm in my seat and think omgihavetogetthecd. Hee.



I get particularly excited when I discover a new female singer, because if you look at my ipod my top artists are Mumford and Sons, Coldplay, Ben Folds, Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Newtown Faulker, Peter Murray, and U2. ALL MEN. The only two female singers that I listen to a lot are P!nk and Regina Spektor. And bonus points, Kate Miller-Heidke is Australian! She has a Vegemite product placement in her video clips and sings humorous songs about Facebook and Southern Cross tattoos. And we get it. It's great.

Anyway, onto the star of the show! Ben Folds can really rock the piano. That was awesome. We got a couple good photos of him smashing some stuff out on the grand piano, accompanied by drums, tambourine, bass guitar and french horn. Um, cool or what?!

As I said, the lighting was an entertainment in itself.

So yeah. I love concerts and discovering new music and that is the point of the post. The end. :)

P.S Here's a couple videos for you.

One that I took of Kate and Ben's duet at the concert. Like hello! How does she even do that with her voice???

And if you haven't watched Charlie's music video for Ben Folds and Nick Hornby's Saskia Hamilton, you must. Right now.



And this song is on the Kate CD that I now own. I really like the video clip and the song is just AWESOME because it's about not being able to dance, and I can't dance. So yay. Watch it :)

In eighteen years, precisely, the planets will align ever so nicely...

Yeah so on Friday morning Dad and I woke up at 4:45 a.m. and cruised down to Coogee Beach to see this:

Those three dots at the top of the picture are planets - Jupiter, Venus and Mercury, to be precise. Down below in the middle of the photo is Mars. They're all rather pretty, aren't they? In 29 years time Saturn will catch up with them, and all five planets visible to the naked eye will be together :) God is pretty amazing, building all that stuff up there. I'm glad we get to see so much of it. It was totally worth nearly freezing to death at the beach to see this.

Sound sounds so good to me!

So blogger was down yesterday and I have a few things piled up in my head that I must write about, but now is not the time for it all, as it is nine minutes to midnight. I will blog tomorrow, but I thought I'd let you know that I just got back from Ben Fold's concert at the State Theatre with Hannah, which was totally awesome. Ben Folds was really, really cool and funky on the piano, but I have to say it was Kate Miller-Heidke's voice that blew my mind. I can't believe I have never listened to her before. I was so excited about this new discovery that I bought her CD, and she signed it for me right then and there. Here's proof: 

So yeah it was a pretty exciting night. I'll tell you more about it, and the planet alignment that I woke up at 4:45 a.m on Friday morning for, tomorrow. :)

Where's Jubby? The Royal Wedding Edition!

Can you find Jubby?

Yeah, I can fly.

So it turns out that turning my ankle (trying to catch that stupid bus) about four weeks ago also resulted in a stress fracture in the proximal phalanx of my fifth digit, or something. So now I'm wearing a boot for six weeks. I think it looks a bit like part of Iron Man's suit.

WIP, maybe?

Yeah and what.

Listening to Justin and Dylan having a really great time together.

Ugh it's making me feel depressed.

I miss my friends right now :(

If I didn't have this stupid ankle injury I wouldn't be so trapped in my house. I didn't realise how necessary it is to just know that you can walk out the door and stroll down the street any time you feel like it. I haven't been able to do that for over three weeks and it's killing me...

I wish it would just GET BETTER and I go running. Just running. Y'know, for the heck of it.


Gosh, I never type "y'know" like that. I guess it's rubbed off from reading It's Kind Of A Funny Story, which I'm glad to say came in the mail yesterday, but I'm sad to say I have already nearly finished it. It's a strange book, but the characters are so alive and the dialogue is so real and I really like it. I like how much I care about the characters. I feel for them. It's great.


And now I will stop before I sound even more crazy than I already sound, what with the blog-moping and the loving people who aren't real. Heh.

"I will turn over half a library to make one book." ~Samuel Johnson

So I was really excited that I'd figured out all the kinks in the murder scenario ... but I've run into a problem. My antagonist has to poison the King's bodyguard cougars before he/she can kill the King, and I wanted the poison to work within five or six hours at the most. I was going with methanol, initially, because it was looking great to possibly have one of the cougars survive the poisoning, and then be permanently blind, thus limiting their ability to be a witness (gosh, I sound like a lunatic. I promise that I would never poison anything living in real life, really), and then there would have been more layers to my story and more clues.

Unfortunately, as I continued my research on methanol, my perfect poison turned out not to be so perfect. Though it was easily accessible, fit into the time-period, and had symptoms that could fit into my plot, it apparently takes 12-36 hours for the effects of methanol poisoning to onset, and so the possibility of using it was totally out of the question. I need something that works within the schedule of the dinner party. 12-36 hours is way, way too long.

Thankfully though, when I was America I bought this book. It has a little information on poisons, so hopefully it will help me figure something out. I'm really looking forward to finally using this book - I've had it nearly a year now and haven't used it for any of my story, but it has great information on all the details of forensics including autopsies, time of death, fingerprints, bloodstains, trace evidence and firearms, all of which I will need to know about once the detective arrives. I love doing research.

Behold!

My new desk. It's pretty awesome. It's also a belated birthday present. Thank you family :D

Now I feel like a real writer with a real office desk and a real office chair. Now all I need is filing cabinet....

I'm sorry for the wedding spam but...

THIS PHOTO IS AWESOME. Can I have a lens like this, please?

♥ Kiss Me, Kate ♥

So my darling Kristy has blogged more than once on The Royal Wedding, and thus I feel that this second post on said subject is completely justified. If you're not into all that fairytale royal marriage stuff then fear not, it is perfectly okay if you stop reading now. I don't even know who you are, non-reader of my blog.

If you are, however, still with me, please take the liberty of click HERE and looking at this before you continue. The rest will make much more sense if you do. 

So, now that you're back with me and you've looked at that lovely little gif,  there is one thing more that I must mention before I continue - I love any excuse to quote Shakespeare. Hence the title of this post. I was rather excited when I came up with it. Sorry, I'll stop interrupting myself now. On to beautiful things!

That moment in the gif there was one of my favorites of the wedding, because - and I suppose this may sound a bit funny, but it's true - it was so real. So much of what you see on TV is fake, or glammed up, but when Kate stepped out onto the balcony, she just couldn't help herself - she was genuinely wowed at the amount of people standing out there to see her. She actually said it. I love it! It makes me happy. 

Speaking of 'wow', I most definitely wowed over this.

Oh my. Isn't she stunning? If I can't get married in something like her wedding dress, then this will do. This will do just fine. Gosh, I'm just absolutely in love. And I never fall head over heels for a dress. Sarah Burton, you are amazing. It's just unfair that one girl gets two delicious dresses on her wedding day - I mean, you do only get to wear them once. Such a waste. If I were Kate I'd would definitely dance around Buckingham Palace everyday in that. Hee. 

Yes, I'll live in London and get married in that dress, and this dashing young man will be my husband (unless Kristy beats me to it - yes, I know you're still reading!). And we'll ride out of the abbey in a horse-drawn carriage, and then we'll live happily ever after and become King and Queen and fill the palace with many pretty little red-haired children.

 

Hey, I can dream, can't I? 

All right, all right. Enough wedding spam (for now, anyway). I shall leave you with this:

You have permission to say, 'aww'. 

It's over 9,000!

Good morning. It's 6:52 a.m. and this blog is going to be neither long nor, I expect, coherent. I only slept for four hours last night, even though I went to bed before 10:00 p.m. The problem is that over the last three weeks I have done so little exercise or any sort of energy-draining activities thanks to my stupid, stupid ankle injury, my brain is still full of energy and continues to tick long into the night. The clock read 00:50 the last time I looked at it last night, and I think it was another hour before I truly fell asleep.

Ugh. I feel so awful right now. Hopefully some breakfast will straighten me out, and when I get home on my break today I will plan some sort of energy-sucking activity with Justin so that I can go to bed completely and utterly exhausted and hopefully sleep the whole night through. Is it sad how blissful that sounds? Perhaps not.

Anyway, the real reason I came on here to blog was to celebrate the fact that I finally did what I've been wanting to do for so long - I finished planning the murder of the King in Eloquence. I'm so excited and happy and satisfied that I actually got a writing goal done, but due to my exhaustion I don't think my excitement is going to transfer very clearly onto the page ... er, screen. So you'll have to do some imagining or something. But the point is, it's pretty good and if you look to my sidebar you will see my Eloquence word count ... IT'S OVER 9000! Hehe. I completed chapter two and FINALLY someone has actually spoken the words, 'The King is dead.' Took long enough. I came up with the idea for this story a year and half ago, and it's only now that I'm getting somewhere with the actual writing of the plot.

Well, I think I'd better stop here because my writing is soon to drift off into total rambliness that makes even less sense than it does now, and I have to leave in just over half an hour for my class ... ugh, Monday mornings are not much fun. But at least Hannah is being lovely and doing me the favor of dropping me home on my 4-hour break so that I can spend some time with Justin today :) That's something to look forward to.

Tata.