Antispin

Despite all the somewhat crazy stuff happening in London, it’s awesome to see people being kind to their fellow humans.   © Licensed to London News Pictures. 07/08/2011. London, UK. As looters and rioters smashed up shops, looted and fought with police in Camden Town, Philippa Morgan-Walker, 25 and her husband, Jonny Walker, 31, made tea for the police who were protecting their street. Some of the officers had been on duty for more than 30 hours. ...

So North London exploded in rioting and fires and all sorts and this has been going on for the best part of 3 days now. While there are folks out there better qualified than I to report on the whys and wherefores of the situation, the one thing that’s struck me when watching the news coverage of what’s going on is the wording and general feel of the reporting. To me, it feels like the media is trying as hard as it can to distance those carrying out the looting, rioting, etc from the populace. ...

My friend Katelyn played me In My Mind by Amanda Palmer on her guitar and it stuck. So now I’ve managed to track down the tabs and lyrics and am going to start learning it! The lyrics are a great reminder to live in the present instead of constantly planning and thinking about how things are going to pan out in the future. Hippy-esque rant over! Enjoy the tune! That and Amanda Palmer’s CD cover looks quite amusing! ...

It’s been an age since I got a clip of myself just jamming with my poi, but we managed to get one when I went north to Arbroath to visit a friend. It was an amazing day and there was nobody around for miles so we had ourselves a play session! While it’s not hugely varied, it serves as a nice reminder for me to mix things up some and to remember long-forgotten or little-used moves and patterns as at the moment, I need reminding that variety is the spice of life! ...

Came across this on Beatport – it’s a track on Simplify Records and it’s a lovely dark, moody, yet chilled dubstep-ish sort of noise. Well worth a listen to. It’s a great mix between the almost grimy side of dubstep and delicious acoustic sounds without assaulting your senses! Grab it on Beatport if you want to support the artist! Honestly, do it. It’ll make you a better human being, somehow! ...

I was at a friend’s house over the weekend and since my new EOS 60D arrived last week, I spent a large chunk of time playing with it and getting to grips with its various quirks and foibles. There aren’t many, thankfully. I also wound up shooting lots of macro shots of bits of plants and I must say, I’m very impressed with the performance overall!  More Dried Leaves

Here are a couple of tracks I came across on one of the iTunes ambient radio stations. Sadly I forget which one, so I can’t really credit it with awesome music but that doesn’t detract from the awesome factor! httpv://youtu.be/eeev3HGBi8o httpv://youtu.be/pn8-qRGBrXA

I had to get this one in here too. A quick rundown of what the UK is and how it works, as well as explaining the Commonwealth and Crown Territories. httpv://youtu.be/rNu8XDBSn10

Some more delightful downtempo chillstep tunes came my way yesterday and of all of them, I think I like this one the most. It’s a lovely take on the stereotypical dubstep structure, but without the driving melodies and earth-shattering basslines. Instead, it’s light and airy with a hint of dark, dirty bass. Sublime! httpv://youtu.be/Tz7usf-KM

I came across this tiny snippet of a TED video on the youtubes and rather unsurprisingly, it’s stupendous! It sort of mirrors how I came to be at this point in my life – by saying “yes” to stuff and trying new things, even if they seem somewhat far-fetched. It’s how I got round to going to Burning Man, despite never having been and being completely out of my depth. ...

My friend Renée pointed me at Addictech.com which is an amazing resource for finding new delicious noises to play. Anyhow, we got talking and while exploring the site, I came across this guy: DCarls, who created a couple of gems that I knew I had to have straight away. Imagine my lack shock and surprise, then, at how good these tunes are! httpv://youtu.be/smIhCRoN3D0 httpv://youtu.be/hwLHbSyQsYc

After nearly turning my HTC Desire into a matte-brown and rather expensive paperweight, I emerged on the other side with a bright shiny new phone which now has a whole bunch of things installed on it. The first thing that I did after recovering it is immediately flash Oxygen 2.1.4 on it. It’s an Android 2.3.4-based firmware which was built from Google’s released source code, meaning it’s not some leaked hack job like a lot of the “Desire HD” ROMs out there. ...

I was going to try to write a thoughtful post about the effects of chemical imbalance on the brain but, predictably, I’m unable to marshal my thoughts into a coherent stream, so instead I’d like to share some more music with the world. Both delightful dubstep-type tunes but very chilled and minimal. Great “doing stuff” music! https://youtu.be/BFCMnWRIv6Y https://youtu.be/OnmyTq5QwqU

While browsing the web looking at videos, I stumbled across a series of clips that were shot on regular 30 or 60 FPS cameras like mine and then slowed way down with incredible results. I was intrigued, as one would naturally be by such tech. I discovered that folks did this with a plugin called Twixtor, which through some mathematical wizardry does some highly impressive things with frame interpolation. What this means is that is seamlessly inserts additional frames between your existing ones in order to slow down the action by quite remarkable amounts. ...

I came across this on DeviantART! It’s a simple (ish) piece of flash programming but it produces some rather pretty patterns and is quite addictive. Spirograph freaks, eat your heart out! Psychadellivision by ~Volcanic-Penguin on deviant ART

Someone introduced this music thing to me. It’s horrible, but catchy. Listen to it. https://youtu.be/AAiCRuK98ig

Came across this lovely piece of photographic goodness on the Internets and it’s truly impressive how the guy managed to lug around his lighting rig for four days!

I shot some macros outside in the garden just after it had finished raining and yet again I had to salvage them from my memory card which became unreadable. It’s time to get a new memory card, I think! This one is about 3 years old and it’s quite honestly running out of I/O capacity!  One of my white roses!