| “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” | 9:29 pm, November 9th, 2010

Ahh Confucius.

If only every adult in the world could drop everything for five seconds and see things with unjudging, unspoiled eyes. I think it’s amazing that we have the ability to see beauty in everything- every being, every tree, every building. Sometimes we just pass by things without even so much as looking at them, and it kinda sucks! Life is beautiful. The world is beautiful. I think people should appreciate everything they have more!

I haven’t really blogged in a while so here are some random updates from me as I think of them randomly! And my first random thought was….life is beautiful.

I started my new job last week! I feel pretty lucky because I’m actually really enjoying it. There is SO MUCH STUFF to learn and sometimes it’s a bit overwhelming but I’m slowly learning everything and it’s all really varied and fun so that’s all cool. My manager’s going away for two weeks at the end of this week too so that’s kinda scary! I hope I’ll have learnt all the basics by then, especially how to use all the different programs…

I got to design a print ad for the China side of things yesterday! That was actually pretty fun, but also kinda stressful because I had around an hour to finish it completely and I was still figuring InDesign out. I suppose that’s what designing/marketing is like, because there are deadlines…but there’s ALWAYS something to change and fix up. I think I’ve got the basics of InDesign figured out though. It’s very user intuitive, which is good. It’s kind of like Illustrator actually, but yeah, it’s been interesting learning how to use that.

Also got to interview some people for an internal newsletter, which was also pretty interesting! Journalism is definitely a learning process, that’s for sure. The interviews were really enjoyable though! I think that’s kinda what I like about the job- I can write, and design stuff, and organise things, and admin stuff… the days don’t even seem very long because I’m always doing something!

It also means I’m in the city all the time now, and so I can now explore different parts of the city! Ok well it’s not that interesting. But there are really cool nooks and crannys here and there which are really cool.

Cam was kind enough to bring me lunch on my first day at work, which I thought was totally sweet of him. Oh- he also got me another present for my birthday, and it finally arrived last week!! (well actually, the Friday before last) It’s a metal steampunk butterfly steampunk necklace and its SO pretty and awesome. It has a watch mechanism and a small heart locket and everything! <3

He also taught me how to solve the bigger twisty cubes (seriously..isn’t he amazing)! I can now solve the 5×5 and 7×7 cubes though I am preeettty slow at it. I’m trying to solve the 6×6 one now, but its kinda hard because it’s an even numbered cube(there’s no middle piece to go by). Even the 2×2 was hard to solve!

My friend Matt also got me a birthday present and it arrived last week too. It’s a huge book of inspiration from artists’ and designers’ sketchbooks, so now I don’t really have an excuse to not finish mine by the end of the year! I have heaps of sketches though, its just a matter of finishing them and making them look all pretty. The book’s pretty awesome though- thanks Matt! :3

Soo now I’m currently chillaxing and wondering if I should start watching Paris Je T’aime or surf ebay/amazon. Seriously, how FREAKIN AWESOME is the exchange rate right now?! So good for buying stuff online. Seriously, I have so many books I want to buy from Amazon. Books in Perth are SO DAMN EXPENSIVE. Even specialty book shops….its insane. It’s SO INSANE. Watchmen here is on average 35-40 dollars. You can get a copy in Asia for ~25-30 dollars.

I went to Quality Comics yesterday and checked out book prices. They have a pretty wide range, but whyyy does it have to be so expensive I know its got something to do with Australia’s import taxes but still…it’s like Australia’s purposely barring everyday people access to quality books(libraries can only go so far!). Most of the books at Quality Comics are pretty expensive(Planet has most of them cheaper anyway). But even still at Planet, they don’t always have the books I want. And even then, its WAY more expensive than prices online. On Amazon, I can get Y: The Last Man Book 2 for 20 USD. It’s 50 AUD here. The Swamp Thing is ~15USD bucks there. Over here its 37-47 AUD. Yeah I know you have to take into account shipping, but if you’re buying in bulk you clearly save a LOT less. And even if you’re not buying it all at once, you’ll probably still save money. It’s ridiculous.

Omgosh, I also saw The Fall by Guillermo Del Toro is out when I passed by Fantastic Planet today. ARGHHHH CANNOT WAIT TO READ IT. I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited by a book series in a while actually! The way Del Toro and Chuck Hogan write is unputdownable. I will probably buy it when I get paid! I’ve also been meaning to get into Chuck Hogan’s books, apparently he writes really good thrillers. The Town was actually based on one of his books, The Prince of Thieves, which I really want to read. Hopefully I can find that somewhere soon too!

I don’t really have much else to update you all on…..I want to share this though:

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’ … She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize …. She was not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

…and visit this site. I thought they were funny!

P.P.S. If anyone can find the original website for this image on threadless, that would be awesome. I WANT THIS SHIRT!!!

| All eyes on the calendar | 3:13 am, October 19th, 2010

Kinda wishing I had a tray of TV Dinner cupcakes to celebrate my birthday right now. Instead, I’m going to do an impromptu blog post about being 21, and, my thoughts on life so far.

…because I have nothing better to do with the first hours of my birthday, and I have a few things to say before I actually go out into the world as a 21 year old!

I’ve never been one to celebrate birthdays. I just really don’t get into celebrations or parties in general, and this has always been the case for me (YEAH, I’M BORING, SUE ME). I’m having a little get together for my 21st though, only because I haven’t had a real birthday party in years, and I felt like I probably should since a few people were making a big deal out of it. In that way, I guess it’s kind of made me realize just how far I’VE come in life, and how much of a milestone being 21 really is. Yeah, that’s right. It’s my 21st and I’m recognizing just how awesome/scary/mind blowing it actually is!!!

But really, why exactly is turning 21 so important? Sure I’m now officially legal in America (which we all know, is the centre of the world…ha-ha). And I’m now of an adult age to do everything I want with all of the free will and resources that I have. But since I turned 18, and became officially legal in most aspects in Australia, I’ve realized just how much of a transition I’ve made in those three years, and now that I am FINALLY 21, I’ve come to terms with just how much more I’ve matured and grown since the day I realized what a cruel, beautiful, unfair, incredible, sad, amazing world we live in today. I’ve gained friends and lost friends, and no matter what’s happened, life goes on and people move on.

People aren’t who they say they are, people can say things behind your back, people have ulterior motives for every action and word they say…

…but there are also the people who you can talk to in the early hours of the morning, people you can giggle with over the most inane things, people who share the same love for music and movies as I do, people who constantly show me new things I’ve never heard of or experienced…

Finding those kinds of people are definitely worth the hurt and confusion of the people that let you down/disappear completely from your life, and while friends may come and go, finding true friendship is something incredibly hard to come by, probably in any day and age.

I don’t think I’ve ever really had a best friend, because my interpretation of ‘best friend’ means something completely different to many other people. Sure people have called me their best friend before, and I have no problem with that. It doesn’t mean I like them any less than they do, I just think the term ‘best friend’ encompasses a lot more than what they do. I suppose having a best friend to me would be like having a really close twin you can talk to any time of the day, about absolutely anything that’s on your mind. It would probably be a lot like a really close relationship but without the intimacy involved!

I think deep down, everyone’s searching for that best friend, and while I’m sure many people can agree with me, having that revelation that we are all truly alone while lying in bed is frightening, I have also realized just how awesome I have it here, and how LUCKY I am to have friends I can count on.

I really didn’t see my 21st as *that* big of a deal – hell I almost forgot my 18th birthday! And even then, I quickly organized a random dinner thing which turned out to be a small happy gathering of people drinking bubble tea and laughing at hilariously bad b-movies. It was fun and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. And that’s exactly how I want to spend my birthday this year- with friends that have been there for me, laughed and cried with me, and shared various details about life and insights with me about the same world we inhabit and people we’re surrounded by. It makes me sad that some people can’t get along and some people can’t forget the past and move on, and some people can’t take the high road instead of the low one but….that’s people for you I guess.

Three years since I turned 18, I feel like a different person. I didn’t think I’d changed much at all since then, but looking back now I actually really have. I was naive and ignorant about a lot of things, perhaps a little idealistic as well. Maybe I still am a bit today…but I also feel a lot older and a lot wiser about many things. Things they don’t teach you at school, and stuff people don’t usually talk about.

I’m standing on the brink of full adulthood and its downright scary. Like a choose your own adventure book, I could make the right choices, or the wrong choices, and I have no idea where I’ll end up. There’s so much I want to do and so much I want to learn and yet at the same time it all seems like such a huge task to just start something and finish it in its entirety I don’t know where to start.

And its been a grand total of FOUR years since I left high school, and a month since I graduated from uni. Being 21 and being here in my room, being able to type all this on the internet, and being able to express myself in so many different ways has made me realize how lucky I am to just exist here in this place, and have a wonderful bunch of friends and family to depend on.

I am so thankful for everyone that has touched my life in some way- good or bad, it’s helped me learn and experience things in ways I never could have imagined. I’m thankful for being here, and thankful for everything that has been given to me. It’s been a confusing, tiring, satisfying, adventurous, angsty, wonderful year overall for me, and while I admit I said my birthday didn’t feel like a big deal, I want to make the most of my first year as an adult, and my first year as a free agent.

And now that the birds have started crowing, my computer going all slow and me starting yawning, I think its time I went to bed.

Sorry for any grammatical errors. It’s early and I’m now quite tired.

I love you all. Seriously.

| Introspection | 4:36 pm, October 13th, 2010

Procrastination is the root of all evil.

So is apathy, angry dreams and fluffy kittens.

I’ve been meaning to blog/draw more recently but so many other things have gotten in the way it’s been a bit hard to find the time…so this will be a rather epic, long blog post.

I was actually going to post this last week but wrote a draft and forgot about it, so now it is here in its full technicolour glory, awaiting to be read by you, the reader.

I sometimes feel like….things are slipping away. And I’m just standing by watching it all happen.

I don’t even know if that really makes any sense to me. But …yeah.

It’s nearly the end of the year with only… what-? 2-3 months to go…and its kinda scary. I’d really like to have a proper fulltime job soon, and that issue ALWAYS seems to crop up whenever I talk about my life these days, but seriously, a job which I actually enjoy would be really quite nice. Deciding what you want to do for the rest of your life is hard, and its so easy to just think ‘…you know what, I’m really not that good at anything so what’s the point?’ but I guess you also have to realize a lot of things are also practice, dedication and a whole lot of bullshit. I’m actually seriously thinking about doing a tafe course next year in web/graphic design but we’ll see I suppose. Oh and that reminds me, something that really pisses me off: Job interviewers who don’t let interviewees know about the job after saying they will. Seriously…it’s so disrespectful, especially if they ask for an interview and can’t even be bothered calling/emailing back after. It’s just like….where’s the professionalism?! ugh.

I had this really odd dream last night too(this would have been last week now), which is pretty weird to recall because it involved a poem and Sylvia Plath. I was in some timber house with my friend Cindy, when she starts talking to me about a depressed manic and I realize she’s talking about Sylvia. We then lock ourselves in the toilet while we read her poem, and outside we can hear her banging down the doors looking for us. It’s all a bit scary and it was like we were being haunted by a crazy depressive spirit. I don’t really know what the hell I was thinking last night but it was all kinds of weird. Random huh?

Another random, nostalgic thought of the day: I used to read a lot of books when I was younger. Like….a lot. I used to visit the library at least once every few weeks and get as many books as I could. And I really wish I still did that.

I try to, and I read the occasional one every now and then. But god …. it feels like years since I’ve actually wanted to just get lost in a book and not surf the internet every few chapters. I think I stopped reading so much around the time I started going to uni, and since then I’ve just…never really gotten back into it. Perhaps it was just the goddamn readings we had to do in uni that put me off reading altogether. Or perhaps having my laptop in my room isn’t the best idea, because it’s just there and it’s instant gratification. With books, you have to get into characters, and into storylines, and…it’s hard to connect to something when there’s so many distractions around. But the thing is, I can’t even watch a full movie now without getting distracted. It’s kinda…I dunno. It’s like my brain’s numb from everything. Or I’ve just lost something that I was interested in before. I’ve just felt really … restless lately, like….I need to do something. Some. thing. Productive.

It’s funny coz I coincidentally was reading this comic earlier on Brave New World vs. 1984, and it describes pretty much the entire prospect of distractions, irrelevance, trivial preoccupations and general apathy in an ocean of information and misinformation today:

In the world I live in, I guess Brave New World kind of has a point. But then again, I think I’d definitely rather decide for myself what’s right and wrong through the information that is freely available to me, rather than living in a censored police state with no individual thought or reason. Which also reminds me, I really need to read A Clockwork Orange sometime soon. I may even go to the library tomorrow before work so I can get it out! I think I’m more excited than anything to just read a good book again.

It is also my birthday next week, on the 19th! I turn 21, and people say it’s a huge thing and a milestone in life…so I suppose in a way it already is. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished all that I’ve wanted to achieve but hey…every day’s a new day. It’s not that big of a deal for me anyhow, but it’s definitely put things into perspective a bit.

And right now, a thousand different things are running through my head: spring, summer, new beginnings, nostalgic memories, freefalling, sunshine, rain, flies, waterlilies, lightning, thunderclouds, anger, yellow umbrellas, aliens, grape slushies, frustration, sunsets over lakes, crickets chirping, anxiety, fear, carnivals, stress, buses, cities, mountains, clouds, indifference, deserts, cacti, suburbia etc. etc. etc.

I’m weird sometimes.

In other cool, non introspective news, Cam taught me how to solve a 3×3 rubiks cube the other week! He’s pretty amazing. I think it’s amazing in itself someone actually got through to me how to solve one of those things. It’s actually pretty fun! It was in my bag when I went to work and my manager saw it and went ‘wow…now that’s a blast from the past!

And in other non real life news, I stumbled upon these rather funny images which depict the backstories of famous paintings:

I thought they were pretty funny, especially the Scream one.

I love reading house design/architecture blogs, and I just had to share these with you all:

Seriously, how amazing are they?! I want the paintbucket light!!! I had this cool idea before to get like a custom made desk lamp in the shape of the batman logo….hey it could be pretty neat!

I also came across these funny artworks by a former artist who doesn’t make anymore macabre comics/drawings due to ‘religious reasons’:

Seriously…its a shame he doesn’t draw anymore coz his art’s pretty awesome(and funny!).

And now I’ve run out of things to say and don’t really know where else I’m going with this.

I will leave this post with this supercute photo of a puffin…And one of my fave fake science images:

Plus a random recipe for Irish Stew!

I thought it’d go well with today’s random blog post.

Also, did you know there exists a cloud alt symbol?! I was going to post it on here, but it doesn’t work and I’m too lazy to fix it. It is pretty amazing though.

Plus, this amazing digital painting I stumbled on a few minutes ago!

PS. Drew this a few days ago. I started it last week but didn’t really finish it til yesterday. I don’t really know what else to do with it. :/

| Some things deserve their own post… | 4:32 pm, October 4th, 2010

This is one of those things:

(I did not make these!)

| Brainfuzzled | 4:04 am, September 17th, 2010

So it’s pretty late, and I just spent way too long on ebay…but..um..yeah. God I’m tired. My brain isn’t even registering words properly, but I still have to brush my teeth AND throw Meeko out.

I need to sell so much stuff on ebay. And apply for jobs.

But first, I need to vector this picture. I have like one day to do it. More like….5 hours. And I don’t want it to look like shit. It’s for an ad for dotdotdash which I had finished AGES ago, but now, one day before the deadline, turns out I need to vector SIX LINKED HANDS and just insert it into the ad. And change the font at the top, and make the text bigger. I have just been way too busy to even start it and it’s kinda worrying because I don’t want it to be subpar but when I vector something is has to be fucking PERFECT and so I usually spend at least few days just tweaking the paths and stuff. But I have a few hours and….asknflafajrefbjlrdsfbemrs.

The next issue looks so delicious though. If you didn’t already know, it’s on food and there are some pretty cool photos and such in there. I personally like my designs for this issue a lot more than the other one…..I think I’m starting to find my style. Which is rather satisfying.

This might be short notice, but we are a few pages short so there are FREE TWO PAGE AD SPREADS on offer.

You read right.

FREE TWO PAGE AD SPREADS.

You have to mail me quick though- preferably before 7pm TODAY!! I mean you can’t get much better than this. This would usually cost like….~400 dollars or something? And it’s pretty good exposure. If you have something you’d like to advertise, just mail me quickly quickly quickly so I can get a 2 page ad together and send it off.

Oh also- if you have a local band or know of a local band who would like exposure, dotdotdash is collaborating with local Perth music news op SpaceShip News for some cool musicalities. It will be part of the Jukebox issue for dotdotdash which is coming out early next year, and will include a CD featuring local musicians. How exciting.

It’s already September and I’ve hardly made any headway into my visual diary. I have started watercolour painting though and it’s so relaxing. It’s really hard to control though – I love all those dream like watercolour art but for how effortless it looks, it is actually really hard to blend colours together and achieve a dreamy like painting without making it look like a smudgy, muddy mess. Heh. I’m just having fun and learning!

The Magnetic Fields is inspiring me lately. They are such an amazing band. I frickin LOVE All my little words. And Sweet Lovin Man. And Underwear. And A Pretty Girl is Like… And everything. B) EVERYTHING. Stephen Merritt is a genius.

I really want to make some cards for my birthday party, and this christmas party I’m having with my friend Cindy. It’s so much FUN. I still haven’t really organized either though- due to me being kinda antisocial to any kind of party on my part. I should probably get onto that soon! It will probably only involve food and cake though.

Ok now it’s incredibly late and I should go to sleep.

I will leave this post with this:

Inspired by the Lady of Shalott. Love the poem, love the legend!

This dude has done some other amazing work- I love this one. And this one.

They’re all pretty incredible!

| Weird dreams and weird nostalgia | 12:34 am, September 10th, 2010

It’s kind of annoying, because ever since Inception came out everyone’s kinda been into the whole science of dreams thing.

I looked up dreams inside dreams before and all I got was Inception references!

Anyway I had a most interesting dream last night. I should really start a dream diary of some sort because it was weird..

I woke up at around 8am but dozed off again, and I was all of a sudden sitting in a huge lecture theatre but the seats were like movie theatre seats. It was like sitting in the Octagon theatre at UWA or something. There were loads of people and I was surrounded by people talking to each other that I didn’t know.

I started talking to some random people and joking around like I’d known them for ages, and it was like we were waiting for a lecturer to come in for our class or something. A door is at the bottom and white light is shining through the door.

I say something to a girl about how we should escape before the teacher comes in. She’s like yeah ok! And this other guy joins us. But just as we’re about to exit, the room changes and becomes like a third world bunker of some sort filled with crying kids and dishevelled faces. Everything gradually changes- not like a cross dissolve but slowly, the ground turns to brown sand, and the seats become dirt, and it’s getting darker and people begin to cry. We’re in like a setting kinda like Egypt or the Middle East or something.

Outside I can hear gunfire and bombs going off. It all gets a bit scary and I look around again and there’s all of a sudden soldiers around us with machine guns. I ask the nearest guy what’s happening, and he says it’s all to do with some movie called ‘Hi-5′. Yeah. I wasn’t thinking of the kids band but maybe JJ Abrams Super 8???? Either way, as soon as he said the name of the movie, myself in the dream had flashbacks to another dream I had ages ago, which I may or may not have written down.

It was the one where it was all creepy and dark and like I was in a horror movie, and I was walking around a post apocalyptic city, and walking through derelict buildings and being followed by shadows. It sounds silly but it was actually quite creepy and although I don’t remember the specifics of the dream, it was very weird. Hmm…maybe I didn’t write it all down. Maybe I forgot all about it and it was just my subconscious recollecting it all this morning in my dream.

Anyhow, I had flashbacks to that dream, and myself in the dream considered it to be fact- something that had happened in the past, and somehow linked to the gunfire going on outside.

I walk a few steps to my left, and all of a sudden sunlight shines through, and I see a metal fence where hundreds of armoured US soldiers and activists are standing in front of us with HUGE guns. It’s like I’m stuck in a fenced off area with these people, surrounded by soldiers for a crime we didn’t commit. I’m suddenly scared for my life and I see people around me that I know from the lecture theatre.

The US soldiers start shooting at us through the metal fence, and other people inside with me start shooting back. I realize I am in direct line of fire, and I begin running back right into the shelter. I wonder what’s going on and attempt to hide behind some people. And I’m running and I feel something heavy hit the side of my head and I’m like ‘oh I’ve been shot’. For about 2 minutes. Then I’m like ‘oh wait…I should be dead’. And I wake up.

And the weird thing is, when I woke up, I could feel the side of my head throbbing. Not hurting exactly..but yeah. It was weird.

I have weird dreams…

On a site related note, I found some super old stuff on the PC the other day.

Including the website I made for Hero with 2 other people in first year!! Haha. Those were the days… And not just that! But high school stuff too!!! Stuff which I’d thought I’d lost forever!!! All down to year 12 timetables…home ec projects…ancient history stuff….random stories I’d started writing…yeah. It’s pretty amazing.

Also found a lot of old neopets screenies which are hell funny. I used to play neopets a lot with my friends back in the day, and looking at them now and looking at the site today its just like…..woah. I thought these were funny:

…And now I feel like the biggest nerd ever. I guess you wouldn’t really find these funny unless you knew what playing neopets was like! Hah.

I ALSO found this old tutorial I wrote when years and years ago on my old geocities site, because I didn’t want to forget how to do it:

Realistic Cloudy Effect

1.Open up a picture, 300×300( you can change if u want)

2.Pick two colours you want your clouds to be, i chose blue and white to look more real. Now go to filter>render>clouds.

3. You should have a cloudy bg now. To make it look more real go to filter>brush strokes>spatter. Leave the settings as is. This makes the clouds look…more even i guess.

4.Now go to filter>stylize>wind>Blast.

5. Now go to Blur>Gaussian Blur. Set radius to 2.0 pixels but keep pressing ctrl-F until you have the effect you want. I ended up with this:

i figured this out while i was messing around in ps. i dunno how useful this is…but i hope it helped! i reckon it looks more real than the original filtered one anyway. It’ll look better in a bigger picture, this one loox crap becoz i had to make it smaller

Lol….yeah. Isn’t it the most amusing thing ever? I’m sure there are more efficient ways of making realistic clouds in Photoshop these days…but I was using Photoshop 5.5 and Frontpage at the time!

This was on my old geocities site, and I even had an about me page. This is embarassing but this was the music I was listening to back in 2001:

Music

Evanescence::Bring me to Life

Linkin Park::Somewhere i Belong

Linkin Park::In the End

Christina Aguilera::Dirrty

Good Charlotte::The Anthem

Good Charlotte::Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Good Charlotte::Girls and Boys

Good Charlotte::Little Things

Ashanti & Ja Rule::Whats Luv

Ja Rule::Livin it Up

Dj Sammy::Heaven

Michelle Branch::Everywhere

YEAH. I KNOW.

Though you have to keep in mind, these were the days when I had a walkman, and taped everything from radio. In fact, I think I still have my tapes somewhere. The first thing I ever heard about getting music off the internet was on Napster. Then Kazaa. And then I realized: radio pretty much brainwashed everyone, including kids, and we really just didn’t know any better. Or I just didn’t know any better. Thank GOD for the internet! I’m sure without it I’d still be listening to crap like Rihanna and Lady Gaga today.

I also had a site description about my Geocities site….my gawd it’s embarassing. We all used 2 type lyk diz. No joke. What was I thinking?!?!?! Seriously?!!?!?

Here’s an excerpt:

History

This site was always called Psychadelic Swirl. I thought the name sounded really kool after seeing austin powers in goldmember. lolz. i gess i got struck wif inspiration. i’ve forgotten when this site started but it was AGES ago. like….1 1/2 yrs ago. newayz this site used to be a blinkie site. Mainly a site where u could request free blinkies and stuff. I made the time to make free blinkies for ppl and also help ppl wth starting sum of their own. yep i was very generous. heh. but then ppl kept bugging me to make blinkies when i was really busy and that annoyed me. i mean i think ud b pretty lucky if u got a blinkie for free. seriously. i remember i requested one and i didnt even get it:/ So wat im saying is i kept the site going for a while, from requesting blinkies to the full course in frames….like premade ones and stuff….i even rote tutorials! heh. which takes AGES to do. then i changed the layout to an air one and decided the nto go on a long hiatus. ppl couldnt really access my site after that but now…..a yr later…hehe….im back….noooo….nah. im still gunnab doin blinkie request just….dont bug me k?? i hav sum new rules too. u have to tag or sign the gbook. not that hard. well yeah. thats the life history of this site:P pretty long if u ask me but o well. lol. I’m glad u finished reading this^^

LOL. This was back when Geocities was popular, and when making animated gifs was like producing flashy ajax scripts today. Animated gifs were like the best thing EVER. I used to have a whole collection of them, because I used to make them for other people, and swap them with other Geocities people, and save really cool ones….

…then there were the animated cursors, and animated backgrounds, and animated dividers….heh.

What else did I find? Old photoshop brushes, fonts, buttons, psds, more screenies, layouts, patterns, psds, banners, psp files…its AMAZING.

This was the first ever thing I made in photoshop. I was using some free windows photo managing program to edit stuff, and then paint shop pro, but as soon as I started using photoshop I was like OMG!!! BEVELS!!! TRANSPARENCIES!!!! OUTLINES!!! OUTER GLOWS!!!!

I used it for a layout on my old blog.

But yeah. Aren’t digital files incredible? I find it funny they’ve just been stuck on my computer for years, and only now are opened up again in their pristine ancientness.

| Early Mornings | 12:06 pm, September 6th, 2010

I’ve never really been a morning person, but I’ve been waking up earlier and earlier recently and it feels SO GOOD. It’s pretty bad because when I’m NOT working, I don’t really have a set routine. I go to sleep pretty late, and wake up late-ish. I’m pretty determined to make an effort to eat, sleep and exercise healthier though, and perhaps I’ll take it a bit slow but I really do want to get a bit healthier by the end of this year. That means less desserts and less cake for me (hah).

I actually was listening to the radio before, and heard Little Red’s new song ‘Rock It’. Umm. yeah. It’s harmless fluffy catchy and kinda like bubblegum MGMT but I CAN’T STOP PLAYING IT.

Okay so the band and people in the video look a bit hipster-y. And the lyrics are kinda lame. But cmon, doesn’t it make you feel really happy and fuzzy inside? It reminds me of high school actually. Like a high school dance, or just hanging out with friends at lunch or something. Ahhh memories.

Anyway, I’ve pretty much finished all my designs for dotdotdash. I might do one more, just coz. This issue’s theme is FOOD, which is very exciting, because I LOVE food. Deadline is in a week so gotta get cracking on to that!

Other things I want to do this week:

• Research used cars
• Make Red Velvet cake
• Edit IKEA’s video for the Catalogue Party
• Finish some sketches and work on new ones
• Sell some stuff on ebay
• Play the Sims 3 (I haven’t played this in ages. I want to build a cool house.)
• Make some posters for D3
• Buy more nail polish remover and yoghurt covered sultanas!
• Paint something pretty
• CLEAN MY ROOM

I’m starting with the cleaning bit today. :roll: Woo!