Archive for January, 2006

Three Profound Stories

The number 3 is a magical number. If any of us truly understood the depths of its many mysteries, there would be no limit to what we could achieve – our knowledge would be such that we could have sexual intercourse with light waves. Each of these three stories is just three sentences long, and consequently all are profound beyond depth itself.

Short Story No. 1: Love

Once I knew a woodlouse by the name of Stetson Breadbie, a louse who was never great in stature, and never had a dime to his name, bless the little twat; I loved him dearly with all my heart. When he left me, as all lovers do, it was as if someone were shoving rusty nails under my eyelids and waggling them around. Since that fateful day, I have clad my face in an impenetrable iron mask that makes me look like my uncle would if he was a robot.

Short Story No. 2: Fear

As I was getting in to bed one night (in the dark might I add), I trod on something cold that was poking out from under the bed, and breathed in sharply. Sure, it was probably the buckle on the strap of a bag that I kept under there, but maybe, just maybe, it was the hungry, reaching finger of some cold, dead thing that made contact with my heel that night. If I think for too long about this incident, I urinate in my clothing.

Short Story No. 3: Anger

One morning, as I was a about to tuck into a bowl of cornflakes, said flakes were suddenly knocked all over my nice clean table by a lost child who had come stumbling through my house, crying and shitting all over the place. “Please mister, have you seen my mummy?” he asked pathetically, unaware of the breakfast catastrophe his thoughtless actions had brought about. As I systematically broke each of his bones, using my Turkish hobbling stick, he knew my wrath – and I knew sweet, bloody satisfaction.

Surfeit of Creativity

Or is that a decifit. It depends on whether you’re looking at the intention, or the actual output. Recently my creative gland has been secreting its special endocrines into my bloodstream, giving me the urge to make things. This could be building a shelf, drawing a picture, making an animation, filming a movie, writing a computer game, painting a shelf, drawing a movie, filming a picture… any of those. All of them, in fact. That’s part of my problem: I want to do all of these things so much that I can never settle on getting started with just one.

Now you might say, “come on Nick, you’re a scientist. Get back in your labcoat and titrate this acid solution.” You are partly correct, except I forgot anything to do with Chemistry years ago. While I may be a coding fiend, I am also other kinds of fiend too. I’m a fiend of all trades.

I want to be disgustingly good at drawing. I’m currently alright at doodling, but nothing epic. These people who can whip out their sketchbook and 3B pencil and knock up a fantastically detailed drawing of a dragon grabbing burning peasants and smoking them like cigars (or whatever)… they’re amazing. I want to be that good, and I realise that this takes years of practice. So why haven’t I been practising? I don’t know. I do a bit and then move on to something else. So while I know I could get really good at something if I put in the time, I never do, and thus, nothing is created, and the world supply of commas runs out at the end of this sentence.

Making a computer game is within my abilities now, but it takes a lot of time and it was disheartening when I tried recently and came across a show-stopping bug with the engine I was using. I might try again sometime with a different engine.

The other endeavours - movie making, animation, even plain old writing - are all things that could benefit from a little practice. I don’t mean to be arrogant but I think I could make something really good if I stuck to it, and occassionally I have. Enough people have informed me that I’m an intelligent individual, so I’m quite clever, whoop de doo. That just makes me harder to please mentally (oh, the trials of being a white middle-class male. I’m such a dick!). I really want to make something that people see and think, “that’s cool”. I want to make a name for myself. Being “Nick who hasn’t made anything” or even “Nick who has a job but nothing in particular to show for it” doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t want to just get through life without rolling 3 doubles and going to jail. I want to leave stuff behind that I made. “Remember that guy, the one who made this thing?” “No.” “Ahhh, but look at it. It’s all… dusty. Brilliant.”

So my point is that I need to set myself some goals, and things to do every day. This is probably an ideal time of my life for it, as I am freelancing from home and have spare time to draw and play. Note to self: playing Zelda on the Gamecube doesn’t count.

The Making of The Bar

This article has been literally months in the making. That is, I wrote a couple of paragraphs in October and forgot about it.

If you’re in the loop (or you’ve looked round our house as prospective renters), you’ll know that one of the cool things we’ve been wasting our time on is turning our tiny spare room into a tiny bar. Think Changing Rooms vs. Pimp My Ride vs. Commando vs Terminator. Imagine that! Arnie versus himself! Of course, Chuck Norris would ultimately win. But I digress (I dye cress!). Like many things, it was a comment made in jest that went a few steps too far. We documented the demise of our good judgement and the creation of something awesome in a small space. When you see the final result, you will probably want one of your own, possibly. Guaranteed!

Inexplicably, the landlord didn’t seem to mind.

Continue reading ‘The Making of The Bar’

Reasons to be gleeful

Life can be a confusing place for some. What’s It All About? Why Is It Happening? Why Is It Happening to Me? What The Hell Is Me? Thankfully these questions were answered long ago and just largely ignored by the throng. For your pleasure I’ve condensed them to this concise phrase:

Life is awesome.

Continue reading ‘Reasons to be gleeful’

One day, we’ll write something…

…but until that day, we’ll continue to fill the front page with more barely-useful things. Like the Recent music widget on the left there under the photos. Isn’t that interesting? Now you know what music we listen to. And a new skin, and and uploady whatsit. It’s all a bit pointless really, should probably write some interesting content instead. This is why we caught and domesticated Sam. He knows how to write. If only we could get close enough to trim his talons…

Bloody student houses

Although none of us are students any more, Fort Awesome is technically a “student house”, which is basically shorthand for “has as many rooms converted into bedrooms as is humanly possible (including partitioning living rooms to make an extra bedroom) and has an unspoken clause in which random strangers can turn up with no notice and look at your house and even just start taking photos without permission“. I can appreciate that we were students once and we once had to look around houses, but you know, I’m not in the mood for being fair because we’ve just had to show round the eighth fucking group of people today. Yes the double beds don’t come with it, the bar doesn’t come with it, blah blah blah.

So as you might have gathered, we’re not going to be living in this house next year, if only so we can get out of the student housing system, and join the magical realm of regular houses where people don’t give themselves the right to wander in and out (for anybody in doubt, you do technically have to give notice before you come round, but there’s no point arguing with students, they just stand there looking sheepish and say something about “we’ve come all this way”, blah blah).

I was a student once. That’s why I hate you all so much.

Sweet, sweet skins

Ever in search of innovation, we’ve added a menu on the left where you can select different skins for the site, depending on whether you like a black or a white background. Have a go! Still trying to fix the menu being all fallen-down on Internet Explorer, by the way. We’re on it!!?

Tonight, we will be mostly going to Crash. Most of us are. Some of us aren’t.

Ænigma

ÆnigmaI know that those at my abode have already heard and are aware of such things but I felt like gloating some more. I’m kind-of in a band. Recently my buddy Adam and I decided to give ourselves a deadline of New Year to get some tracks recorded so that others could hear what we sound like. This has been done and you can check them out here. Those are only the first couple of rough mixes but I think they quite nicely represent our sound.

Please feel free to comment, but be nice or else.

That’s-a Much-a Better

Well, we had a few, got out the old pen and paper, and scribbled how the website should look. We decided to relegate stuff we write from the front page, apart from the list of recent articles on the right. Here is the News where we put stuff just generally about what we’re up to. On the left you should be able to see our recent photos on Flickr. And over the far right there ought to be some obligatory advertisements. Buy now! Or forever hold your peace.

It’s still in the process of having fonts tweaked, some links and stuff made to generally look better, so hold off on the criticism for just now, until I say go (that time didn’t count). Looking into having an alternate black-on-white version, to suit people who don’t like black backgrounds. (Check it out, I made a mockup.)

Lacking a certain “I don’t know what”

I’ve been looking at the Fort Awesome website, and pondering on what is missing. We wanted it to be a sort of portal for excellency and a place where we can put funny things, but at the moment it’s little more than a blog, and blogs are so 2005. I’ve jazzed it up a little by putting in that Flickr photo bar so that we can put up our photos (at the time of writing I’d uploaded 4 wonderful pictures of ‘Moses’ being wonderfully drunk, and grinning like a wonderful idiot).

Any ideas? I think the blog thing should have less focus, and just be a little column with headings which people can peruse. Perhaps a dedicated area for putting funny pictures and sounds that we make. What could be better!

Comments people, comments.