echohelloworld

I’m not sure about the copyright issues with this photograph. It’s only intended as a spatial representation of a quote that really hit me in this book, so hopefully it’s ok.

Morning shrinks space, but leaves no messages

At this point in the book (that I now appear to be obsessed with), Johnny is ruining himself with obsession over a girl. This girl has given him her pager number, told him to call but then never returned his message. I can’t decide whether “morning” is supposed to symbolise the passage of time until he sees this girl again, decreasing the chance that she’s ever going to call, a reference to his worsening agoraphobia or something totally different, but I’ve taken the former; most probably because that’s an angle I can relate to and I expect anyone can given the appropriate level of abstraction.

The book is full of quotes like this, and so much more incredible observation and invention. It’s really quite unnerving and impulsive at the same time. I’ve literally had to drag myself away from it this evening. The pace can be a bit annoying, and the admission that the footnotes are fictitious renders them relatively pointless, but still readable in case something important lies therein.

I think this is the sort of book that Jordan would read, and Charlotte should not read - the fear of spiders is enough without adding darkness to that list too!

ps. There’s some utterly inspiring imagery in here for budding photographers, too. I don’t really feel I’ve done that proud today, though.

You know what it’s like. You’re moving house, your girlfriend makes up a box and calls you into the room. You go into the room and she’s in the box, giggling like she invented the concept. Naturally, you grab your camera, and the flash going off makes her even more aware of how funny the situation is. You decide that the only way to take her down a peg and make your afternoon bearable is to capsize her.

No? Just me?

Went down to the courts to play some ball today and there was a huge cruise liner there, but obviously I didn’t have my camera on me. By the time I got back to take a photo, it’d gone. This made me sad.

I realised today that it’s like 6 days til my birthday. When I was 10, I’d never have imagined being this blasé about my birthday! I’ve already had my presents, though; 160GB iPod, shorts, a tshirt and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I’ve been wanting to read that book for absolutely ages!

Continuing my unintended closeups in the kitchen series, some matches.

Can’t stop, people round, video games.

I personally don’t believe that technology and techniques that benefit both the user and the developer should be shunned just because the lion-share of users are still relying on older technology. PNG gives far better quality images, usually at a greatly reduced file size. It seems like a no-brainer. Except for the fact that IE6 doesn’t support transparency in PNGs.

There is an IE6 PNG fix on TwinHelix that I can only get to do half the job, which is really irritating. The technique makes the image render with transparency, but makes it expand to a somtimes arbitrary size with the dreaded red cross in the corner. Another problem with this is that it doesn’t allow you do position the image. I’m currently using a relatively verbose alternative, which essentially involves you emulating an img tag, but allows you to position your element. Hopefully some will find this helpful as I was racking my brains for something like this on my last project.

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I noticed that broccoli has quite a cool texture up close. Hopefully this gets that across.

There is a huge cemetery right next to Southampton Common. I knew there was one there, but I didn’t realise how huge it actually is. There are hundreds of graves there, it’s incredibly overgrown and it’s a really quite upsetting place to be. There are some incredibly ostentatious headstones and there’s even a locked crypt. Kinda reminds you of the mortality of everything.

I also discovered that there’s not really a lot to take photos of in cemeteries. The one I picked looked so sad, and the ivy growing over and around it I thought made it look really creepy. Enough words.

I like triangles.

I also like my bike. I say “like”, I mean “liked”. Someone took my poor BMX off our balcony today, which sucks. We don’t have bikes insured on our contents insurance either! Mondays, eh?

The word “festival” is misleading here, unless the definition of festival has changed to “a field, sparsely populated with people tenuously connected by not disliking a given theme”. There didn’t appear to be any planned events, and there weren’t really any funky kites or anything like that. Havind said that, it was free to get in and the weather is gorgeous (yeah, I’m British, it’s in my genes to comment on the weather) so one can’t really complain.

Having said all that, the people on/in kite buggies looked to be having fun.

Edit: Damn Wordpress desaturating my images.