shot down.

i summoned up the courage the call the passage homeless centre this morning. but who'd have thought it, they actually have a waiting list for volunteers and i might have to wait 'til the summer. bugger. fear not though, because i sent an email to the director of the centre, something along the lines of this:

hello captain fantastic im a wanky art student and i want to take advantage of the destitute so i can get onto a degree course next year. hit me back y'all. *

should get a reply tomorrow.
read an interesting article on the guardian website today, apparently theres some sort of cult out there which sees it as enlightening to spend 3 days in the lives of the homeless, queuing at soup kitchens, receiving blankets and even begging. morally questionable fo sho. i have to admit i did consider this approach, spending a night sleeping rough to get a better idea of how it feels but i think this snippet of the article sums up every reason why i shouldnt;

'You must be bonkers,' said Peter, a middle-aged, well-educated former IT specialist who lost his job and then his house after suffering a nervous breakdown. 'I don't see the point of you doing this on any level,' he said with politely contained rage. 'What are you going to learn that you don't know already - that's it's horrible being homeless?' His friend asked why we have come in summer. 'If you really care about sharing our pain,' he pointed out mockingly, 'why didn't you come in the middle of winter?'

however, it did shed some light on something ive already read about; the distribution of food and other aids for the homeless at lincoln's inn fields. and after some brief research i now know that its every day at 7.15pm so i think im going to go there tomorrow. do a little drawing. take a few snaps. would be good to have some imagery to work with because at the moment i havent actually done any work.

stay tuned.

* this is obviously not the email i sent but i do realise that however i word a letter, its probably going to come across that way, cos essentially its true. i will be taking advantage of the homeless, but then again any film made about poverty etc will do so. i wonder if this is necessarily a bad thing?

a few changes.

since writing the project proposal i have decided to focus purely on the homeless because i cant really cover everything id set out to, and i feel a better outcome would come from a more specific and detailed project.

one other thought i have had is the need to be sensitive with this subject and not to take advantage of the homeless in order to satisfy my aims.


theres a lot for me to learn here.

links links links links.

heres a website i stumbled across recently. to be honest im surprised i hadnt already heard about it, its that good. fontstruct.com is a font creation website with built-in software with many customisable modular parts which you use to create fully working fonts. it also works like flickr in the networking sense, you can share and download yours and others fonts and stuff like that. so basically its pretty cool, check it you get me.




and here are two links for a couple more mixes ive made, i dont think theyre as good as my previous one, but theres some pretty good tracks and some new remixes on them so your ears might enjoy them.

a more chilled out dubstep mix

a bit of everything

and if you go to sumopaint.com theres a pretty cool online illustrator software which makes a nice free alternative to photoshop

thats all from me

stumped.

this time round i've got two weeks to answer a brief [well, 1 week and 3 days left now] but it seems the more time ive got to get work done, the harder it is. the idea is to catalogue everything. well not exactly everything, but everything within certain confines that i can set. once ive collected all of these things they have to be catalogued or organised in some way which i imagine should be relevant to the confines.

i have no idea what to do.

i listed all of the books dvds cds games and videos that i have on a few shelves in my room, and im photoshopping a sort of mindmap of them and finding ways to link them all together, but it doesnt look very good and i dont really know where it's going.

i guess what i want to do is something related to consumerism and waste, maybe about the throwaway nature of clothes nowadays, somehow linked to the poor conditions in which sweatshop workers make them.

meh.

a blog?

so yeah i got pretty intrigued, if not jealous of a mate of mine who's got a pretty cool blog (hi tom!) [edit: how rude of me to not include a link] and figured he could do with some competition, although i dont think it's me who's going to give it to him. also a lot of lecturers and talking people at college go on about blogs as if theyre the answer to all creative success. as far as i'm concerned i think if i do this it'll give some sort of structure to my thinking and we'll all be better off for the experience.

i looked at the gadgets that you can add to your blog when you set it up. you can have a slideshow of all your photos on flickr, if you have any of course. i guess thats the next thing to tick off on my list. they also have a south african joke-a-day gadget which was bizarrely one of the most popular gadgets going. i tried to add it to see what all the fuss is about but there was an error, something like source not found. maybe thats the joke