Scribbles

I've been playing with the Colors! painting package thing on the Nintendo DS. Here's a doodle.

Angry Otto

Angry Otto
Originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity

I made this little fellow in Processing, a graphics programming language this afternoon. I was inspired by all the little monsters made using Processing on this page. In the video, the moving dot represents the location of the mouse pointer and Otto really hates mouse pointers. It's fun to make him chase the pointer in the actual application and to see his cross little face snap at it when he gets close enough makes me giggle every time. It's surprising how much life and fun you can impart in just 200 lines of code.

A Quick Update

I had a pretty good weekend all told. Saturday was spent mooching around town and then cooking veggie lasagne and chocolate and chestnut mousse for our pal ZF who has just moved from California. She came over to Schossadlerflug in the evening and we ate drank and were merry until about 2 a.m. where she went for her first experience of the London night buses and all the adventures that they can provide.

On Sunday we played Spore, which is amazing. I think hard-core gamers aren't going to like it much because it's very much a journey rather than destination type game. Winning (if that's the term) isn't really the heart of what makes it great. If you don't get a small tingle of joy at seeing your own 6 legged and 4 armed monster hatch from an egg and stomp about the landscape in search of something to eat then it's probably not going to really appeal to you as a game.

I also spent the afternoon finishing off this biography of John Dee, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, mystic, alchemist, scientist, probably spy and advisor to Queen Elizabeth 1st. I'd been wanting to read something of him for a while that went further than the angel summoning and mysticism with which he is most famously associated these days and this book was it. He was a fascinating man with a wide-ranging mind at a time when religion, the occult and science were all so enmeshed as to be almost inseparable. A good read. I received the book nine days previously and for me to read 350 pages in that time is unusual so it must have been good.

Tonight I shall be playing more Spore I think; these planets don't get conquered by themselves you know.

All Off To Lord's

It was the Friends Provident Final on Saturday and this event saw myself, Papa Atrocity and my chum Tommy Dog meeting up at St John's Wood tube station at the unpleasantly early for a Saturday hour of half past nine. I left Schossadlerflug at 8.20 so that I could pick up supplies for lunch en route through Marylebone. Once we'd collected ourselves together we pottered up to the ground where we endured the usual security bag-poking and leg-patting that the Lord's marshalls seem to like indulging themselves in. We took our seats and Kent got us underway in a pretty lacklustre fashion with both openers falling cheaply.

Tommy Dog invented a new photographic technique which invloved stuffing the lens of a small compact digicam into the eyepiece of his binoculars to get a super telephoto image albeit with lots of vignetting and chromatic aberation. I had a go too:

During the lunch interval Tommy was able to indulge in two of his other hobbies beside cricket, those of beer drinking and reading books with pictures of tanks in them.

I stuck to the beer part.

Here is a snap of Papa Atrocity looking perplexed at Number One Son. He does that a lot.

After a few splutters, Essex did what they ought to given the target they had been set and won the game with a little to spare. Here the Essex dressing room celebrates, They are in the red sweaters on the first floor of the pavilion.

All in all a very good day with a game that had more excitement that it at first appeared it would plus I got to sit outside with my dad and a buddy for a whole without a single drop of rain spoiling procedings in spite of the weather forecast. All in all, a happy time was had by all, apart from Kent and their fans.

T Party

This weekend has been Tinsetroos Birthday Festival. She began the celebration on Thursday with dinner with her folks whilst I was at home with the flat to myself wrapping her presents. The main social event was karaoke on Friday night. Everyone knows that T likes to sing and so twelve of us packed into a wee room at Cousin Jills to belt out a few standards.

In a slight break with tradition I opted to sing Money for Nothing rather than my usual Johnny Cash numbers as I felt me and Mr Knopfler have similar vocal range (not a lot). I didn't manage the Sting parts though as they well beyond my limited range. I was quite pleased with my "Hoola moola that's the way you do, money for nothing and your chicks for free" complete with hint of geordie accent. As is traditional there was also a rendition of Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do with highly exaggerated welsh accents later on. T and her school-chum KG put everyone else to shame by actually being able to sing really well. It took a collective chorus of Europe's The Final Countdown to takes us back to the ridiculous from the sublime. This part of the evening is immortalised on video though I don't think it's really suitable for public consumption. It does prove that we'd all drunk a lot more than I remember though. Further evidence for this may be viewed below:

Yesterday T opened her presents from me which included some crazy Japanese socks, a T-shirt I designed and printed for her, Guitar Hero - Aerosmith, and a few other treats. The weather was filthy all day so we only went out for brunch and then scuttled back to Schossadlerflug until the evening when we got all dressed up and went out for dinner to Rasoi Vineet Bhatia which is a superb Indian restaurant in Mayfair. It was astonishingly good, certainly in my top ten meals I've had. Amongst the delights I had included tandoori salmon, minted chicken, duck confit with a coconut sauce and a, and this is no lie, fois gras crême brulée which was barmy but brilliant. Two and half happy hours later we rolled out back into the night and made our way home holding our contented fat bellies.

Today we've bummed around the flat as, once again, the weather has been shitty all day. As I write this T is shredding on Guitar Hero and showing Joe Perry and Brad Whitford how it's done. Metaaaaaaal!

The Worst Pies in London

Over the last three months or so, T and I have been putting together costumes for my pal Vivswindy's annual fancy dress party. Long-time readers may remember that two years ago I went as R J MacReady from The Thing and T went as the dead Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Last year's barbecue was cancelled so that the host could marry his beloved, though he did arrive at the wedding in a Back to the Future equipped Delorean so all was not lost.

This year T and I decided to couple up on the costumes and it was decided that Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett would offer us an opportunity to get creative. I bought a vintage style shirt as this was beyond our tailoring skills but we made my waistcoat, razor, razor holster, wig and gloves from scratch. T went to Camden's finest goth emporia for items for her outfit but made the top herself and we made the pie from scratch too. Those fingers we made a while back? Those were for the pie. Here I am, blind as a bat as I decided to go without glasses for as long as possible to improve the look of the costume. T also made me up to look suitably ghoulish:

Here's the two of us hamming it up for the camera

And this is the inevitable "someone pretends to eat the papier mâché pie" picture:

Vivswindy, the host, always has a meticulously researched and sourced costume, this year The Rocketeer from Joe Johnston's film of the same name. Here he is talking to the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Where could his comrades be?

Oh here they are. Dorothy, The Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man are clearly being shown something extremely filthy on that digital camera by the nun. For shame.

There were a great many supervillains present also. Here Two Face poses with his fiancee Poison Ivy. I do like Ivy's wellington boots.

Vivswindy's brother did a marvelous turn as Jareth from Labyrinth complete with a pair of Darth Maul socks stuffed down his tights for extra, err, presence. Here he is dancing with HW who came as Sarah, also from Labyrinth. She is trying not to stare down.

At some point in the following morning, I wasn't wearing a watch for authenticity reasons, we all crawled off to bed. I took this snap of Tinseltroos to show off her magnificent back-combed hair. She normally has very straight hair and this is the most volume I've ever seen:

I simply gave my hair to Keanu for safe keeping.

Truly I am a God

The Spore Creature Creator was finally made available and after a couple of false starts (you can buy it for the Mac now but you can't actually have it yet) we got a version working on Tinseltroos' PC. We were pretty cross after all the installing, uninstalling, upgrading and other Microsoft based yadda yadda needed to make it work but when it did, boy it didn't disappoint. For those not in the know, Spore is a game where you can design your own organisms and watch them live out lives, evolve and develop until they become sentient and then go off to explore their galaxy. Pretty much the ultimate in God Games. At present only the creature designer is available but that on its own is so much fun. Sticking limbs and sensory organs all over your creature, scaling them, tweaking their shapes until you have your finished beastie is incredibly entertaining. Here a re a couple of creatures I made yesterday. First is a Snufflodon with its young:

And here's my take on an Elder Thing from H P Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness:

What a little cutie. You can probably expect more creatures to appear over the coming weeks, I don't see myself getting bored with this one anytime soon.

Finger Painting

Fingers Painted, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Tinseltroos and I are in the midst of putting some fancy dress costumes together and for one of them some dismembered fingers are required. Last night we stuck our hands into alginate and filled the resulting moulds with plaster of paris. This evening, upon getting home from work, I painted them up. Tinseltroos had already given them a good fleshy base coat, I added some texture and detail to the skin and painted in the nails. I knew all those years at art school would pay off eventually. I'm rather pleased with our ghoulish creations. I love making costumes, it encourages all sorts of cutting, painting, sticking, sewing, and is thus, I feel, a good thing.

My Book Arrived

My Book Arrived, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

One of the things I wanted to do during my fortnight's holiday was to finally get my book of photographs designed, laid out, organised and printed. Having evaluated all the possibilities open to me I decided to go with www.blurb.com as their options seemed better in the types of book I could design and the freedom I had with layout and covers. I actually ended up doing two books, one large hardback book and a smaller paperback that I can give to friends as it's a little less expensive to print. I ordered one of each and yesterday my large book arrived at work. I'm really happy with how it turned out, the prints are exactly the right density which is excellent because I have a penchant for printing pretty dark when I can - I like a lot of blacks in my prints and if I'm not careful a less exacting printer could print the pictures too darkly. So I can really recommend Blurb for anyone thinking of self-publishing, it's a great way to get your work, be it photography or text, out there and available for public consumption, if they want it of course.

When the small version turns up, assuming it too is OK quality wise, I shall order a copy for everyone I know who appears in the book. It seems only fair to say thank you for the time they spent putting up with me trying to take their picture.

There is also a competition on Blurb's website for photography books and I reckon I will enter that. I don't think I have a chance of winning but what the hell. Booda Baby cajoled me into it and for that I'm thankful.

Well it's been a long day; I'm working on three shows at once this week and I'm feeling it tonight, so I shall take myself off to bed.

Work In Progress

Here's a little sped up video of the most recent quick sketch I've done in Colors on the homebrew DS card. I love this little application.

Tiny Art

This is a quick little post to mention the joy of a lovely piece of free software for any who have a Nintendo DS and homebrew card. It's called Colors and it's from www.collectingsmiles.com a lovely website name if ever there was one. The software leverages the DS's portability and it's pressure sensitive touch screen to make the perfect tiny pocket sketch book. It takes a little getting used to because the screen is so small but it's really quite delightful to have these tiny little jewel like painting sketches appear in front of you as you scribble away.

One of the other nice features is that the program stores each brushstroke as you make it resulting in an animation playback facility where you can watch the whole painting being drawn from scratch. It's quite instructive to see how I work. I had always thought that I obsessed over a single detail until I liked it before moving onto the next but from watching the few sketches that I've done I seem to flit about the image from place to place tweaking things as they catch my eye. I really didn't think I worked like that.

Here's a couple of sketches I did yesterday and if I can work out how to make a movie of the process of painting one I'll try and upload that too at some point:

Cake or Death?

We had a charity raffle and cake sale at work yesterday. I decided to try my hand at a receipt I hadn't done before as I usually do a ginger cake but fancied a change. I plumped for a chocolate cake and then hit the internet looking for the perfect one. Strangely putting terms like "best chocolate cake" into Google returns more than one result, which is a logical impossibility but there we are. I finally settled on this receipt, which claimed the lofty status of "Ultimate Chocolate Cake". Well I could hardly refuse, now could I? Here are a few photos of the construction:

This is the pan I melted my own bodyweight in dark chocolate in.

The cake as it appeared, naked straight from the oven. This was getting on for midnight so I had to let it cool overnight before making the ganache after breakfast on the following morning. It ended up looking like this:

I ended up, after having licked the spoon I used to mix the ganache, like this:

At 32 years of age you'd have thought I'd be able to eat without smearing my food all around my mouth wouldn't you? You'd be wrong.

Games night

Soho, London, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Here is a photograph I took yesterday that is completely unrelated to this post.

As I mentioned at the weekend Tinseltroos has discovered "Singstar", a karaoke game for the Playstation 2. The only problem was that we did not have a Playstation 2 so one had to be obtained. It turns out that second hand PS2s are incredibly cheap, you can get them for a little over thirty quid on eBay. T managed to get one of the smaller, more recent ones and it is a very dinky device.

Excitingly, not only is the hardware cheap but so is the software. This week eBay has furnished us with "Gran Turismo 4" (for me, mostly) and "We Love Katamari" for both of us. Last night was an extravaganza of videogaming at Schossadlerflug. I played "GT4" and "Star Wars - Battlefront" on my laptop whilst T played "Katamari" and "Singstar". I think the Katamari game is the highlight of the bunch. Games as idiosyncratic, beautiful and entertaining as it are few and far between. Everything about "We Love Katamari" is delightful. The music and graphic design are especially note-worthy. Tinseltroos is now threatening to knit herself a Katamari Prince. I can practice sucking less at "GT4" whilst she does this.

Guitar Heroes

Guitar Heroes, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

It was supposed to be Tinseltroos and my Christmas present to ourselves but we'd both had very crappy weeks at work and decided Christmas had to come early. So we rocked out for a few good hours last night when I got home from work and I suspect a little more rawk may happen tonight.

I'm in work again today, but as I have a lot of simulations to run, and most of that involves a great deal of waiting I'm playing a lot of Zelda on my DS. Today has gone thusly. Kick off a simulation, wander round a dungeon in Zelda looking up every now and again to check on progress. Rinse and repeat. Boring but could be worse.

Varied Fun Shenanigans

What a difference a week makes. Last weekend I worked so by the time last Friday rolled around I hadn't had a day off in a fortnight and I was beginning to feel it. For reasons too dull to catalogue here I didn't have to work this weekend at all. Joy! Apart from my birthday weekend I think this has been my first two-day weekend in about three months. This enabled me to have some fun time!

As I've mentioned previously I made up my mind a couple of months ago that the Flying V would have to go and that all my travels around guitar shops in London had not yielded that which I sought. I put all the search terms I could think of into eBay and sat and watched as nothing turned up for weeks until Tinseltroos suggested I try the US eBay site. I had no idea we in the UK could use it but that's just my dumbness for you. This made perfect sense because not only is it a much bigger marketplace but the type of guitar I desired was very American in nature - and never really caught on here so much. Joy of joys I found the perfect model, a brand new Charvel EVH San Dimas guitar located in a guitar shop in Fort Lauderdale.

The other advantage of buying from the US is that the strength of the pound means I get a lot of guitar for my money. So I bought the instrument and then waited. Firstly I waited for the seller to acknowledge that they'd received my money. This took days during which I panicked that I'd been scammed somehow as the cash had definitely left my account but no word. Finally I hear that they have the money and that the guitar will be dispatched the next day. Days more silence. I prompt them to send me the shipping info so I can track the package and arrange to pay duty when it arrived at Customs. Silence. I begin to get very nervous. Perhaps it really is a scam? I begin to do some extra detective work. By Googling the email address that I sent the PayPal payment to I find out that the firm is a large music store in Florida. I find their 'phone number and call them up. The staff are incredibly helpful and say they will bully the guy who deals with the eBay sales to send me the info. Eventually said guy admits that the courier who took the guitar to the Post Office never got a receipt with the shipping info. ARGH! My beautiful guitar could be anywhere between Fort Lauderdale and a van on the way to our studio and neither I, nor anyone else, have any way of knowing. It could vanish and no-one would be any the wiser. All I could do was wait. Finally on Thursday a letter from the UK Parcel Force turned up demanding that I pay a hundred pounds in import duty and tax before they'd deliver my guitar. I have never been so pleased to hand over a big chunk of money for effectively nothing in my life. And then on Friday the beast turned up. Here it is being held by a happy little rock monkey.

Today we took our annual pilgrimage to Discover Dogs. This year, because Tinseltroos and I have decided which breeds we'd be potentially able and want to own we tracked down the breeders and made sure we met as many of those dogs as possible. I had a play fight with a Griffon Bruxellois (which I would have won had it not run away), as well as petting a Tibetan terrier and a Norfolk terrier. After we'd done our "serious research" we went and played with as many dogs as possible before we tired ourselves out and had to retreat to the Fulham Road for burgers and beer.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with real-life Hollywood film industry types as we try to sell them on the idea of bringing the visual effects on their next project to the studio I work at. I am a mixture of incredibly nervous and very intrigued. It isn't something I do that often because I try and avoid the whole selling side of the business in favour of actually doing the work and I think I make a pretty poor salesman but I really want to work on the project so I'm willing to be a complete whore for a morning. Fingers crossed.

Stinks and Smells

For the first time in I forget how long, Tinseltroos and I had a whole weekend to ourselves, to do with as we pleased. In order to maximise the pleasure we started yesterday comparatively early by wandering into Soho at about 9.45 for breakfast at Balans, a great cafe/restaurant on Old Compton Street. They do a great blueberry pancake with bacon and maple syrup, a dish I developed a real taste for in New York having sworn to all and sundry beforehand that I thought the idea of mixing bacon and syrup disgusting. Shows how much I know.

After a leisurely breakfast we jumped on a bus to just beyond Buckingham Palace. There, on Elizabeth Street, is a fantastic perfume shop called Les Senteurs. Its stock is amazing, the staff knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. In fact it's one of those places that is a true pleasure to buy things from. Tinseltroos and I both bought a couple of bottles. I needed to replenish my Green Irish Tweed and I was persuaded to buy Parfums d'Empire's "Cuir Ottoman" which I am currently wearing and is making me smell wonderfully leathery and a touch talcum powdery. Look out for a post on this on Tinseltroos' new blog, Smellbound to which I will be the (thus far) only male contributor. We walked back from Mayfair through Covent Garden to pick up the last items we needed for our stencil bleaching experiment. En route I was accosted by one of the staff of the legendary Neal's Yard Dairy who proffered a small piece of Stilton to try. It was sensational and so I was lured by their lactic tractor beam into the shop. It is a well known fact about me that I cannot enter a deli or cheese shop and come out with less than three cheeses. And so it was yesterday. In addition to the Stilton I got a slice of old favourite Montgomery's Cheddar of which I am apparently not the only fan and also a chunk of Cheshire Cheese made in Whitchurch, a village about 5 miles from where I was born. We ate big chunks of these along with English apples and sourdough bread upon our return to Schossadlerflug.

And then the real fun began. As I wrote at the arse end of last week we had planned to do some stencil bleach printing and I'd come up with a Green Man design that I liked and planned to use.

It was however an absolute bastard to cut out and use because of the filigree detail and I was nervous that I'd make a mistake cutting the stencil and ruin it, that the bleach wouldn't resolve the detail very well and that I'd tear the damn thing the first time I lifted it of the fabric. Tinseltroos, being more sensible, opted for simpler designs and she cut three different patterns in the time it took me to swear and grump my way through one. Still I was pretty damn pleased with how it turned out.

And so we got on with the bleaching itself. We made sure every window was open and that we'd covered all the surfaces in bin liner to avoid flat-deposit-voiding accidents and stuck our stencils onto our newly acquired garments. We mixed up some cheap household bleach with water (about 50/50 mostly) and, using a small atomiser, sprayed bleach onto the cloth. Most of our designs had two stencils, one for detail and one for an outer "glow" so once one layer had been done we pulled the first stencil, then dropped the second in place and applied more bleach. We stuck the stencils down with Spraymount which made them a lot trickier to get off the cloth once finished but did mean that we got quite crisp lines on the designs because the bleach didn't bleed under the edges. It was a very magical experience to watch the bleach do its chemistry on the cloth and for the image to appear in its new colour gave me exactly the same thrill that I used to get when I printed my own black and white photographs. Once the bleaching was done we put each item in the tumble drier for a few minutes before really soaking them in the bath.

As one batch soaked we sprayed the next. Needless to say we got better the more we experimented so my second batch was better than my first. After the last batch had soaked for a while we put the whole lot into the washing machine and gave them a gentle wash on the 30 degree delicates cycle before hanging them up to dry and going to bed. Here's a selection of what we did:

And here's me wearing one of my creations today:

I'm so pleased with how these turned out and it was so much fun to do (apart from the hours of stencil cutting, but that's my own stupid fault for coming up with such a convoluted design).


Today we went round the British Museum and plotted what we are going to put in the fruit crumble we're going to prepare for supper. It's been a perfect weekend and with crumble to round it off it'll end as well as it began.

Back To The Wedding

As an extra present for the lovely couple whose wedding we attended a few weeks back, Tinseltroos and I have made them a wee poster. There is more Photoshop and VFX than photograph now but I'm quite happy with it. There should be a poster sized print heading their way even as I type.