Also, “The librarian and the stripper” sounds like a cool name for a film. (Not that kind of film.)

Conclusion: Whatever I do, there is no way in hell that I can pass all my courses, and hence no way in hell that I will be allowed to keep my Mobility grant, without spending hilarious amounts of money on extra flights and nights in hotels. I don’t have money to spend on extra flights and hotels. And I want to go home.

This annoys me to such a degree that I don’t have words to express it.

Working title: “Personality Defrag”

I’ve been to many places
Made them pictures in my past
Many thoughts and faces
All those traces last
I’ve paced a million paces
Couldn’t wait another day
Here’s not where I want to stay

I ran to find myself
Fled somewhere I thought I wanted to go
I ran to find myself
But I find that I’ve left myself behind

Now you’ve got so far
Yet you seem so sad
When the old wolves call
It’s a subtle warning flag
Now your old wounds bleed
And your act’s gone bad (~?)
What I think you need:
Personality defrag

“Personality defrag”. Make any sense?

Backstory/justification: I watched Star Trek and, inevitably, a period of S.P.O.C.K. obsession followed.

My Metallic Soul

Latest model, every detail engineered,
I am loved, admired, revered
Watch your smiling faces, mine does not betray
That I’d rather do this another day

The sun is high
Not a single cloud in the sky
But my light receptors are hacked
I see the world in black

Don’t you cheer me up, I shun your loving words
All you say, I have already heard
I stop listening long before you even start
My metallic soul’s not like your beating heart

The sun is high
Not a single cloud in the sky
But my light receptors are hacked
I see the world in black

The first robot with emotions
I was working yesterday
Now I’m going through the motions
Doing what I should — what does it matter anyway?

The sun is high
Not a single cloud in the sky
But my light receptors are hacked
I see the world in black

Please pardon the moody. It happens.

As we all know (or perhaps not — not everything reaches the mainstream media these days), personal integrity, the Internet and freedom of speech are under attack. Not only in the UK, but all over Europe. We cannot let this happen. Something needs to change, and it’s about time that we change it. Let’s start by changing the UK. Let’s start by starting our very own Pirate Party.

There’s not many of us at the time of writing, and we have yet to organise ourselves into something formal. But I bet there are many more of you out there, who share our views and are only waiting for a polite push in the right direction.  Now I’m saying the same thing to yo as, a month and a half ago, I said to the members of the PPI forum:

I’m not versed in the rules for political parties in the UK, other than the very basics, but I would love to be of help to get something going if there’s interest. It would be a pity if the UK, which seems to really need a Pirate Party right now, would remain without …

Long story short: Anyone out there who’s British and/or in Britain, who’s up for shaking some life back into PPUK?

Come on, we’re waiting!

You can either contact me by comment or by e-mail (or AFK, or on Facebook, or by other means), or Simon Wood by e-mail (put “PPUK” in the subject line, so that we don’t accidentally classify you as spam).

Update

The UK part of the PPI forums has been re-opened, so go there if you want to take part in starting-a-party discussions!

Here’s where I ran into a tiny problem. The headers — that is, the BIG colourful ones — have previously been static images, using a pretty font the name of which I can’t remember, because at some point in February my trusted laptop dies miserably, and with it went all the fonts I had downloaded. New categories meant a need for new page titles, so my first idea was to find the old font or one that looked like it and then let something like sIFR or FLIR render the headers.

It’s not easy to look for a font when you don’t know its name, because there’s so many of them. This, however, is what finally made me give up on my search for The Old Font: I introduce the charmingly but inappropriately named Migraine Serif.

Migraine Serif (and Champignon)

Can you blame me for falling in love?

Anyway, long story short, after playing around with the design for a bit, I decided that it would look way cooler with a script E, and so I searched and found Champignon, which is the other pretty font in the image. (Champignon is listed as ‘unknown licence’, but what the hell, I’m only using one letter, it can’t be that bad.)

So, the before/after section we have all been waiting for:

Thoughtbook: Before

Thoughtbook: After

Looks cool, right? *fishes for attention* There’s much more content now, yet (to me at least), it looks much cleaner, which is exactly what I like my designs to be like. As you may or may not have noticed, I also took the opportunity to restyle the sidebar, blockquotes, post headers and ‘meta text’ (the “by Erika on Saturday 18 April” etc) slightly while I was at it, and I found a plugin that lets me ‘AJAXify’ the blog front page, so that clicking “Continue reading” loads the rest of the post inline, instead of loading another page.

Besides redesigning the Thoughtbook, I chucked the previously static bits of my web site — namely, the CV, the portfolio and the front page — in with the rest, which was lots of fun, because I got to experiment with some Wordpress features that I didn’t even know existed beforehand. This way, I can update everything much more easily, and the file structure on my web space isn’t such a god-forsaken mess anymore. In particular, I like my new portfolio very much:

Portfolio: Before

Portfolio: After

Here, the difference is obvious. The old portfolio was, admittedly, functional, but terribly cluttered, with tons of little images and text. Now, clicking a picture brings up a ‘lightbox’ style overlay using AJAX, so we don’t need to have everything fighting for the same tiny space, and loading goes much quicker.

Well, that’s all from me for now. Can you tell I’m childishly proud of myself?

(Do feel free to comment on this post with any opinions on the new design that you might have, or any glitches or bugs that you have stumbled upon. I’m to excited to notice that sort of thing …)

It is time for me to admit that I own fourteen DVDs and at least twenty CDs (there’s more at my parents’ home) that, for the above reasons, I need to get rid of. It makes me very, very sad, because not only do I love watching films and listening to music, but unlike some, I also love holding a physical representation of the ethereal in my hand, putting a shiny new disc in the player, flicking through the liner notes, watching extras/bonus materials, or just feeling the fascination and envy upon looking through someone’s CD collection.

Now, without further ado, here is the  unabridged list.

DVDs

• Moulin Rouge, 2-disc special edition
• The Illusionist
• In Bruges (this one hurts more than most. I positively adore this film)
• Music and Lyrics (another film that I really, really love)
• The Prestige
• Braveheart
• Schindler’s List
• Leon
• Shakespeare In Love
• Rob Roy
• The Phantom of the Opera (2004 adaptation with Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum), 2-disc edition
• Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, 2-disc edition

CDs

• Sean Lennon — Friendly Fire (case slightly damaged)
• Les Fatals Picards — Pamplemousse Mécanique
• Barbara chante Barbara
• Thomas Dutronc — Comme un manouche sans guitare
• Sandrine Kiberlain — Manquait plus qu’ça…
• -M- (Mathieu Chédid) — -M- (case slightly damaged)
• Moulin Rouge soundtrack
• Robyn (with UK bonus track)
• Veronica Maggio — Vatten & Bröd
• Patrik Isaksson — Kom genom eld (single)
• The Ark — We Are The Ark (full-length album in ’single style’ cardboard sleeve)
• Aldebert — Sur place ou à emporter
• Aldebert — Les paradis disponibles
• Coldplay — A Rush of Blood To the Head
• Coldplay — Viva La Vida (this hurts )
• Coldplay — Prospekt’s March EP (this hurts even more.)
• Steps — Steptacular (don’t ask)
• The Blues Brothers — Best Of The Blues Brothers
• R.E.M. — Automatic For The People (case slightly damaged)

I am going to take them to BookEnds, the second hand book shop run by the Aberdeen Students’ Charities Campaign, in a couple weeks’ time (why be specific) and hope that I might get a pound or two for them. If you want to snatch them before that, please give me a shout.

It should be noted that I will keep the films and CDs that I have bought second hand — they were already sold once, so no extra money to the dinosaurs, hence I can forgive myself — and the ones distributed by independent companies who aren’t owned by ‘the Big Four’ — I’m only opposing the imbeciles who sue their customers for spreading their content. I wish that Featured Artists Coalition would publish their list of members somewhere, so that I could pick those off my list. Luckily for me, The Usual Suspects was bought second hand. Less luckily for me, I will not be able to buy Twilight or The Boat That Rocked for another few years.

And what am I going to do about all my books? … no, no, I just can’t. My dedication isn’t strong enough for me to get rid of my beloved books. I’m sorry.

As a sidenote, this obviously means that I will be writing significantly fewer reviews, unless I get to borrow CDs/DVDs from friends. Pity too; I like writing reviews almost as much as I like listening to the music/watching the films. Instead, I will have to get creative myself and get Tion/Imaginatron off the ground. Anyone got an old (but decent) voice microphone lying around?

And, if you also want blogging to remain free, please consider sending a picture of yourself with the words “Free blogger” to join the thousands at http://www.beppegrillo.it/iniziative/freeblogger/. Or have a look at http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/11/italian-bloggers-cal.html. The Web is, it seems, under more of a threat than ever.

I am disappointed.

Medium summary

When I pay to see a psychological thriller, I want a psychological thriller, and not Biblical prophecizing cock-and-bull. Please disregard my religion or lack thereof for a minute; Ezekiel meets Star Trek is not the ideal resolution to an intriguing supernatural and numerological riddle, and I find it hard to believe that I would have thought it was even a year ago, when I classified myself as religious. The catchline of the film was “Knowing is everything”, well, let me rephrase that: “Knowing” is apparently bloody pointless.

Long summary

All right, we’re talking about this film called “Knowing”, featuring Nicholas Cage doing his patent concerned face for 120 minutes in a story about an MIT professor who gets his hands on a numerical prophecy about the end of the world, written on a sheet of paper by a primary school lass named Lucinda, fifty years ago. Of course, we spend the first hour waiting for him to figure out that the sheet of numbers is an end-of-the-world prophecy, and only after that does the action really begin, with Cage’s persona running about trying to figure out, first whether the prophecy is genuine, then who the hell this Lucinda girl was, and finally, trying his best to save the world from impending disaster.

He is of course doomed to fail. Lucinda’s prophecy lists “all” major accidents since 1958, with dates, co-ordinates and death tolls, and when our hero goes to the sites of the two upcoming tragedies, try as he might he can only watch people kick the bucket around him. How he plans to stop the end of the world is unclear.

What is also unclear is how this so far relatively promising story along the lines of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable could so desperately paint itself into such a ridiculously stupid corner. I have a policy of not revealing the endings of films to people who haven’t seen them, however, this only applies to films that I consider at least vaguely worth seeing. Then again, sure, if you like embarassingly predictable plots, mysterious-looking guys who follow the main characters around and then turn out to be some sort of angels-cum-extraterrestrials or a-new-heaven-and-a-new-earth themed endings (literally), this film might just be for you. If not, then not.

LA Times, according to Wikipedia, writes that “Knowing” is “moody and sometimes ideologically provocative”. “Ideologically provocative”, are you kidding me? It’s ideologically propagandist, plotline intelligence challenged and a huge bloody disappointment. Alternatively just lame. Definitely a must-not-see.