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.

Fast grundtonen inuti just i kväll ligger rätt långt mer åt ensamhet; ett ganska trött litet djur som längtar hem, och inte till platsen hem, utan till ett hem i en famn som låter mig låta bli att bära på så mycket; ett hem, som är stabilare än jag, som har gott om värme, lugn och klokskap, och ont om rädslor, labilitet och starka triggers.

Ibland händer det att ett stycke text slår till en hårt, hårt rakt i magen.

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 …)

Och plugget? Ja, um … jag vet inte riktigt vad det finns att säga om det. Säger jag inget så har jag inget sagt, som det heter.

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?

Utmaningen består i att ta mitt “theme” för Wordpress och konvertera det till ett “theme” för Drupal. Återigen får jag erfara (jag satt och svor över samma fenomen för ett och ett halvt år sedan) hur snälla Drupal är mot programmerare, och hur förjävla idiotjävliga de är mot designers. De kan säga vad de vill, Wordpresstemat tog ca fem timmar att sätta ihop allt som allt; jag har nu suttit här i tolv jävla timmar med Drupal och inte fan ser det ut som nånting alls. Jag får huvudvärk på fanskapet. Det är en sak att systemet är annorlunda uppbyggt, men man skall väl för fan kunna tillåtas modifiera teckensnittet i kommentarsformuläret eller (läses med fördel på göteborgska)? Eller måste man ge sig in och gräva i deras sketna förbannade template.php och relativt avancerat stuff för en sådan enkel sak, som man i Wordpress ändrar med jävla HTML som vanliga människor? Jag får ryck!

Tyvärr börjar det bli lite för mycket kaos av sajten för att inte föra över den till någon bättre lösning än den nuvarande. Fan.

Angående projekt Blisomfolk, så har jag sovit illa — i bemärkelsen för mycket — de senaste dagarna. Sänggång vid tolvtiden de flesta nätter (dock inte idag), men insomnande först vid 2-3-tiden; väckarklocka ställd på halvnio, men uppvaknande tidig eftermiddag. Problemet är att jag inte har någonting planerat under dagarna nu under lovet, så veckans demon heter “En-timme-till-är-väl-ingen-fara”. Det faktum att jag kan tänka ungefär likadant även en vanlig dag när jag har föreläsningar hjälper förstås inte.

Dock har mathållningen varit helt okej.

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.