I sat down on my chair tonight and the back snapped off, I hurt my arm.

Remember, I’m just going to write what pops into my head, alright.

So, also tonight, I made that money I talked about:

Click on the image for biggerness, just in case, you know, you wanted to feed my ego by printing it out and trying to buy sweeties with it (it’s not legal tender by the way).

Oh, and yesterday I made dinner, or tried to. The dessert, a strawberry cheesecake, was an unparalleled success, and I quote my flatmate: “this is the best dessert you’ve made yet”, however the main course, cheviche (raw fish marinated in lime juice) was not so stellar. Thankfully I had a backup vegetable omelette, so we didn’t go hungry.

Here’s an interesting thing photoshop threw at me today.

I shall pretend that I wasn’t actually so desperate for money that I decided to try and forge some and say that I wanted to print out some fake money for a game I wanted to play in class.

I wonder what’s going on behind the scenes to make this happening, and how much it’s slowing the program down. I imagine it’s down to those yellow dots (and on reading the linked article, it appears that it’s either that or some other digital watermark), and the thing wot photocopiers do.
Anyway, it actually took quite a long time to generate this image. I had already opened the file, performed minor colour correction, cropped, coppied, pasted into a new document, rotated, resized, moved, duplicated, attempted to resize again, and that was when the message came up. I left the program open while I went off and taught and when I got back photoshop had forgotten and let me edit again, much to my annoyance because I wanted to screencap it to write this blog post. I had to close photoshop and repeat the aforementioned process to get the warning to pop up again.
Needless to say, I just used a different program to open it, the always glorious (and utterly free) Inkscape, which, coincidentally came out in a new version today. The little play I’ve had with it so far is very promising, I can well believe that one day it’ll top Illustrator (it has for some time been better than illustrator for basic vector editing functions, it only lacks the vast range of tools and effects and things). And all that got me thinking that I should make my own brand of play money, for future classes. If I get around to it I shall, of course, show you here.

So then, here’s the deal:

Every other day I’m going to log in to this blog and hit the New Post button and then write something. It might just be vague strands of nonsense, it might be dull, it might be enlivening, but whatever it is, hopefully I might end up documenting things here again.

I think I worked out the main reason why I haven’t had the motivation to blog in the past goodness knows how many months, it’s that my audience had(has) changed.
Why I have always blogged has been, primarily, for myself, as a kind of diary. Making it in a public format gave me the motivation to do it but at the end of my day it’s a place for me to look back on and fill in the holes in my memory. That family members (some of them) and the occasional friend would drop by every so often was simply an added bonus, a way for some people to keep up with my goings on, a way for me to communicate with a few. But, as soon as I started realising that random acquaintances and colleagues would drop by here, and then what I’d blogged about would crop up in conversations sort of freaked me out a bit. I could, of course, make things private here, but that goes a little against the spirit of the internet in my books. So I’m just going to try and ignore the fact that ne’er-do-wells and malcontents might be lurking in these nooks and crannies and start writing for myself again.

On Sunday my flatmates went out to buy the paper and they saw a lot of people in a bar, so they came back all enthused, let’s go to a bar, they said, and have a little drink before we start cooking lunch. So we went to a bar, and a crazy alcoholic guy started talking to me, and I couldn’t stop him, and he talked about people being beaten up with baseballbats in london, and how he couldn’t get a girlfriend because of his mother, and how all english people are bastards and how his girlfriend got an abortion without telling him and so he said pack your bags and leave bitch and how he likes newcastle. And then we left that bar and I walked into a tree and we went home and watched three films back to back.

I just clicked on the New Post button, and now I have to make myself write something.

So, I composed a short piece of music for a friend who has made a flash computer game and is trying to sell it. The game’s called Llama Glama, so I guess the track’s called Llama Glama Loop. Here’s the mp3:

llama glama loop

And I’ll link the game once it’s out in the wild.

Yesterday we had a fun day in the flat – we (or, more accurately, my flatmate) bought a dinning room table and chairs for the flat and my flatmate’s parents brought it round this morning along with a new tv. This precipitated a day’s worth of fun messing up IKEA construction instructions and, enthused with remodelling energy, we reorganised the living room, I fixed my flatmate’s stereo and now we almost live in a real house. We cooked a stupendous prawn and pasta dish and I made chocolate scones, which went down very well despite it being a little against my principles to combine chocolate and scones. I was thinking about letting you all know a little more about the flat, because I think we’re in a fun little place:

We have a cat that’s just finished being heat for the first time – she went completely insane for a week which was fun, and disturbing. I don’t want to admit it but I’m almost at the point of changing my righteously anti-pet stance. We make fascist coffee in a coffee pot designed for one. We watch a lot of films and fight continuously with recalcitrant subtitle files. We eat very well and I bake a lot of cakes and things and this is part of a weird anarchic organisational system that we have managed to cobble together whereby although we have no schedules for chores or systems for shopping together we nevertheless manage to work out a weird kind of balance whereby we all do the shopping and we all steal each others stuff and I bake cakes and sometimes cook other meals and my flatmate Davide cooks a lot of the meals and Kris never cooks but cleans more than anyone else. We drink a lot of wine and we consult dictionaries a lot and sometimes we just sit around saying stupid things.

I’ve been practising animation things again and I’ve started learning about Cinema 4D, a 3d graphics program – here’s a video I made recently for my desktop background, because I like wasting processor resources:

snailsnail go baby from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Right, I’m off to spend the rest of the day writing lesson plans and watching Dawson’s Creek.

Hello blog, I haven’t mastered this again yet, have I.

Let’s throw some random meat into the electric grinder.

I cooked toad in the hole today.

Yesterday I went to Ikea for the first time in my life. It was absolutely more horrific than I thought it would be, however, I now have a nice shiny new desk, and I don’t have to use the computer lounging in bed with it propped on an odd assortment of cardboard and plastic boxes and dead loudspeaker. I can sit up like a proper simian. The desk was a birthday present – a fantastic birthday present – thanks my dear Elisilla.

So, oh yes, for the birthday I had myself a little party, for which I spent two days beforehand making cakes, lots and lots of cakes. Here is the pièce de résistance – a triple layer chocolate explosion of a cake (along with a rather hairy arm). Several party members had fits and died after eating it. We called it the orgasmo gástrica.

And finally – One Punto Stop the latest in snailsnail’s poetical ramblings…. this time in Spanglish – go on, knock yourself out with a hammer:

There must be other stuff, but it escapes me for now.

Peace. Out.