THINGS YOU CAN DO THAT AREN'T YOUR DISSERTATION

Just in case you were struggling for ideas on how to become a mighty procrastinator like yours truly.

As part of third year, we must all face the most heinous, and truly awful beast known as....

THE DISSERTATION.

now it's really not like me absolutely normal for me to bury my head in the sand when things like this come around but even I have been shocked at the amount of things I have found to do instead of making a start on this essay. Fellow fine artists, I'm sure you can sympathise. Unless you're one of those with some form of common sense; in which case you've probably already finished your one, and are wondering how I'm still alive.

Anyways. These are but a few of the things I have found to distract myself from this very important essay.

THE LIST:

1. Room tidying - and I'm not just talking about my standard "push-all-the-scattered-crap-to-the-edges-of-the-room-to-maximise-floorspace" approach here.

2. Cleaning the kitchen. Like, properly.

3. Rearranging all my books into alphabetical order.

4. Eating. (my personal favourite)

5. Pretending I'm an infamous, clown-masked bank robber

6. Building a new computer.

7. Drinking various alcoholic beverages (another favourite)

8. Buying lots of things on the internet.

9. Waiting for the things you bought to arrive in the post.

10. Working my evening job as a senior popcorn scooper at the local cinema.

11. Arguing with the British Gas customer service department.

12. Making pinhole cameras out of random boxes and film canisters lying around in your room

13. Defacing children's colouring books.

14. Staying up until stupid o'clock in the morning making a list of things that have nothing to do with writing a dissertation.

and last, but by no means least:

15. Staring at a blank Microsoft Word document trying not to think about how fucked you are if you don't pull your thumb out your arse and figure out what the fuck to write.

Still, I have a pinhole camera or two set up in the studio, so that'll be something exciting to look forward to tomorrow. I hope that they're not horrendously over-exposed - that will just ruin my day. I've never had too much luck with pinhole techniques, but let's hope that this time round everything will be awesome, and I'll have a badass photograph created over a period of 24 hours.

Will update tomorrow if I'm able. Until then, it's time for bed.

Night y'all.
-Padfoot

NEW YEAR, NEW START

'Sup, internet?

Well I'm pretty much bedridden today, as I maybe drank a bit too much cider last night. Maybe. So I figured I'd update this thing.

So... where to start? 

I'm back at uni, for my final year - But I guess that's fairly obvious. I'm also living with much nicer people this year - feels great to be able to be in a house where I'm not losing weight from stress and feel like I'm about to go insane all the time. Sadly those assholes I was living with are still trying to cause trouble. But let's not go into that. 

I've been bashing out a surprising amount of work; I'm actually fairly confident about where my studio practice is going. Started out by experimenting with acetates, trying to transfer digital images into analogue ones printed in the darkroom. I can't even begin to tell you how good it felt to get back in there - it's strange. I find a kind of inner peace in that dim red light, mixing all those chemicals together. Maybe it's my inner 4-year-old fondly reminiscing about the time when I combined a buttload of different shampoos into the sink. I think it was shortly after someone had read Roald Dahl's old classic "George's Marvellous Medicine" to me. I remember basking in the glory of my creation. Sadly my mother didn't see it that way. 

But I digress.

I also made some pretty awesome polaroid images by accident. 

Basically the film I was using had expired around 2 years back, and so the chemical paste wasn't spreading properly up the image. "fuck this" I said, and proceeded to manually squeeze the chemical over the image with implements ranging from the edge of a table to an old gluestick. And I got some really interesting results. I love happy accidents.

I'm thinking of getting some more film, potentially expired, and trying to make some more images like this - or if not, just making them as weird as possible. Sadly however this stuff is hella expensive so I'm waiting until I get paid before I buy any more. Besides, I should really get started on my dissertation.

urgh. if there's one thing I'm almost definitely shitting a brick about, it's that.

I should probably go get on with that.

Or at least, I say I will, and then end up playing Dead Space 3 again. Even though it is fucking terrible.

ah well. Until next time.

-Padfoot