That’s a long time…
I am a lucky girl… take a peek at the beautiful flowers I was given on Friday night. Ah yes, in this house it’s Valentine’s day all weekend <3
…Oh and the Fireworks
From where we were all stood on Blackfriar’s Bridge on NYE we actually couldn’t see the whole of the London Eye, but I found this brilliant video that shows what we were missing. I love the gold dust sparkly fireworks. Definitely my favourite!
Bring. It. On.
I have a feeling that 2010 is going to be raucous.
Atleast the last few months have mentally prepared me for the worst, I feel like I have aged by about 20 years. I occasionally catch myself thinking… “it can’t possibly get any worse?” which I hate. As obviously, things could be alot worse.
The 2010 version of me will be alot more optimistic, I am genuinely convinced everything is going to be awesome and that the new year will give me stuff to look get excited about.
(On the other hand, we all know where forward-thinking like that got me in 2009!)
Not that I necessarily believe in all this but it also just happens to be my year!! How could anything possibly go wrong! Let’s not tempt fate, eh?
My Masters in Graphic Design at the London College of Communication is starting on the 11th January (I enroll in 5 days and kiss goodbye to a hefty chunk of cash at the same time, looks like I am inevitably back on the oh-so appetising noodle diet?) and I am so excited about it…. the noodles too.
#Singsong# These are a few of my favourite things! Sketchbooks, RedBull, hundreds of PrittSticks, breaking into floods of tears for no real reason, bulk-buying printer cartridges, late nights and later mornings!! I love every painstakingly hard moment of it all.
(Don’t worry, that is not supposed to rhyme.)
For those who are genuinely interested, I will be blogging my briefs, outcomes and workshops, so it’s kind of like you are studying at uni with me… ‘cept you’re not… and you wont have to drain your savings account in order to do it, like moi. Fun factor 10.
So guys and girls, I hope you are all as excited about the new year as I am. And I hope that if the last few months have served to prove anything to anyone, let it be that anything is possible if you set your mind to it.
SEE YOU IN 2010! xxx
Merry Christmas ‘09
O.J. would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. (That picture is not creepy at all… except it is.)
3 days until I trek back to London and start mentally, physically and let’s not forget financially preparing myself for my MA which starts in exactly 10 days. Yoiks!
It turns out after all of the hassle I am not infact going to get my loan in time for the start of my course at all, so I will be breaking into my savings as soon as term starts. I bore myself just talking about how much trouble this Masters has already been so I am going to refrain from whining about it anymore! Maybe it will be my new years resolution? Woah, one step at a time please.
I don’t know about new years resolutions just yet, but my Christmas wish (yes, everyone gets one) is that the new year be less stressful. 2009 did me no favours, and so has turned me into a hardened, cynical, grump. ^_-
I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas day, spend time with your most favourite people, eat lots of turkey and ‘taders and not too much drink! (and listen to this while you do)
White Christmas
Extreme weather we are having huh? Well not compared to Washington, where they had a whole Winter’s snow in one night! Subsequently they have 2 foot of snow in places, airports are closed and hundreds of flights grounded. The worst snowstorm in 6 years.
Well that may be. But it doesn’t make it anyless beautiful! While we are all decorating the inside of our houses snow does its very best of decorating the outside. Magical!
Take a peek at the video of inside the White House… it puts my Christmas tree to shame!!
WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)
I had a post scheduled since January 20th this year, being that was the day Barack Obama came to office and I thought that this year would be relevant and important in bringing The War on Terrorism™ to an end, as President Obama had said that one of his first moves in office would be to bring the troops home and pull out of Iraq by August this year. Some said this was a fairly adventurous decision but even our own government mirrored Obama’s determination and also said they would have our troops home this year.
Me being the idiot I am, totally believed that it would mean they’d *actually* be home by Christmas this year and so scheduled a post (which I have now had to delete as completely irrelevant) to celebrate the first Christmas that alot of soldiers would have home since the war in Iraq started over 6 years ago.
I’ve since written this replacement post and have adopted John Lennon’s way of thinking – War is Over (If You Want It) as today just happens to be the day that he was assassinated and also the anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s War Is Over Campaign. Which was first launched 40 years ago today, back in 1969. The billboards went up accross the world in cities including New York, Tokyo, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Toronto, and some others.
I love the posters! Four decades old today and it just goes to show how classic design prevails, they still look awesome today. To download the poster or the desktop bckground be sure to click through to the Imagine Peace website.
Here is an excerpt from the above vid/documentary
John: We specifically did the poster event round the world for Christmas to try and get atleast one plug in for peace on Earth at Christmas because that’s what it’s about …and happy birthday Christ… that’s what it’s about.
Interviewer: If you had one wish for Christmas time what would it be?
Yoko: Peace
John: Peace on earth
Yoko: …and love
The video has graphic content, as it includes the video for Happy Xmas (War is Over) but I do reccomend you watch it if you can. I like John Lennon’s enthusiasm. He was eccentric, but he cared. The world would be a much better place if there were more people like him in it.
Trillions
I found this short film over at Vimeo which discusses the possibility of the future trillion node network.
“It is widely accepted that in the foreseeable future the worldwide network of computing devices will grow to billions, or even tens of billions of nodes. However, if we broaden our consideration to include networks of information devices (all artificial systems that deal in any way with information), then we are likely to be faced with much larger numbers. A network of one trillion devices is not inconceivable.”
For more information visit Maya’s research.
“Really interested in the implications of a trillion-node world? Read Dr. Peter Lucas’s seminal white paper that not only predicted this sort of scaling and complexity but outlined some of the resilient patterns that we need to follow to get there from here.”
No regrets
I calculated how much money doing my Masters is going to cost me… an unsettling figure, but a necessary one.
I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that it’s a good thing that “full time course” actually means “3 days a week” because I don’t think I will have the luxury of cutting back on freelance with this MA like I did when I was at uni studying for my Degree.
I shall have to balance my time *very* carefully between sketchbooks/studying/working (good thing I am little miss organisation!)
Sigh
Eeek an announcement!
Everything IS going to be amazing!
But first, marvel at the awesomeness of this nebulosity. (It’s an emission nebula in the constellation of Cepheus.) Yet one of the many many things that makes me a dork, I read NASA’s APOD. Read the description here.
I love looking at the stars, there is something ancient and magical about them. Shame I have been doing no star spotting since coming to London ofcourse, nothing but orange skies to be seen here, so for now APOD can be my window to the sky.
So, without further ado, time for the announcement:
YES! I was accepted into the MA Graphic Design course at the London College of Communication at the University of the Arts… unconditionally! I have been doing a skippy dance since lastnight when I got the letter.
I am about to make the oh-so fun transformation from Freelancer to *Swot-who-freelances-in-her-spare-time*! So excited, mostly about the pressure. I like deadlines and schedules it’s motivating. Oh, they are going to hate me at uni.
*Edit* Term starts on the 11th January so that’s only *68 days* until crunch time. Watch me fall to pieces via my updates on twitter. I’m sure my mental demise will be visible… I get so nervous!
Hallowe’en!
I was on Oxford Street on Friday evening and there was a massive box of boxes ready to go off and be recycled… and then I had an idea for a Hallowe’en costume.
As my boyfriend George had been struggling to come up with his costume and we had a party to get to on Saturday night, we decided to make something out of all the card. So once we (and by “we” I mean he…) had lugged all the card back to our place at Tower Bridge, this is how George and I spent our Saturday.
I’ll post more about Hallowe’en weekend later, including Pete’s’s equally amazing costume! Lots and lots happened, I’m just waiting to get my mitts on pictures of it all!
Oh and how about this guy? He is far too round to be scary but the kitten has enjoyed licking it’s eye sockets so maybe the weirdness of that scene would frighten off any ghoul!?
