CP Update – I’m published!

Just a quick update to last week’s post about me being asked to write for Creative Pool. My first article has now been published (hurrah!), in fact it’s the article I entered into their competition. If you fancy reading it, clicky here.

Giving a back to Wells

Recently I fulfilled a long standing promise to give a talk at a meeting of the Mother’s Union in Wells. When I was fundraising for my trip to Nepal last year my Nana organised a tea and coffee morning, which thanks to the help of the local community became quite an event with a massive cake stall and a raffle. In all it raised around £100 for my trip, bringing a step closer to my target and my challenge in Nepal with the NGO Action Aid. As a small token of my gratitude I agreed to come back and give a talk about the challenge I undertook. I think they appreciated it.

Write stuff

Firstly apologies for that awful play-on-words. “Write stuff”, I don’t know what I was thinking, put it down to youthful exuberance if you like (it’s not though).

Anyway I’ve just heard (on Wednesday) that the excellent, free, online service for creative industry jobs, Creative Pool, have selected me to write some articles for their monthly newsletter! Pretty sweet, I reckon. I entered a writing competition for them a while back and apparently impressed enough for them to ask me to wax wordy on design subjects.

The first issue featuring meself is coming out early next week; if you can stand the anticipation I’ll be linking it here (and across other social media platforms).

This week’s dilema – saving the environment

As well as a follow-up to last week’s article on living the good life, this post is part of (cue trumpety fanfare) Blog Action Day. If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, it’s essentially an attempt by the good people at Change.org to get the internet talking about the totally shit state of the environment. Bloggers all over the world have been signing up, including the blog for the government of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, to write about environmental issues relating to their own interests. The plan is not to cause direct change (although that’d be a bonus) but to start discussions and bring the environment back into the public arena.

All right! So it’s nice to be part of a global initiative, but what will I be bringing to the party? Well it’s definitely more of the pineapple on sticks than the main course. However as some obscure retail chain once quoth “every little helps“.

And it’s supermarkets that have proven to be the inspiration for this blog. Since I moved house a week and a half ago (into the middle of a city for the first time in my life), I’ve been attempting to ’shop local’ and avoid large chain stores wherever possible. It’s been pretty interesting and pretty flipping difficult, mainly because it’s been busy at work and I have to walk past two large supermarkets on my way home. However I’ve persevered, and despite several lapses, I reckon I did quite well, considering my previous, supermarket-dependant lifestyle.

I successfully found some sink and drain unblocker from a small hardware shop. Then I couldn’t find an independent deli to buy some olives from so I went to Sainsbury’s (admitably from their deli counter). I bought a rather nice open fronted wicker cabinet from the Salvation Army, but then I went to Argos and got a shelf. Hmm… I reckon so far my ethical-shopping report reads “must try harder.”

Let’s back-track for a minute. Why am I putting myself through this awkward and, as it turns out expensive, trial? Clearly it’s partly a sense of middle-class guilt, that as I can afford to change the way I live I really should, but also I really, genuinely believe that individual positive change can influence others into the same patterns that might (might) prove beneficial for us all.

But what is so wrong with supermarkets? Well plenty, but I’m not advocating the abolishment of the capitalist system, just an adaptation to our unsustainable way of life. And the evidence is getting overwhelming that we (and by we I mean everybody) do need to radically change the ways we consume.

Right, I’d better nip off to the open market to get some nice fresh, seasonal veg and a pound of pork chops. I’m trying my best to change, what about you?

Turning over a new leaf

So I’ve moved into a lovely new flat in the middle of Norwich, described by many as a “fine city”, very exciting and all that. Amongst other perks it means I have only a short walk to work rather than a 40 minute drive or an even longer train journey. Major, major bonus.

And a fresh start has given me some thoughts on other areas of me. If you watched BBC’s excellent Future of Food series, researched and fronted by the ever reliable George Alagiah, you might be thinking along similar lines. For those that didn’t catch any of the programmes I’m talking about the increasing evidence that the modern Western lifestyle, my lifestyle is unsustainable.

So I’ve decided to see if it’s possible to radically change the way I live my life, the way I consume. Now hold on a minute chums, I’m not about to go off on one of my ethical rants. This time the focus of my wrath is just me. Confused yet? Yeah me too…

Basically I want to see if its feasible to stop buying everything from just a handful of generic shops, supermarkets, high street fashionistas, all those big corporate places that have shaped the way we live today.

I’m no fool and I’m also no radical, I like the easy option. So I’m planning to start small rather than immediately stripping off all my clothes, going to live in a hedge and forage for mushrooms.

Food I reckon is an easy place to start. Luckily Norwich has a plethora of shops which makes this even easier. Not just shops, good old Norwich is home to the UK’s largest open-air 6 day-a-week market. The challenge is going to be find the time to do it what with having a life and all.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

[image credit: magazinewood.com]

Countryfile, Alan style

This weekend I have been engaging in one of the most overlooked of countryside pursuits; fruit picking. Namely plums from of of the trees in my parent’s garden.

Here’s a couple of points to bear in mind should you ever decide to pick some plums yourself. First make sure you pick during early evening. This ensures that you have enough light left to see by, but is also the time that flies, wasps and hornets that are inevitably attracted by the fruit which has fallen from the tree, are least active, giving you a better than average chance of escaping a stinging.

Also endeavor to be the one at the top of ladder, as plums that are dislodged during picking hurt/splatter considerably more once they’ve had a couple of metres to accelerate.

Beware the softer fruit; they may be harboring more than a stone in the centre. Wasps love to burrow into plums and lie there, drunk on juice, until your unsuspecting hand closes round them. It can take some force of will to remain clutching a ladder, ten feet off the ground, with a handful of sticky fruit and stingy insect.

But for those lucky enough to survive the avalanche of plums and swarms of lethal bugs, the rewards are great ie. free fruit! Stick that up your seasonal aisle Tesco!

Battling the Undead on the World Wide Web

I’ve been doing some research this week on online games for a possible project at work and whilst trawling through the confusing pile of acronyms that this throws up, I came across Urban Dead, an HTML text based wonderfully low-fi MMO (massively multiplayer online) game.

The premise is that “you play the survivor or victim of a zombie outbreak in a quarantined city centre, alongside tens of thousands of others”. Intrigued I investigated further.

Whilst the game is overseen by a number of dedicated admins, it’s mostly shaped by the players, all 1,162,854 of them, and as the game is based on descriptive text rather than flashy graphics the scope and depth as much about the collective imaginations of the players, as it is about a planned and contained game engine. The interaction with people within the arena of a role playing game appeals to me, I really want to see how people react to what is essentially a chat room set in a George A Romero film.

Further delving revealed a whole wealth of information written by participants on subjects ranging from best tips on game play, a lexicon of zombie communication (Grh. – Sometimes used as a casual greeting between zombies) (http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Zombie_Lexicon), through to a complete history of the town where the game is played pre-zombification. It seems that a lot of people really get into the part of post-apocalyptic survivors/zombies.

My favourite piece so far is this WordPress journal written by a games developer from the perspective of his character. The level of involvement the players have with their characters seems to be the secret of the game’s success, as well as adaptability to the actions the players take. Urban Dead has just celebrated it’s 4 year anniversary.

Urban Dead is free to join in and play so that’s exactly what I did. When first you sign up you’re confronted with a number of choices about what type of character you’d like to become, ranging from a well armed soldier, through to nerdy scientist. I opted for the “realistic” approach, selecting a Consumer character, with no particular special skills apart from shop-lifting. Selecting the name Argus Mcphee, I was dropped into the forbidding city of Malton.

Despite rather enjoying fantasy action/horror as a genre (well who doesn’t love a good zombie movie?), I was ill prepared for my first foray into the world of MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing games).

After using my ‘Action Points’ to wander around the neighbourhood a bit, I found myself in an isolated part of town and unable to get inside ran out of AP and my character promptly fell asleep. This is a cardinal sin, leaving yourself stranded outside leaves you easy prey for zombies, and so it proved when I logged back in to check on my character a few hours later, he’d been torn to pieces by a pack of flesh-hungry ghouls.

Bugger – I hadn’t even survived a whole weekend.

I really got drawn into the world of Urban Dead and, albeit briefly, I really cared for the fate of young Argus Mcphee, and despite the fact it was a text based game I got quite involved, seeing in my mind’s eye the ruined buildings and rubble strewn streets of a fictional city.

Apparently my newly zombified character can be returned to human status by a scientist with the correct injection, so I’m going to log in and shamble off in search of one. Now how do zombies go again… ah yes… “Grrrrrhhhhhhhhhh!”

UPDATE: changed post header but still check out Timo Grubing’s zombie-a-day blog.

Boom, boom, boom

What with the festival season being well underway and my thus far being a bystander to all the carefully fenced frivolities, I’ve made the rather spur of the moment decision to buy a ticket for the Boomtown Fair, formerly known as Recydrate the West.

Last year me and my brother made the epic journey from Norfolk over to Bristol, then on into the heart of Wales in an overloaded Ford Ka. As any festival-goer will blub on about if you ask them, a music festival is a memorable experience, partly due to the close grouping of so many half-starved, over-tired, drugged-up ‘young people’ into fields. Everyone has there own tales of festival survival of when the going got really tough, when the metaphorical port-a-loo of fate was overflowing with the excrement of early morning desperation. These stories are as much a part of the fun as the actual bands themselves. I’ll never forget (I’m scared by the experience) of staying up the whole night at Reading making sure no-one tried to set fire to our tents. Great times.

Obviously I can’t freaking wait for a new adventure, a mere week away!

Actually, I’d better go find my tent. And my wellies. And my festival hat.

At least it’s not swine flu…

It began with with a just a general shit feeling at work, groggy and headachey. By the time I got home the feeling had sharpened into intense stomach cramps. Remembering someone telling me that it was good for upset tummies, I drank half a can of Coke. Almost immediately I vomited up what felt like everything in my body. Pickled Onion flavour Monster Munch may be a delicious snack, but tasting it in reverse was very unpleasant.

After spending a day lying around uselessly, the virus, which I guess was what it was, seems to have passed, with only moderate vomiting and diarrhoea. Why am I blogging about this, I hear you wonder vaguely? Well partly I’ve been stuck indoors all day feeling pretty rotten so I’m venting some frustration, but I thought I’d also consider my illness from a current, world-health crisis perspective.

There’s no doubt that the media has gone totally swine flu mad, publishing 24 hour casualty figures, to keep us all up to date and while information is key to keeping us, the public, aware of the seriousness of the threat, that the more we hear, repeated in increasingly hysterical tones, the more people are starting to panic. I do rather think that last week’s spike in people reporting to their doctor’s with ’symptoms’ has quite a lot to do with the first reported death in the UK from an apparantly healthy individual.

Fortunately some rednecks on YouTube have answer! This video helped to put a smile back on my deathly pale face. Laughter is after all the best medicine.

New job – about time too

After literally months of searching I’ve finally been rewarded with that most sacred of graduate Grails, a job. As of Monday I will be gainfully employed as a Junior designer at Soak Digital, a digital marketing company in Norwich. Whilst this means that I’ll finally have some financial security, it does mean an end to the almost nomadic existence that I have lived this past half-year. I’m a bit sad about that; I really enjoyed flitting around different agencies, and I like to think I’ve picked up a trick or two along the way. Hopefully these things I’ve learnt will stand me in good stead for the new challenges that I’m hoping this new job will bring.

Time to grow up and be a proper designer, although what that means, I’m not quite sure. Yet.

Throughout this process I’ve turned time and time again to Adrian Shaughnessy’s excellent book, How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul. It contains sagely and down-to-earth wisdom and the passion that is apparent in the way he writes is a continuous inspiration to me. Lovely stuff.