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it's dangerous to go alone! take this.
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[05 Jul 2009|05:06pm] |
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tried to take my contact lenses out while really hungover today. right one popped out and fell on the floor when i blinked and didnt realise. spent another 20 minutes trying to get it out before realising. my eye hurts now.
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| why |
[01 Jul 2009|01:03pm] |
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why is it that merely deciding that i want to exercise seems to make me get sick?
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| Ok, go! |
[29 Jun 2009|01:28pm] |
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Ok! Party week is over, time to seriously get back into it again. Intake: reduced & healthy only, no caffeine or excess sugar
Exercise: daily, extended ride + short weights
Sleep: by 10:30 Lets do this.
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[28 Jun 2009|10:36am] |
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ohhhhhh i exist in a world of pain but gd it was worth it, what a brilliant night. thanks to everyone who came, especially those who braved sickness and not knowing anyone. i had a great time, hope you all did too.
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| a great day |
[27 Jun 2009|01:33am] |
dear livejournal,
i have the best friends ever. in the entire world. if you think you have better friends than me, you are wrong, die in a fire.
love chris.
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| Peavey |
[20 Jun 2009|09:31pm] |
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Played the peavey classic 30 today at the guitar shop in paddington. Verdict: WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT And the tweed case just sells it
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[20 Jun 2009|02:22am] |
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dear diary, tonight i saw ben, dane, heather, rachel, pete, darren, spencer and brendan, and it reminded me exactly how lucky i am to have such a wonderful circle of friends. regards,
chris
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[16 Jun 2009|11:19pm] |
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i am a sweet awesome plant
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| books |
[15 Jun 2009|11:48pm] |
| [ |
music |
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The Acorn - Books |
] |
"i'm the books you're tired of reading"
gosh, the acorn is incredible
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| believe it |
[14 Jun 2009|02:01pm] |
alright, no fucking around this week. serious exercise time again.
monday: 16km ride, 5km run
tuesday: 8km ride + ddr
wednesday: 8km ride
thursday: 18km ride
friday: 16km ride, 5km run
it was nice to have it easy for the last month while there have been more pressing things about but no excuse to get lazy just because it's cold.
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| finished |
[09 Jun 2009|05:11pm] |
Yesterday I got the final mixes back from our producer. I listened through them and everything was exactly what I wanted it to be. The record was Finished. I've been doing this for ten years and I've never finished a record before. This sounds like a pretty strange thing to say for someone who's produced and released three CDs, but it's true.
The question of when a record is 'finished' is not as straight forward as it sounds. In a perfect world where we all have all the studio time that we want, all the equipment that we want, and do everything as perfectly as we'd like first time, this would seem to be a pretty simple idea, but it isn't. Even if you do have all the resources that you need, when do you stop editing? More vocal harmonies? Delay, reverb, chorus? Pan the guitars more, suck the high-end out of that kick drum a bit more? At what point do you sit back and say to yourself, 'I am finished'? It's something that you just feel, when the sound in front of you matches or surpasses what you heard in your head when you went in. That's difficult because the recording process itself always changes songs in itself, as you realise that the ideas you had don't sound like you thought they would, or the technical process finds itself suggesting other parts, extra content, new techniques. What you envisaged may not be anything like what you've ended up deciding to create in the mean time. And that's assuming everything you do goes well - when it doesn't, you're left working around tracking mistakes, poor microphone choices, questionable singing, equipment failure and just not using gear that's good enough to produce the sounds you wanted. When do you stop trying to compensate for the things that went wrong and accept the quality you've ended up with?
I had always thought that it was theoretically possible to reach a stage of knowing that a record was finished, it had just never happened to me before. Every other recording that I've done, I've either run short of time, money, equipment, skill or a combination of all of the above, and at that point, had to accept whatever I had in front of me at that point as the finished product. It has never been my decision - the choice was made for me.
This record .. is Finished. I can't begin to describe what that feels like.
crossposted from thismyresolve.blogspot.com
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| hottest 100 of all time |
[04 Jun 2009|10:58pm] |
my 10 votes for the hottest 100 of all time:
Muse - Time Is Running Out
The Living End - Prisoner Of Society
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
Rage Against the Machine - Killing In The Name
Tool - Stinkfist
Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American
Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings
Refused - New Noise
Massive Attack - Teardrop
SONG REMOVED OPEN SLOT MAKE SUGGESTIONS
what were yours?
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[04 Jun 2009|03:19pm] |
BREATHE IN FIRE
KNOW I'M FREE
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| rock |
[04 Jun 2009|09:47am] |
"ROCK IS DEAD
long live paper and scissors"
this badge is on my Strike Anywhere hoodie. i noticed it the other day. i didn't put it there. how did it get there! rachel! was that you? AH secret gifts are awesome, especially when they get to you without you even realising
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| eyes |
[04 Jun 2009|08:55am] |
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the gold rings in my eyes have faded and they have settled to green. i used to like it when the gold band came out because it meant that i had my fighting spirit, but i hope they get to stay like this for a while. it is nice to be able to relax.
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| birthdays |
[03 Jun 2009|01:28pm] |
every year i post ridiculous lists full of things i want for birthdays. as it approaches, and my fake internet birthday passes, i find myself in the interesting position of having reached a state of what i'd almost call enlightenment, if the term hadn't been so destroyed beyond all meaning. i was reading a study earlier in the month that accented everything i've discovered this past year. stuff, really doesn't matter. nothing does, actually. that's why i'm not really phased about selling my car. it's just stuff. the only things really worth investing in are your relationships with other people. they're what makes you happy. everything that's built me up or dragged me down over the last year has been because of my relationships with people. they've provided all of my happiness and sadness.
if you insist on getting me something, i do need clothes, but it's near impossible to find clothes i like, so vouchers for places that sell clothes are probably a much safer bet. either that or find a way to fix my tv, but that may be more difficult again so who knows.
anyway. it's been an interesting year. i could've never predicted any of it, which makes for an interesting life so it's difficult to complain too much. and i've never been short of something to do or people to do said something with. so thanks everyone.
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[30 May 2009|06:50pm] |
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jose gonzales makes me so, so happy. happy isn't even the right word. it's a kind of content in feeling human emotion that i can't describe. it turns something inside of me like fluid through a waterwheel thats torque brings about creation of new things. a kind of incorporeal ecstasy that isn't even by definition pleasurable like sweetness or a pleasant temperature change, it just stimulates and opens every part of my emotional being the way that a massage kneads and excites the muscles and skin, increased bloodflow, enhanced sensory perception .. it has an almost narcotic quality to numb pain, soothe, relax and take away from the reality you exist in. the melodies and harmonies collide with constructive interference to produce patterns that's psychosomatic effects flow out into the body into actually feeling physically sedated. as the song winds down and the notes become more sparse, it's almost as if i'm waking from sleep.
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| seven |
[29 May 2009|10:18am] |
in what can only be considered a twist of irony, i've discovered something that could be amazing. i might actually need -less- sleep to feel better.
last night i went out to hunz and after dropping pete/dash/brendan home and showering, i didn't end up getting to bed until 1am. and i slept brilliantly - all the way through. when my alarm went off at 8am i was shocked to wake to find that i felt amazing. previously seven hours sleep was enough to leave me feeling severely damaged but with wakeups that could've easily been reducing it to five. i realised not long after that the only other time i've slept all the way through since i started this experiment in trying to solve why i wake up so many times for water in the middle of the night was my last night at port douglas when i stayed up until 1am.
now that i've mostly sorted the water intake problem and the sleeping habits themselves, it's possible that actually being more tired when i go to bed by pushing out my wake time to 1am is actually making me tired enough that when whatever remaining thirst kicks in at night, i'm already in a deep enough sleep rhythm to sleep through it. who'd have thought?
after all this being tired and looking like shit, maybe i actually need less sleep. that would be bizarre, and totally awesome. extra hour of being awake = my life just increased by 1/24th.
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| unplug |
[27 May 2009|12:12pm] |
For the first time since I wrote Quit, I’m so floored by a mental realisation that I am no longer able to perform my primary function at work.
I’ve long felt that Big Brother, sensationalised news, and celebrity gossip were a means of control by distraction on the part of mass media and the government. Flashy misdirection to keep us occupied while the real business of running the world happened in front of us, all around us. We sit in the middle of it, oblivious. But that was more of an idle passing thought than anything really tangible or pointed. They were useless crap and that was it.
Earlier this month I took two days off and went to Port Douglas, just outside of Cairns. When I got on the plane, I turned my phone off, and didn’t turn it back on again until I was back in Brisbane three days later. I didn’t take a laptop, or an iPod, or a DS, or my 3G card, or speakers, or a radio. I took clothes, a guitar and a pair of drumsticks. What I realised in that time of unplugging was that without my distractions around me to keep me occupied, I was forced to deal with, accept, and live in the reality around me. There was no digital world I could use to extend my reach and escape from where I was. I had to engage the people around me when they spoke, and open up meaningful dialogue; become interested in the things and people that were actually around me. And it felt real - not disposable, or iterative. I was there, that was my life.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Herbert A. Simon, polymath economist, 1971.
The world currently produces just less than two exabytes of new, unique information a year. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. One billion gigabytes. We will produce more unique information in the next five years than has been produced in all of human history up to this point. We live in an information age where bits, not bullets, decide the outcome of elections, protect our money, and keep us safe in transit. This is unfathomable - we cannot grasp exactly how much data is out there. And it’s only going to get more. We laughed in Back to the Future 2 when Marty Jnr turned on 16 channels on his flatscreen TV but it’s not much different to having two IMs, a movie, 10 firefox tabs and your phone on when you get home after work. We are so overloaded with information that we have forgotten the world that’s actually in front of us.
"A body can only react as fast as it takes a signal to move from the brain to its extremities"
In ages gone by, with ships being the only method of international travel, it could take 8 months for any new piece of information that was discovered to reach the other side of the world. The global information pool, the sum of all human knowledge, could therefore only increase at a very small rate. With the laying of undersea intercontinental cables, this changed but they were so expensive to use that every day people didn’t have access to them. You still had to traverse communication channels to get things transmitted. With air travel it changed again, but the real money was optic fibre. Plug in some routers, develop a scalable non-centralised communications protocol and you have information freedom. For the first time in human history, individuals have the ability to quickly and easily add anything they learn to the global information pool. If I figure out a way to use my iPhone as a remote control for my car today, tomorrow it will be online and on Tuesday, someone in the UAE will have done the same and have it playing a video of a dancing cat at the same time. The rate at which we, as a civilisation, as a race, are learning has increased to the point where it can be considered instantaneous.
With an infinite increase in the rate at which information is being added to the pool, so increases the amount of information we are presented with daily. Every day, everyone we know updates their digital presence with new photos, statuses, quizzes, comments. Is this information essential to our survival? No. But we treat it as though it is, and we feed off it incessantly as if it were ambrosia, filling our thoughts and attention with who just ran into someone in the street and Which Jap Car Are You?; and somewhere along the way we have mistaken these things that we add for a meaningful contribution to the world around us.
Orwell predicted we would become enslaved and controlled by things we hated - repression, military force, big brother. However, I have a feeling that it was Huxley who was right; instead we have been subdued by things we love, slaves to facebook, twitter, online gaming, cable television, a different Big Brother. We have become so involved in our own expression of the trivial that we have forgotten what original content is. We praise people for making parodies and in doing so, promote metacontent over actual content - real contributions to the world. We talk in quotes from things we like, references to other things that were funny, and then mistakenly think that it means we are funny.
None of these sites or technologies are evil, or even bad. Information sharing is responsible for the development of the modern world. I probably wouldn’t know any of you if it wasn’t for the capital i Internet. But the way we use them has become something of dependency instead of freedom, like accepting a microwave tv dinner instead of cooking for yourself. We live through them rather than use them to live our lives better. This is not about not using technology - I love technology, it is my job and one of the things that interests me most. Without the internet I wouldn't have contact with a number of people who are absolutely indispensable to me. The meat of my point can be summed up quite simply:
"Do what you are doing."
So unplug. Turn off your phone. Get home from work and go see a friend. Call someone you haven’t talked to in a while and ask them to have dinner. You don’t need to check your facebook, or your twitter, or your tumblr, or your phone, or any one of the other hundred things in your life you’ve become a slave to. What they present is not necessary to your survival. The only thing that matters in your life is your relationships with the people around you. They are what is important, they are the things that will comfort you when you cry, they will keep you safe at night and keep you happy enough to keep getting out of bed and going through the pain of work just to see it through to the weekend.
Un. Plug.
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