Re-sort

I have been reorganising my site a bit. I decided to use the WordPress Portfolio system, which allows you to build a network of pages showcasing work. I thought it might free up some time and energy as there is so much built in functionality there.
It’s early days yet, but I have changed some of the menu above to reflect the changes. You can see the full portfolio pages here.
As well as giving each project it’s own page the system provides specific pages for tags and types so as I add more things the possibilities of how things can be viewed and juxtaposed increases, which I find very interesting.
Here’s a few different groupings below to give you an idea:

Animation

 

Comics

 

Pictures

Notebooks


Like I said it’s early days. As I ass more things hopefully it’ll fill out more.

Also I am toying of upgrading my WordPress so I can sell stuff directly from here instead of Big Cartel and that should enable more to do some more CSS modification of the site.

 

New Front Page

I updated my front page with some GIFs, to jazz it up a bit, but also to simplify and to give people a better first impression of what I am about.

I’m a bit concerned the loading time might be affected by the heavy file size.

Any feed back would be greatly appreciated.

Comments open.

Adding a Secondary Microblog in WordPress

After a few days off at home I get to overthinking things, like how this website works for me and how it can improve the way I use the internet in general.

Background: Like many I often find myself spooling through web content, looking for I know not what. Now this has in the past actually added much to my life, new friends, unexpected ideas and new ways of doing things coming into my life because I discovered them in such a way.

However there is a balance and I would rather use more of the limited time I have on this good planet to make my own creative progress, still enjoying the benefits of the web, but to do that in a focused, limited and directed way once my affairs are in order.

This means, to me, spending and posting more here, on my internet home. I use and enjoy Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and love posting what I do in those places, but they are other peoples places not mine, and would rather I have those status updates, images, quotes and links posted here as well as there, so I have a record of them should any of those accounts become compromised and also so I have a searchable record of these things.

The Proposal: To create a secondary microblog within this website,  but also with the capability of separating it  in the rss subscription so friends who also follow me on social media won’t get the duplication and only receive macro/longread type posts they may not have already seen elsewhere.

Method: A greater organisation an delineation in posting. I have created two main categories. Firstly MACRO, which encompasses my news blog, and any update pertaining to what I have been up to, art I have made and things happening at BDH. There are 9 subcategories for this and they are:

  • 365 Drawing Project – A 365 daily drawing project begun in good faith, but thwarted by life, death, progress and other forces. I have since scaled it back to “regular” but I still aim to fulfil the 365 target.
  • Animated Journal  – “I had always liked the picture a day format, video diaries etc, and animation is, traditionally a long drawn out, painful process, so this was me trying to find a way to free it up and make it a bit more ephemeral. I should’ve just waited a few years for the smartphones to do it for me, but there you are.”
  • Event Diary – What’s happened. What’s happening. What may be happening in the future.
  • Notebook Pages  – “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
  • Personal Record – Diary, stories, personal updates, journal, histories.
  • Picture Stories – Comics, narrative images, story telling, sequential art.
  • Process Archive – How tos, Maya, CGI, work arounds, Ways of doing.
  • Smooth Criminals – Mastermind Group, heroes, mentors, friends.
  • Work Updates – Mainly things pertaining to my role as Head of CGI at BDH.

The second one is called MICRO, this will be a scrapbook of sorts, a research project, a gathering of links and artifact, juxtaposition of non sequiturs for future consideration, as much for my benefit as anyone elses. Within it there are 7 sub-categories as follows:

  • Note Taking – note taking method, master mind groups, daydreams, ticket stubs, daily pages, day books, sketch pads, tentative drawings, empty cities
  • Radiant Thinking – Creative logic, positive imaginings, brain food, associative machines, dynamic potentials, positive humanism, sexual politics, human rights
  • Story Mapping – Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
  • Picture Literatures – Alternative Comics, Sequential visual narrative, photo stories, cave paintings. Little comics everywhere.
  • Imagined Spaces – Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Unity, virtual realities, 360 Video, computer graphics, rendering, augmented environments.
  • Broken Rhythms
  • Math – Number theory, abstract science, spacial quantities,
  • Flickery Lights – Unusual animation, things that move, experimental puppetry, stop motion, cinematographs.
  • Photo Ghosts – Real scans, photographic echoes, fictional memories, old fashioned film, compulsive transparencies, ethereal landscapes
  • Status Updates – notepad, blurtings, tweets, thoughts, discarded moments.

In addition to these will be the category of Daybook which is a home for longer form posts involving min and other peoples work, otherwise defying categorisation.

It is clear to me at this stage that many of the things I have posted here so far fall into these categories so I will be retrospectively allocating posts to the above for the help of navigating the archive.

 

Moving In

Due to my concerned over putting all my internets in one basket and the fact that Google miffed me off because they’re closing Reader, I decided to port my slowblog onto WordPress.

I don’t have much time so the operation has been a tad clumsy.  I also decided to prune some of the weaker posts so some of the links might not work, but eventually it should get there.

Kettle’s on, make yourself at home.

(PS – if you can see the ad, apologies, I’ll get that sorted in due course. Early days.)