Downtime

I apologise for the severe lack of posts in recent times.  I'm finding myself with either not much to say, or lacking the enthusiasm to write it all down.

I'm doing better at the whole going through the motions thing.  Actual feeling and emotional response is returning.  Which is a good thing.  Not completely there yet but I'm being patient, for once.  Living with Chris hasn't completely driven me mad yet.  Actually, my relative sanity and the fact that I haven't hit him over the head with a frying pan yet seems to be a result of the fact that I'm dreaming the crazy violent inappropriateness every night.  I find myself waking up to Chris putting his arm curling up to me and putting his arm around me, just after the two of us have been punching the hell out of each other in dreamland.  It's beyond surreal.  Either that, or I've been dreaming about other boys, which is probably worse really.

I'm currently not sure whether this blog will continue, I still have a lot of different things going through my head and I'm sure your lives would all be much improved by knowing such things, but I've hit a rather major snag.  I used to write fairly honestly about whatever was going on with me and Chris.  It gave me a place to vent, and it gave Chris a vague idea of what was going on with me whenever he remembered to actually read the damned thing.  However now I actually live with Chris.  Which means I don't want to vent on here, only to be confronted with a what's going on, i didn't realise anything was it, i thought we were okay" panicked attack from Chris 5 minutes later.  Sure I still want to sort out whatever relationship problems I inevitably develop at some point, but sometimes you need a space to vent, sometimes you need time to think, or calm down, and I wouldn't get that luxury putting it in my blog when the boy will be reading it 3ft away from me.  And he wont have the time to read the whole thing, think about it, and be forced to take time by the physical practicallity of writing out a reply, he'll be reacting as he goes, at me, for better or worse.  So I don't really want to discuss in detail what's going on with me and Chris anymore.

Which means, if I'm holding back such a big part of what I'm generally not truthful to a lot of people about, then what's the point in only half following through on it?  I haven't decided completely whether to kill the thing or not, but that accounts for the lack of postings recently

Some techie geekery

For all those who care not one shit about technical doohickeys, pass by now.

With that said, my brief and off the top of my head review of PLASA 2010.  PLASA is pretty much the biggest techie trade show there is, taking over the whole of Earl's Court 1 & 2 for an entire week, and its free to go to!  Pretty much every company worth knowing has a stand there and many companies unveil new products there each year, so basically, if you work in anything to do with staging, techining, production, etc, it's a must, and a lot of international buyers fly over specifically for the networking potential of the show.

I found this year's show heavily toned down from last year, PLASA always tends to be somewhat flashy, attempting to show the pinacle of what's the swankiest looking and highest costing stuff in the technical industry that year.  Last year they shot a laser all the way from the back of EC2 to the entrance of EC1, that was impressive.  The hippo stand last year was a lot of fun, it looked great, and there was plenty of hands on potential to play with their video servers and software and see the power behind it.  The biggest lights you could imagine were brought out, and free to play with and attempt to blind people halfway across the exhibition centre.  It was basically the technicians version of the funky play area at the science museum.

This year was a lot more... professional  I guess, you had to actively go and ask for product demos,very little option to play and experiment yourself, and hardly anything was actually rigged up to any real output to see the effects you were making, and the sales staff generally seemed to avoid talking unless you really obviously wanted to.  This was less good in many ways, it discouraged people from taking more than a glancing interest in a lot of products, and Chris, who I dragged 'cause I hate doing PLASA by myself, was bored out of his mind.

It was a complete LEDfest this year.  Now, LEDs are great, they reduce power consumption massively, which when you consider a west end show running for one night consumes the same amount of power as a small town probably does in a fortnight, theatres are definitely the way to go to save energy costs worldwide. LEDs have a lot of versatility; depending on how advanced the light in question is, you can create virtually any shade, at any desired colour temperature  generally as a moving head and they can, sometimes, make a decent fill light.  For general background colour wash, concert style lighting etc, they are definitely the way forward.  However, I have yet to be convinced in ANY way that they can actually replace a standard parcan, fresnel, or profile for sheer strength of wash fill or throw.  Get beyond about 3 or 4 meters away from a general LED light, and its potency really starts to wane, even powerful macs, some of which are on display at PLASA this year, the stands 6m away are only getting a slight wash of led colour, rather than blasted by light as you would see coming from a 750w parcan.  It's basically the same story as energy saving light bulbs you get in your home, they do a similar job and its a good idea that we should all embrace, but most people agree they simply don't do the job that their predecessors did, and they are rather deficient in some fairly crucial areas.

On top of this, the white you get from an RGB LED light is massively blue shifted, and even the white LEDs give a rather stark light.  Now yes, you can correct this with colour filters and such, but that can then present problems when you actually want to use shades of the RGB mix.  Remember how in art class as a kid, mixing the 3 primary colours never quite gave you true black, it's the same issue, except with light theory rather than colour theory  (don't even get me started on the theory of what colour mixing looks like under mixed lighting, it makes my head hurt a LOT).

Until I can get a relatively warm, daylight tungsten feel light beam, that will throw a consistent high stregnth beam of any colour from 25m away up in the catwalks or rigging of a show/venue, I will refuse to be convinced by LEDs as a full replacement option for any rig.  I've seen it attempted in several venues and there's just not enough fill light.    They tried it in my current workplace originally, you couldn't see a thing, so now there are 10 parcans installed too, 2 per staging area, which given the layout of the staging area and rigging points, is only half the lights you need but its something at least.


All that being said, there were a few things that caught my eye at PLASA and impressed me this year.  THe first was the omnidirectional rigging fixture in the innovation gallery, i forget the manufacturer, that could potentially be game changing and make life so, so much easier for a lot of big set builds.  The MAC 101s were really good to see, the functionality you'd want and expect from a mac light, with a wide range on both the pan and tilt fuctions, but in a pretty damned small enclosure.  It's pretty much ideal for the sort of work I do, you can daisy chain the power just like the dmx, and it changes a standard fixed rig into something so much more versatile.  I can see myself pushing for that light a lot in future projects.  The other thing that caught my eye was Avolite's new Titan Mobile.  The venue I'm currently at is running the Chamsys MagicQ software, running solely off a PC, whilst this isn't a huge problem, i do prefer the reliance of a physical console, and it makes life so much easier when programming or needing to edit a show on the fly during a live run.  I was therefore looking at the MagicQ PC wing.  The Titan Mobile blew that idea straight out of the water.  For a slightly bigger console it provides so much more functionality, a keypad for one thing, twice the amount of physical dmx outputs, and the software package is so much more advanced, and includes Avolite's built in visualizer which saves buying WYSIWYG or the like at the exorbitant cost of that to integrate with Chamsys.  And I was offered it at LESS than the cost of the inferior MagicQ PC wing.  Now getting Avolite would involve retraining the entire staff here so they knew how to at least turn the lights on, as well as repatching the entire venue which no-one ever likes to do, but then again Avolites are designed with constant repatching in mind, for touring, so their system is actually quite easy.  When the boss gets back in 2 days, my budget proposal is now going to include a request for the Titan Mobile, instead of Chamsys now.

That Friday Feeling

Sorry for starting posting and then stopping again.  Work is keeping me busy and tired.  My hours are constantly in flux so I'm finding it hard to develop into the shift pattern of sleeping, but eventually it'll all calm down.


So Friday was kinda awesome.

Firstly, although I got into work 20 minutes late because of queues at the bank, I by chance got in 5 minutes before the boss did, so I was still able to cop off at my normal finishing time and make out like I'd worked an 8 hour day instead of a 7 hour and 40 minute one.

Secondly, it was one of the first days I ever got back and didn't just want to crash out straight away.  Annoyingly, I couldn't find anyone to go out with either, so my night just fell apart into doing nothing, but it was doing nothing with energy, which is an improvement from where I had been.

Thirdly, I got a text from Terence saying he'd had a really awesome date the day before, and had been grinning all day, and whatever makes one of us happy makes the other one happy, which is why he sent me a random text with information like that in.  On top of that he got the job he's been for recently, so he will actually have some money and such with which to live his life now :)

Fourthly , my day was actually relatively productive, mostly due to the high I was on from the fifth thing that happened (though it happened 2nd in order chronologically if you wanna get technical), as detailed below.

The fifth bit of awesomeness that happened was about 20 minutes after I go into work, I was all set up working on my laptop and working my way through the MagicQ manual as I need to learn the lighting software for this venue and I get no training on account of stealing someone else's job so they're not that keen on being helpful or cooperative unsurprisingly.  The lunchtime tour group comes in and starts eating.  The tour guide obviosuly knows the bar manager quite well, but I'm not paying attention and am slightly round the corner so I can't see anything really anyway.

Both tour guide and manager head back past me towards the kitchen.  I look up to say hi and be polite, and the tour guide (who speaks german btw, nathan will appreciate this) is actually really cute, germanic looking, muscled, tight blue tshirt, looks early to mid thirties, eyecandy win!  that at least perks the day up a little bit.

But it gets better... as he walks past and I say hi, he looks at me, says hi with a huge smile on his face, then turns to the bar manager and says "Who's he, he's handsome".  I break out in a huge grin, well that's an ego boost.  I then catch him during his entire time here making sure he adjust where he's standing so he can sneak glances at me and everything.  It's kinda cute.  When he gets the chance he comes over and flirts with me for 20 minutes.  Flirting amongst us includes talk of lighting design, which isn't as wierd as it sounds, as he sings on stage aside from tour guiding.  But alas not everything can go on, he is a tour guide after all, and so once the lunch is finished he must be off and such.  I'm elsewhere just as they're finishing up, so I figure I won't see him, but once I come back from the job that I was doing for 10 minutes, I find him waiting by where I was working.  He invites me out for a drink the next time he's here.  He's off around Scotland and the US for the next month, but is here the whole of October.

Yeah it's that aries thrill of the chase thing, I always love the new getting to know people period.  If I was hotter and could get away with it I would be some form of serial dater.  I know that it can't go anywhere, and I'm not looking for, and Chris might not even want me to go for a drink with the guy 'cause shagging with alcohol is fine, but the fine line of a date is something entirely different.  But that's not really what I care about. What I care about is the grin that I had on my face for the rest of the day, cause some guy had thought I was hot and said it in front of the people I work with, that he asked me out for a drink, that I got to feel really good about myself on a day when I thought I looked like complete shit (being a techie, there's no point in making an effort to dress up for work, you just end up covered in paint dust or in the dark anyway).

So yeah, that made my day all kinds of awesome.


Work aside from that is going okay, some good some bad.  I'm making friends which is good, and every night I get to watch girls in spanky pants kick their legs up over their head.  The above incident with the tour guide (his name as michael, but as chris pointed out, he will just forevermore be Hot Tour Guide, henceforth HTG, unless I get chatted up by another one, in which case I might have to start distinguishing by nationality) seems to have melted the iceheart of the bar manager, who spent the rest of the day making teasing comments to me about how much the guy liked me - like I'm complaining!  I plan to submit a massive new tech budget at some point - I'm trying to keep it under £5k.  We need twice as many lights, as they're only each area with 2 parcans, which if you've seen the area, just isn't going to work.  So that's a grand gone easily for some S4 Pars.  One day I'm going to rip out all the DMX, XLR, Ethernet and Powercables and rewire the entire tech room.  Will probably have to volunteer to come in on a Monday and Tuesday for that one...


Carnival tomorrow, the biggest party in the whole of Europe.  Hopefully it doesn't rain like it did all day today (which I was unaware of until 6pm, that's the problem of spending all day underground, you know nothing about what's going on in the outside world).  Last year when I went to Carnival I got to know Joel really well, so well in fact, someone asked us how long we'd been together; we'd known each other about 2 weeks by that point, ahem.  And after that night, I knew him in the biblical sense too.  Gotta love those friends you've been all too familiar with in the past.  Who knows what could happen this year...

Facsimilie

This post will make instant sense to half of you, the rest of you will have to fill in the not-entirely-cryptic blanks.

 

Having spent a few weeks going through the motions one way, I'm not going through them the other way, and no, that's not related to bowel movements or any other form of peristaltic action.  Rather than 'you don't know what you had 'till it's gone', it's more a situation of 'it can never be like it was'.  Now, that doesn't necessarily preclude it continuing, or even getting better, but it still results in a rather unfortunate and indeterminate 'awkward' period.  I don't react the way I should do; I don't want what I'm supposed to, and when I'm faced with it, I appear very aloof (points for use of aloof in a blog post I feel), mostly because it feels so inappropriate in one way or another.  And this is at a time when what's needed of me is the exact opposite.  I need to demonstrate extra-ordinary reactions, I need to be that much more proactive than usual, but I'm not... I just feel numb.  Because of my actions, or because of the way I had to process the fallout of my actions, and all I can currently do is hold on, going through the motions and mitigating further damage in so far as I can manage for the moment, until such point as things change.

Serenity

Chris is not a console gamer. he never had one himself, and unlike the rest of our generation, seemingly neither did anyone he was friends with as a child.  In fact it's kind of pityingly funny to put a console controller in his hand, be it PS3, Xbox, N64 whatever.  "What's fire?!  Wait, Left 1 AND Right 2 AT THE SAME TIME?!?!  Z BUTTON?!?!  Where the hell is the z button?!  UNDERNEATH?!?!"  I blame his lack of console gaming as a child for Chris generally having issues playing any kind of FPS genre game.  Anyone who played goldeneye as a kid (or indeed still does, for let's face it, that game is a genuine classic), learnt how to aim, shoot, jump, and maintain camera angle all at the same time by necessity.  And equally, I find that regardless of what console you play/ed above others, you can generally adjust to a different console with relatively little difficulties; there is always at least one L and R button, the z button, if it exists, is always underneath.  The trackpad is usually movement, if there's 2 of them, the other is camera angle, and the fire button is almost always the button nearest your right thumb.  Simple.

 

Chris criticizes the need to memorize strings of button presses to execute special moves, as this doesn't happen at all on computers really.  Fair point, though I reckon that's a skill you learn through playing consoles naturally.  And I think it allows for more flexibility than a PC game, you don't need to have certain spells or moves readied all the time, you can cast a heal simply by remembering what button sequence you need, and the most commonly used actions often have rather memorable sequences anyway.

 

Despite only owning a wii (and also technically a PS2), I love console games.  For one thing they're social, sure, you can play Starcraft 2 on battlenet with someone, or even have an Unreal Tournament LAN party, but a few hours spent playing Halo, or Goldeneye, or Mariokart, encourages so much more social activity, is so much more active, something to do with actually sitting next to each other and sharing the same screen.  Especially when there's 4 of you and you have to squint to find your own quadrant and what's happening in it.  I could quite happily spend a Sunday afternoon only half getting dressed in the most comfortable, loose fitting clothes I own, ordering pizza 'cause nobody can be arsed to cook, and blowing the hell out of each other with rocket launchers or dune buggies.  And I have to accept that Chris probably won't be one of those people, no matter how many times I try and get him to find the z button

 

So if anyone wants  to be my dossing-around-the-house-buddy, let me know.  Though for the next few months, 'Sunday' might have to seem suspiciously like 'Tuesday'

The bitch is back

Fear not, I have not abandoned you all, just not much has been happening, or at least not much that I've wanted to tell everyone.  I'm still stuck at my parents,  5 weeks and counting.  The country is dull as hell, and being at my parents is increasingly wearing, and limiting of my earning potential.  On the upside, I have somewhere to live from September; a 2 bedroom place with Chris and one of my flatmates from last year next to Victoria Park (about 15 mins walk from Bethnal Green tube station), it's really really pretty and the move in date can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

 

I sort of have a respectable day job now.  It's technically an undefined role at the moment, and I'm sort of stealing someone else's job as part of it, but things are in the works.  Now I just need to get paid so I can actuallly afford the rent for the new placee, instead of it all be whittled away on commuting fares.  It's shift work, which sucks, but I get 2 free meals a day out of it and its teching, plus at the end of it it'll look hella awesome on my CV.

 

My body is still playing up, it kinda  has done since the US for some reason, no discernible reason, and I've even been into A&E twice to no avail, but everything my body feels like fucking up currently is doing, the only reprieve I'm getting is that the hayfever season is largely over for me.  But skin, sleep, digestive system, hormone levels; all screwing around going up one day and down the next.

 

 

I wrote in my last blog post that my parents and I have never had a lot of trust for each other on certain matters, and that got me thinking.  My parents consciously or unconciously know I'm a rather compulsive liar, especially where they are concerned, and I've been telling them half truths and outrighht lies since I could talk.  Equally, my trust in my parents was shattered a fairly young age due to various affairs and the like.  The big showdown with me and my dad at 16 happened because I'd lied to them about something relatively trivial and they refused to let it go and I refused to back down because I'd lied in order to obtain some privacy.  My parents, like me, or rather the other way round, whilst being respectful enough to not enter my room when I'm out  or the like, have a tendency to snoop if given half an opportunity, so as much as there is of my private life that is actually private from them, that's only been achieved by a secret agent spy level of elaborate cover stories and plain not talking about certain things ever in their presence or any presence that might stand half a chance of getting back to them.

 

We have this rather bizzare relationship to each other where we trust each other on a superficial simple basis, but where anything of import is concerned, it's not so much that we don't tell each other, just that we're highly suspicious of what we do get told as we know its not even 1/8th of the story.  Ah well, in 2 weeks I shall have moved out and be in my nice shiney new house in London once again.

 

 

I got a job, this is the one that I mentioned a while ago that I said I couldn't discuss much.  It's working as technical staff at the Medieval Banquet by the Tower of London.  It's not well paid and my week runs Wednesday - Sunday, which means I get no social time (though in fairness, I do finish in time to head out to either Vauxhall or Dalston Superstore just as they're geting busy), but I get to pretty much define the role myself and choose my own hours within certain restrictions.  That and once I've finished, I get to put that I was PM of a London tourist attraction on my CV :D  No doubt you'll all read about me bitching/praising it in the months to come.

Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Eurgh, parents, mothers.

Does anyone else have the problem that despite being twenty-something, and it being a temporary measure, anytime you start to raise your voice slightly, sound incredulous, or take offence to anything your parents are saying they start telling you to calm down, that they're just 'asking', just trying to have a conversation etc. Like when you were a little kid and any hint of being upset was just an indication that you were tired and it was time for bed. I just got a variation of the 'whilst under our roof, our rules etc' talk from my mother, mostly because I refuse to tell her anything about what's going on with me and Chris at the moment. Frankly, its between the two of us; if I felt like discussing it with my mother I would, and I get that some people would want to discuss it with their parents, but considering my parents don't know half of the stuff going on in my relationship, I really don't. Though at the rate she keeps pressuring me I'm going to crack and tell her everything, the kink, the being in love with other boys, the renting, but I'd like to have my escape plan firmly set before fully committing to that method of attack.

I get that she's concerned, I get that I don't tell them much about what's going on in my life, I get that all I want to do is hide in my room (in part, to avoid being confronted with further attempts at getting information out of me), and that people ask her what my plans are for next year, or why I came back from the US early, and she can't answer. For some of these things, she should really accept that I honestly don't know, yes she would know if she was in that position, but I don't live my life in the same way. And there are parts of my life I don't care to share with my parents, I'm grateful for their support, for it being without condition, but that's the point, I very obviously don't want to talk about these things, I could use your support, but I need you to trust me that I have my reasons, and my parents and I have never had a lot of trust for each other on those kind of things. I was told earlier that I'd just dropped the not going to PwC thing on them suddenly and changed my mind on the spur of the moment without warning and been lying to them the whole time telling them what they wanted to hear, WTF?! What about the solid summer of arguing, I made my decision rather late yes, but that's because rather pivotal information regarding my fee liability, i.e. the difference between 10k and 30k only came to light 7 days before I was due to start, I really couldn't help that one. But we'd been arguing like hell over it for like 3 months up to then.

This is all because I've spent too much time back at my parents with no obvious sign of leaving. I have a rule, max 2 weeks stay at theirs in any one period; any longer and it all starts to break down, and my dad and I end up at serious risk of repeating my 16th year when we actually came to blows during one argument. I've been here 12 days and the above is happening, go figure.


In conclusion, I NEED to get out of here ASAP. ANYONE, with a spare couch/bit of floor ANYWHERE (though london is of course ideal), who can put me up for a few days, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me come seek refuge with you ASAP! Before the hellmouth opens in a small country village somewhere in the home counties.