Hello World

Boooom!! I’m a dad! My boy Bran Silver Perdok Wright was born three hours ago in the front room, weighing in just shy of eight pounds. Trish made it all happen in less than six hours without any drugs or any help at all, just some intense hundred-thousand year old mooing noises. Amazing. I caught him, said hello, gave him to his mum and snipped the cord. Now he’s curled up with Trish and I’m on the front step with a good cigar and a glass of quarter-cask Laphroaig, listening to Brave Men Run (In My Family) by Sonic Youth, all in love with the universe etc. x

Nov 3, 2011 at 5:06  Filed Under: Blog  Comment

Steve Jobs

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs

Oct 6, 2011 at 11:01  Filed Under: Blog  Comment

Random Rant

Yeah, so without wanting to sound like a cranky pedant, one thing that really fucks me off at the moment is the current destruction of the word ‘random’ that is going on out there. I just tweeted about it in response to something apparently soliciting your random thoughts. And so I responded with my thought. And like most thoughts it was, by definition, something I actually thought about. Thus reducing its random quotient to… almost fucking zero. Oh dear. Oh I see, you mean irreverent thoughts. Like: I wonder if broccoli floats in blood.

Mar 12, 2010 at 6:48  Filed Under: Blog  Comment

Veg Bowl

I noticed this morning that Trish seems to have filled the fruit bowl in the living room with poatoes and onions. Yet if I do something like flick peanuts at the cat (which I often do because it is highly entertaining) all hell breaks loose.

Mar 1, 2010 at 12:02  Filed Under: Blog  2 Comments

Outernet Explorer

Okay, so I’ve updated one of my older software projects. What used to be called the Indifference Engine is now a fully-fledged random web browser.

It’s called Outernet Explorer and you can download it from here, for Mac and PC.

It gets web pages and images by generating random search patterns and pulling a result at random from the results. You can tweak the randomness factor to make thinks more or less obscure as well as set it to automatically refresh at an interval of your choosing if you want to just sit back and watch the web go by. There’s also an option to open the pages it finds in your regular browser if you find something that you really want to bookmark and visit again.

Feb 28, 2010 at 20:30  Filed Under: Blog  Comment

Toadstools

Has anyone ever seen a fucking toad sitting on one of these things?

No.

Feb 13, 2010 at 23:30  Filed Under: Blog  Comment

Crap Drawing

I wonder if you know what this is.

If you said, a spontaneous automatic drawing in the surrealist idiom, give yourself a gold star. But you’re wrong. Sort of.

What this is… is the aftermath of the cat getting halfway through crapping when something seems to go horribly awry.

He went through a phase of doing this and I was determined to catch him. Then one day I was just sitting there reading when the door burst open and in he trundled, back legs up behind his ears, tail angled up and out like some sort of rudder, a look of steely determination in his catty eyes as he furiously pedalled his way across the room with his front paws.

By the time I realised what I was witnessing, the spectacle had petered out with an anguished miaow and he had returned to his daily routine with the sort of aplomb and grace and refusal to acknowledge what just happened that only a cat can muster in such situations.

Feb 10, 2010 at 22:54  Filed Under: Blog  3 Comments

Smashed

Okay, here’s something that happened quite recently.

I was out on a Christmas drinking session the other night. Drank until I could barely stand and then as usual my homing device kicked in. Normally what happens is that no matter how drunk I am and how unlikely the prospects are, I somehow manage to successfully navigate myself home from any part of the city under my own steam.

And that’s what kind of happened this time, apart from the fact that the usual sort of mystery minor injuries weren’t as minor as they usually are. I turned up on my doorstep with a possibly broken nose and that bit of skin you have under your chin hanging down in a big weird flap.

Woke my girl up and when she opened the door and saw me she went into a funny sort of state of shock and started to faint. My whole face, shirt, jacket and jeans were drenched in blood. No joke. Soaked. I’m incoherent with no idea what had happened and my girl’s on the floor with her head between her legs doing some crazy breathing exercises to try and not pass out.

In the end she got me to casualty though and they sorted me out… six stitches in the chin, one taped up nose. And a bit of a hangover.

The only downside is that my girl refused to take a photo because she was so utterly freaked out by the way I looked. And I was too fried to be capable. My memory of the night is obviously pretty patchy but I’ve got a clear image of my face from catching myself in the mirror at home and through my drunken stupor thinking, Holy Fuck this is serious. I did however get an after-the-fact photo of my new iPhone that I used to try and phone home. Bear in mind that it took about 5 seconds for the phone to go from brand new to looking like this before I thought, okay this isn’t going to work, Plan B- just keep walking.

Feb 9, 2010 at 21:58  Filed Under: Blog  Comment

Hey, Betcha Thought I Was Dead

Hello internet. I’m so sorry, I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve this- but I’m back.

Back again to pollute the web.

And I suppose it’s been quite a while really. To be honest, I feel pretty refreshed after such an extended virtual hiatus. I got a bit bored with things and I just sort of stopped updating the site and suddenly boom! it’s been a long time. You know how it is.

And so what’s been happening? Well, my life’s kind of very the same and very different really. Same girl, same cat, same flat. Which is all great.

Same routine too. Go to studio: make work, look at work, think about work. Go home, do stuff (sleep) get up, repeat. That’s the way it goes.

What else hasn’t changed much? Hrm, let’s see. Most of my t-shirts and jeans probably. Which isn’t really that good. Maybe. Although I don’t mean it literally of course… I do actually change into a different pair of jeans every six months or so.

So what has changed? Well, I’m working with a gallery now. And that gallery is none other than The Modern Institute. One of the finest galleries on the planet. Couldn’t ask for a better art thing to be part of. So yeah, this pleases me to virtually no end.

And I stopped smoking. Just got up one morning, all angry with cigarettes and said, Right that’s it, I quit. And I did. Don’t smoke them, don’t dream about them, don’t care about them anymore.

Um, let’s see, what else? Quite a lot actually. I’m sure it’ll all come out in due course.

As you can see I’ve rebuilt the site. I’ve always wanted a wooden website and so I just pulled it down and built it from scratch.

So yeah. Hello. Feel free to leave a comment, get in touch, say hi and all that.

Feb 3, 2010 at 9:47  Filed Under: Blog  4 Comments