New Tat: The photos

Well you wanted them so here ya go:

FAQs

• Why is it all shiny?
  It's all shiny because I've just put on the Bepanthen to keep it all nice.
• Are you gonna get it coloured in?
  Yes it will be colored in (see below). I have to wait at least two weeks for the lines to be completely healed and then make another appointment when both me and my tattooist are free (possibly August)
• Did it hurt?
  Jesus on a stick did it what! The three most painful places in order (bad to worst): Inner elbow, collarbone, outer elbow. The outer elbow not only hurt the most but also took the longest because Liesje needed to make sure that the ink was not going to "drop out" as the skin there is tough.
  I have to say though that lollies help a lot! I had a bag of fruit gummis and a handful of those gives you a sugar rush that (almost) cancels out the pain. I needed it too as my legs were shaking from the adrenaline after a while, which was bad because you really need to sit/lie still.
• Who is Liesje?
  Liesje is my brilliant tattooist. She also writes for an online magazine called The Tattooed Heart (here is the My Space version).
• What is the image?
  It's from a Moet and Chandon ad by Alfons Mucha. You can see it on the right here. The irises and tulips will be added to when I go in for the next part. So that will be even more pain.
• How long did it take?
  Well I went in at 12.30, Liesje started tattooing at about 1pm and we were finished at 6pm. We did take some breaks though, so 3-4 hours maybe?
• Do you like it?
  I fucking love it! I look so much prettier (which I'll admit is hard to tell in the photos above)
  
  UPDATE
• Can you elaborate on the personal significance of the artwork?
  I have had a love of Art Nouveau for a looong time. I think it may have been the first artistic style that I recognised while growing up (with Art Deco). I also drink Champagne whenever I can. The berries in the basket will be raspberries. My grandfather used to grow raspberries and I have very strong memories of them. Tulips are my favourite flowers (followed by snapdragons) but irises look cool and are more nouveau
• How much did it cost?
  Liesje, like nearly every tattooist, charges by the hour. This piece set me back $450, which was under what I think it should've cost so I'm going to pay over when I get the colour done.

New tat, bro

I believe that the best time to get a tattoo is in winter. This means that you don’t have to worry about sunburn (like I do), there’s less temptation to go swimming and it’s all healed and stuff by the time sleeveless summer rolls around.

The downside is that it’s annoying having to wear long-sleeves over your new artwork and goosebumps under a brand new tat hurt!

Nigerian email scams from Sudan

So this wasn't the most inventive email scam I've recieved (that was about a girl whose parents died during the London bombings), but this little gem from Alexander Kelueljang is pretty good.

Alex fled Sudan to a rufugee camp in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and now needs my help to retrieve his father's safety deposit box. "This box contan (1.8 million dollars) was concealed in a metallic box".

Why I love this particular letter is this one sentence:
"We were advice to live Sudan immedantly as i am the next target of he rebbles that assassinated my father."

I wish that this wasn't a real scam. I wish that if I contacted Alex he would say "Please, I need you to assemble a crack team (of ex-CIA, ex-Navy SEAL etc etc) to pull off a Danny Ocean-esque heist on the National Bank of Ivory Coast. The best time will be during the FIFA African qualifying match due to happen next week. Mr Green, you are this family's last hope..."

48 hour finale

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Burst Reviews:
Remember "burst theory"? Well this is the movie review version of that. So be warned the post is made almost entirely out of sour grapes.

This may also be one of "those" posts. The kind that mean I'll "never work in this town again", which is weird because technically I haven't worked in this particular town yet. The metaphorical town is Wellywood.

I'm gonna review the finalists in the 48 hour competition, and I'm not very nice about some of them. As such I'm not going to say which film I am reviewing, I'll let you guess which one it is. The list of finalists is here. (oh and I've scrambled my reviews so it's not in the same order as screened...or is it? nope...or is it? nope...but maybe...).

1. What was the genre? I asked. Crime? someone answered. Wasn't it Religious? someone else said. Fuck I don't know, I said, it could've been anything really. I thought the acting was pretty good and I lurved the camera work; but I was just pissed off at the kind of non-story and non-genre. Also what's with not sticking to the PG rating these days? I thought the M rating only applied to grindhouse films
2. I didn't laugh as hard as I did the first timeI saw it (or maybe i did, it's hard to recall) but I think this is a good pure 48hours film
3. it was...alright. I laughed pretty hard at the [famous] joke. This film was weird as most teams did "straight" grindhouse films (funny because they were bad) whereas these guys did sort of a spoof. Looked great though
4. I didn't laugh at all when I saw this film a second time and the first half with it's pieces to camera irked me something awful
5. It just didn't grab me, but I suppose it wasn't that bad.
6. I realised later that the film didn't make sense. They got a joke with the "missing reel" gag but it meant they were able to cut straight to the gory bits without having to worry about the story. It's a fallacy that Grindhouse films didn't have stories, they were just reeeally bad ones.
7. Sooooo cuuuute. The story wasn't too bad either
8. Yeah, I laughed at this. But then I realised what it was...Hot Fuzz. The really straight main guy running a tight ship with his goofy assistant, "fired" by his boss. Even the shots were the same.
9. I had this as my "lock to win" and was really surprised that it didn't even get runner up. Still this is what you get when the guys who sing and produce music for a living get musical as their genre. Loop's Mikee Tucker was in the credits as many things and the actors included Daniel Weetman from various Wellington bands and Raashi Malik from Rhombus (who also has a solo album I think). Oh and it looked freaking fantastic!
10. I hated this film. Hated it. The only time I laughed was at the "What do you call that" line. Improvised crap with absolutely NO story and that we've all seen before in this competition and in numerous mockumentaries.
11. Really really crap and was probably a fluke entry. Though how it beat out Destination Earth, Rope Burn, that film noir one called Crime, Rope Theory and dozens of others, I will never know.
12. At the time I didn't like it but after thinking about it later, I liked it. They also did the "missing reel" gag but didn't lose any part of the story (only some of the plot if we're being pedantic) I'm happy it got in.

Wow that emptied out the old spleen! So this is where I say "Actually, they were all pretty good and most of them really did deserve to be in the finals". And it's true most of them did. Some of them should never have even been considered. You know who you are.

Dum dum dummmmmmm!

Not Genetic

I'm slowly, painfully going bald.

But this has nothing to do with the genetics. My hair is being pulled out one strand at a time (occaisonally in small clumps) by my head phones! Frickin heck it hurts too, which leads to the odd bout of public swearing.

Burstitis

I read Kung Fu Monkey’s post about Burst Culture (and then Warren Ellis’ and then Che’s) and I thought that now would be the time to adopt it.

At the moment I’ve got a stupid freakin’ boatload of stuff on and writing in bursts just makes it easier. It’s pretty much what Martha’s been doing for a while.

So my new rule for web-writing is (be it on the blog or forums or whatever):

if I have to think longer than 5 seconds about the next part of my statement/argument/humorous anecdote then I must be done and will press “submit”.

That way I won’t be stressing about properly covering my ideas, instead I’ll be flooding the place with proto-ideas like a primordial web before the evolution of higher web-beings.

So with that in mind:

1. I really needed a post to go up that could follow the one about Rolly.
   
2. I went into the Sony Store on Willis St a few weeks ago looking for an extension cord for my Sony headphones (female to male headphone jack cable). Dick Smith had sold me one that was 2m long (the shortest available) and was heavy enough to pull the phones off my ears.
   
   The guy in the Sony store said “hang on a sec…” then he grabbed a white thin iPod-esque cord out of a drawer and said “here ya go”. Wow, how much? I asked. He shrugged and said just take them.For that act the Sony Store on Willis St gets a big thumbs up and a wee song: Sony, I wanna thank you for the Son-shine, you gave!
   
3. I told the guy at the Sony Store I had lost the cord when in fact I had left them on the ground and one of my (very very naughty) cats pooed on it.As we left Amy said to me: “we should go back in and say: I lost part of my PS3, it was the bit that you put the disc into, and everything around that”
   
4. Our 48hours film went incredibly well. Incredibly well! We had two micro-dramas (about batteries and sound). We won Audience favourite in our heat.
   
   A lot of people on the crew are thinking that we’ll get into the finals, but I’m managing my expectations. We got Educational or Religious film. I pushed hard and got my idea through: a very very very dry “documentary” about something called Rope Theory (the theory wasn’t my idea). No gags and no jokes, we made it just like a real documentary (albeit about a fake topic). The content was based around a BBC documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem (but not stolen).
   
   I felt that people didn’t really “get it” during the heat. I overheard one guy saying about our team: “they took themselves too seriously”. Well (fingers) to you buddy! Some of us actually came into this competition to make a decent film not just string together a bunch of gags with no story or script.
   
5. Saw the Flight of the Conchords pilot the other day and I liked it. A couple of the characters bugged me, but let’s see where it goes. Whenever it gets here.
   
6. The title of this blog is from the injury my players always seem to suffer in Madden: Elbow/Hip/Knee Burstitis