ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: werk

what i’ve been doing the last couple of days is making print ready artwork for a series of promotional posters for one of those reality tv shows in which twelve housemates get locked in a house with hidden cameras and then get voted off one by one over three months or so. these posters will be mounted three to a trailer which will be towed around the city streets, obstructing traffic and polluting the already toxic city air in more ways than one. for all this, i apologise.

in keeping with the tradition of having a celebratory breakfast to mark the completion of the job, i made this lovely spring-coloured toastie: thinly sliced avocado, salted and peppered, on wholemeal. i like green food.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 April 2004 at 8:46 am

permalink | filed under breakfast, werk

i’m in the middle of an illustration job at the moment, and until an hour ago had been in that limboland where the client has the sketch you sent them late last night, and has yet to tell you whether or not to get back to the drawing board.

turns out all is good. phew.

the illustration incorporates a child’s drawing, in fact a simulated child’s drawing, by me. this is a challenging prospect because it usually irritates me when i see “child’s drawings” in television ads or whatever, where the artwork has obviously been made by a grownup art director. maybe i need to instigate some regression by watching some children’s daytime tv and eating chocolate biscuits.

on my desk i have my long-neglected box of crayolas. the smell of the (nontoxic) wax is intoxicating.

someone help me before i pull a ralph wiggum.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 February 2004 at 11:22 am

permalink | filed under werk

oh how distracting. just as i was about to put an end to the day’s procrastination, my doorbell rang and a postman handed me a large brown padded envelope. inside, “optic nerve 9” and “summer blonde”, a collection of “optic nerves” past. i am joyous and lucky, and at the same time, doomed.

thank you, nellie.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 February 2004 at 4:49 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, nellie, werk

surely you wouldn’t expect it to be a good day when the burgler alarm in your building goes off at 6am (you ignore it because it’s just some idiot who hasn’t disarmed it before stepping out the door, most likely those horrible noisy people from downstairs), and then when you finally do seriously wake up half an hour later and stretch, your foot goes into a cramp. oh and also, it’s forecast to hit 34°.

it doesn’t seem so bad at first because you’re stuck at your desk post-tea-and-plum-jammed-crumpets, and you’ve got the fan plugged in, and edie brickell and the jayhawks playing, and the fan causing all these sheets and sheets of proofs you have all over the room to flutter in a most reassuring and soothing manner.

directory job #2 is due at the printers today and you’re on the homestretch. so close you could lick it. you could be done by just after lunch, and then you could go outside, a place you haven’t been to in such a while that it seems magical and mystical.

and then the calls and emails start. the ones that say “we left a whole bunch of listings out of january… can you insert those?”, and “oh, it seems there was a glitch in the spreadsheet that led you to believe a quarter page ad goes on this page, when it’s actually a half page ad”, and so on. and then when in defiance of last minute hiccups it’s finally been burned to CD, just past lunchtime as anticipated, “can you email us PDFs of all the pages with ads on them so we can check them?”.

o if such care with checking had been unleashed earlier. so hours and hours and megabytes (32!) later, it washes over you like cold sick that directory job #2 will not be so obliging as to leave you in peace this evening. crap.

+ + +

the entry below was interrupted by the arrival of text to lay out. what i meant to say was, if you have a blender and you chuck in a tin of jackfruit with half the syrup and a handful of ice cubes, you end up with a pretty tasty approximation of a vietnamese fruit shake. at the main market in ho chi minh city you can get a soursop-strawberry shake that’s tangy like a strawberry yoghurt smoothie, but the best ones are from a hole-in-the-wall cafe along the main drag in hue. you will see a sign outside that says “the best fruit shakes in hue” and you will be sceptical but only until the shop lady puts in front of you an icy, glistening orange thing. o papaya shake, i miss you so.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 December 2003 at 10:38 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, drink, grumble, trip, werk

um. so if you cast your eye towards the top right corner of the window — this window — you may notice a little person with an inverted rice bowl on his head. clicking it will take you to the bane of my current work schedule: rice bowl journals, a hub of blogs from around asia, or by people of asian descent.

“we speak asian.”

it’s not all animated tare panda icons and people who think they are manga characters. like, for example, there is this girl, and this girl, and also this girl, who recently posted some extremely [speechless. adjective to come. in the meantime, use “really good”] pictures of shelves upon shelves of exotic cakes and filled buns in a bakery in sarawak. lordy, to have been in that bakery…

so even though i turn on the computer at 7 every morning, suddenly it’s an hour and a half later, and there’s still just a little too much text formatting to get done. even though the truth is that any amount of text formatting is too much, and any distraction that will take me away from it is worthy.

to this end, last night i saw “lost in translation“, which was funnier than i thought it would be, and sadder, and um, really good.

and in the next few minutes i shall have to decide if i want to experience the 3-hour there-and-back commute out to penrith for the launch of my previous directory job. the one attractive prospect about going to penrith is that’s where the only krispy kreme outlet in australia is located.

mmm… donuts…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 December 2003 at 2:13 pm

permalink | filed under at the movies, misc, werk

i just shut down the document i was working on all of today — text formatting for yet another directory job… four years of design school for this? — and i blinked, and suddenly my field of vision was like that cypress hill “insane in the brain” video, where it’s like the screen is soft and every time someone pokes at it, ripples radiate out. woo.

um. so i was watching “fear factor” during dinner last night, and when i turned it on, what looked like a group of professional wrestlers was in the middle of a dare in which they rolled three giant dice, on which were printed the names of various ‘gross things’, and whatever they ended up with was put into a blender for a nourishing power smoothie.

as one of the male wrestlers threw his first die, he said, “i sure hope i don’t get the fish sauce.” which he didn’t. what he got instead was spleen, kidneys [addendum: ms amber emailed me that the ingredients were actually bile and mashed brains, which makes it about 89% worse] and… durian. i know the durian’s debatable; sometimes when i’m in the mood i will happily eat a slice of durian strudel or a durian popsicle. but! blenderised spleen and kidneys [bile… mashed brains…] over fish sauce? whas?

ummm. so i was watching “gilmore girls” during dinner tonight, and god those girls sure can talk. in great volume and at great speed (the speed is probably to facilitate the volume). and here i am with absolutely nothing to say, to anyone, ever.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 December 2003 at 9:56 pm

permalink | filed under tv, werk

“ok. when i reach C i’ll go out and get the paper and some strawberries.” “ok. when i reach M i’ll make a crumble.” today has been broken down into alphabetical subdivisions, because i’m working on (still!) the index for previously mentioned directory layout job.

the directory layout job has taken many turns of late. more accurately, in the last couple of days it has lurched towards being finished, and then lurched to a halt, and then lurched back on track… something to do with deals struck with the sales rep at the printer who went on holidays without telling anyone. to cut a long and stupid story short, it’s still due at the printers tomorrow, and when i think about it i laugh and then i cry. then i laugh, bitterly.

and then i get to S and dammit it’s time to make that crumble. right now i can smell rhubarb-pear-strawberry-oats-brown sugar-butter-cinammon wafting up from downstairs. when i reach V it may be time for crumble!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 November 2003 at 5:49 pm

permalink | filed under cake, werk

so the question, after coming off a week-and-a-bit long deadline, where a job to design a cover for a book turned out to be a surprise redesign of a 176 page book, is, “what shall i eat?”

in between the sitting down at the computer before 7 in the morning and then forgetting to look away every half hour ’til 10 or 11 at night, there were such forays into emergency sustenance as the 9pm fried egg and baked beans on toast with leftover beetroot salad and the noon to 2pm apple-and-cinnamon pretzel frenzy.

right now i cannot even look at the screen of computer without my left eye going into spasm and my right arm going numb. the tradition after handing over a bunch of discs to the printers is to buy myself breakfast.

what oh what shall it be?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 September 2003 at 10:44 am

permalink | filed under breakfast, snacks, werk

having recently spent like, $311 on new spectacles, which the shopgirl (“frame consultant”) assured me were *very* fashionable and just what everyone was wearing in paris at the moment, and which ironically made me want them less, and which obviously in the end didn’t matter because I got them anyway… i was kinda hoping that my level of blindness would stabilise for a while. and i think it did. but this week, with noise kicking in for the year, and print deadlines growling, baring fangs and schwiping claws at me from every direction, i feel helpless against the pulled-tight eye muscles that reward me at the end of each day. living in soft focus isn’t quite as romantic as it sounds.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 February 2003 at 9:07 pm

permalink | filed under (after a) fashion, werk

How is it November already? More importantly, how is it 2001 and people don’t know better? I can’t make any sense of the wrongness and stupidity.

NO WAR  
NO RACIST SCAPEGOATING
 NO FOOD PARCELS THAT LOOK LIKE CLUSTER BOMBS
NO WRONGNESS AND STUPIDITY

Well! Only about a month to go until my job as the art department of noise comes to an end. I got to do some cool things which will be archived here as soon as I get the time, probably around the same time I become unemployed.

– – –
before i had a “blog”, i used to write a sporadically updated letter on the front page of my website. this is one of them. i am consolidating it into these archives, because i can.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 November 2001 at 10:23 pm

permalink | filed under grumble, werk

Category Archives: werk

Click

Search

Categories

Archives