What is this place?

Oh yes! Of course, it’s my blog, website, portfolio… HOW ARE YOU? Haven’t seen you in ages!  Truth be told, I haven’t exactly been here for you, Blog.  I’ve been busy working on other projects you see Blog, so unfortunately I have neglected you to an extent.  Oh no, no, no… Don’t cry Blog! I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.  Important thing is, I’m here now… I guess before this gets any weirder I should move on.

Hey there folks, Ben ‘ere.  Needless to say, this post is a bit of an apology, with a touch of excuse and a slight dash of ‘give me a break’ on the side.  Recently of course this blog, this site, hasn’t been producing much in the terms of postly goodness.  Now my website stats tell me that this year I’ve had 700,000 hits to the site… most of them inevitably are probably my own… but nonetheless… it’s a number nearing a million.  Which is very exciting, I like big numbers, despite my lack of linguistic ability to actually say them correctly.  No matter how many people there are reading the site, not having any new posts out is rather annoying…

The truth is I’ve had an awful lot on recently.  Then again, I’m a bit ECD (see title) so it results in a lot of ambitious projects being started without any thought beforehand about STRESS.

But what’s been worrying me recently, is that is seems like all these creative projects are diminishing my imagination.  I’m probably just dreaming, (that’d be nice actually, haven’t dreamt in a while) however, it’s when I’m sitting there trying to think about new ideas for the many projects that are on the way that I stop and wonder how on Earth I used to do it.  It seems like I would just come up with idea after idea… but now it seems like a much more tedious task.  I figured I’d give my creative condition a proper write-up:

Excessive Creation Disorder

An illness that results in a massive ambition to create as many things as possible.

Side effects

• Lack of original ideas
• Idea staleness
• Repetitiveness
• Self questioning blog posts

That first side effect is another one of my issues.  I’ve heard it before, there’s a saying that no idea is ever purely new. If you ever have an idea, it’s an adaptation of another idea.  It will never be original, you’ve stolen it from somewhere, whether subconsciously or completely aware.  That idea is some stolen thing that you never actually came up with.  But then it’s about changing that idea, where you take that idea to.

The thoughts behind this post?  Not original, in fact, according to this concept, nothing I’ve ever made is original.  How does knowing this help my creative process?  Not at all.  It’s climbed in like some parasite and has attached itself tightly.  Whenever I’m thinking of ideas I’m turning so many down because they’re not original, they don’t seem unique.  It’s irritating beyond measure, especially since I always have attributed myself to the abstract noun that is ‘imagination.’

So, it’s back to the drawing board… at least until I can convince myself that it was me who made these new and improved compound ideas, that they are original.

I thought I might take the time now just to tell you some of the things I’m working on, as well as some things I have planned for the near future.  It’s exciting but at the same time daunting thinking about how I’m going to get them all done by the end of the year. (Dammit, I feel like I should be writing scripts right now instead of writing this pos… oh, 630 words eh? Whoops. Must have got carried away there)

Ben’s Projects List (De-personalized for security reasons)

• NeWs! – Film Series – DUE August 23rd
• John John – Film Series – DUE August 23rd
• SECRET- Short Film – DUE October
• SECRET – Short Film – DUE October
• SECRET – Short Film – DUE October
• Love Is Loss – Music Video – Due August
• YouTube Videos (Quite a few)
• Scribble’s Notepad 2.1/3.0
• SECRET – YouTube – Sometime September
• Upcoming Essays
• Any Homework Tasks
• Sports Video Montage – DUE August
• Website Coding

Is it possible to up the gear?

All these things I feel like I should be getting out of the way, it seems totally possible, within easy reach.  Whenever the time comes that I begin to get these things out of the way, time just disappears.  More things gather, then the workflow is congested.

No, it’s not a fantasy, I need to complete these things, I need a system, I need a pace.  Something stable, something that works, something I can rely on.  Do I just expect to much?

This isn’t much of a post, I apologise.  I had planned for a post on something but with the variety of things I’ve been doing today I really have no idea what it was.

I’ll write again soon.  After some rest.

Ben,

Hello there!

This will only be a short post I’m afraid folks… more on that in a moment though.

Just got off from two weeks of school holiday, the time when I should have been catching up on sleeping, getting everything done so that I can come back to school and get given a whole bunch more tasks to fill the tally back up.

Ah, nope.  Not happening.  Somehow I’ve returned to school, with a lot on already as it is.  Do I do this to myself? Do I honestly have to instinctively make life more complicated than it should be? – Enough of the questions into empty internetific space…  the answer is yes, yes I do.

I’ve done it before, during the holidays with all the free time for creative brilliance, I get the so called ‘clever’ idea to start doing multiple projects of my own.  Videos, graphics, software, stories.  I start doing all of these things, like I’m running a hobby marathon, then school resumes… and I’m still trying to do all these different things, as well as school work…  It doesn’t work,  with my level of perfectionism and OCD school projects already take enough time to complete as it is.  In fact I actually did one of my school assignments over the holiday.  I was meant to word process my book review notes.  Instead I wrote it out in a full review form with colour coded notes and simplified questions.

Ben you crazy fool.  Why the heck would you write up 15 pages, 7000 words… a combined total of over 41,000 characters?  When really you only needed to write about 1 and a half pages.

I’m not answering that, I’m too scared that I’d offend myself.  I’m going to be living with myself for a really long time, so, it’d be a torturous experience.

Agh, tired, feeling…

See you later folks, will write an update blog some time this week to tell you what’s going on.

Thanks,

Ben.

You’ve probably heard it too. Tablets will be the thing of the future, we’ll all have one, and we’ll all use them for everyday tasks. They’re already creeping into our schools, into shops, hospitals, businesses… They’re all over the place. But does that mean they will replace desktop computers?

I mean, when you think about it, these tablets are getting more and more powerful, and can do more and more things with them. In fact you can picture coming home with your tablet, slotting it into a sort of dock, in which then it acts like a normal computer. So it does seem like a future that could happen. There are Android tablets that do this kind of thing already, they slot into a base which makes them like a laptop, but it makes you wonder… if you wanted a laptop, wouldn’t you just get one of them instead of buying a tablet and a laptop attachment for it?

One thing that I do a lot with my computer is video, graphics editing and typing. These things really don’t mix with tablets at the moment, I’ve tried video editing on a tablet and it’s just painful and annoying and slow. Eventually your pointer finger gets ludicrously sore from all the precise taps and drags that you have to execute. In my opinion, even if tablets were incredibly fast, and could handle video editing easily, it still means a lot of finger wagging.

Graphics editing on a tablet? Pffft, get out of here. Yeah so Adobe has a Photoshop app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, but does it create graphics? No, it barely styles photos. Really you’d expect better. But again I can imagine if there were any decent graphics developing programs for the tablet, they’d be a similar hand exercise to making a movie.

Typing? Goodbye tablet. Yes you can buy keyboards that you can plug your tablet into, there are even ones that run over Bluetooth, meaning more things you have to charge up and fiddle with. Tablets are too annoying to type on, no matter what brand they are or what OS they run. Touch screens aren’t good for typing.

However, there are some things that tablets do that my computer doesn’t do very well. Making music is one of them, I find Garageband on the iPad to be better than the actual desktop program.

“But Ben, Garageband for desktop has far more instruments, effects panel, thousands more loops, way more music tracks. The iPad app is featureless”

Yes, but the thing about the Garageband app for iPad is that it’s cleaner, in my opinion playing the keyboard on the iPad is better than playing the keyboard on the desktop using the actual computer keys. Also in my case where I have a Windows computer, it’s also a better option than spending $50+ on a music making app. I’ve made WAY better songs on the iPad app than I ever have in the desktop app. The Garageband iPad app seems to sound better too.

Managing connections, I get quite a few newsletters, website comment notifications from this website and emails from YouTube telling me some dumb arse has made some mindless question about something that was already explained in the video. I also have Twitter and Facebook to take notice of. For this iFind that tablet devices are really good, far better than a computer. There’s no way I’d be checking my emails with my desktop computer on a camping trip. This is where the tablets shine, online stuff and playing games. I wouldn’t bother trying to use them for much else, it’s fun to have a go at making a movie on them every now and then, but for something like that it’s just not practical. Then again, when it comes to internet stuff if my computer is turned on that I’ll use it in preference to a tablet, because I get the full web, not this mobilized crap that 80% of websites are changing to these days. YouTube Tablet Version is a pain in the backside, you can’t edit your settings for your videos and don’t get me started on Mobile Facebook.

Anyways,

That’s my quite ridiculous rant for now.

To tell you the truth I only wrote this picture because I took a picture of an iPad awhile ago and I wanted to use it somewhere. So that was the inspiration for this post, apologies if it sounds unstructured. I thought it up as I went, unlike most my other posts where I already have a string of thoughts to include.

Til next time,

Ben.

Greetings fellow being,

It’s been yet again another procrastination Sunday.  Not too long ago I was debating about making a YouTube series where I play games… I know, exciting yes?  There’s definitely not a shortage of gaming videos on YouTube as it is, but I figure that this channel will give me an excuse to actually relax.  Normally I cut these entertaining things out of my life because I can’t justify using precious time on something that’s not productive.

Today I created the YouTube channel ‘Intelligic‘ which is where I’ll be making gaming videos. (It was only after I came up with this ‘brilliant’ name that I found out it shared similarities with an electronic cigarette manufacturer’s name ‘Intellicig’) I would have done it sooner, but I was hoping to just have one channel and upload everything to that channel alone, keep everything in the one place.  But instead it looks like I’ll be making separate channels… perhaps even a separate channel for vlogging.

Definitely not what I had planned on doing, but perhaps it’s the way I should be heading.

I hate Sundays, Friday afternoons are good, Saturdays are bloody fantastic.  Sundays are pure evil, they seem to go WAY too fast, and the list of things you had planned on doing is left untouched.  Very depressing.

Right, I’m off.  Burning DVDs to tick off one of my To-Do’s.

Ben,