Helluvablog

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal

the way you dream, the things you feel.

Deep in your spirit let them rise

akin to stars in crystal skies

that set before the night is blurred:

delight in them and speak no word.

How can a heart expression find?

How should another know your mind?

Will he discern what quickens you?

A thought once uttered is untrue.

Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:

drink at the source and speak no word.

Live in your inner self alone

within your soul a world has grown,

the magic of veiled thoughts that might

be blinded by the outer light,

drowned in the noise of day, unheard…

take in their song and speak no word.

I had exactly no entries for the October competition. Which means that I get to fritter away the prize money on beer and chewy cola-bottles. Mwahahahahaha.

Well, along with my new fat pipe form my hosts I also get full scripting support for perl, php, SQL etc and free installation of stuff for blogging and gallery creation. With this in mind I am planning to stop using Blogger for the Helluvablog and switch to the far more sexy Moveable Type.

I need to get everything set up and runnning first though. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when the change happens – in fact the changee should be quite obvious – and it shouldn’t make any difference to bookmarks or shortcuts to this page.

Well, it’s been a while. I’ve been really busy with work, the aftermath of the portrait party (still going through the photos), and drinking beer. I’ve also been busy with making changes to the way Helluva.co.uk works – or rather, will work in the future.

I’ve upgraded my web-hosting service to give me much more webspace – 1GB to be precise – and much more bandwidth. I’m now hosted with Doteasy on their Ultra Hosting plan. Just check out my big fat pipe.

“Why?” I hear some of you ask.

Well, the whole helluva thing started with an idea for lots of activities in one place. At the moment I’m still getting my head around making websites etc and at the moment the more astute of you will have noticed that all the various helluva links go to areas related to helluva but hosted on different sites. So what is going to happen now is that all these things like the forum, my photo gallery, Jon Jones’ forthcoming art site etc, will now be hosted on my site giving me more control over how they look and fit in with the planned overall appearance of the site.

So generally speaking, if I disappear for a day or two, don’t worry – I’m not dead I’m just wrestling with some code or some other nerdery like that.

The October Quotes Competition in now over and the November Competition has begun.

Did you get ‘em all? There’s £10 in it if you did… you have until 11.59pm Monday 3rd November to e-mail me with your answers. Use the Contact Me link on the right.

I went to The Old Crown, Birmingham’s oldest pub (built in 1368), on Thursday for lunch with a friend who has a design studio in the nearby Custard Factory. When they brought my meal (chili with rice and flour tortilla) it was so salty it made me almsot implode. You couldn’t taste anything but salt. So I sent it back and changed my meal order to a lamb shank. When this came it was tough – even hard in places – and overdone and generally tasteless. Since I’d eaten nothing else that day and I thought that sending something else back would get me ‘special sauce’ I ate it. That evening when I got home, having eaten nothing else, I started to feel a bit funny. I began to quiver and quake and my stomach started to do gymnastics. Thought I was imaginging things at first but it got worse and worse until the inevitable Olympic sprint to the toilet, followed by (I’m sorry) extremely high-pressure bum gravy (EHPBG™).

That’s been me ever since: Five minutes on, five minutes off – there can’t be anything left in me but it’s still going on. I’m starting to wonder whether I should be crapping through a seive to catch the internal organs that must be on their way out by now. My arse feels like the raggedy end of a burst balloon. I’m not happy.

This is the last thing I need with the Portrait Party tomorrow. Can you see it?

Me: Hi, thanks for coming

Model: Hey this is great, I’m really excited.

Me: Erm, can you hang on for a few minutes while I have a shit?

Christ.

My 66-year-old ma phoned yesterday and offered to come round and bring me some anti diahorrea stuff. I said no, thinking that a/ I’m too old to have my ma run around after me when I’m ill and b/ she’s 66 and has just beaten cancer, I can’t have her coming all this way just because I’ve got the trots.

Now, with just over twenty-four hours to go to the portrait party and over forty hours of gastric meltdown so far, I’m starting to think “Mommy, help me – I’m nearly inside out”.

Suddenly realised this week (actually it was pointed out by Wolf in a post on SXC) that I needed make-up to put on the models to avoid shiny faces. AAAAAAH.

Well, I went to Boots and bought make-up. Had a young girl almost wetting herself with the effort not to laugh at the big burly guy being flustered by the array of powders and creams and their prices. I couldn’t believe that the brush to apply the powder costs more than the powder itself.

Probably didn’t help that my (so-called) friend came along and reverted to his teens by camping it up and saying that he was sure that it would look great on me. I had to give the shop assistant permission to laugh in the end as she looked as though she was about to do herself a mischief.

In addition to my 28mm prime I now have another lens for my camera – a 100-300mm zoom EF lens. It’s one of the upmarket, ultrasonic ones and it’s on ‘permanent loan’ from a friend. I thought it was broken when I first put it on my camera. With my 28mm lens, if you have the focus set to auto, when you press the shutter release halfway there is a quiet, high-pitched whirring noise as the lens whizzes round to its focus point. It takes less than a quarter of a second. I suppose that I’ve come to associate that noise with focusing on something. When I put the new lens on the camera and tested the focus there was no noise and I just happened to be pointing at something that was almost the correct distance away for that setting so I though nothing had happened. Pointed it at something further away and hit the shutter release halfway without looking through the viewfinder – nothing moved and I heard nothing. Oh shit! Then I noticed the ‘Ultrasonic‘ badge on the lens and looked through and refocused. It’s like magic – things just instantly refocus themselves in the viewfinder in complete silence. I’m worried – I’m getting all spoddy about a fucking lens for god’s sake.

Anyway one day to go… shitting it.

Well the Portrait Party is all arranged. Got the studio lights and gels. Got two rooms at the local pub booked, got a DJ, got tickets/invites printed.

What’s the Portrait Party? Well it goes something like this…

I’ve got two rooms at the local pub, one with a bar and a DJ playing chilled out tunes and the other with a photographic studio set-up (lights, backdrop etc.) and I’ve been going around stopping people in the street and in pubs, bars and shops and telling them that they have great faces and I want to take their picture and giving them invitations. When they get there they can avail themselves of the free drinks (one per model) and chill out whilst signing model releases and meeting the other people involved. Meanwhile I call them one by one into the other room and take their photos. Almost all of the people I’ve asked have been enthusiastic about it and I’m starting to get excited about it.

It doesn’t end there though because my friend Jon Jones – who is an amazing artist and will soon have his own Helluva Section – will then do a series of paintings from the portraits. If it goes well then we will arrange a joint exhibition of our work. Either way it’s going to be a great experience for me with it being the first time I’ve ever set up lighting for a shoot or taken anything but a semi-candid portrait. So it should be a learning experience.

Trouble is, as I’ve been looking for interesting faces I’ve been asking beautiful women and craggy-faced, lived-in looking men. I’m going to end up with a room full of princesses being chatted up by winos.

…And it’s all happening this Sunday. Wish me luck.

Yay! My archives actually work now!!!

Trinipops posts on the Worker’s Anonymous EZboard from Bolivia. Tonight she posted three of the most action packed lines in BB history:-

Well now that the riots have stopped and I’ve managed to fly (oh the luxury, even if I was a teensy bit on edge going through the checks because I’d only just finished a night of vacum cleaner impressions) I can go look for some infected sand flies. I saw my first tarantula last night too, in my kitchen, but Wil killed it with a machete.

Necrotising Fasciatus, anti-Government riots, forced cocaine abuse, tension, fear, escape, wild poisonous spiders and a hero with a machete. All in three lines. Wow.