Life has been busy.
I am always looking for new and different ways of improving my life, both the quality of it and how to better myself in terms of character and skill for the future. I've been so dead-set in getting myself stronger so that I can have a better job, have more money, own more things and so on. One of my greatest fears is to become complacent and set in my ways.
However, the danger of being so strung up about constant improvement and renewal is forgetting what you already have. In my case, this has been the skills that I have already picked up and worked hard on while at university. I have neglected my creative practice for the longest time, in part because of how things ended up when I finished (will cover this in more detail some other time) and a general disillusionment with academia at large. After I had graduated I didn't want anthing to do with that world anymore, and as a result took to doing different things and just trying to enjoy my life as I left all the heavy shit behind.
Despite all this, only recently have I realised that I really miss making things. Some of my favourite memories are of making different things just for fun and experimentation, not for a presentation or audience but just the process was all that mattered for me. Whether that was performing for the camera or out to the silent void that is the Internet, these are some of my most special moments.
After what I would consider to have been an extended hiatus, I have gone back to making things again. I don't really have a plan with any of it yet, but I have thought about revisiting things that I have already worked with to try and mine them for new meaning. My little Thinkpad isn't really built for image editing and video, but that's precisely what I've been doing over the last few weeks. It's a gentle process of trying out different things but not pushing the machine too hard to risk overheating/kernel failure!
I've abandoned using the Adobe Creative Suite for my work. I now consider it malware insofar as it traps users into contracts and requiring the payment of cancellation fees, uses a tonne of local resources just to install and remove their apps, and requires a constant Internet connection to phone home to Adobe servers (if it cannot do this every 7 days you are locked out of the CC Suite). While their software has now become the industry standard, I don't think an individual like me really needs something as convoluted as this. Now, I hop between a mixture of Kdenlive, Krita, Dotgrid and Inkscape (all free and open source software!)
At the moment I've been trying to make a video using my notes and scraps from the past month during lockdown. Not sure where it's headed but it's getting me excited in any case.
From my screen to yours, T.