Like for world economy, our lives can be represented on a Cartesian plane. At times the line goes up, at times it goes down.
For those times of decrease, it would be nice to have some of those mushrooms and bottles you find in Alice in Wonderland.
This week’s theme was Decrease, and here’s my pic.
For next week, the Oracle said 22: Grace.
I had learnt a lot of good things I could do with my days.
I had learnt how to set myself free from overload.
I had learnt where my own mind space was.
I had learnt how to take care of myself.
I had learnt how to be lazy and self indulgent.
And now? Now it seems like I’ve forgotten all about it, and – as usual – it’s definitely no good. I’m at a loss. In the middle of all this tax-paying and saving and working and respecting and waiting and being patient, where did all the fun go?
I’ll have to go back to my lists.
Resolution #1: re-establish the Friday post.
Resolution #2: re-establish the weekly pic. I have my copy of I Ching here and they’ve just said “41. Decrease“. Let’s say: a week to think about this and take a pic, like in the good old times of the GSFP. (You can follow along if you want!)
Resolution #3 … get a fucking grip!
(Tonight, I dreamed I was hungry and craving for a cream pie that was in my old fridge, the one I threw away last week. But it was expired and I let it drop on the floor and said to D. “Let’s not eat this! We’ll go away and buy stuff and bake a pie in our new home!”. So, apparently my subconscious was working for me in the background already with its own resolutions.)
There’s nothing new around me in December: I’m still working like a dog, moving from my old house crammed with stuff belonging to three different (untidy) generations, paying thousands of € taxes and striving to survive in this cold. This month is only Haste, Annoyance and Effort, so there’s nothing new to show you or tell you: I’m spent, apprehensive and hypochondriac. Like this.
As usual, around my birthday I get caught in a digital frenzy: I reinstall all my operating systems on mobile, laptop and desktop and I redesign my website. I’ll never be content with the way it looks for long, I’m afraid. It grows old in a year and as time passes I develop severe allergies to its looks. Check it out! It may still have a few minor glitches here and there, as I’ve written it from scratch (yeah, I know… don’t say anything about it). It won’t work good with Internet Explorer: all rounded corners will appear as squares. But that’s your problem. Plus, judging from my stats, less than 5% of you visit it from screen resolutions which are lower than 1024×768, therefore I’ve decided that the rest of us is not going to suffer from the fact that you’re checking it out on your mobile while in the toilet: the bigger your screen, the better it looks. Take care 
[I'm almost 32 and here's some of my Friday twitter wisdom for you, kids.]
If you’re a man and you fantasize about succumbing to the plunging v-neck shirt, please shave your chest for the love of all that is holy.
Every morning I wake up terrified that I might have forgotten all my passwords.
There’s an approximate range of four degrees C within which Italian people stop complaining about the weather and can occupy their heads with other things.
As a grown up, I should have become an IT_CH > IT translator.
Bands and artists incorporate chat client sounds in their tunes just to make you mad.
Part of Adele’s huge success is due to the fact that she always shows up first in iPods.
Being from Eastern Europe apparently entails a few milestones: at some point, I’ll grow tits and long blonde hair overnight; after menopause, I’ll start wearing a dead bird on the head and will tend to call it a hairstyle. You can put me in a home, at that point.
My greatest sex toy for 2011 is the vocoder.
Anything with Ryan Gosling in it tends to become my favourite movie of all time.
I definitely should find time to exercise the Darth Vader manoeuvre. That thing with the Force-choking.
At some point of my education, my parents must have decided that I didn’t need any instructions about domestic organization and financial management, because I’d definitely have a secretary as a grown up.
When your accountant’s emails start having red, font-size-15 headers, you should start worrying.
Don’t stupid product warnings make you wish to disobey them?
You can spare yourself watching Tron Legacy: the bit with Daft Punk playing Derezzed in the club is on YouTube.
Playing with your profile pic is fun and rewarding and it’s something I’m not going to renounce to. Changes to profile layouts allow you to do just that. (BTW, you can still adapt my old profile pic tutorial for your Google Plus profiles.) Now that the timeline feature is up, here’s my profile pic and how I did it.
Here’s also my previous pic.
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What you need
- Photoshop (my copy is CS5, you can download a fully functional 1 month trial from the Adobe website).
- Your Facebook Timeline activated (if you don’t know how to do this, follow this tutorial).
- A pic of at least 1227×508 resolution, with what is going to be your profile pic in the lower left angle of the pic.
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1. I’ll use the template I found on Ausgetrock.net (whom I’d like to thank), but own amended version of it (I made it slightly bigger, so that the profile pic won’t look like a lo-res picture). Mine is uploaded here (right-click and choose Save As to save it on your hard drive).
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2. Open the PSD file and select the timeline hack template layer.
I’ve always thought that I’m simply narcissistic, until I committed myself to a weekly themed photo. I’m not the most punctual of creatures and didn’t shoot all 52 pictures, but the whole experience helped me see many things about my imagination. For example: it’s not that I simply like taking pictures of myself; to express a theme, the easiest thing for me is to use my body, or somebody else’s. Just like with language. I try to enact it. Whose body I use is not so important: of course, my choice tends to include people I’m quite familiar with, or, let’s say, people I’m not too ashamed to ask to sit or stand somewhere, half naked and uncomfortable, for an hour or so, until I get the light right.
There are parts of the body (mine, or other people’s, as in this case) which are particularly useful when trying to convey a feeling. Feelings are usually disturbed by eyes and mouths (sometimes eyes can go away altogether). Eyes and mouths are too practical, too concrete. They catch all the attention and need to be cut out of the frame, averted or hidden. Everything happens somewhere around the neck, the chest or the belly. Clothes and other objects can hide feelings away.
To sum it all up, abstract concepts often require silence, secrets, hiding things, and shutting up.
Something like this.
EDIT: There’s one more pic I kinda like. There you go.
Let me tell you something:
1. Being in a bad mood doesn’t mean that you’re unhappy.
2. Being sad doesn’t mean that you’re unhappy.
3. Feeling lonely doesn’t mean that you’re unhappy.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I’ve suddenly turned into a self-help book.
It’s just that the sooner you understand that happy is not synonymous with cheerful the better. It’s a very common yet lethal misunderstanding. To be happy, you have to learn how to balance your emotions. This is what your priest, philosopher or therapist will help you discover at a certain point. It means that you know when you’re sad, angry, elated, content, cranky, grumpy, thrilled, merry and so on, and you’re able to express it. Shit happens, you know? You must not pretend that it doesn’t make you blue or pissed off.
That said, if you’re miserable or a bit down and you’ve told me about it, chances are I’ve sent you one, or even all of the following links.
I’m pasting them here for convenience’s sake.
LINKS THAT AMUSE ME
1. Singing hot dogs, pogo pineapples and Get Naked!
2. Bull frog
3. This sucks!
4. Life in 64 easy steps
5. The Sign
6. Something Wonderful is About to Happy – Most Popular Engrish (please read comments too).
7. Mind Powers
8. Morning Potency
Last winter we went snowboarding in Livigno in the Alps, which is a duty free zone. D. bought a camcorder and shot all our trip, with occasional raids in his territory by other camcorder bearers. It took me more or less 6 months to find enough computing resources and time to watch and choose what’s useful in 20 GB of raw HD material shot by us newbies and to dress it up nice and flimsy. Oh yeah, and I’m crap at video editing. We’ll do better for our next trip, I promise 
I’m a vain creature and I like self portraits.
But I’m not a photographer and I don’t have hours and hours to dedicate to photoretouching (and I hate what is usually meant by photoretouching – the kind of things you’ll find in PhotoShopDisasters). There’s also another problem: the higher the resolution of your camera, the bigger you look, and this involves that you see every detail blown up – i.e. you buy a DSLR and you suddenly realize you look like a swamp monster.
Here’s my workflow. I take no credit about it: if you speak Italian, you can follow the original video instructions from Francesco Marzoli (Digital Post Production) here.
Before I forget this: save often. And also another thing: save often.
Here’s the original pic (you can enlarge any image by clicking on it – this pic is reduced in size to 1000×1500 for obvious reasons: the original raw file is around 10 MB).
1. Open your high res file (better if RAW) in Photoshop. I use PS CS5 – you can download it for a free 30-day trial here. Try and ignore the fact that if you enlarge your pic your skin looks like Alien’s.
The Swamp Monster
2. Duplicate the background layer by dragging it on the Create New Layer button
3. Select the new layer and choose Filter > Blur > Box Blur
