I had a great time in Luxembourg this weekend and met some fantastic people. I’m hoping I made a few real friends as I know I want to work with some of them too.
You can get a little tired of the echo chamber here in London so it was great to relax with a few like-minded folk who come at things with a slightly different outlook and European direction. Seesmic and Twitter are great for breaking down barriers and connecting people, but my own inability to learn another language (I figure I need to finish butchering this one before I move on to a new one) means I navigate towards English speakers first. Thankfully every person in Europe is way smarter than me and forgives me my ignorance. This means I already have a nice little European social group to turn to online.
However, nothing beats sitting down in a hotel that was once a fortress to chew the fat (and Toblerone) together.
I was incredibly impressed with everything I saw in Luxembourg, but what stirred me the most were the people. I travel a fair bit, but it takes more than history and postcard pretty scenery to get me fired up about a place. I was bored to tears in the jungles of Mexico because the pyramids are just mausoleums. Impressive, yes, but it’s not like the ancient Mayans have contributed much lately (unless you count the Mel Gibson movie with the face chewing) and a hundred years from now someone taking the same trip as me will see pretty much the same thing. Mexico City, however, rocked…
Jess drags me to a lot of OLD places that are quite happy to look backwards for the next century and concentrate on diverging tourists from their cash by wearing silly costumes and treating their whole nation as a museum. Dead places, dead ideas.
Everyone I met in Luxembourg was well aware of the perceived shortcomings of such a small country, but crucially they were all committed to moving forward and changing those perceptions by being as progressive as possible. The people won me over first and then it was easy to sit back and enjoy the view.
Anyway, I’m going to break my posts about the trip up with my usual stuff here and also try and keep things short and snappy. Just sorting out all the video I shot will take a week plus I’m learning how to handle a new camera and a new editing suite at the same time. But more on that later too…
Right now here’s some footage as a teaser that I almost deleted and then shoved into iMovie 08 as a quick refresher:
Canon kindly sent me one as part of their Canon Camera Buzz sponsorship. It’s been pottering around in the post for almost a week, but I finally got my hands on it:
Sometime around 4am on Friday the power into our building went somewhere else.
It finally came back on Sunday.
This is an old building. The lower part of our flat used to be the rafters of a 250 year old tannery building. The upper part of the flat where I’m writing from is a much later pre fabricated edition. It comes complete with an emergency thermostat so that if I ever forget to put the heating on and the temperature drops too low it’ll kick in and stop the place from freezing. Our heating and the emergency system require electicity to do their thing.
By Saturday the only place that wasn’t an icebox was the freezer.
We spent part of the weekend in a hotel just around the corner. That was weird.
I did a little work on Friday from the coffee shop, but not much. I just about caught up, but I’m way behind.
The plan this month was to get a decent Twitter/Seesmic event sorted out. The first Tweetup with TrustedPlaces was a lot of fun and the second one at the Juno screening seemed to be an interesting place to take the concept. I’m all for just getting together for drinks with like minded folk, but the idea of pointing cool people at something just as cool that’s mostly off their radar (like a movie for example) really appealed to me.
I was all set to get that going for the end of January, but decided to hold off until one of my favourite Twitter and Seesmic people gets back from Australia. So stay tuned for an update on that as we’ll certainly be doing something in February. But I still got to flex my event planning muscles… Dean and I got asked to arrange a little get together for Loic, Vin Vin and Seesmic this Thursday. We had to keep the numbers down so it was capped at 20 people which make it nice and cosy. However, we’re now having some press pop by too so we’ll probably be eating out of each others’ laps…
Nice group of people though and I even get to finally make friends with Thayer depsite our previous differences over this kind of thing.
Which reminds me I still need to write about Seesmic too.
AND the vlogging event I was in Brighton for last weekend.
I’m seriously considering taking an extra day off a week just to catch up with the writing…
I kept forgetting to post this video on my own blog (some vlogger I am), but now it’s up on Londonist I guess I should give it a home here:
A couple of things bug me about this now that it’s out in the wild. I’ve since found out more stuff about the tank that I’d liked to have included, but if I get enough I’ll do a follow up later in the year. The editing is awful, but that’s ok because I’m learning as I go along and I put it together at 4am. The ‘titles’ are too long and already piss me off. I have a lot of musical friends so ripping off L7 should stop at some point…
There’s a lot I like about the video too. It frees me from the pressure of coming up for a ’show’ for Blip and Viddler and all the other services out there. By piecing this thing together for Semanal (more about that in the next post) it gives me the perfect excuse to focus on a show type format while I use smaller vids to pepper the site with no real agenda. The title ‘Visible Monsters’ of course was just an extension of this blog’s title, but now people expect a series of similar London based stories. That’s no problem as I have a bunch and it’s also kind of fun.
One man’s monster is another man’s hero so there’s plenty of scope there.
Right, now I should talk about WHY I’n vlogging which is more interesting… stay tuned.
Been a while since I was excited by a Thai movie, but this little bout of girl power has me chomping at the bit:
“Chocolate” tells the story of an autistic girl who learns how to fight both by absorbing the martial arts she sees on TV and from the muay thai boxing camp next to her home. When she discovers a list of debtors in her sick mother’s diary, she decides to go collecting. Her quest leads her to confrontations with criminal gangs and also her father, a member of the Japanese mafia.
It’s directed by Prachya Pinkaew who I like a lot. You can read more about the production here. And check out the trailer. It has a slow start, but then kicks off big time complete with a snippet of injured stuntmen, classic Jackie Chan style:
Two questions I was asked a lot last week: 1. Is your blog dead? 2. Is Visible Monsters a video blog now?
No would be the answer to both.
I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time off-blog, but where as I would usually come back and mention little things like the fact that someone tried to mug me again or the night I got to hang out in a New York City firehouse at midnight I’ve been Twittering or Seesmicing them instead.
Some like the term microblogging, but I prefer to call it lazyblogging - I love both Seesmic and Twitter, but in some ways they make it too easy to just throw something out to the crowd. Once out there it bobs around for a little and then gets dropped in favour of the next shiny sparkly thing. I love other people’s cool new services, but this place is mine and I like filling it with stuff.
I am going to messing with video a lot more this year, but there is also going to be a lot more of that word stuff so don’t throw away your good reading eyes just yet. The blog got all dusty and neglected for a number of reasons, but this isn’t a ’sorry I haven’t been updating post’ as much as it is a ‘back to business as usual’ post.
So let’s get back to business as usual.
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