There is nothing coming up today. So that’s it. A break. For one day.
The weather is beautiful. Sunny, a slight wind, around 23 Celsius i’m thinking. Wonderful.
I’ll be back tomorrow. Gonna have a glass of cider brut now. My first ever. I do hope it sparkles!
Bye bye.
There you go! Not in any order, just starting at the beginning and seeing where i end up. I will focus on gif animations and flash presents. The gif animations i will actually show here too. The interactive flash animations i will show a screenshot of and link to.
Onlinedance
1 September 1999
A dancing gif animation in a starry night.
likewise
22 March 2000
A javascript rollover image
I did try to copy the code, but it didn’t go so well. So i show a screenshot here. Sorry guys and galls.
Dream
21 April 2000
If someone forced me to pick my ultimate favourite one, this could be it. For the people watching this site on a smartphone or tablet. Too bad! Screenshots for you.
?
18 May 2000
Writing something?
My favourite number is 4!
9 August 2001
Nine different options in this flash file. They do change while you move the cursor inside the file.
Timesharing
12 March 2002
I don’t think i ever had these two points meet each other. And now, while i open the page and watch it, it does happen! There is a variation in the speed and andgle of reflection. And of course the starting point.
prototyped heart
21 April 2003
//a complicated way of doing a heart, by trial and error
//prototyped this time, and adjustable in width, even negative width works, to my surprise
//b = width
//lw = linewidth
//hc = line- and fillcolor
//ha = transparency
MovieClip.prototype.drawHeart = function(b,lw,hc,ha){
this.lineStyle(lw,hc,ha);
this.beginFill(hc, ha);
this.moveTo(0,0);
this.curveTo(b*0.23 , -b*0.26 , b*0.4 , -b*0.1);
this.curveTo(b*0.57 , b*0.07 , b*0.4 , b*0.3);
this.lineTo(0 , b*0.82);
this.lineTo( -b*0.4 , b*0.3);
this.curveTo(-b*0.57 , b*0.07 , -b*0.4 , -b*0.1);
this.curveTo(-b*0.23 , -b*0.26 ,0, 0);
this.endFill();
}
_root.createEmptyMovieClip('mc', 2);
mc._x = 300;
mc._y = 100;
mc.drawHeart(300,0,0xFF0000,100);
writing
22 May 2003
Random meaningless poetry
This time
19 January 2005
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Dress me up
8 February 2005
Love love this one. Yay!
The Answer
22 February 2005
OK OK i got ten.. well, there is one other one. So i’ll change the title of this post! The one music clip i made. It is for a demo of Bloc Party, The Answer. I made this in one evening. 😀
Making this post has made me very very happy. I sang along with whats her name.. Idina Menzel’s Let it go. That went well! I danced a little. I also cried. Pfff. Well, listening to Bloc Party’s The Answer made me smile smile smile. Gotta wind down a bit. I’ll drink the one cidre i have and then go to bed. Or.. just check whats on tv. Maybe a nice movie. I’ll see!
Bye bye 🙂
At the moment i’m going through my old work. Some of it in a cupboard downstairs. Some of it still in the attic. In a ring binder in the cupboard i found some more contactsheets. I decided to photograph these too and make a separate post of the. I do like these.
I also photographed two pictures i found, because well.. i like em.
Another thing i observed when i scrolled back over the last 15 posts, is that i seem to keep images more before the break. I won’t be doing that with the walks pictures. This page will get so large to download. I do think though that the really important photos i do like to keep before the break. If there is a break even.
Ooh well.. just some minor thinking there. On with the show!
Ooh, the top image. It’s one of the single images i photographed. I love this one.
Also something else. I don’t think i talked about it specifically. I just want to emphasize here that i made these photos myself. All alone with the camera, smiling into nothingness. It does remind me of my first memory, where my mother points to my father behind me, who takes a photograph of me then. I was like a year, a year and a half. The fact that i do not see my father, but i see the camera he is holding on front of his face. I don’t know if the memory is related to my obsessive self portraits later on. But it is something i think about.
A last image of this post. Just because i think she’s cute. 🙂
Walking straight through the centre of Rotterdam this time. Partly over the Meent, then i crossed over to the Hoogstraat, went down the Koopgoot, than partly over the Lijnbaan to the Binnenwegplein, the Oude Binnenweg, the Nieuwe Binnenweg, then over the Schie, past the old Delfshaven over the Schiedamseweg to Marconiplein, where i took the tube back home.
The Nieuwe Binnenweg i felt was changed a lot. Gentrified. Quite a lot of male barbershops, second hand clothing stores, eating houses. The Schiedamseweg was still the same old long road with many different stores, from bellhouses to a Croatian shop. Still nice!
I do try to greet people, not be withdrawn, but look around, look at the people, smile. It is hard sometimes, especially in a large town like Rotterdam. People put on this protective form of walking by yourself and getting to where you want to go. I’ve done that too. Sometimes i still do that. But i keep on trying to see if there are any people simply willing to smile. To be honest, it’s mostly older people who are open for any sort of contact.
I also made a short video on the Eendrachtsplein, between the Old and the New Binnenweg. Enjoy!
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker
The founders of Steely Dan, one of my all time favorite bands. The band split up in 1981. Fagen and Becker reunited in 1993 and have since toured and released albums as Steely Dan.
I’ve most likely known Steely Dan since their beginnings. I remember an assignment at highschool, to draw a redesign of an album you liked. I picked Countdown to Ecstacy from Steely Dan. So i must have been like eleven or twelve when i bought their albums. The first one, Can’t buy a thrill, was released in 1972, when i was eight years old. As my eldest sister Marja was the biggest influence on my music taste in those years, i knew about them from when she got the album. I do have all their albums up until Aja. Then i got into ska and new wave. A different story. 🙂
Max Martin
I’ve known about this man for quite some time, from the time he wrote Britney Spears hit …Baby One More Time in 1998. But i didn’t look him up until a week ago. I hadn’t realised he wrote so many hits. Martin is the songwriter with the third most number one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon. 17 of his hits are the following:
He started out in Sweden, with Ace of Base among others. Then he started co-producing and co-writing for the Backstreet Boys 1999 Milennium album. The following people read like a list of of all the hits all over the world. I don’t know much about this world, but it seems to me Martin is among the ones most revered in the industry. “We work melody first. That’s Max Martin’s school,” Kotecha says. “We’ll spend days, sometimes weeks, challenging the melody. The goal is to make it sound like anyone can do this, but it’s actually very difficult. In Sweden, you don’t do anything until you do it right.” Savan Kotecha, the American who co-wrote both of One Direction’s big hits, spent six months in Stockholm developing songs for their new album with Martin disciples Rami Yacoub and Carl Falk.
Mark Zuckerberg
Criticism Facebook
Yeah. Hmm. I write these updates by making the post and adding the names while i think of them. The previous three names i had rather quickly. And then i thought of Facebook. And its founder. Or rather, one of the five co-founders.
I do not that much about him. And for the first years i happily ignored facebook. Once i had to make a facebook page for a company for work. Not the kind of work i like to repeat.
He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010: “The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.”
There are a couple of things i don’t like about facebook. It is overly prudish. The order of posts i don’t get. But yes, there are so many users on it, it is hard to avoid it. So i do post updates from this blog there. I do feel though for most users that facebook is the one place they go to. Browsing (‘surfing’) seems to be diminishing. I’m a internet reader and watcher since 1995. I’ve seen many ways of browsing and remembering the nice places. I guess i’ll stay happy with the few around me who are doing the same. Still, i don’t mind publishing on facebook occasionally. And with my F.B. Purity, which hides the ads and more, my life is even better 🙂
Yes!
This is work i made starting May 1999 until March 2005. It is made in Flash, but luckily there is also an export GIF animation option, which i used today to export all the movies again. One, Sad Little Square, i couldn’t export as a gif. There is a click button in it, which was impossible to remove.
So. I do feel a huge sigh of relieve now. Truly. This is one of my best works. I watched them all again today, and yes, i laughed. I saw the technique evolving, but not taking over. I saw this little square leading its life, going through heaven and hell. (Yeah yeah, the little square is sort of me. **duh**) It’s place on the front page of lfs.nl was obvious to me from the start.
A series of short visual stories about a little square who explores the world, is happy, sometimes sad, often tired, fights and has sex.*
Not based on any real life events.
So, i’m happy to publish the square series once more, as gif animations. It is of lower quality than the flash swf files, but the animation is basically the same.
I started out simple, with Happy single square. I had only worked with Flash for a couple of weeks. The day after i made Tired single square, because yes, i was tired after the busy day before. Making something new, something i felt worked, something exciting, it does make me feel tired. I suppose it does that to everybody being creative.
The following stories were of me visiting hell, fighting demons, traveling through the world, getting help from an angel, dancing, feeling sorry for itself, dreaming, remembering, having sex, making an end and continuing anyway.
And then a five year break. The last three are from 2005. They are wider, there is more happening outside of the square. I curse too.
I’m not sure which ones are my favourite. I do like Memories. Good morning world i like too. But really, i do like them all. From the simple first ones to the more complicated last ones. And as a series, yes, i do think they are among the best things i ever made.
So there. I made the animations repeatable. Else you would need to reload the page each time. But really, if you do wanna see these animations in their original format, go to lfs.nl and follow the links from the front page. I do think i’ll be posting these animations on facebook and twitter over the next days. That is how much i like ’em.
Enjoy!
Happy single square
Tired single square
Single square goes disco
Single square meets single square
Red square vs. green square
Two single squares
One cute single square
A night to remember
Good morning world
Silly single square
Helter Skelter
A good night sleep
Memories
5 Squares
One night stand
The end
Square goes pop!
Check
Hellbent
Go!
Getting past art school in my personal history. After i did my exams for art school, in 1991, i started talking with a friend about organizing an exhibit. It took us over a year to get the exhibit ready together with a special evening with performances.
The evening was sold out. Yep, sex sells.
The following people performed:
The exhibit had the following participators
Afterwards i was exhausted. Empty. There were quite some difficulties. I’m pretty sure i’m not always the best person to work along with for something like this.
This exhibit is part of my past, and with all its failings, i’m still a bit proud of it. I knew i had these photos, but they were in a box in a cupboard. I hadn’t looked at them for years. Watching them now, i actually do like ’em.
Last week i showed all the contact sheets i could find. This post i will post some works i made with these photos. It is about choices i made then. I don’t know if i would make the same choices today, most likely not. But i can not go back and change what i did then. So it stands.
I don’t have my work set out chronological. I do know i miss some pictures. Some works i really disliked. Other works puzzled me. And others i enjoyed. As with most work really.
The work shown at the top of this post is my final examination work. I’m not sure what to think of it to be honest. This work falls in the puzzle-section.
As for why i made this photos. Well, it did start out as assignments i got at school. But i did continue. Partly because they worked for me. I could see something in there i could use. I also did see i was kind of pretty, but really, i don’t think i was after that.
I used these photos on lfs. Actually, when lfs was still home.luna.nl/~ellen/preview.html. Which to my complete surprise, is still online! I do know a bit about the company Luna, which still exists. I closed my account in 1999, 16 years ago. But, anyways.. i used the photos mostly in the Retrospective part. My first steps online. Yay!
I’m sorry. I’m so tired.
The past days i am thinking of making two specific presents, but they require more work than usual.
I just started to write about one of them, but no, i gotta make them and see how they will work out. For now, i’m leaving this post as is.
Have a good weekend!
Reading was my most treasured pastime from when i was able to read. I read fairy tales, myths, and all kinds of books from the library. Each week i went there. It must have been from my 8th, 9th. Sometime around that age. I bought many books. You can read my post about my teen books if you wish to know about those.
My favourite writer was Tonke Dragt. She is not in that post. That is because her books are still in my bookcase in the front room. I even bought one of her books in the 90s. Her books were my introduction into science fiction. I must have been around 12 years old. From that age until i was like 17-18 years old, scifi was the best!
So yeah, i did loose sight of the major developments in scifi from the 80s on. I got a bit more in fantasy, i bought some scifi books later on, some of them i liked, some of them i didn’t. It is a major escape for me, i can still pick up a book or a series and simply dive into it. Right now i’m reading The left hand of darkness by Ursula Le Guin. I came across her name a couple of times on brain pickings. So today i picked up the book once more and started to read.
I’ll give you a list of the books in my scifi and fantasy bookcase.
Top row, fantasy
Second row, fantasy
Third row, science fiction
Fourth row, fairy tales, myths and science fiction
Sometimes when i’m in a bookshop, i wander over to the scifi and fantasy section. I might go soon once more, to get that last Wheel of Time book, which was released years ago. Reading is my most treasured form of escaping yes. Something about being all by yourself with just text which lets your imagination run wild with stories. More than watching movies and tv series. But i enjoy those too!
Ooh.. i did buy the first four ebooks of A song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. I got into the second book. Maybe it is the ebook format which doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe it is the long threads and many many many people in the books which keep confusing me. Not sure. But yes, not finished reading those either. Loving the tv series though.
And another ooh, at the bottom two rows of this bookcase, magazines. Which are not scifi. Still need to fill up these rows with some magazines which are still in the attic. I know, i am a hoarder. But! the pile of magazines on the right are going to be thrown away.
Bye bye!