10 Fondest Memories of 2013

1. Spending the best part of the year in one of my favourite countries; Italy where I learnt to live aspects of life I would never imagine I could. This memory is marked in my heart and I am looking forward to tell my kids about my experience.
2. Getting engaged to the love of my life and my best friend. I don’t know how cheesy or cliched it could get, but I never stop to say how improved I am as a person since his presence in my life. Thank you.
3. Chattering away with my sister on a two hour Eurostar Train to Paris for a mini holiday we were going to spend together. It was after a long time I got to spend quality time with her and it was one of those moments where you are just content to have such amazing family around you to share thoughts, to say what you haven’t said for a while and to come closer.
4. Having a beautiful kitchen made at my parents home where I live where we spend most of our time relaxing and gossiping. Food is what makes the world go round!
5.  Meeting a friend who became my closest and most cherished person in my life. She is my confidante and my shoulder to cry on when needed. Here’s to friends who never leave your side in times of happiness and sadness.
6. Having a day of realisation where I felt I was buying things haphazardly without considering how much of a waste it is. Thus it became my new year mission that I would use up what I had already bought and continue like that. I can safely say it is the most liberating feeling to not be in a rat race of fashion. I am comfortable with what I already have and to have an excess of things is idiocy.
7. Finding a hobby in art and design where I even designed a part of my room myself through an idea that struck me one day. Little did I know it was already a fad in the design industry, that being patchwork design.
8. Also finding a love and interest in Photography which I never thought I could. I began to take amateur photos from my mobile and they were appreciated. Taking photos is a soothing pass time for me and I thoroughly enjoy it.
9. Attending the Easter Chocolate Market with my Mum in Siena. It was a day of extreme chocolate and extreme fun. My mother and I ate chocolate from practically every stall there was in the Piazza del Campo at the heart of the city. The highlight of the day was my mum revealing a banana she had brought with her from her bag that she wanted to dip in the chocolate fondue. We had come to this market the day before she she had come prepared.
10. Attending the Christmas Market in Manchester where I had the most delicious hot chocolate and waffles. At the same time I felt a little sad at how we would have to wait another year before these Christmas Markets would come back. There is another kind of delight about Christmas Markets, and everything seems nicer than normal.

Can you tell me what your fondest memories were of 2013?

A Hairless Ape.

Oh these images just wow me every single time. Makes me want to debate on evolution and Darwinism.

Matt Molloy’s Amazing Time Stacking technique

Surreal and tantalising. Click here to see more of Molloy’s amazing work.

The Nature of Self

When life turns a shade grey and hopes begin to shatter. When you almost give up on the thought of a life cherished with happiness  and meaning, a sudden roar of the wind is heard outside your window in a quite residential area.

The leaves start rustling fervently as to defiantly confirm nature’s worth and lament at your ignorance at not being able to appreciate being.

Nature has its way of announcing to us quickly what we have purposely been avoiding.

It is this affirmation we get from the sounds of nature that explain why sadness in life is also part of a natural process, like the wind which goes from being at a calm state to unexpectedly bellow as if to complain

.

Yet you know that the wind will be rewarded again with eventual composure, in a similar way that sadness does not last forever. Nature is life itself. Once we grasp that idea we shall never let any sorrow take hold of our lives.

The Blue Eyed Zebra

Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Titan

Hollywood Quote of the Day

“60 Per cent of the time, it works every time”

This is from the Movie The Anchorman and it is exactly my senseless but wishful thinking of winging an exam without having studied much. 

Why Chrome has failed me….(so far)

I am not the least ‘techcentric’ as many people of today may be. The reason why I have used a made up word is because in this day and age of technology, there have been so many made up words, particularly in the year 2013 that I do not feel any shame to go ahead and make one of my own, unless of course someone has already made use of it! 

There was the infamous ‘selfie’. Who would’ve thought it would become quite the craze. The mere sound of it makes me wince a little at how easily it is used, even in the most professional setting. David Cameron’s nonchalant usage and practice of the selfie along with other unmentionable leaders of the world was another of the the many cringeworthy moments of this year! *Shudder*.

Twerking. As far as the origins go it is said that this word has been in use for quite a while and thus it can be deemed as not actually being made up. I do however highly doubt the authenticity of this word. I mean just look at it, its a joke in itself. I think the popularity that has grown as a result of the Miley Cyrus twerk stint is quite ridiculous, because although people have not taken to her horror act, that same dreadful performance caused an uproar in the media of 2013 and as much as you’d like to hate it, it became quite the phenomenon. People came out with absurd buttock dance moves on YouTube and Vines were created for sheer mick take, but were nonetheless watched as a source of enjoyment. So all the hatred that was poured out for Miley Cyrus became one huge fan following, even if it was indirect. Sounds rather strange to me.

So after having gone off on a tremendous tangent I would like to come back to my original point of discussion, and that is the issue of Google’s Chrome. I have had some great difficulty having to adjust to Chrome as my fiancé very dearly persuaded me to switch to Chrome after having used Safari for quite some time. Knowing myself I find it a burden having to adjust from one browser to another. Strangely enough I was absolutely content using Chrome before I did the jump to Safari.

Yet I find that the shift back to Chrome has not been taken too kindly by myself. To put it simply in layman’s terms is the best I can do. Thus from my point of view I feel Chrome lags when too many tabs are opened and there is a delay when clicking certain icons. But the saddest part about the whole concept of Chrome is actually the Google Chromebook that has recently been launched. I have lately been in need for a portable web browser and given that the Chromebook is the affordable alternative to an expensive tablet, I had no qualms about buying it since it is ideally a small laptop, lightweight better at web browsing than a tablet and has an excellent battery life. However what really distressed me was how one cannot install Skype on it and instead you have to use the replacement for it called Hangouts. In theory it is an excellent idea Google has come up with, however in practice there are only a select few that use it, the majority keeping their loyalty for Skype, thus I find it hard to succumb to all things Google. When I did use it to try it out on my Apple Macbook, it caused quite a stir in my computer where the laptop got very hot and the fan kept revving up loudly and quite persistently. It prevented me from using Hangouts at all.

Secondly, I feel that Safari performs better as a web browser. When you are having to log off and on continuously between separate accounts, you’d like to be able to sail through without any disturbances of not successfully having logged out, or having to shut down the web browser completely before clicking back on it to try again. In Safari’s case it happens less, however in Chrome’s case, it is actually quite a frustrating task in order to get by, and I find there to be quite a few glitches in the middle of all the email account changes which can be problematic.

If Google can primarily counter all these issues regarding Chrome, I would be a very glad customer in buying the Google Chomebook in particular. I never really thought about it before, but I feel Safari has so far been steadfast in its performance, and though I do not condemn Google because it does have some amazing features, I feel I will keep looking for other web browsers if they do not up their game.

McApple Pie of My Eye

A must read

Eyestrain Productions

If you know me personally at all, chances are you’ve heard about The Pie. Maybe I’ve even taken it out to show you, let you touch it, encouraged you to sniff it. The Pie is legend, and has been for a great many years now. And if you know about The Pie, then you know we’ve just passed a significant milestone on its journey through the ages and into immortality.

The rest of you I’m going to have to bring up to speed.

I mentioned an important anniversary several weeks ago in this blog. Not the one related to the blog itself, nor my comic book work. I’m talking about that other, mysterious anniversary, I was so specifically vague about. The twenty-five year anniversary.

Rather than recap the whole sordid story from the beginning, let us instead begin at the end – or at least the end as it stood…

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5 Pieces of Trivia about Jane Austen’s Life

1. She had a brother before she was born called George, who under mysterious circumstances, disappeared before she ever got to know him on a more personal level. Some critics say he suffered from a mental disability, while others say he had a hearing impairment both which might have caused a restriction to the progress of his other siblings in the house. Thus he was decidedly sent away by his parents and to this day one has never fully discovered as to what really happened to him.
2. Contrary to the the popular image we have of a very modest and moral Jane, a lady (Mrs Mitford) in her society in Steventon once described Jane to be ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembered’.
3. In her Sister in law Anne Lefroy’s earliest accounts about the memories of Jane Austen she mentioned that Cassanda Austen (Jane Austen’s mother) once stated how ‘if Cassandra’s (her sister) head had been going to be cut off Jane would insist on having hers cut off too’. This was in response to her protests of being sent to school with her sister in Reading, as the idea of separating from her was unbearable for Jane. This was one of the few initial examples of the closeness between Jane and her sister Cassandra which carried on till the very end of her life.
4. Her short story ‘Henry and Eliza’ that she composed during her early teenage years portrayed the protagonist heroine’s starving children ‘biting off two of her fingers’ in order to feed themselves.  There is a somewhat perturbing quality to her story, and the earliest signs of Jane having extremely wild and unconventional ideas. This kind of imagination cannot simply justify a kind of pastoral or societal domestic life portrayed in most of her later published novels, and there is definitely more of a metaphorical or allegorical meaning to her books.
5. Her interaction with her cousin and later sister in law Eliza might have been the reason she was familiarised with the world of high society life, of flirtation and marriage. It was also probably the reason behind her very expressive wit and irony for this kind of a society, which she at the same time found very intriguing indeed. Whilst visiting Eliza in London she wrote to her sister Cassandra ‘and I begin already to find my morals corrupted’. This may have been considered a joke, but on the other hand it also showed her sheer enjoyment in being at the heart of a city much delighted for its eclectic social life.