Unfortunately, I’m not much of an artist (or an artist at all if the truth be told) so I’m dependent on other people’s work. I could just do what an unfortunate number of other online folk do and just copy-and-paste from wherever I find it. Instead, I make use of the Creative Commons Search engine. It searches for all sorts of media that have been clearly licenced with any of the Creative Commons licences. You can choose which site to focus on (I find flickr the most useful) and you might be surprised just how much “stuff” is out there to use.

I usually manage to find images that I like but which don’t always fit the purpose for which I am searching. I bookmark them or something with the aim of coming back to them but you know where those sorts of aims end up. So instead, like I have done once before I’ll just share some of my favourites here, some with intelligent comments and some without.

Most of these images are licenced under a Share-Alike Attribution licence and I have hyperlinked back to the image’s flickr page as my method of attribution. Thanks to all the talented artists and photographers who do such interesting work and like to share.

This image reminds me of going for walks with my children. They can’t manage to go anywhere in the bush without picking up a stick. At least this woman has managed not to turn it into a pretend light-sabre.

Wow! Real life mermaid.

I’ve never made it to any sort of SF or fantasy or gaming con. And definitely never dressed up for the occasion. But I want to.

Bob the Skull online!

No idea why I saved this one. Probably looking for gargoyles of some sort.

A black-winged angel. What else is there to say?

Is this a jester? A demon? What? Another one I could tag with a big bag of don’t know… Ok, it’s a jester, the flickr page says so!

As he was finishing up the shading, he said that my skin was taking up the ink really well. In fact, he described it as like “butter into hot toast”. Now aside from being a slightly off-putting and creepy sort of image, I decided that at least my freckly, Anglo-Celtic, sunburn prone, skin cancer timebomb skin was finally good for something.

What it effectively meant was that he didn’t have to spend extra time scrubbing the ink in properly, I got out of the chair quicker and I can see already that it’s healing up nicely and quickly.

And in case you are wondering, the word is “feliĉeco” which is Esperanto for “happiness”. It is there as a reminder for me of… well, lots of things really (perhaps that could be a subject for another post). That is why I got it on the arm where I did, so I can actually read it.

I sat down this morning to put some of my recent happenings into writing. For some strange reason, I thought that it was a good idea to write a poem.

Unfortunately, I’m not much of a poet. I don’t consider myself a particularly good prose write either, but I reckon I can write better paragraphs than stanzas (you can see some previous efforts here and here).

I started off with just a list of single words. It made an interesting list, but I couldn’t get very far with making lines out of each of the words. I was sitting in front of my computer at the time and I realised that I had many songs that matched up with each of the words on my list. So I did some searching and came up with a list of appropriate songs to match the story of my life this year. Now, some of the songs aren’t necessarily a great match but their titles are. Don’t read too much into any of them but I was hoping that it might read out (ie spoken) reasonably well.

I’ve linked to a last.fm page for each of the songs if you are interested in who they are by or what they might sound like, so feel free to click onwards if you feel the need.

So without any further introductory nonsense, here’s my first ever poetical playlist:

Much has happened, people have moved, changed (inside and out), left jobs and schools, started new jobs and schools (sometimes more than once) and all sorts of other interesting things.

In the interests of a clean slate and a the chance to get things going again without any excuses for procrastination (well, any more than normal), I have decided to archive my old blog: Can You Spell Cacophony and replace it with this site. Actually, this site will be for my standard and boring ramblings about life, work, family and any other chips on my shoulder. I have already created another blog: Out The Bladesage Gate, which will be for my gaming, writing and wordbuilding exercises (and related nerdery), but it has taken a little while to get going. Watch this space.

In case you are wondering, “What do you want?” is a tilt towards my late father with whom I would always have a race each time we spoke on the phone to ask (as rudely as possible): “What do you want?”. To which of course the correct response would have to be: “nothing from you”! Still miss you Dad, and all your stupid emails that started with FW:.

You might be looking at this terribly boring theme and wondering what I am doing, but there is method to my madness. It’s plain (as per the name), it’s simple and it has very few options. I have regularly said that one of my hobbies is “fiddling with my wordpress blog and very rarely writing anything for it” and that is what I am trying to deal with here. If I can leave off all the fancy options and pretty pictures and widgets and plugins, then I might actually get around to writing instead of fiddling… I’m not much of a writer really, but I’m a hell of a lot better at writing than I am at web developing. Let’s leave it there shall we.

So thanks to anyone who made it to the end of this post. Read it here: My goal is to write at least one post a week (even if it’s not much more than a couple of links) on either this site or on The Bladesage Gate every week. Eventually, I want that to be at one on each, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.