I received a letter from my mum today. I admire her strength because even though she has rheumatoid arthritis she still writes and sends me letters every now and then. There’s been very little communication between my mum and me for years because there was no trust. I always felt like I couldn’t honestly say what I wanted to say. I did once tell her how I felt about things after my father passed away and she hung up on me. I tried many times but it doesn’t seem to work so I gave up in a way. What’s the point if someone refuses to listen to you or literally ignore you or what you are trying to tell them?
Ever since I moved to the UK, I have been sending her little surprises, a nicely wrapped gift box with over a hundred pictures in them, I’ve printed them and cut them myself. Each set of pictures wrapped in nice golden tissue paper along with a very long detailed letter. I’ve sent her another parcel on her birthday in February and ordered a book for her which was delivered the next day. So I make sure I’ll send her those little messages of appreciation and I try not to have any expectations in return.
So each time a letter gets in I’m eager to open it and read it. She was very positive in this letter and she told me she was happy with the set of pictures I sent her for her birthday and the beautiful book. She feels lonely ever since my father passed away and is having a hard time moving on, it will be five years ago this October. I can relate to her loneliness and deep down I hope she will find the strength to move on and leave the past for what it is, it is only holding her back and making her feel miserable. I’m not allowed to tell her, it upsets her.
So whenever I write her back I always emphasise her strength, because I do admire her strength. I guess she is just too insecure to realise what power she holds within. So I won’t stop sending her little tokens of love and appreciation, no matter what she does with them. Hopefully one day she will be able to set her self free from her past and everything related to that so she can enjoy life as it is… and truly live.
Flash 8 Actionscripting
Things have been hectic last week when I started the Flash 8 Actionscripting course. It was quite an experience and I’ve met some really nice people. I thought I wouldn’t be able to follow but I realised I actually learned a lot when I explained some of the scripting to A.. During those three days I learned to build a game entirely in coding. On Friday, the last day of the course, the game contained only four movieclips, everything else was code.
It was a very interesting course and my brain was fried each day when I left Holborn to go home by Tube but it was definitely worth it! I’m just feeling slightly uncertain about whether I will use coding or not; I’m a visual person, therefore I chose to become a graphic designer, I have a trained eye for design subtleties and find myself nagging about letter spacing or kerning whenever I see something totally wrong design-wise.
I can easily point out five centimetre between my two index fingers, if I would ask you to measure it, it would be exact five centimetre [or any length]. This is caused by the fact that at graphic art school I have been drilled to draw exact 5mm by 5mm squares with exact diagonals within a 10 by 10 centimetre square. And if one would be slightly [read plus or minus 0.1 mm] wrong I had to start all over again. I had to draw characters [typography/display typography and typeface design] by hand in different sizes using different techniques, ink, paint and a Burmester Curve Drawing Aid Set aka a French Curve.
Coding is not a visual thing, it’s more or less a maths thing, typing lines while using certain methods to create actions/output. Actionscripting is object oriented programming, you could create a simple circle by coding it instead of drawing and I’m still not sure if I would rather draw or use coding to create the same object. According to Matt Weisfeld [The Object-Oriented Thought Process] learning Object Oriented concepts is not accomplished by learning a specific development method or a set of tools. Doing things in an Object Oriented manner is, simply put, a way of thinking…
I’m trained to be visual and not a programmer, although I now understand the concept it still doesn’t make me a programmer, I will probably end up being a mixture of both. It was a hectic course and I’m glad I did it, I have another certificate to mention on my CV. For now I will re-read the book and start practicing what I’ve learned but I’ve promised myself if I won’t be able to code that circle within a certain amount of time I will allow myself to simply use the drawing tool…
