Upcoming performances

(Europe was fantastic, thanks. A travel blog is forthcoming, with pics)

First thing's first: I'm in the state final (not very impressive, there was no heat or audition process required to get into it) of Class Clowns on Saturday. Class Clowns is a nationwide comedy festival that's been going for several years. Students compete in state finals and the winners from each state go to Melbourne to compete in the nationwide competition. I've won the state final before, two years ago with a duo act, which went on to be the runner-up in the national final. So it's a lot of fun. I'm performing on Saturday night a short stand-up act and a duo with my friend. So regardless of whether you care about me or not, come and watch - it's always a great show.

It's on at 7pm on Saturday, 27 June at the Backspace Theatre, behind the Theatre Royal. Tickets are $11 and are available at the door.

Secondly: Rosny College's Cabaret is currently on. I've nothing to do with it, but I recommend it to you - I saw it today and it was fantastic. It's college-age students and production, but it doesn't show in the quality. I'm going to see it Friday night again, as the four main characters swap around every night and I'd like a chance to see the other cast. So anyone who wants to come and see it with me, this Friday (the 26th) is when I'll be going.

Cabaret is being shown over the next week and a half. Some performances are in the evening (starting at 7:30, I believe), and others are matinees, that start at some time in the morning/afternoon that I'm not sure of. It's at the Rosny College auditorium, and all of these details and more can be found on its Facebook page.

I've had the opportunity to see some great theatre lately (Metamorphosis, Old Nick's Hamlet, and recently Billy Elliot on West End in London), and there's only more to come.

Like I said, travelblog forthcoming.

Tim

Europe

First of all, I'm aware that it's been a month since I last blogged. I've been busy, and there hasn't been that much to write about anyway. But expect some awesome posts to be forthcoming.

Secondly, tonight I'm off to Europe for three weeks. I'm looking forward to it immensely, and I'll be taking many, many photos. I'll upload them to Flickr and to deviantART, and post any that are any good here. I won't try and travelblog (I'm only taking my iPod for internet access, and don't want to spend my whole time in net cafes), but I will be Twittering a fair bit.

Send me an email (timjhurd@gmail.com) if you need to contact me, or send me a message on MySpace, Facebook, or whatever social network you happen to stalk me on (I just get emailed in that case, anyway.)

So yeah. I'll be back in three weeks. Have fun without me!

Tim

5 Twitter Accounts You Should Consinder Following

I seem to be blogging more and more about Twitter, recently. Oh well, it's an interesting topic.

As well as following interesting people on Twitter, there are a number of other accounts that can be very interesting and/or informative. Here are some of my favourites.

1. @BreakingNews


I believe I covered this in a former post, but it's something that nearly every Twitterer should know about anyway. Formerly BreakingNewsON, this account posts breaking news as soon as it happens, often faster than mainstream news networks. I've found out about several breaking news events almost instantaneously since I started following this account, and it's also very handy for tracking ongoing news stories.

2. @Veratect


Continuing in the same vein, a very informative and topical Twitter account is Veratect. Only set up a few days ago, Veratect has only one purpose - to provide breaking news about the spread of swine flu. Posts are always prefaced by the country that the post applies to. If you're at all concerned about this porcine virus, then Veratect is a must-follow account.

3. @playtwivia

Now for a bit of fun. There are a multitude of Twitter games, and Twivia is among my favourites. It's very simple - they ask a question, you DM or @reply your answer, and get featured on their scoreboard. The questions are of a challenging but not ridiculously hard difficulty. Definitely worth a look.

4. @twitterfiction

Another account I've mentioned previously - this one in my last post about Twitter and writing. Twitterfiction tells user-submitted stories in, of course, 140 characters or less. There's something fascinating about a succinct, concise, but well-told story.

EDIT: It has come to my attention that @twitterfiction hasn't been updated in over a year. Oh well - it's still fun to read through the posts.

5. @thewordoftheday

Okay, a gratuitous plug here. I run this one. And while it's nowhere near as famous as the others I've mentioned, I am very pleased with the popularity it's gained - over 900 (over nine HUNDREDDD!) followers as of today. Every day, you get a cool word, pronunciation, and definition. And you can suggest your own words and probably get a mention. Come on, it's awesome.

I hope this post was of some help to you. Happy Twittering!

Tim

Twitter and writing

I've been endeavouring to do quite a bit more writing recently, and like any aspiring author or poet, one of the biggest problems is inspiration. To attempt to solve that problem, I've found help from a site that I am on far too much - Twitter.

One of the things I both love and hate about Twitter is that it forces you to be concise. In an email, blog post, or similar message, you can rattle on about anything in as many damn characters as you like. But Twitter's 140-character limit forces you to get your point across succinctly and explicitly. How is that good for a writer? Well, the shortest stories are often the best. I've been quite addicted to @twitterfiction recently, and I love the stories on there. Whether you're like me when it comes to a short attention span or not, it can be a lot more interesting to read short, well-written stories or poetry than to read a novel.

Twitter is sporadic, instantaneous, and provides a real insight into people's minds. Many people tweet in a "stream of consciousness" style, just typing whatever comes to their heads. And as annoying as that can be for some, it's an amazing tool for inspiration. Apart from just reading your Twitter feed or the public feed, there are many tools that bring that data to life. Twittervision is one of them - you can have it as a flat map or as a 3D globe, showing you tweets from all around the world. But by far my favourite is called twistori. It grabs tweets from the Twitter public feed that have either the words "I love", "I hate", "I think", "I believe", "I feel", or "I wish", and shows you results for whichever phrase you pick. It's a very simple yet captivating way to see how the public feels.

So next time that you have writers' block (and it happens a lot, at least for me, anyway), take a look at Twitter. Take a random post from somewhere, completely out of context. You don't know the story behind it, nor do you know how the tweet's author is feeling. But that doesn't matter. As a writer, it's your job to make that up.

Happy writing/Twittering!

Tim

Cross-posted here.

For an hour, you too can pretend you're saving the planet.

Written for English, but it's a topic I wanted to write about anyway. Cross-posted from here.

It's an admirable idea. To get everyone to consume less electricity for an hour. That was the stated aim of Earth Hour, a global effort by the WWF (that's this lot, not these guys) to try to get as many people as possible to switch their lights off for an hour. Now was it a success? It depends on how you define "success". I think that the participation in Earth Hour was quite overwhelming - millions of people worldwide did indeed turn their lights or electricity off, news stations did their broadcasts in the dark, and even Google made a token effort by turning black (which has nothing to do with saving power but rather saving white pixels). But, as someone who cares about the environment, after an hour of living in relative darkness, I was disappointed to find out: the planet isn't saved yet.

Why not? It's because we don't care enough. I'm including myself in that category - I'm all for alternative energy and for preventing global warming, but I, like many people around the world, don't do a thing about it. Most of us felt like we were really making a difference during Earth Hour by turning off our lights. We felt like we were saving the planet. But if we were serious we'd get out there and protest, pour money into alternative energy, try and get into politics to make a difference. But I, like most others, simply only do what's convenient. It's easy enough to turn your lights off for an hour. I could have saved even more energy by unplugging my laptop, but I didn't. Cause I was using it - simple as that. I didn't want to slightly inconvenience myself. And I feel awful for having that attitude, but the truth is that it's the way that most people think. And simply put, the planet will not be saved until we get over ourselves. The same goes for any issue - to help poverty, for example, I could be donating to these guys, but the closest I've come to "making poverty history" is by playing this (which is fun, don't get me wrong.)

But that's not to say that Earth Hour didn't bring about an amazing community spirit. The blogosphere was a-Twitter about the issue, and people were posting pictures of their dark streets on Flickr left right and centre (here's mine). It was quite eerie to walk out on to the street at nine o'clock pm and have it feel like midnight, or like the same city years ago, before electricity and before all the conveniences of modern life. The only lights I could see around me belonged to the people across the road, who I doubt care at all about the environment due to the "No Greens" sticker on their four-wheel-drive. But apart from the odd household, nearly everyone got behind Earth Hour, and made the event in some ways a success.

But like with any issue, this problem of depleting resources and global warming won't go away until we do something about it - a little more than a token effort of just turning off our lights. Our intentions were good with Earth Hour, but we need to go just a few steps further if we really want to make a difference.

Education Department filtering fail.

See what happened when I innocently tried to access my dA page in digital art today?


I'll try and see who I can talk to about this...

Tim

EDIT: After talking to the IT guys, they're going to contact the DoE to see what they can do about unblocking dA. And I've just discovered www.thesun.co.uk is blocked as well (under the category Nudity). This is getting a little out of hand.

EDIT (9/4): Common sense seems to have prevailed, and it's unblocked.

Latest screenshot

Ubuntu 8.10 - controls are Industrial, window border is Dust (from gnome-look.org).


Tim