Random Thoughts

4AD Yearly

After buying the 4AD biography half a year ago (or something), I’ve been planning to read it while listening to everything 4AD has released chronologically. I mean, you have to.

The only problem was that I didn’t have everything 4AD has released. I pretty much had everything between 1984 and 1997, where I began to lose interest.

4AD have been really good about including singles and extras when they re-released earlier albums on CDs, so you can usually get everything that (say) The Birthday Party released on 4AD 1980-1983 by just getting the four CDs. However, there’s a quite a lot of odds’n’ends that haven’t been collected in that manner (like the Rene Halkett/David Jay 7″) and stuff.

So I spent an evening going through the discography for the 20 first years, placing everything chronologically. I had to “break out” the bonus 7″ tracks from the CDs and stuff, but it’s mostly straight-forward. And there’s some judgement involved — I wouldn’t want to listen to all versions of all Gus Gus cd singles, for instance. There’s a lot of remixes, and that would be boring. So just one version of each “release”.

And then I ordered everything I didn’t have from discogs.com. I really like Discogs — people on there are usually smaller businesses, and they have a quite streamlined way to buy stuff. Of course, buying used stuff from Amazon would be even easier, but Amazon is kinda nasty, right? So I stay away from Amazon.

And now I have everything! Everything! I can finally read the book! Yay!

I wish there was I way I could make the chronology available for others to listen to, too, but I don’t really see a way to do that without it being all illegal and stuff.

Useful Consumer Review

Anything that’s wireless doesn’t work.

But there’s degrees of not-working-ness. I’ve had wireless keyboards that drops one in every five keystrokes even though the receiver is only a meter away, and I have keyboards that drop only one in twenty keystrokes over a range of ten meters.

But the most problematic wireless gear is wifi. I had a Netgear Access Point, then a … er, I forget, and then a Cisco one, and they all sucked. I mean, really. None of them could give reliable networking over ten meters through a couple of walls. I ended up with the Cisco two meters away, and I still lost teh webs sometimes.

And then I got this Asus RT-AC68U thing.

The Asus RT-AC68U wifi AP, hiding in a cupboard at the farthest reach of the apartment

By Emacs! What a difference!

I’ve had it for a month now, and my laptop hasn’t lost connection once! And the throughput! And latency! It’s unimaginable! It’s almost like having a wired connection from twenty years ago! It’s fantastic!

I can even sit on the balcony and work! I should use more sunblock! It’s really hot in Oslo this week!

The Eyefi card I’ve got in my camera still can’t get any connection unless it’s less than a meter from the access point. That kinda sucks.

But a huge numbers of thumbs up for the Asus RT-AC68U. It’s the best wireless router in the history of wireless routers.

(This advertisement has not been paid for. Actual router functionality hasn’t been tested; I’m just running it in bridge mode as an access point. May not be applicable to your region.)

White Hermitage

Couture: Silk

Today I’m going to attempt a real screen printing. I’ve selected an image from Daltokyo by Gary Panter — the first drawring from the first strip.

I’m printing on a black shirt, and the drawing is with black lines on a white background. So I can’t really print the lines themselves, but I have to print the white background instead, so I have to create an inverted print on the transparency. (It’s very confusing.)

Side note to summarise a bit what I’ve done wrong so far. And hopefully learned a bit from:

1) There’s a huge difference in transparency quality. I’ve bought three different “normal” transparencies (often called “overhead transparencies” or “OHP”), and they’re all too “pebbly” to be used for much of anything. That is, they’re very coarse, so you get a very uneven distribution of ink. In other words, you get a lot of white spots where you want total blackness.

2) All inkjet printers aren’t created equal. The first one I had, an HP Officejet, printed out quite badly onto transparencies and other plastics. Most people who do stuff like this seem to prefer Epson printers, so I got one of those, and it works perfectly.

3) There are different types of squeegees, and if you use a squeegee that’s not meant for printing onto clothes, it’ll be a lot more difficult to get a good result.

4) You need lighting to expose the emulsion. Look at my professional-looking new rig:

The recipes say “use either a 250W for this exposure or a 150W for that exposure”. Well, guess what. It’s virtually impossible to get any incandescent light bulbs in Europe these days, because of the world ending in a heat death or some other kind of trivial thing. But I’ve managed to score two 105W halogen bulbs that approximate 150W incandescents, allegedly. And I’ve bought two really cheap Ikea desk lamps.

So here we go. Exposure. The chart says 16 minutes for 250W and 74 minutes for 105W, so 2x “150W-ish” should be… 35 minutes?… At 40 centimeters.

Washing the silk. I take the head off of the shower thingie and blast it. All the non-exposed bits rise off! Looking good, but I could perhaps have exposed for five more minutes…

I bought a huge whopping cutting board to have something to strap the shirt onto, so that I have an even surface to print onto.

And then we just squeegee away.

Result! Sort of.

My squeegee action isn’t perfect yet. I pushed too much ink through on the right there. Probably because I’m right-handed…

Anyway, if you know what you’re doing (and I’m vaguely starting to), and you have all the right equipment, the turnaround on screen printing is just a few hours. It’s kinda fun and it looks nice once you get the hang of it.

IT”S WORTH IT!!! PLEASE LET IT BE WORHT IT!!!!!1!ONE!!

Wall of Vaughan

I still haven’t read the 4AD biography (any day now), but I was reminded about my plan from, like, 20 years ago to make a Vaughan Oliver wall. That is, nail a lot of 4AD sleeves designed by Vaughan Oliver (and Chris Bigg (aka 23 Envelope/v23)) to a wall and behold the beauty.

I didn’t do that then, because I wasn’t a teenager any more, but now I’m a teenager again (mentally), so let’s go.

First carefully plan the layout…

Experiment with different nails. These were too coarse.

Nice small black ones. And I’m not nailing anything through the sleeves. Too much of a nerd for that.

Done! (Sorry, neighbour, who had to listen to me nail (* 24 4) nails on a Saturday afternoon…)

So… er… uhm… ok, I can pick the sleeves down when I grow tired of it. Or perhaps it just needs more sleeves? I dunno.