Ash the Mighty

Random Stuff in Passing . . .

Well, I’m still alive. Those that follow me in Twitter are probably more aware of this than they are comfortable with as I update that on a frighteningly regular basis. What can I say? It’s a lot easier to “blog” when you’re limited to 140 characters. My life has been rather insane recently, and while there’s been very little that has been truly momentous that has occurred, there’s certainly been enough to keep me busy . . .

FAIRE is “in season” which means that I’ve given over my weekends, such as they are (more on that in a moment) to dressing up in a variety of ever-escalatingly environmentally inappropriate clothing to entertain visitors to the Arizona Renaissance Festival. When I returned from grad school all that I really had from my old costumes was my much-worn kilt, which while warm, could be worn in such a way as to minimize the heat. Then came the velvet doublet. Then our new Entertainment Director decided my doublet needed sleeves. THEN I decided I wanted to try being a Musketeer. Do you KNOW what a Musketeer wears?!? THREE LAYERS OF BLACK VELVET!!! (Photos) In short, the heat has made me functionally retarded. But at least I’ve had company as my brain has been fried in the person of Michael, the giant ape standing there with me in those photos. He’s a very old friend, since pretty much my first year at Faire 15 or so years ago, and we happily split our time between wandering around complaining about these young whipper snappers who don’t do anything right and hitting on the female whipper snappers who don’t do anything right.

Hey, they’ve gotta learn the hard lessons somewhere. May as well be from us.

PHOTOGRAPHY has continued to be a passion and is becoming a possible revenue stream/future profession. I try not to think along those lines too much however. Doing what you love as a job always seems to translate into learning to hate what you love, so I’m kinda holding back. That said, I’ve continued to develop BlackHole Photography.com and have added gigs and gigs of photos to it, including some of a celebrity who I’d say at least classifies as B List ranking (Chris Noth of Sex in the City/Law and Order [IMDB]). This weekend I’ll be helping to photograph my cousin Adam’s wedding, which will be all new and exciting.

WORK has been, well, work. In a moment of likely ill-conceived impetuousness, I agreed to go back to 3rd shift. The department needed it for all sorts of reasons, and I rather wanted some peace and quiet and to be on a shift that wouldn’t have me jerked around all the freaking time. This was about a month ago and it is indeed what I got. I still have not entirely adjusted to the schedule, but that is at least partially because of Faire. Hopefully once the season is over and things settle down a bit I’ll be able to really get used to things and get my life back into something resembling order, even if it is at the opposite end of everyone else’s order.

And finally, my LOVE LIFE has pretty much been chaos. I’m not going to say anything more than that because, well, my grans read this stuff. Hi Bama, hi Gigi! The rest of you pervs can use your imagination.

And that’s just about me. At least all I can think of. Hope you’re all well and I’ll try to talk to you soon . . .

Lovies,
~Ash.

Do you expect any less of me, really?

Vegas pictures are up. And at just a biscuit over a hundred. Hey, you should be proud of me! I whittled that number down from WELL over two-hundred and fifty! Granted, the last twenty or so were of my parent’s and their new dog, taking Christmas card pictures after we had gotten back, but still! I cut it in half.

You’re welcome.

So they’re available for your viewing pleasure in two formats. One is a new javascript-enabled format which I’ve been playing with for about a month now which I dig. That version is available here. Unfortunately, this kind of gallery has a few bugs however and can be a bit arduous to work with so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a replacement. I had thought I had found that replacement in a Flash gallery which you can see here. Alas I have discovered that it isn’t nearly as flexible as I thought it would be and can also be a memory hog, so make sure you close the window after you’re done with it or you might find FireFox/IE/whatever crashing.

Anyway. While we’re talking, I may as well announce that I’ve also been designing a new site to bring together all of my disparate photography projects under one roof. It’s called BlackHole Photography. I still am not done deciding how it’s really going to look and feel. Call what’s up there Alpha. Soon I hope to move on to Beta testing.

Now I should really go eat. Cheerios at 9am isn’t doing it for me when it’s almost 7pm.

Hope all is well . . .

~A.

Back.

This’ll be short as I am currently just killing time at my Mom’s computer waiting for my photos to download via an INSANELY slow USB 1.0 card reader onto her computer. Whatev. Still faster than zipping all of the 200 plus 5.5Mb files and uploading them for her to download.

Anyway. Well, I’m back. The flight was late but otherwise uneventful. I don’t recall where I leftoff before but I’ll just re-iterate that I had a truly great time and I’ve got very few regrets about the entire thing. In fact, I’m gonna cross post this on MySpace just for fun and because USB 1.0 continues to infuriate.

Well, once this is done I’ll be off home where my normal card reader will make considerably shorter work and tomorrow I’ll be whittling the 200 files down to a much more manageable amount. I’ll announce when and where, but they’ll eventually be made available. Some of them are OK. Some are awful (I was drinking, after all. A LOT.), and some will be going in my portfolio because they are TEH SEX.

And I’m out.

~A.

Photography and Plays

A few people asked what plays I ended up acting in for the Marathon, so below I created a list. I also have decided to make shakespearemarathon.com semi-public. What does semi-public mean? Check out the site. If you can figure it out, good for you. If you can’t, congrats. You’re officially semi-retarded. Go buy a helmet.

Also, on my last day off from this madness I spent pretty much the whole day taking headshot photos for a couple of young ladies who will be auditioning for SSC’s upcoming season. Now they’re both very brave for two reasons. One, it’s TOUGH auditioning for ANYTHING. It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there and I’m very proud of them both! But also, they had me take their pictures! I don’t think I flatter myself too much when I say I’m OK with certain subjects. I have moments of magic with buildings, nature, and “guerrilla candids” (ie; random people in crowds, catching humans in motion, etc), but actual posed portraits have NEVER been my thing. Just can’t do ‘em.

That said, please check out what I managed with Jorden’s and Alanta’s headshots. Not too bad if I do say so myself. Helped of course by the fact that both young women are incredibly beautiful, patient, and very experienced at having their picture taken (Jorden’s auntie is a photographer and Alanta was a beauty queen in her youth), but I was still amazed!

And thus I leave you. Enjoy!

PLAYS:
“Much Ado About Nothing” — Messenger/Verges/Friar Francis
“Two Gentlemen of Verona” — Proteus**
“A Comedy of Errors” — Egeon/Dromio of Syracuse
“Hamlet” — Marcellus/Norwegian Captain
“Othello” — Clown/Messenger
“Henry VIII” — Henry VIII**
“Taming of the Shrew” — Lucentio/Huntsman I
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” — Dull/A Forester
“Coriolanus” — Brutus
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — Demetrius**
“Antony and Cleopatra” — Silius/Proculeius/Watch I

** = HOLY CRAP CAN YOU BELIEVE I GOT TO PLAY THOSE PARTS?!?!?! Sorry. Still excited about it all.

Cheers!
~Ash.