Firstly, and perhaps of least interest, is that I had felt my posting had become a little rudderless and overly me me me where I had intended it initially to be more constructive in commentary. Of course this sort of constructive theme-based posting is time consuming and I was finding it hard to dedicate enough to it.

Secondly, I recently quit my job of almost 10 years and have started up my own ‘studio’, which again is a time consuming venture and leaves little for extra designerly activities, well at least in these first initial  months so far.

And thirdly and lastly I had kind of gone off posting on the blog as I became very aware of being monitored by my previous employee. Lets just say, I was called in by upper management to remove certain content (not just from tis site too) that they deemed in poor taste. In other terms content which conflicted with the ultra-conservative public image of this particular institution. So much for freedom of speech, I guess. What they pointed to was stuff which you would find on any old ‘popular’ media blog. For example, I made reference to the site ‘9-Eyes‘. This was deemed as offensively geared as it takes unexpected shots found on google street view involving people with guns, throwing up or even naked. No consideration was give to the fact that street view is a very popular public service available to evvvveryone. Another was reference to the tumblr site ‘Kim Jong-Il Looking at Stuff‘, which was deemed to be racist in nature, but to who? North Koreans? Even my description of myself was seen as poor as it suggested jokingly that ‘I was prone to prolonged inactivity’ which made me seem lazy and reflected badly on me and everything I represented. So much for sarcasm.

This all left me uneasy about the use of the blog and was even an influence on my decision made in point two to move on. My response at the time was to abide to their offense and take the posts down. I didn’t see any value in putting up a stink even though I was pissed off. In the sidebar I put a picture of Senator McCarthy as my wee joke to the fact of being surveillanced. Once the fuss dies down I put the posts back up anyway some two weeks later. Anyhoo the consequence made me feel indifferent about doing any kind of posting, blogging whatever.

The disappointment for me was that I was starting to get significant traffic through the site, beginning to average 3000 or more hits a month, with a consistent and growing readership. I enjoying doing it too but this has been tainted especially by point three.

I think what is needed is a wee reinvention now that I am free from the shackles of ‘be managed’. I’m interested to hear from readers what were some of your favourite previous posts which grabbed you perhaps and made you read more. Please post your comments and we’ll see if I can get this beast going again along a more coherent direction …

- Scott

I’ve Seen the Butcher by Deftones

Cameo  Lover by Kimbra

Hey, I’m currently planning a trip to the United States. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for some time. The motives for doing the trip now, this year, I can’t expose just yet but the reasons nonetheless are result of something positive I have done for myself.

I’m hoping to be there for a month or so; I’m traveling by myself so the trip is completely on my terms as to what I see and do. I have an idea of where I want to go internally though would love suggestions from everyone especially from locals or recent visitors on where else I could go along my rough paths or what within each city is worth checking out or local tips and tricks or people that would like to meet up.

My current trip takes me from:

> San Francisco, CA > Austin, TX (maybe) > Chicago, IL > Portland, OR > Vancouver, Canada (maybe) > Los Angles, CA >

Although I would like to go to Boston as well, I’m not planning at this stage to go any further east than Chicago.

My keyword/ phrases for the trip are:

‘culture’, the ‘lowbrow arts’, ‘history’, ‘comics’, ‘music’, ‘folk arts’, ‘craft arts’, ‘design’, ‘illustration’, ’boutique’, ‘bespoke’, ‘networking’, ‘toys’, ‘books’, ‘zoos’, ‘walking’, ‘good public transport’, ‘galleries’, ‘museums’, ‘events’, ‘street art’, ‘relaxation’,   … + maybe some more to come

Any one who has a suggestion or comment please either contact me by,

- dropping me a comment on this post
- messaging me on Facebook
- tweeting or private messaging me on Twitter
- emailing me at: scott(dot)savage(at)orcon(dot)net(dot)nz

It’s inspired by the time when Castro’s cousins, Honey and Layla were down in Dunedin and they watched Karate Kid 2 together.

The first, is a project I’ve had in the works for a couple of years and am finally giving it a full head of steam. It is entitled God Awful, which will orientate around the production of a magazine feed by themed submission. More on this to come but the site design is under way and will be launched in a couple of month all going well. Keep an eye on it here as it unravels.

God Awful is one of those phrases which can be inherently interpreted a number of ways. The magazine will hopefully be the antithesis of the usual negative interpretation, focusing on things which are inherently, well, not awful. The mantra for it all is ‘Good God, that’s Awfully Good”.

The project in essence is an formal curated extension of what I already do here in a way, hopefully identifying (well subjectively) things which people should know about, though with each edition having a specific conceptual sway. A lot less puppy pictures though, except for the one above.