Nullsphere

YouTube - Kiwi!

This is one of the saddest animations ever. Beautifully done, splendid music and powerful message. My review sucks but the animation doesn’t. Click it, you know all the cool kids do.

Just like love stories, so many have written about the beginning of the affair, how many have written about the bitter or sad partings? Maybe the pain is too fresh, the story too intimate to be shared with strangers. Or perhaps the grieving is not over yet and the rawness is too lurid, too lewd to be displayed. Continue reading »

I’m a little late in posting this. I’ve been gradually aware that 2005 is all but spoken for. One might think that come December, nothing major can happen anymore and that it’s safe to work on a retrospective at the beginning of November.

Let me tell you that it isn’t so. December is the cruellest month when it comes to brutal changes and it can be so in music as well.

Without further ado, here is my year in review, with its highlights and low points.

Best place:
Australia - Hands down, no contest. Simply the most amazing place in the world. Cleaner air, nicer people, more relaxed atmosphere. What more can I say? I think I’m in love.

A close second is Ivry, where I had some of my best moments this year.

Best moment:
Finding that despite living one your blackest moment, true friends will crawl out of the woodwork to give you a hand or a shoulder to cry on.

Worse moment:
My mother’s funeral service - I don’t think I would have been able to bear it without Laurence and Pierre. To both of you, a big thank you, which pales in comparison with what you’ve done for me.

Most seminal moment:
Realising that blogging can indeed get you Dooced, either from a job or from a position. After a rather controversial turn of events on another blog of mine, a situation blew up sky high. Fortunatly the repercussions were only on percieved prestige and losing the estime of people who hated me anyways.
But in the end, nothing matters as long as you stay true to yourself and your standards.

Best comedy moment:
It isn’t per-se in 2005, but I had to mention it. It was a cold, dark evening before a LAN party I attended last year. I was at the flat and we had a meeting that we needed to go to. Unfortunatly the meeting was boring, we had no food left when we got home and we tried to get drunk to no avail. The next morning, the 7 am wake up was so painful and I went on for a no sleep weekend after that.

Best girly moment:
Going shopping in La Vallée with Jasmine. Nuff said. I love that girl.

Five things I have learnt this year:

1. Your friends are sometimes the people you have know the longest, but often, the best ones are the ones you didn’t think you’d ever be friends with. Cherish them, be grateful they are there for you and be there for them when you can.
2. You may fight with your parents day-in, day-out and feel like you hate them, but in the end, you’ll miss them like mad when they’re gone. Unless they were monsters to you. Which my mum wasn’t, despite a few tough times. I love you, Mommy. I really miss you and I’m glad I got to see you a little before the end. I’m sorry for all the times I was an asshole when I was a kid. I’m also grateful I got to realise how much I love you and Dad.
3. You have to be yourself and learn to love that person. It’s possible to have multiple layers or sides that you’re not overly fond of, but if you get right down to it, you will end up losing yourself if you always do everything someone else is proper.
4. There will always be someone to criticize you. Ignore them. Yelling back at them will only excite them. And if you can’t get them to shut up, distract them with a sparkly ball.
5. Love doesn’t have to be tragic. But tragic love makes fantastic canvas for fiction writing.

And despite it not being the most interesting this year, a section on “best of” lists.

Top 5 songs:

1. Death cab for cutie - Follow you into the dark
2. Green day - Boulevard of broken dreams
3. Within Temptation - Stand my ground
4. Killing Heidi - Black sheep
5. Nickel Creek - Toxic (Britney Spears cover)

Top 5 books:
Memoirs of a geisha - Arthur Golden
Read it once, read it twice, read it three times this year. I even read it in Australia, which brought new life to the images I had in my head for this. The movie adaptation should live up to my imagery, which is a hard thing to do.
The Devil wears Prada - Lauren Weisberger
Peddling fashion to generations of impressionable young women, Anna Wintour Miranda Priestly is a legend. Working for her is the dream of millions of young women but the nightmare of one of them.

Top 5 tech things:

1. iPod nano - Style, function and novelty value. Everything a geek could want in a sleek package. If the nano were a woman, I’d say Angelina Jolie.
2. GMail - Unprecedented account size, excellent spamfilter, free, great interface, and TAGS, TAGS, TAGS!
3. Make - At last a magazine that talks to geeks of all description and all walks of geekitude.
4. Wordpress - A great blogging tool.
5. Nokia 770 - Don’t tell the boy but I’m in love with the idea of a Linux-based WiFi enabled tablet that can be used to surf the net wherever you can’t just whip out your laptop. In short, it would be the next evolution of a PDA. Although I’m going to wait a little before I get one.

It could be said that 2005 is the year of the Google.