Reconfiguring the Warp Core

I’ve been fiddling around with a bunch of the behind-the-scenes stuff on the site. I may have fiddled a bit too much where I shouldn’t have. What this means is:

  1. All of the image links in the blog are broken.
  2. Some of the other pages have moved, specifically: About and Contact. Others may also have strayed.
  3. Anything you may have bookmarked in the site may be nonfunctional.
  4. RSS Feeds may or may not be dead.
  5. The home page for the blog (http://edpas.net/) only displays the most recent post, and the navigation links at the bottom of the page don’t lead anywhere. If you want to browse earlier posts, I’d suggest you use the chronological archives listing from the sidebar.
  6. Error messages are less than useful.

But don’t touch that dial! I’m going to fix everything or else put it back to the way it was. For those of you curious about what’s happend, I’m not exactly sure. But I have strong a suspicion that it has to do with a conflict between some of my custom mod_rewrite rules and those of my blogging software. Regardless, I made a full site backup before I started changing things around. If I can’t sort things out, I’ll simply do a manual restore.

My apologies for any inconvenience or despair this unfortunate situation may have caused. All of this is in preparation for some significant new content that I’ll be posting in the next couple of weeks.

A Christmas List for Someone Who is Hard to Buy Gifts For

Every year around late November or early December I get requests from my extended family for a list of possible seasonal gift items for me. This isn’t unusual, nor is the fact that it is prompted by the fact that I am apparently hard to buy for. This year I actually made a list, but it turned into more of a blog post than a practical guide to navigating the shopping-centric part of the holiday season on my behalf.

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Restoration and Upgrade

I’m going to overhaul this site over the coming weeks. I want to more appropriately reflect my planned change in focus from a photographically-centred journal about my life in Japan to a site that is primarily about my professional arts practice.

As a warm-up I decided to try to get the existing site into some semblance of order. To that end I’ve done a bunch of housekeeping, all of which was long overdue. The short version is that I’ve made some cosmetic changes, restored the missing posts from July 2005-July 2006, upgraded the backend software, and changed the web location of the journal. I’ve also committed myself for the foreseeable future to calling this a “journal” rather than a “blog.”

And even though I’m steering this journal in different direction, I’m planning to leave all of the old posts online.

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Technical Difficulties: Disappearing Posts

Most of my recent posts have disappeared from my database. I have backups, but it’ll take some time to restore the blog to its former state. I’ll be restoring the missing posts as soon as I have time. Hopefully I can also restore the comments on those posts.

Regardless, I’ve been really busy with a couple of projects. My writing-about-my-art project is coming to a close. The manuscript is hovering at around 38,000 words including the footnotes. And I’ve started to work on the final edit of my Crossroads video, which I started in 2002.

Four Petty Fictions

I’ve been working on what I once described as an artist statement, but which has grown in such scope that the label doesn’t suit it any more. Now weighing in at over 25,000 words, it is now best described as a sort of collected musings, diatribes, polemics and suchlike, centred around my art practice. It’s an unknown number of edits away from being anywhere near presentable so in the meantime, here is something I came up in the aftermath of our moving out of the slug-infested cottage. These bits are greatly embellished sections that may or may not have been cut from letters to a former landlord, landlord being, of course, not necessarily gender specific.

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The Bad Beginning

Many people have asked me how things are going in England, hoping to hear fabulous stories of our Second Grand Overseas Adventure (the first being our Japan junket). Sorry to disappoint, but I’m finding England to be simply dreadful.

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Wrestling with the Omnibus Artist Statement

This week and last I’ve been busy trying to write an artist statement. I started with some notes, and then some research, and now a deep sense of doom and futility. Why? Well, an artist statement is supposed to encapsulate the artist’s ideas about their practice in approximately one page. Mine is currently running to about 15 pages. Single spaced. At last count it was about 7500 words. It’s about evenly split into thirds: one-third of that is quotes from texts I’ve been reading, one-third is my responses to the quotes, and one-third is stuff that I’ve come up with independent of quotes. Add to that another couple of pages of miscellaneous notes, lists of terms to define, and subjects for further research, and you can get an idea of the unwieldiness of it all.

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Posted in Art

Concerns About My Studio Practice

Deciding to work on an all-digital studio practice was not without its worries. In conversations with friends in Saskatoon in the summer before coming to England, I talked about my frustrations with creating digital works, and how those frustrations had led me to abandon—temporarily—digital practices.

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Posted in Art

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging

I’m sure you’ve all been wondering where I’ve been, and why I haven’t been blogging, so here’s the explanation. After the first time around, back before the blog was actually public, I realized that if I didn’t make a habit of posting every day, I’d eventually get stuck in the trap of having too much inertia to overcome in order to post again. I’d accumulate so much stuff to post that I wouldn’t be able to set aside the time to write about it. So when I did my stretch of daily posting for months on end in 2005, I had made a mental contract with myself to never miss a day.

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State of the Ed

I know it’s been ages since I last wrote here. There have been a number of reasons for this. I hadn’t planned to go into silent hibernation for so long. Part of it was my motivation for writing and posting to my blog, which I’ll get to soon. Seeing as I’m not in Japan, and won’t be there in the foreseeable future, this space is no longer going to be about the land of the rising sun. Instead, I’m going to be posting more about my art practice, as I try to return to the path of being primarily an artist, as opposed to someone who identifies themselves based on their current “money job” and secondarily as an artist. Oh yeah, and rants about England. I’m likely to be posting lots of those.

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