Reasons to love Sydney: Thunderstorms

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Did you know that in Finland there are 40 different words for snow. There's words to describe slushy snow, snow downpours, sleety snow, light fluffy snow... To be honest I kind of love it. It has a kind of romantic quality to it. In the UK, the same seems to stand for rain. I didn't understand how many types of water falling to the ground there could be until I embarked on the adventure of marrying a foreigner (apparently I'm the foreigner here... go figure). On the first mention of wet air, I was both amused and depressed. On moving here, I realised the necessity of so many descriptions of rain. My personal favourite is the aforementioned wet air, that seems to not be visible to the naked eye when glancing out the window but sneaks through every slightly loose weave in your clothes and permeates your very essence with WETNESS. Pleasant.

In Australia there seems to be two types of rain: rain and THUNDERSTORM. Rain is rain, but thunderstorms? They are the epitome of awesome. First, there's the dramatic entrance of a thunderstorm. What usually starts as a rather lovely, sunny day is marred by a big, rolling black mass of cloud, occasionally showing off like a 4 year old toddler with barely concealed flashes of lightning. It darkens the sky and bodes doom. DOOOOOM. 

Yes, thunderstorms are drama queens.

Next comes the electricity in the air. The kind that makes you think that every hair on your body is standing on end, when in fact, it's doing no such thing. But hey, it feels exciting. Then comes the smell... The smell of a thunderstorm is what I miss the most. You can keep your poxy roses. I pah at your fields of flowers. The smell of a freshly mown lawn? PAH I SAY! The smell of heavy rain on hot ground is one of the best smells in the world. Period. It fills your nostrils with awesomeness. Yes, awesomeness. It's that good.

Then the sky falls down on you in the form of sheets of heavy, heavy droplets of water.

In short, thunderstorms are awesome. I know I've used awesome a lot in this post, but there are no other words to describe it.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Awesome.

Image lovingly stolen from here

52 posts

Let's start with the cliched new year's resolution posts...

Last year I seemed to massively drop off social media and blogging. This is mostly due to the fact that I was kicking arse in my job (or just spending a lot of time there), making Twespians bigger with Laura, running a few more ghost crawls and going on a couple of holidays. Oh, and getting married. That took a little bit of time...

I've been quite happy with the stuff I've done in the past year, including two speaking gigs, running a bunch of pub quizes and pub crawls around the country, attending a bucketload of events and dipping my foot back into the design and build work. 2011 was the year of pretty darn good. 2012 is going to be the year of awesome.

To begin with, I've already got some speaking gigs set up, a new year of Twespians and now for the content business... This year I'm going to post 52 posts over the year. Hopefully I'll post more, but at the moment I'm focussing on at least one per week. This marks the first one for last week. I blame Australian time zones for the delay in posting. The next one will be posted in the next two days.

Ok 2012...

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Ghost hunting at the Fortune Theatre

I had something forwarded to me today that piqued my interest. As you probably know, I do my theatre stuff, as well as occasionally hosting ghost crawls (pub crawls with ghost stories). Therefore, having something sent to me by a theatre marketing bod about ghosts in a west end theatre = brilliant. However, I did notice that the Fortune is also home to the Woman in Black, the original west end horror play.

Do I smell a clever marketing ploy?

Ok, I'll drop the façade. I know this is a bit of a viral for Woman in Black, but at the same time it's quite well done. Looking back through the blog, they've done their homework creating Dr Simon Hill (unless he is a real person?), with posts dating back almost a year all around orbs, photographing ghosts and haunted parts of London. However, I'm hoping they don't just stop there. Why not go the whole hog and make Dr Simon real? Organise some ghost walks around Covent Garden with a real live doctor in parapsychology (who's going to check the credentials) that ends up at the Fortune where something real happens!? Then give them some passes to cheap tickets for the show for some more spooky theatrical goodness.

However, in saying that, I love the fact that they've already gone to this kind of effort and it's something more marketing departments should be looking at. What do you guys think?

An article I wrote on UX and Theatre

It's now almost a month old, but I realised I didn't post about a blog post I wrote recently on UX and Theatre. I mulled over this post for a while, getting some great feedback from cohorts like Laura, Peter (who inspired the article) and James (who I have a slight mancrush on). In fact, James' feedback has made me start working on another UX and Theatre article that's a little more indepth and thought out, so watch this space. Also, make sure you watch Peter's talk from TEDxYork, because a) he's an awesome speaker and b) he talks a lot of sense.

User Experience and the Theatre

Posted on November 20, 2011 by 
What do you remember from your last experience at the theatre? an opera? a dance piece? Have a think about it. Jot down five things that come to mind. I can categorically say that for the majority of you all five of those points would have something to do with the performance itself. User Experience is a field that has been getting mass exposure from the design and web development crowds, but why aren’t we looking at it for the arts as well? Arts companies can look at other areas and industries, like restaurants and immersive arts organisations, to see where they can push their user experience up to the level they should be aiming for.

(read the full article here)