Frankfurt street art

•May 27, 2012 • Leave a Comment

There was some awesome street art under the Frankfurt bridge where the skate park was.  On the other side of the wall there was a basketball court with hoops and metal soccer goals.  Aside from this, I didn’t see much street art around the CBD aside from tags.

Click this next one for the full wall next to the basketball court.

I was going to make a panorama shot of the wall next to the skate ramps, but I left one of the panels in the middle out, so I will have to reshoot them all on my way back home… whenever that may be.

Sorry, I don’t know who any of the artists are.  If anyone does, please let me know!

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Artyness, Europe, Things I see
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Around Frankfurt city

•May 26, 2012 • 1 Comment

I was in Frankfurt from May 4 – 7.  I didn’t really venture outside of the CBD; I was only there for a couple of days and spent them just walking around the city centre.  I was staying at a hostel opposite the main train station (interesting area at night).  The river was only a short walk away, and I spent a lot of time walking up and down it, admiring the bridges, cranes, cafes and ducks.  Good spot to jog if you’re so inclined (I didn’t get around to it).  I found a skate park under the bridge by the river with a lot of good graffiti. It also seems to be where the young folk congregate to drink on Friday and Saturday nights.

The Occupy Frankfurt camp, which had been there for seven months, was cleared out on the Wednesday before last, but a rally of 20,000 people on Saturday saw the camp re-established.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Europe, Things I see
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Just so you know, I’m still alive

•May 25, 2012 • Leave a Comment

I have been overseas for three weeks now and I haven’t posted yet because I have a lot of photos to go through.  I haven’t finished doing this yet because I’ve been busy, and by that I mean I’ve been a little busy but mostly too lazy to do it.

So far I have been to Frankfurt, Berlin, Kiev, Chernobyl, and am now in Brussels.  My second summer for the year is just starting.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Random shiz
Tags:

The next super-freaky sleep paralysis incident

•April 22, 2012 • 7 Comments

I first wrote about my sleep paralysis awhile back.

After being on sleeping medication for the past several months, which was actually fairly effective, the growing side-effects convinced me to stop taking it.  Aside from a bit of nausea and the rebound insomnia being a BITCH, it hasn’t been TOO bad.  Wait who am I kidding – insomnia makes me want to stab myself in the face.

Anyway, after finally getting tired enough to go to bed at 8:30 this morning, I had a series of sleep paralyses each time I would start to drift off, but they were much worse than the ones I’ve had in the past.  They paralysed me for longer, and as much as I tried to pull myself out of it by wiggling my toes and fingers I couldn’t move any part of my body; even trying to force my eyelids to stay open wasn’t very effective.  I can’t remember what I was dreaming about each time I woke up – it happened four times – but for some reason it was scary, so I tried really hard to become fully conscious rather than letting myself be pulled into sleep.  As it was morning it was broad daylight, so I thought it shouldn’t be that scary if I let myself fall back asleep again.  But each time it happened, the sleep paralysis would kick in again and I felt compelled to fight it.

The other really strange thing about it was that each time I started to lose consciousness, I would feel a deep humming sensation in my head, and then my body would start shaking as the dreams started and the paralysis told hold.  Each of these cycles occurred very quickly, in a matter of seconds as opposed to the drawn-out process it usually is; and I could actually feel it taking hold each time and thinking “should I fight this, or should I surrender?”

It’s really hard to explain, and I wish I could attach a cable from my head to my Mac and record what I see during these things.  They always feel like they’re going for much longer than they really are.  The longer it takes you to get your body to move and pull yourself out of it, the more you panic – and panicking when you can’t move is not fun.

Well that’s my sleep weirdness for this weekend.

x K

Posted in Things I write down
Tags: , , , , ,

Turn on the bright lights

•April 22, 2012 • 3 Comments

Sunset on a Melbourne rooftop last weekend.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Melbourne CBD, Things I see
Tags: , , , , ,

Killing time in Collingwood

•April 6, 2012 • 2 Comments

I was going to shoot some film, but of course once I got to Collingwood the sky had turned overcast, so I just took some iPhone photos instead.

The room with the mattress in it was covered with printed lecture notes, so possibly a student was squatting here.  It’s a pretty dodgy place.  It’s sad that so many people studying fulltime can’t even afford to rent.  These days, it seems it’s pretty much impossible to study fulltime and be able to pay rent unless your parents can help you out a bit.

Posted in Collingwood, Things I see, Urban exploration
Tags: , , , , , ,

Rainbow dinosaur cake!

•April 2, 2012 • 1 Comment

On Saturday night Bel, Renee and I had a joint birthday party, plus their housewarming, plus their dogwarming (they are fostering a retired greyhound for three weeks).  Bel loves dinosaurs, so Renee and I decided to make her a dinosaur cake.

We made two batches of cake mix, divided it up into four bowls, and put a different food colouring in each.

I had no idea how to get a nice marbled effect, so Renee just poured the bowls one by one into the tins.  It worked out really well:

Then we had to cut the dinosaur shapes out of the cake.  As I have no creative ability whatsoever, Renee drew the dinosaur design on paper first and then cut the shapes out of the cake.  We covered the tray with dessicated coconut coloured with green food dye, to represent grass.  Then assembled the dinosaur parts on top.

The rainbow dinosaur looked pretty cool:

After icing him yellow, we added Lindt chocolate squares cut in half as the spines along his back and for his toenails.  Green, brown and white M’n’Ms on his body and for the eye.  Green sugar balls on his neck and legs, and a bit of leftover pink cake for his tongue.

We truly outdid ourselves this time (and by “we” I mean mostly Renee) and Bel loved it.  Not bad for something we made up as we went along.

And as an added bonus, Bel and Erica had made me a cat cake:

Pretty special.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Random shiz, Things I see
Tags: , , ,

Box Hill Brickworks fail

•March 29, 2012 • 13 Comments

I’d been meaning to go to Box Hill Brickworks for the past two years.  Anyone who knows me well will know I procrastinate and leave anything that can be done next week until next week, and all of a sudden a couple of decades have passed and it still hasn’t been done.  Lord knows how I ever managed to get a degree.

Box Hill Brickworks was one of those abandoned places that I kept not getting around to.  I finally organised to go out there and photograph it on the weekend just gone, and was looking forward to being able to finally be able to cross it off my list.

I was delighted to see that it was still standing, and access was gained by easily climbing over a barbed-wire fence.  However, once we got inside, we were disappointed to find the stairs leading to the upper levels had been blocked with a solid sheet of metal.  Fail.  Too little, too late.

It was still worth it to see bits of old machinery on the ground level.  I always try to picture abandoned factories as how they might have looked when they were still running.  And the people who worked in them.  And the presence of old hand-written sales records in one of the back rooms made the place that little bit more human.

As we went to climb back over the fence on our way out, a large group of little kids in the park opposite the brickworks yelled “penis!” at us.  Such rebels.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Melbourne misc suburbs, Urban exploration
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Ironlak corpses

•March 28, 2012 • 1 Comment

This is your life, and it’s ending one minute spray at a time.

Ironlak casualties can be found far and wide throughout Melbourne abandos.

They work hard and are then left discarded on the ground.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Things I see
Tags: , , , , ,

Old Queens Parade warehouse

•March 24, 2012 • 4 Comments

I’ve been going through a tonne of old photos tonight, and have found quite a few of abandoned places that I’d forgotten I even had.

One such place was this old warehouse on Queens Parade in North Fitzroy.  Mail was still being delivered through the mail flap on the front door, and had clearly been accumulating for some time.

I’d just tagged along with Maka who was scoping out a potential new place to paint.  It was small but had some interesting features – aside from the mail on the ground (I’m always fascinated by the human elements to abandoned places), there was a makeshift bar upstairs, a disused foozeball table, and a hanging hook above a hole in the floor(!).  Lots of good walls for painting, too.

Pre-painting:

Post-painting:

photo by Melissa Findley

The above photo was taken by my fellow street snapper Melissa Findley; you can see more of her photos from this location on her site under the ‘Street‘ section.

Interestingly, as I was finishing this post, my iTunes – which is currently on ‘random’ – decided to play Wu-Tang Killa Bees.  Not even making this up.

x Kitten of Doom

Posted in Artyness, Fitzroy/Fitzroy North, Things I see, Urban exploration
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »