Tag Archives: cake

Birmingham Zine Festival at Supersonic 2011

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In addition to whatever else I do with the time instead of sleeping/eating I also help to organise Birmingham Zine Festival. It started in 2010 as the result of people who make – or in my case, read – zines coming together with a few ideas. We had our second festival in June 2011, which was really well attended and was great fun all around!

Birmingham Zine Festival Zine Fair

Supersonic Festival has invited Birmingham Zine Festival to hold an exhibition and stalls of zines and artwork at their festival this year. For this we invited some of our favourite small press publishers from the previous festivals including Adam Cadwell, Carla Smith, Lizz Lunney, Catherine Elms, Dina Kelberman, Joe List and many more.

There’ll also be a screening of ‘$100 and a t-shirt’, Joe Biel’s documentary exploring the thoughts and experiences of zine-makers in North America, and a panel discussion – from A to Zine – Featuring Alex Zamora of Fever Zine, Nic Bullen, formerly of Napalm Death and Charlie Woolley. The panel will discuss the history of zines, their inspirations and the resurgence of zine culture.

If you haven’t done so already, get your tickets for the festival! We’ll be there on Friday and Saturday all day. Come and say hi! Bring cake 😛

fizzPOP’s first birthday

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Recently fizzPOP celebrated the two of its first birthday’s. On January 26th the mailing list was set up and on February 28th we had our first meeting. We count each one as our birthday, which, in theory, means more cake!

fizzPOP hacksession 03/03/2010 (by Nikki Pugh)

Leftovers from the last session. Photo by Nikki Pugh

I’m really quite proud of what myself and Nikki have achieved so far with fizzPOP. As I’ve stated in my many presentations about hackerspaces and fizzPOP it was first set up to scratch an itch: I wanted to have a space outside of education to learn more about electronics and technology. Luckily Nikki had the same itch and we soon found ourselves working on the creating and running of fizzPOP.

I wont rattle on about the history of fizzPOP as we’re still creating it, and there’s little to gain from talking about the pitfalls we’ve had. The thing that I’m most proud of is that we can regularly get people from all over the west midlands (and occasionally reaching as far as Liverpool and London) in a room to do what they love most. I just wish we could do this more regularly, maybe even every day!

fizzPOP 12/08/2009 (by Nikki Pugh)

Photo by Nikki Pugh

What next for fizzPOP? I’m still recovering from fizzPOP workshop from the awesomeness that is Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers, so have no brain space left to think about anything else! All I know is that I want to see more workshops like that and more people showing off their mad hacker skills.

Birthday Cake

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After seeing my newly created twitter background, Jon (aka scribbleboy) asked me to do one for him. So I did. In fact, I did several versions

Birthday Cake (by hellocatfood)

Birthday Cake (by hellocatfood)

Birthday Cake (by hellocatfood)

He asked for something red, so I took a few birthday pictures and did the equivalent of putting them through a shredder!

It seems recently that there’s been a bit of a backlash against databending. Reading some of the threads/comments over at 8bitcollective.com suggests that people are getting tired of people posting everything that they’ve processed through Audacity without much though to its artistic content. I tend to agree, so I thought I’d do something more with the output of the bends in order to make these ones. I took them through GIMP and edited them a bit, made them seamless for tiling and changed the colours slightly.