I've been trying to figure out how these 'custom' MySpace themes work. As someone that supplements their income with 'real' web design and tech support *cough* once I started to look at the code you can get from these MySpace freebies I was kind of surprised that what they give you to do works; in some respects it's theoretically open to all sorts of abuse because you can 'inject' all manner of snippets into it. Although you can't do that to someone else's account (unless it's 'hacked') it doesn't stop someone adding malicious code to their own page and causing problems for those that visit that. Anyway, I'm getting the gist of this stuff but, as to whether i actually do anything is another matter entirely.

It's kind of funny actually that the kind of web sites businesses and individuals need/want mean you never really get the oppotunity to explore some of the 'deeper' aspects of web design; basically no one wants to pay for something they see has no material, tangable value (but that's another story), the irony is that things like Search Engine Optimisation does(something else I do, for a price  ).

I've been slowly working on a new home for my art site having upgraded the account to I could do more 'stuff'. I'm hoping to do some articles on subjects to do with painting and art, possibly even some videos - not sure if they'll be 'tutorials' as such, but they will describe various techniques on sketching and drawing amongst other things.

The domain being used at the moment - http://www.nyart.co.uk, which is forwarding to the current host, will be re-directed to the new site once everything is sorted out.

Stay tuned.

Oh yes, almost forgot, the new version of the site will have an RSS feed making it really easy to keep up to date!

I got an email the other day asking for help on painting clouds. As I was writing the reply I couldn't help but slap myself for sounding like that little twat of a kid from the Matrix with the spoon "bend the space around the spoon" bleh!

My reply was along the lines of "not painting the clouds, but painting the shapes and colours within it". Bloody Matrix. That would have been a legitimate response to the chaps e-mail. Now however, you have to be even more careful to not come across as some intellectual snob!.

I was reading an article the other day about an artist that has made a bronze cast of 'TomKats' (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes) babies first stool; yes you read that right, some lame arsed artist has made claim to have created a bronze sculpture of their babies first diaper dump (that's assuming Scientologists allow the use of diapers).

Oh, it gets better... the artist is planning to sell this piece of 'art' on eBay and it's quoted to have generated around $40,000 interest without even going up for sale yet (at the time of writing).

And who would buy this art? An equally shallow 'media whore'; you don't buy things like that for their artistic 'value', it's media hype pure and simple, the evolution of the "cult of celebraty" (deliberately misspelled there by the way - 'cele' and 'braty') or "me".

Someone will buy this and their faces proudly slapped all over the papers, perhaps Tom and Co. may purchase it?

If there was ever a case of proof positive to what I've said before about the "what is art" question, this is it (the 'short' answer to that by the way is "Whatever the art establishment tells you"). I'm not linking to this 'crap' by the way so just search for "TomKat poop" and you should get results back with lovely pictures, pretty shoddy workmanship as well which doesn't help in the 'quality' stakes.