I remember blogging this time two years ago about the Write Now Festival.

And I remember blogging this time last year, again about the Write Now Festival.

And so not to break with tradition, here is my yearly Write Now Festival Blog.

This year was different for me, as I was lucky enough to be venue technician. It was the first year I’d been left completely on my own to set up and rig, and despite being absolutely knackered all the time, I really enjoyed it.

The first time I blogged about the Write Now, I was desperate to prove myself as a technician, but really – I did nothing in the festival other than hoover and move some furniture around. The second year, I hid in the office and only surfaced if something went wrong, but since then I’ve worked in New York, I’ve worked in the Royal Court, I’ve been on tour, I’ve been taught by LIPA, and I’ve learnt from experience, so this year I put my all into it, because I was confident.

I made an effort to get to know everyone, and this year has been the most rewarding Write Now Festival for me. I rigged for 10 amazing shows, stopped a fire, became a patching ninja, learnt how to change a lamp in less than 40 seconds, designed and operated lights for a really succesful show and mostly, I made about 100 new friends. It genuinely made me happy when I saw cast leaving stage with smiles on their faces, hearing rounds of applause and audience laughing and having a show finish without anything blowing up…

But in this business, you try not to become attached to things. You can’t become attached to people, their shows, sets, equipment or ways of working. You can’t become attached to anything – because it will end. So from being the first and last person they saw in the theatre, the person who swept their stage and checked their lights, made sure their dressing room was tidy and their props were there, I know already that the cast and crew from the ten shows have already started to forget me, and are thinking about their next show.

At the end of shows, I used to cry. At the end of my first show in the Royal Court I was in tears, I cried at the end of Buxton, Manchester, New York…I cried at the end of Desperate Scousewives and Ladies Day. But along with learning to not become attached to anything, I learnt to not be sad when it’s over, because in this industry you make friends for life, and somewhere along the path you’ll bump into eachother again. Despite saying you haven’t become attached to something, when you revisit it, you realise what a major part of your life it was, and that makes revisiting it so much more meaningful.

And so, in true theatre style, the festival has already been torn down, the posters are gone and preperation for the next show begins on

Tuesday. They say there's no rest for the wicked. Damn right, I must be a horrible person!

(PS, right click and "view image" on this - one of my favourite images from the festival, all credit to AB Photography, such as nice guy!)

I could easily post about the festival I’m currently working on.

I could also post about the fact that for the first time ever I was so ill I had to turn a show down.

I could do the deep post I wanted to write ages ago about how humans cling to their parents much longer than any other animal, or the post about the baby pigeon, or the post about World of Warcraft, or the post about Saints SMASHING Leeds and The Wire, or the post about have to re-pierce my nose with some ice and a sewing needle…

But I’m not going to post about any of those things, because right now only one thing is on my mind.

Dragonvale.

I’m a moderate gamer, I love my RPGs and my MMOs, I can name all 151 original Pokemon and to this day I think Starfox Adventures is one of the best games ever made, and I’ll wake up at night and play it in secret, because I can only play it in small doses before Fox’s bouncy run makes me feel queasy and I have to lie down again. I’m not a mad gamer, as much as I’d love to be, because any 3d game makes me motion sick, so I much prefer my handheld consoles. My DS was my best friend for years, silly little keyring games saved me from long long car journeys (until just being in a moving car made me motion sick too) and as much as I claim I got my iPhone so I could access my emails on the go and get wifi easier, it was actually to play games on.

Every week I pop onto the top 25 free and download a few good looking games. In fairness, I do usually delete them a few days later because I’m bored of them. Most of my apps are based around dinosaurs, and I did have a phase of downloading every “tap” game I could find. Tap Jurassic was a personal favourite, until it got the way that the only dinosaurs I didn’t have were ones you had to buy with real money, and as much as I love the dinosaurs, I was adamant I wouldn’t use my hard earned money to buy some pixels.

It was then that I decided to have a clear out of my apps, because I had a few games like that, and they were making my iPhone look messy. I got rid of some crap apps, some games I’d finished and some I don’t even remember downloading, and in this jumble I found a little app called Dragonvale, which to me was essentially Tap Zoo, but with Dragons.

At first I thought it was shite. The one dragon I could buy at the time was a plant dragon (What the hell is a PLANT dragon?!) and my little dragon island was covered in trees and rocks and other chunky things that made my island look like a tip, but I stuck my plant dragon egg and left it there for a while and waited for it to hatch.

4 days later I own 3 islands, about 15 dragons, a big dragon nursery and I’m about £8 poorer, because I’ve done what I swore never to do, and made in-app purchases.

The nice thing about Dragonvale that I haven’t seen in other games is that 99% of the times aren’t purchase necessary. Sure, a dragon might be 25 gems in the market, but with some patience you can breed dragons you can buy with coins and you’ll get your 25 gem dragon for free. The gems are there purely for speed – speed up your breeding, speed up your hatching, speed up your food making….and I love speed.

I stopped writing this blog post to play Dragonvale, and then I fell asleep, and now I’ve forgotten the point I was trying to make.

Anyway! Get Dragonvale! But don’t put your card details on your iTunes account, because you’ll end up skint. Unless you count your wealth in Dragons.

As part of my course, both designers and technicians have to do a module called “The Context”, or “Contextual Studies” depending on who you talk to. I think the purpose of the module is to allow us to see our place as Arts Practitioners, and understand where in history our roles came about, and our roles in relation to art and other similar things. Bauhaus and surrealism comes into it somewhere, but I don’t know why.

In practise though, Context just turns into a massive debate between designers and technicians about art and culture. Today we started talking about the moon landing, and finished talking about the chemicals used to recycle cardboard, and how they’re more dangerous than just leaving cardboard to disintergrate. If we all had a pint or two down us, and were in someone’s house or a pub, context would be dangerous. It gets fierce.

One of the biggest discussions we had though was Facebook.

When it comes to Facebook, there’s a certain type of snobbery. Forget all the apps, and the timeline and the theories about our information being sold (which it is, I have no doubts about that) and just think of facebook as a communication tool. Facebook is a way to interact, just like texting, or emailing, or writing a letter, or talking on the phone, or talking face to face. But for some reason, communicating with someone over Facebook is looked down upon.

Why is it a lesser means of commincation? In what way is having a face to face conversation with someone better than having the exact same conversation but online? Personally I would rather be face to face, but that doesn’t mean I think any worse of the same conversation but on Facebook. Why is typing the words any different to saying them?

I understand face to face, or even vocally, there can be so much more expression, but even typing, you can put emotion into what you’re saying. It seems to me that people have a way of looking at technolgy like it’s the lazy, simple way of doing things – a cheat of sorts, and people look down on it like it’s inferior.

Moving away from this rant, I got my nose pierced the other day. I keep forgetting it’s there and touching my nose, and it bloody hurts.