Hashtag Launch Party

After quite a few delays, we finally managed to have the launch for Hashtag Magazine. We had the launch at Alix's flat, and the shortcut through the NHS is actually quite lovely when taken during the day instead of in the dead of night. Of course, my walk home was still alarming. 

I think there must be a rabbit warren under the NHS complex, as I don't think I've ever walked through there without seeing at least one - I ended up walking through there twice in two days and saw a total of four bunnies.

I also finally got around to drinking the champaign I won for my knit+ presentation. 

I also saw what I assume was the same fox in the same place the two nights I walked home, which was pretty exciting as I'd never actually seen a fox before (I don't think anyways).

The Saturday night we went over to Leanne's for Eurovision. I'd never actually watched Eurovision before  and it wasn't quite as insane as I was expecting, but was still kind of amazing. We drew countries, and person whose country came in absolute last lost completely.

The Eurovision Song Contest, shortened to ESC, Eurovision, or EuroSong, is an annual song competition held among the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1956.

Each member country submits a song to be performed on live television and radio and then casts votes for the other countries' songs to determine the most popular song in the competition. The contest has been broadcast every year since its inauguration in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world. It is also one of the most watched non-sporting events in the world, with audience figures having been quoted in recent years as anything between 100 million and 600 million internationally. (x)

Austria won this year with Conchita Wurst's Rise Like a Phoenix - you can see the video of her song in the link. (x)

Back! (also, trains)

Sorry for the long absence. I've spent the past week trying to preemptively get a lot of school work done before my vacation in Majorca, because when I get back we will have three weeks left in our live projects and I will also be starting on a two week placement at a publishing house, and there's a couple of essays due in there as well.

In short: busy busy busy!!

Friday morning I met Alix at the Starbucks in Waverly place, before meeting up with everyone else on the same train as us. There were about eight of us going down early on that train (in total, there were ten of us that went down early and hung out that weekend, though Keira didn't get there until Saturday). However, Alix and I were in a different train car than the rest of everyone, as we had booked seats together in the quiet coach, which ended up being a not-so-quiet experience, what with the screaming, restless toddler sat right next to us (his mothers attempts to get him to calm down and be quiet were remarkably ineffective). We got some work done with Hashtag, napped (or at least tried to), and hung out and talked.

We needed some photos to put on the Hashtag facebook page for the countdown, so when Becky and Leanne stopped by for a visit, we got Leanne to take some photos of me and Alix, hard at work. 

(also, Becky tried on Alix's glasses and was utterly adorable in them)

In my extensive experience riding trains in the UK (aka four times) I've found that, particularly in Scotland, you don't get to see a lot of the countryside, as the train lines are cut into the earth, and most of what you see are the sides of the edges of the hills surrounding the train lines. Once we got further down into England, however, the landscape did open up considerably.

My train ride home the following Thursday was late (I left at 7) and alone (everyone else left much earlier that day). However, I basically just read an entire book, so that was nice. On the downside, none of the plugs in my train car were working, and my phone battery was really low when I got on the train (like, 13%) and it obviously died. By the time I got home, it was 12pm and I was exhausted as I had not slept properly in a week (more on that later), the sum total of which meant that I did not practice French that day and broke the almost 70-day streak I had going. Which was quite sad. 

I'm gonna be breaking up the previous week into a bunch of posts to be scheduled for while I'm in Majorca. I'm not gonna be really talking about this last week much, as mostly I just went to school and did work. 

Oh, and in case you didn't see it on Facebook, Hashtag Magazine is now live at hashtag-magazine.tumblr.com.

Off to London!

This isn't a really real post, just wanted to say that I'm off to London tomorrow, and due to the exceptionally busy week I've just had, I don't have any posts queued up, so there will probably be a bit of a gap in posting.

In the meantime, you can check out the Facebook page for Hashtag Magazine, the new digital magazine that I'm launching in eight days with some of my friends (because we don't have enough to do). A large part of why we decided to launch it though was because we all wanted to build our design portfolios, so rather than doing loads of mock magazine layouts, we figured we could write a bit of copy, and actually produce something real and complete! So the magazine is heavily focused on design and less on text.

HASHTAG is a young and trendy online magazine launched in 2014 by five girls based in Edinburgh. We’re obsessed with fashion, food and TV shows, and we’re here to share the fun with beautifully designed articles! For you, we shall travel, eat, drink, pet pugs, and empty our wallets in stylish stores. You can count on us to bring you la crème de la crème of the current trends! 

Also, we presented our pitches in Interactive Media today, and they were offering a bottle of champagne for the best presentation... and I won! :) This is the Prezi I used for my presentation, and you can see all my posts about the project over on my tumblr. My course leader is really encouraging me to actually go forward with the app, everyone on the panel thought it was a really viable product that I could definitely actually make and sell. I'm not sure I have the time or energy, but its pretty awesome anyways.