TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

TET at Gawler Skatepark, South Australia. A common problem among skaters dealing with work/life commitments (typically older skaters with families, careers, or both) is finding the time to actually spend on a skateboard. In fact, life in general getting in the way of skateboarding, is what often leads so many to drop out of the sport, only to rediscover it later, once everything else starts to even out. I'm certainly in that category. Never really giving skateboarding away altogether but only using a skateboard to get from A to B, when I didn't have a vehicle, for many years. In the last couple of years I've been trying to get back into the sport properly, i.e. building up my trick list and skating for fun and not just to get from A to B. The problem is I have so many interests, projects, paid work, and more, that I would often leave skateboarding to the end of my day. Kind of as something to look forward to. Except I wouldn't be that motivated to really improv...

I've gotten quite behind with posting about my own art projects and skateboarding adventures so I thought I'd begin to remedy that with this one post that allows me to feature four of my related videos. About midway through 2018 I posted a video to my TETLife Youtube channel where I randomly sketched a couple of characters. One was a skeleton wearing circle specs and a business suit which was inspired by my own avatar TET character. That video is below. I got a comment on the video that drawing the skeleton with a skateboard would be a 'winner'. I agreed and decided to see what that would look like. Specifically I set out to make a design that would look good as a skateboard graphic as well as being printed onto other merch, posting the video below of my process. There was too much footage for one installment so I split the video into two parts. For the second part I donned my TET avatar grey business suit (to match the skeleton design) and tried to do ...

Captain Marvel is a return for the MCU to the origin story. As such, I've seen a few people say this feels more like a phase 1 film than a second to last film in a string of movies spanning ten years. From my point of view that's not a bad thing. It's not sustainable to try and make every movie bigger than the last when you have infinite stories to tell. With that said, this is quite an origin story, that features characters both new and old, with the old characters playing younger versions of themselves, given the film is set in the 1990s - before anyone had even heard of The Avengers. The movie follows Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), a former military pilot, as she attempts to unravel her past in order to realize her full potential as the MCU's most powerful superhero. Along the way the Earth is caught in a war between two alien races. If you follow the MCU at all you'll be aware of the controversy surrounding this character. A certain subsection of fans a...

The Robot Uprising will be color co-ordinated. Concept Art: © Continental AG Continental’s Vision: Seamless Mobility Combines Autonomous Shuttles and Delivery Robots is a title that appears innocent enough on Continental's press release for CES 2019 (that was held in January) but on closer inspection they're clearly advancing the imminent robot uprising. On the surface Continental are developing an urban robot delivery service where by teams of dog-like robots are transported to specific locations by driverless cars (known as CUbEs) to deliver packages directly to your door... and your neighbour's door, and that other place not far from you... you get it, we're talking lots of robots being transported to specific locations. I've written before about how robots are slowly moving from patrolling our homes to keeping tabs on us outdoors, in the streets, and even from the air. This was all happening in an ad hoc way, with many companies producing different r...