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_a year out
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When I first came to Amsterdam, I was deeply disillusioned with the chemical industry, and desperate to get out of it. In my view, it was at best, amoral, and at worst, criminal. I couldn't live with myself anymore. Worse than that, I'd gotten bored. But that didn't matter, because I had more ideas than were good for me. I wrote, I drew, I made clothes. I explored the city. I met new people and made new friends. For a while, I ran around in different directions, with no idea of what I wanted to do with my future. You might say, I confused the Muse. My boyfriend, with whom I had come to town, was here for a Java programming contract in Den Haag. A veteran of the Internet, he persuaded me to explore my Muse with computer graphics. Armed only with the gimp (the open source graphics package) and an EMACS text editor, I set to work. ephidrina started life as something very different from what she finally became. I originally had the idea of a cartoon character who blew the whistle on the excesses of the big chemical corporations she used to work for. But Amsterdam had a different agenda. As word got around of my professional skills, I found myself headhunted for a different kind of chemical industry altogether! The irony was not lost on me. I began thinking seriously about the implications of this, and of drug prohibition generally. As a site, it's not perfect. But it did give me the opportunity to learn the artistic potential of computer graphics and the World Wide Web, and to research in depth what turned out to be a fascinating subject, with far-reaching consequencess for all of us. And if you think this means I do a lot of drugs, I don't. I just think prohibiting them is stupid. (22/11/00) |