Month: August 2006
-
hot links, coming through
- Tacky little Flash animations with tacky little (yet infectious) songs. Ugh, they’re the polyester of the internet. Yet.. yet.. every once in a while, one must don the polyester. [source: webzen]
- The twisted films of PES yields up drowning nut and the scandalous roof sex. Very cute; but then rogue peanut comes on and taps a very specific happy center of my brain. I’m sure there are other gems but patience for my plodding internet access runs out right about now. [source: the delightful andy]
- Dirty car art: can’t get my head around how this is done. And the impermanence of it all — urban mandalas, yeah! [source: lady fantastica, hillary]
- Stupid little shooty fun games. Ugh, they’re the crack of the internet. And with that, I enable you with Pop Flop. [source: some sadist]
- Update: Delightful animation by a magical Russian: Bathtime in Clerkenwell by Alex Budovsky [thanx for finding it, Andy-poo]
-
collaboratory
Look, another photo that goes from interesting to positively enchanting when viewing in tiny size! And shockingly enough, it scares me in no way. Perhaps because of the size of the work, the fish seem vulnerable, containable — too abstract to be of any danger to me. This is the work of the person, Ã…, with whom I am having a photographic collaboration on flickr. She is quite the superstar of the flickr universe these days. I imagine she is laughing right now as she reads this. But it’s true! I try to contain my jealousy at her easy eye.This project in which we’re involved is so fun, satisfying, touching, silly. This is the miracle of the internet, people — I can play online Pictionary, make a friend halfway across the world, and (almost realtime) share our visual lives and creativity. One of the few reasons I’m happy to be alive when I am. If not for the internet, I would be yearning doubly hard for the time/place-periods for which I have mysterious nostalgia/saudade: 1960s London; mid-1800s Prairie Frontier; 1950s Nevada; 1930s Paris; 1700s Canada; oh does the list go on.
Fun fact: my grandmother Ann (my dad’s mom) lived in a sod house in the midwest in her youth.
-
Sew sew sew. Think think think. Work work work.
A lot of time on my hands and a need to keep busy = a quilt made in record time. You can see my flickr craftbox [start at the bottom] for more images. I’m going to take a class in machine quilting in September. Need more technique, more skills, more muscle for my mind.Keeping busy working my right hemisphere is key to getting through the days. The raincloud of worry about my father and his health hovers; am trying to keep it from turning into a thick mist and obscuring all good thoughts.
Sew sew sew. Think think think. Work work work.
Tonight I shall buy a pie and share it with some friends after a meatball meal.
-
Eat vegetables with every meal, or your lips will start to peel
I am angry. Angry that no one bothered to hip me to the existence of Amy Winfrey and her incredible animations. Until now. Big thanks to KO who offered up- Muffin Films, which led me to
- Making Fiends, and, once I’m done watching them, I’ll move on to
- Big Bunny.
Oh my, genius. I feel jealousy, appreciation and relief in equal measure when I behold brain candy such as this. I wish I could make things look and feel like that; I love her for putting her love and sweat into such joyousness; and I’m at peace, knowing that there are people like her in the world. Yay!
Promise me, if you’re going to give me only 5 minutes to prove me wrong, start with Making Fiends and watch at least 3 episodes.
-
way back when
I have had a website since 1997, when it was a Geocities abomination. I obtained my own website domain in 1999. I periodically kept blog-like entries all these years, though they were not called blogs then (and will not be called blogs forever, which will date *these* entries in a {hopefully} quaint way in the years to come.. hi, future!)
I think I just referred to it as a website: “Read about it on my website! I’m keeping a website!” until that phrase evolved into indicating something vaguely porny.
I archived many of these pages and am posting them in this blog. I doubt many of them will be of any interest to anyone (except perhaps to the people that are featured, maybe?) but for the purposes in interest in my own personal history, WA-LA.
The original page designs are entertainly wonky and oh-so-pre-millenium. I have indicated the orginal creation dates of the pages (thanks to Claris HomePage’s date stamp function in the code! Hi-tek!), and have tried to include some of the goofier graphics.
Apart from seeing the evolution of my web design and coding skills (towards the better: thanks gods), what is striking is how my writing style has changed as well. I cringe a little at the more immature entries.. but what has changed, really? In fact, there’s a lot to cringe at (lord, i’ve gotten old), but hey. If I’ve going to keep my ridiculous stacks of journals from my youth in the bookcases, I’m going wrap some of my online life lovingly in some acid-free paper.
I’ve added some “backstory” comments from the present, for contextual purposes. I have disabled the comments functions, though. I don’t want to treat these as “live” entries. They are categorized under “archive”.
-
and it’s really really sad too
A tiny robot that lives in a dollhouse. Need I say anything else to make you watch this?
-
crack the W.I.P.
My friends Hillary and Danny gave me a quilt this weekend. A quilt from Montana! Made by Amish (or so I believe). I can’t wait till I get to share the pics with you. Meanwhile, at left is the quilt I started piecing tonight. Oooourrrrggh. I find at this point of creation I always have grave grave doubts in my ability to put together a happy mix of fabrics.To bring reality crashing in now, my pop is doing pretty poorly and I have a little rain cloud of worry over my head. If you are the sending-good-thoughts-to-the-universe kind, send one Jim’s way, okay? Thanks.
-
keep your enemies closer
I don’t get as much spam as I used to (although I’m sure the spam-valanche will come again) and I kind of miss those stupid names and subject lines. Like this one I just got: doorstep is halvah but dapper. More fun with unwanted email:
- Steven Frank draws Spamusement, “poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines.” Quirky. I like this one.
- Alex Dragulescu creates Spam Plants, artwork that is generated through analyzing the ASCII values found in the text of spam messages.
- William Ridenhour takes “the names from spam e-mails, bring them to life and kill them off swiftly.” It’s quite cleverly written. It’s just like the game mom and I would sometimes play on road trips, making names out of exits and destinations on road signs and tell elaborate stories about them. Mom could do it better than anyone — one funny dame, she. I was well into my thirties, last time we played it.
Um, there’s something I’d love for you to participate in … two entries below.
-
Discomedusae
I work at a university Physics Department, Monday through Wednesday. It’s a good fit, great bennies, awful (AWFUL) commute, low stress. Pretty decent. Except for that commute (sorry, but I live in SoCal now. Traffic is a perpetual scab pickin’ subject).But man, for some reason, this week was kicked into some kind of delicious bonus level of fun! The best, on Tuesday: BOMB SCARE! Check out the flickr set for the thrilling lowdown. Who can I talk to about officially changing the bomb robot’s name to L.E.S.T.E.R. 2000? And, though the other parts of the week were not as exciting, it was good times. Special secret shoutouts to KO and RY! How excellent you are.
I deserve to have a happy work environment after the series of ridiculous missteps called the 2000s.
Too bad today sucked like you couldn’t believe. The love-army of sparkling unicorns just couldn’t make it through the thicket of evil.
But hey: you’re more than welcome to track down the original prints of these, frame ’em up and give ’em to me for my 21st birthday, which is coming up. All lies! Except the prints. Aren’t they incredible? I might die from the beauty.
Alright, people, look below. You have homework to do.
