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June 2nd, 2012
08:34 pm - Drabble #2: Scouts
"Well, uh, we got on our, you know, horses, like, at the ass-crack of dawn. Like, we had to get back to, you know, the main, uh, party, like, ASAP. The other, uh, guy, I think his name was, uh, Lucius, he was like, you know, we should uh, split up, you know? I was like, uh, hey man, do whatever, like, but it's a lot more, you know, dangerous, like, alone, you know? Well uh, I never, you know, saw that guy again. It was just, like, me by myself who got back to the camp, you know?"
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June 1st, 2012
05:50 pm - Drabble #1: Candle
Finally, she looked up from the book. She fumbled for her pen and her notebook and, finding them, wrote underneath her other notes: "The gangster is not Robert's father." She underlined "not" twice and then decided she might as well circle it too.
This was when she noticed that the sun was up, and apparently had been so for some time. Without much thought she turned her head and blew toward her light source, only to feel silly when realizing she was blowing on a spiraling light bulb. "It's later than I thought," she thought, and turned the light off.
Current Music: Oomph! - Kosmonaut
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May 30th, 2012
03:59 pm - you gasp and stagger and drabble down your chin
Well I'm going to try a fiction-writing exercise where you write a 100-word story a day for 100 days. They're called drabbles. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) slfcllednowhere has been doing this so why don't I try it, why don't I just do that. Here is post about it. I will post them as individual entries here in this journal thing, because I'm tired of hardly ever posting here anymore. I'm planning to do this as long as I can remember, then eventually forget about it and feel guilty. I'm hoping that I will fail upwards.
Writing 100 words a day should not be a problem, but keeping them to exactly 100 words will surely be a problem. I think I'd rather write approximately 500 words than exactly 100. Oh well.
Here is a table of the prompts for each day. I don't feel like hiding it behind an LJ-cut so I hope your friends page is not wounded.
| 1. |
2. |
3. |
4. |
| candle |
scouts |
doggie paddle |
coconut |
| 5. |
6. |
7. |
8. |
| sultry |
plant |
ship |
sand |
| 9. |
10. |
11. |
12. |
| cabana |
water |
day trip |
jump |
| 13. |
14. |
15. |
16. |
| tan |
bird |
raft |
popsicle |
| 17. |
18. |
19. |
20. |
| sink |
stars |
sundress |
shades |
| 21. |
22. |
23. |
24. |
| blanket |
parade |
straw hat |
tide |
| 25. |
26. |
27. |
28. |
| snorkle |
slide |
boys of summer |
clambake |
| 29. |
30. |
31. |
32. |
| dandelion |
haze |
clouds |
lake |
| 33. |
34. |
35. |
36. |
| charcoal |
smoothie |
salt |
climb |
| 37. |
38. |
39. |
40. |
| air conditioning |
arts and crafts |
grill |
lifeguard |
| 41. |
42. |
43. |
44. |
| swimsuit |
stink |
shell |
dive |
| 45. |
46. |
47. |
48. |
| tropical |
sweet |
salt water taffy |
sour |
| 49. |
50. |
51. |
52. |
| crab |
fish |
staycation |
season |
| 53. |
54. |
55. |
56. |
| sun |
turtle |
wave |
 |
| 57. |
58. |
59. |
60. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 61. |
62. |
63. |
64. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 65. |
66. |
67. |
68. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 69. |
70. |
71. |
72. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 73. |
74. |
75. |
76. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 77. |
78. |
79. |
80. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 81. |
82. |
83. |
84. |
| Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
| 85. |
86. |
87. |
88. |
| Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
| 89. |
90. |
91. |
92. |
| Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
| 93. |
94. |
95. |
96. |
| Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
| 97. |
98. |
99. |
100. |
| Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
Author's Choice |
I edit to mention: I've replaced the Kurt Vonnegut drawing I've been using as my default userpic for almost all the almost 11 years I've been on LiveJournal. In its place is a picture of my face I took recently and then sent through Instagram's filters. I'm using this as my profile picture everywhere now, even though it kind of makes me uncomfortable. So long, Kurt Vonnegut drawing.
Current Mood: horribly tired but good in general, and my back hurts
Current Music: Oomph! - Such Mich Find Mich
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May 17th, 2012
04:25 pm - The story of how my room was taken over by horrible machines; also, more videos
This all started a month ago, and I've been meaning to write about it since about a week later, so here I am finally doing it even though now I don't remember everything.
Four Wednesdays ago I heard a noise. It sounded like tapping or rustling. I investigated and it turned out that there was water dripping from the ceiling of my closet and landing on the trash bags I had in there that are full of torn clothes that I don't want to throw away, because that seems like a sin, even though they're not of use to anyone where they are. Tangent! Gradually the dripping increased and moved to the doorway. I made a video documenting the drippery. After an hour or so it had decreased in speed so I figured it was going to stop and then I would get to forget about it. I was really hoping for this because of all the anxiety involved with people coming over, especially since our apartment was in terrible condition since neither of us really care a lot about cleaning because we're horrible monsters and/or bachelors. I clean the kitchen and the bathroom somewhat regularly but beyond that, like, whatever, man.
Unfortunately, it was not going to go away on its own. Thursday it was still dripping, so we were going to call the manager... rather, kotra was going to call the manager because of my severe-ish anxiety around people I don't know (or, if you're one of those people who thinks disorders are an excuse for the lazy, it was because I'm lazy). It turned out that we didn't have the manager's number, since she was somewhat new. We seem to get a new manager every year. I should have just walked over there and talked to her myself, which kotra was going to do, but he had stuff to do or something and then we figured it was too late in the day. That night just after I finished showering there was some frantic knocking on the door. I answered the door in my robe; it seems inappropriate for people I don't know to see me in my robe but that's probably just me being silly. There was a maintenance guy who said, "You've got a leak!" I told him that it was coming from above, so he went to talk to the people in the apartment above.
Well, here's what had happened: The people above us had an explosion of some sort in the pipe connected to their washing machine. Apparently the most damage was done to the people below us. I feel like a jerk for not bringing this up earlier because then the neighbors below probably wouldn't have had as much damage. I didn't see it but I was told it was like mine but much worse.
The next day was Friday and some guys came over and tore up my room. They put in two really loud fans that were pointed at a dehumidifier, also loud. There were also some sort of weird tubes stuck into the ceiling and wall and they were connected to some sort of contraption that, coincidentally, was loud. What I'm trying to say is that it was very loud. Also hot. We have a little thermometer that goes up to 120°F; kotra put it in my room and it was inadequate to measure how hot it was. Here is a video of all that stuff going on.
They came back on Monday to look at it. Nope, it wasn't done yet. Then it was Tuesday and... well, I think they partially removed things and finished up on Wednesday, but my memory isn't memorying very well. During this time I of course couldn't use my room. The couch in the living room folds out into a bed so I was sleeping on that. I was unhappy about this but the cat was glad that she could sit on me all the time.
A few days later there was another maintenance person: a middle-aged Asian man (probably Vietnamese but I can't be sure) who talked with an accent that I had a hard time understanding, which made me feel bad. He fixed the damage to my room and also killed all the mold that had developed. I don't know if it's this apartment complex or the moist Pacific Northwest in general, but we get mold in our corners if we're not super goddamned careful. The guy spent two days here and when he was done my room looked better than it ever had. Hooray for that guy! Unhooray for how anxious I was when he was (and all the other people were) around.
After that we did some major cleaning. The manager had come in and looked around in general and taken pictures of everything. She determined that our apartment was so cluttered that it violated our contract. She gave us two weeks to clean up, which was later extended to three. Kotra was angry about this. In the days before the inspection he cleaned everything with a fervor, apparently thinking that if the apartment wasn't pristine we'd be kicked out. Kotra is silly sometimes. Anyway, now the apartment is in such a state that I would not be embarrassed if someone came over, and that's kind of weird.
In conclusion, that sucked.
In more recent news: I made pizza and I kept eating it even though it was too hot so now the roof of my mouth hurts because I'm dumb.
Well, enough journaling in my journal. Here are some more bass videos.
I played a lot of Holst in high school and college bands, so it seemed natural that I'd learn how to play his music as I learned bass guitar, even though that's the "wrong" instrument—although many metal bands have had homages to Mars, which is why I use distortion when playing that part.
I don't remember if I finally learned to tie a tie for this video, or if I happened to be learning it and decided to use it in the video. I think a necktie is one of the stupidest things ever but it's good to know what to do with one if you're a 29-year-old male.
Kotra's sister made me that hat a few years ago. I put it on when baking so that I don't end up with hair scones.
This is in the middle of a project I started 6 months ago. I want to make 13 bass videos for each of the songs on the latest Gogol Bordello album. What will separate these from the others, aside being the whole album, is that I'm making them in various locales, mostly parks, so that they're not as visually bland as these things usually are. I've done 5 so far. I'm frustrated at how long this is taking. Mostly I'm afraid of looking like an idiot in public. I should get over that so that people will heap scorn upon me and call me a hipster for not being normal, which I think is the point of the anti-hipster movement.
Current Music: They Might Be Giants - Now Is Strange
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April 3rd, 2012
07:04 am - War And Peace And Addicts
I don't want my journal to be just a bunch of videos, so I will write about the books I've been reading.
I've been trying to get through Tolstoy's War And Peace for nine months. It's 1215 pages long and I'm on page 830 now. It's tedious and unsatisfying and I should just give up but I'm not smart enough. It's about Russia's one-percenters in the early 1800s. I'm at least learning about the culture of Russia at that period, which is surely useful. Apparently the nobility mostly spoke in French: when everyone got fed up with Napoleon after he went to war with them a second time, speaking French became less fashionable, but some of the Russian aristocrats had a hard time speaking Russian. There are long passages of dialog in French, which in my version have been left as they were with translations in footnotes. I wonder if these passages were left untranslated in Tolstoy's original, which would have made much of the book impenetrable to the Russians of the time.
The characters often act in ways that make no sense to me. I don't know if this is because things are hard to translate or Tolstoy is making some sort of point that's going over my head or everyone just acted crazy then because of lax health care. In one scene, soldiers at war make jokes and laugh as cannonballs land around them. In another, Natasha wanders around her family's mansion saying "Madagascar!" to everyone. There's one occurrence that I'm really curious about: when an officer is sick (or perhaps injured, I can't remember) he's taken to a doctor who performs bloodletting, and then he feels much better. Did bloodletting really work that way? They may have thought so in 1812 but the novel was published in 1869, so maybe Tolstoy thought that it worked that way, but I thought we knew it didn't really do much by then. Maybe it actually does have benefits. I know bleeding has therapeutic value, though most modern people are unaware of this and misconstrue self-injury as attention-seeking behavior.
One reason it's taking me so long to read this is that I've been taking breaks to read other books that come along. Most of them have been memoirs by mentally ill entertainers, which wasn't really a choice but a lot of people I'm interested in have been releasing memoirs lately.
There's The Book Of Drugs by Mike Doughty, the guy from Soul Coughing who doesn't like to be known as the guy from Soul Coughing. Much of the book is dedicated to explaining why: the guys in his band were crazy and manipulative and he was pretty much miserable the whole time. There are also details of how he almost died from his drug addiction, which explains the title. He says he saw John Frusciante, frequent guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Mars Volta, on TV talking about how much he loved destroying his life with heroin. This made Doughty jealous, because at that point he could barely get any pleasure from heroin.
There's The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Chronicle, I mean Stephen Fry. It's kind of a sequel to Moab Is My Washpot, his first memoir which mostly dealt with his childhood. This one involves his growing up and getting a fancy-pants education and becoming successful almost immediately, the bastard. I remember I was following him on Twitter when he took a month off to write this. It really seems hurried, but not in a bad way. It's somewhat stream-of-consciousness but very easy to read. Something about it that really surprised me: When he came out to his parents in around 1980, they were thrilled. I guess Britain's attitudes towards homosexuality then were different from those in the US, but still, I wouldn't expect anyone's parents to be happy about it. I'd think the most you could hope for, even now, would be a sort of indifferent "we love you no matter what" reaction, unless your parents are gay already. There's not much drug use in this book, but he promises there will be plenty in the next one.
There's God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked by Darrell Hammond. It's a pretty stupid name, because if you can't have "fuck" in your title then you should just not bother. Anyway, Saturday Night Live is mostly awful but I'm interested in the people involved with it. My take on the show is that it comes with a built-in energy that's exciting, at least when you first see it; after you've watched it for a few years you're used to it so what's left is performances and sketches that were written so hastily that they can't help but suck. Darrell Hammond, despite seeming bland, is absolutely fascinating in his intense mental turmoil. Again with the self-injury: he would have to cut himself in order to stop having hallucinations long enough to go out and imitate Bill Clinton. Of course there were also lots of drugs involved, which is boringly common with New York entertainers of the previous two decades. It seems like being successful as an actor or musician requires being almost dead from substance abuse. Glamor!
There was also Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore. He's not exactly mentally ill from what I gather, but I suppose he's a different kind of entertainer than the others. This book is composed of true-ish stories, mostly about his childhood and youth. It's obvious that there's fiction involved here, particularly in the unnatural dialog. He does have a short introduction where he admits as much. The most interesting story to me was the only one that takes place after he's become famous. It involves the fallout from his Oscar speech. He had to hire a bunch of bodyguards to follow him around because he was getting almost as many death threats as George W. Bush. I have to say that the picture of him as a small child on the cover of the book is so cute that I can barely stand it.
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March 20th, 2012
05:28 pm - another damn video
There's a contest put on by The Mars Volta (or at least their management) to make a video for their song, so I made a video for their song. It's meant to portray mental derangement but I'm worried I just look silly.
I used some of the puppets deana_in_texas made me a while ago. I've been meaning to use them more often.
I was planning on not bothering with this: for one thing, I already have a video with that song, and for another, there are already tons of entries. Plus my video editing skills don't really go beyond... well, the thing I made. At first I was thinking of making something involving public domain footage of rats and birds, but I didn't know how I would put it together. Then I realized I had a bird puppet, and a rabbit which is a rodent and that's close enough, so I went and had my freakout. Note that I hardly ever have this much energy and I was on a lot of caffeine at the time.
They Might Be Giants had a similar contest a few months ago, but it had a judge in the form of John Hodgman. This contest is much less fair, because the winner will be whoever has garnered the most likes by March 26. The contest winner will get $500 in the form of a certificate for Best Buy. I'm of course not going to win but still, why don't you go to the video page and give it a like if somehow you like this. I have no idea if people will like this or if they'll yell at me for making something so cheap-looking or if they'll just worry about my sanity.
The way this works, people who made their videos immediately have a better shot at winning. So far the leader is the first one that was uploaded... and it's just a video of someone's colonoscopy. I'm mostly against this because it took almost no effort to put together, although I guess it's kind of a cool idea. So far this is my favorite, and I also like this. I've actually been watching all of these because I'm interested in the creativity of people who like things I like, and also I'm unemployed. I felt like they were mostly going for the same sort of thing, and also most of them didn't really move with the music. I think music videos should be directly related to, y'know, the music.
Even though most of the visuals took 5 minutes, putting the video together was extremely frustrating and slow. Probably no one is interested in all the boring stuff I did, but here it is anyway. The video editor I used to use was Virtual Dub and it was nice. Unfortunately when I got my high-definition camera I couldn't use it anymore because it sort of loses its mind with high-definition videos. Now I use the default Windows video editor which suits most of my needs but it's not good with effects. I knew what effects I wanted (nothing exciting, just motion blur and desaturation) but I couldn't figure out a way to get those going on. I kept downloading things but they didn't work out. I only like to bother with free software but maybe I should save myself some headaches and just download something illegally. Well, eventually I realized I could sort of use Virtual Dub: I could apply filters but not really see anything. Here is the path I took: First I opened the video file in Windows Live Movie Maker and trimmed it and saved it as a .wmv file. Vdub only works with .avi files, so I used a converter to make an additional file. I opened that in Vdub, applied filters, and saved it. (Oddly, saving it uncompressed resulted in a jumbled mess, but if I used compression the video came out fine.) Then I opened it in Windows Blahblah again and added the images and the music and then I saved the final version. Of course all that doesn't take into account all the various things I tried that didn't work. Every time I tried something it took like half an hour for the video file to be compressed or saved or whatever, because the files are huge because of the high quality... but after going through all that saving the quality wasn't really very good anymore. Ah well.
Current Mood: lethargic
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February 15th, 2012
01:38 am - another video
The Mars Volta just put a song out and I loved it immediately, so I figured out how to play the bass part. At least, I came close. I got some notes wrong in the middle part and I have no idea what the bass is doing at the end so I repeated what happened at the beginning, which could be what happens. Also, my face is gone.
Current Mood: so tired
Current Music: yeah, you
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February 9th, 2012
08:10 pm - I got a new phone.
Current Mood: phoney
Current Music: Holst - 1st Suite in Eb - Chaconne, Allegro moderato
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February 1st, 2012
11:00 pm - bloggery
I've started a blog where I complain about commercials! Check out my blog where I complain about commercials! http://mandaliet.com/cat/
I suppose I should care enough about the layout to not use the default theme, but whatever. The only thing I really want to add is a picture of a broken television, like this, but the site charges way too much for their images unless I pay for like a thousand at once. I've found a whole lot of free images of broken televisions but none of them look like I want them to. Oh well.
Current Music: Gogol Bordello - Rebellious Love
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January 18th, 2012
12:12 pm - another mix CD
I made another of those mix CD things that I make. This sprang forth much earlier than it was supposed to, but I don't remember why I think I should only make these every 6 months.
I'm including links to YouTube videos of each song (fortunately they all happen to be available there, although for the first one I could only find the shorter version) so if you want to listen to something for 80 minutes you can keep clicking on the links. Should I mention that some of these songs have a lot of swearing? I don't know how people feel about that anymore.
1. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Do You Love Me
2. Einstürzende Neubauten - Z.N.S.
3. Tom Waits - Hell Broke Luce
4. The Mars Volta - Cotopaxi
5. Mutemath - Prytania
6. Mike Doughty - Na Na Nothing
7. Steve Earle - Jericho Road
8. Phil Ochs - Pretty Smart On My Part
9. Gogol Bordello - Pala Tute
10. Primus - Lee Van Cleef
11. The Residents - The Coming Of The Crow
12. They Might Be Giants - Marty Beller Mask
13. Mutemath - Walking Paranoia
14. Die Antwoord - Evil Boy
15. Sufjan Stevens - I Want To Be Well
16. OOMPH! - Das Letzte Streichholz
17. Jack Parow - Dans Dans Dans
18. John Vanderslice - Overcoat
19. Peter Gabriel - Red Rain (orchestral version)
20. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Do You Love Me? (Part 2)
I'm also breaking the "rules" by including multiple songs by the same artist. This is because I recently fell in love with two albums. A few months ago I got Nick Cave's 1994 album Let Love In, because I thought I should listen to him more and that was the one with Red Right Hand on it. The "Do You Love Me?" songs that open and close the album (as well as my CD!) are phenomenal, especially part 2, which seems to get better every time I listen to it, though I'm sure there will be a plateau. I wish I hadn't found out what the song is about because now I feel very disturbed whenever I listen to it, but I still love it anyway.
The other album is Odd Soul by Mutemath, a group I hadn't heard of before I was listening to a year-in-review episode of Sound Opinions where a listener called in and said that it was one of their favorite albums of 2011. There are some albums where when I listen to them for the first time I can't really hear them because I have no idea what's going on. When this happens I know that if I listen to it again several more times it will slowly fall together and I will like it a lot. (This is usually what happens with albums by The Mars Volta.) At first Prytania was the only thing I could really comprehend on Odd Soul, but eventually I was in love with the whole thing.
It seems that I like rap when it's done by obnoxious South Africans. I have no idea why I like Die Antwoord and Jack Parow, who by themselves comprise a genre of rap called Zef. Somehow I enjoy the noises they make. It started when my Dutch friend Tan Loc randomly showed me the video for Evil Boy (warning: there are a lot of fake penises in this video, as well as general confusing madness... also apparently I have to mention that it's not meant to be homophobic and they're mostly just joking around) (also the song there is different from the album version which I used in my mix CD so my link above is for a different video). I watched the video a few times and was surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed it, and in fact I liked their whole album. Normally rap doesn't do anything for me, though there is more in this than just rap.
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