things i hate, and some things i don't

At least one of us has been productive with this last summer (hint: not me). Great Friend Hannah with another painting-- supposedly inspired by me! Rather, by two of my favorite things. She sent me a preview from her phone.

fuck yes.

Now for me to get up off my increasingly squishy butt and do something--(even just for fun)--too...

granted there's a two-year gap between when I first started this thing and now, and only six posts to show for all that time... but there's shaping up to be more things I like than things I don't. fascinating, since I'm generally an ornery motherfucker. Anyway, here's another thing I don't hate! (I'm trying to make up for lost time)

http://queercakes.tumblr.com/post/9570572930/kylathegreat-cosmopolitanbloodloss-for-the

my friend Kaitlyn tipped me off on this one via facebook. I'm now up searching for comic-print fabric on etsy, as a geeky end-of-summer DIY. If I actually get around to completing this little project I'll do a follow-up post with my finished product.

A great friend of mine gifted me with Bel Canto for my 20th birthday, and somewhere between haphazardly moving twice that summer and again the next summer before jet-setting to Prague, I misplaced it. I found it again back in June when I once again was moving, packing away four unbelievably bipolar years into cardboard boxes for my grand exodus from Chicago back to California.

It was the perfect book to begin my summer, and end my summer years (sorry. I've since been reading George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. enough said.) It seems fitting to pick this blog back up again with Ann Patchett's incredible story. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, and always really goddamn beautiful, Bel Canto feels exactly what this whole summer has felt like to me; an arrested moment of internal consequence that somehow (frustratingly) doesn't show on your skin. Also it's the most gorgeously written book I've read in a really long time.

anyway, here's some info and praise from Patchett's website.

 A little more abstract, but hey, at least I'm trying to get myself back into the swing of things.

Having abandoned this little pet project for just over a year, I feel obliged to explain my return. It's pretty dumb I guess, and it might be a little bit about a boy, but we're not talking about that, because it's ME, and I don't think about boys unless they're offerring to cart me off to a palace in Egypt, settled aboard a palanquin amongst cushions and peeled grapes. And run-on sentences.

But it's about more than just that, really. Does anyone remember back in the day when I was going to be a writer? I mean, back, way back in the day, right before animator filmmaker graphic novelist artist social psychologist neuroscientist immunologist actress journalist architect drummer. Before all that, I was going to be a writer, and a damn good one. It was in my blood. Hell, as someone who could write better than my teachers my entire academic career leading up to college, it seemed fairly intuitive that that was my "life's calling".

I guess when I hit college and realized I wasn't the hot shit I thought I was, I reacted the way I react to basically everything: I had an Existential Crisis, and backed the fuck off. To quote American Beauty, a favorite film: "I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary." God, how awful would it be to do something creative and just be... normal? Only kind-of good. Anyway, so the point of this self-centered exploratory exposition is: I have stopped writing, and I haven't written in SO LONG, and I think I might kind of miss it.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in my friend(?) Rachel's weed-soaked apartment, packing away pregame shots and contemplating xanax, a cigarette slowly burning to its butt and threatening to catch my lips in the crossfire, when she turned and asked me abruptly what I planned to do with my film major. I shrugged--god knows if I even plan to stay in film. It changes every week, you know. She nodded distractedly. But what do you THINK you might want to do? Shrug-prone, I shrugged again. Maybe animation? I might want to be more on the...art..y...side of things. I honestly can't say. Pause. Well, I think you should write. Me: what? Her: Yeah, I think you should write. Everyone at this school, you know, they think they're going to fucking make it. Be something big. But I only know two people--you and this one theater kid. Your screenplay--(we were in a screenwriting class together)--it's so different. No one else here writes like that. You should write.

Stunned and too strung-out to know what to say, I fumbled out some sort of thankyou and changed the subject back to her. But the thought kind of stuck with me. A writer, huh? Really? Did she really just dig up that old seed, forgotten, unwatered, dried up and dead? I don't want to be just ordinary. But... I did like writing. I do like writing. I don't know if I'm going to make much of her saying that to me. Again, we were throwing the liquor back like whoa. But that doesn't mean I can't do things like this, right? Just to keep myself in practice? Or something? I'm no longer doing it with the intention of squishing the jellied limbs of other writers beneath my steel-toed...pen, cackling as I drown them in the leftover ink from my pages of brilliance. I'm an ordinary writer. Only kind-of good. A teensy blog floating unread in the large cesspool of the unread blogosphere. But that's okay, for now at least....right?

and so, I present you with something I don't hate, #4: writing. because fuck it, maybe I'm a self-centered writer and maybe I'm no Vonnegut, but at least SOMEONE thinks I'm good, and that might just be enough.

Am decidedly a fan of anything that maximizes screen space while minimizing mouse usage. Am NOT a fan of hiding my dock, because I tend to use everything, I mean EVERYTHING on my dock all at once and I like having access readily and easily available. Solution to problem? Quicksilver. With a couple of keystrokes, I can find, click, and use any program I want on my OS. Sweetness. Super sweetness.

http://quicksilver.en.softonic.com/mac <--download link, for your benefit.

something I don't hate: Quicksilver

Short post:

suffice it to say I know next to nothing about UNIX except how to cd directory or cp file in Terminal. attempting to do a makefile for C++ projects that creates a zip archive of all .cpp files in the directory. found the UNIX command:

zip [-AcdDeEfFghjklLmoqrRSTuvVwXyz@$] [-b path]
[-n suffixes] [-t mmddyyyy] [-tt mmddyyyy] [ zipfile [ file1
file2 ...]] [-xi list]

but no explanations of what to change/what goes where.
managed to get some distorted version of it working in Terminal"zip file directory file" was what I was typing in, essentially, but it was creating an empty archive.

no idea how to get this up and running in my makefile.

anyway, it's frustrating. I recognize the benefits of makefiles, but holy crap.
everyone keeps telling me to google tutorials which I AM DOING (e.g. "man zip")
but I admit it. I am slow. My mind plods. Ungracefully. I need my hand held through shit, e.g. explanations of what "-b" stands for, or why
there's an effing "-n" when that doesn't exist in UNIX (according to Terminal, anyway).

something I (for the time being, until I understand UNIX/get this shite working) hate: makefiles

It's a little weird, but kind of really cool.

The song is pretty good too. Low key, but unassuming. Apparently the artist, Oren Lavie, co-directed. Shot in all stills. Really cool the way they have the light from the window shifting at the beginning and end, but at the same spot throughout the "dream". Those kinds of shots can't happen by accident. Was also a huge fan of the sock-fishes.

something (someone?) I don't hate: Oren Lavie

more about the video:

* The video was shot all stills - roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.
* It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.
* It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minutes computer sequence, frame by frame.
* Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.
*Each of the wonderfully talented people above have worked on the video for a fraction of their normal rates (except Oren who worked for his normal rate of zero).

-Lavie's blog

I have been inspired.

firstly by a resume-tips email feed I'm subscribed to but never read except for this morning,

and secondly by this: http://fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com

explanation of the first: Resume reader guy said he googles applicants to read their weblogs. Now I'm not google-find-able, but this made me think to myself, "If I *WAS* to be found on google, wouldn't I want to appear interesting?" Thus violent blog-restructure (via making new blog!) for optimal interesting-factor. (I'm not too interesting otherwise, so I'm sorry, this is the best I can do for now).

explanation of the second: It's funny. Also, themed.

So I decided to give myself a theme, though it isn't really since all I do is complain about the plethora of things I hate anyway. But now it *seems* like a theme, which is what counts.

So, without further ado, my first entry.

*****

Pandora wigged me out at first. I'd heard of it here and there brushed it off as a thing that the unpretentious people of the world subscribe to. Being massively pretentious myself, decided to reconcile it to the mental file of "whatevarrr" in the complicated filing system in my head. My first tangible contact with it was at a small hangout/party at the end of finals week last quarter, where the station was Third Eye Blind or some too-soon 90's throwback or other. Bad stuff. Not good. So I filed it further back, in "gross". I like to listen to my own music. And besides, until recently, I wasn't really into playlists, I would just listen to albums all the way through if I was in the mood for something.

BUT, since there's always a BUT in stories like this, at job #1 yesterday, amidst piles and piles of data entry, one of the other RA's put The Killers Pandora on... and despite my iffy-ness with the Killers (I take issue for completely irrelevant moral reasons, so ignore my tendency to dislike perfectly innocuous music), there were a surprising amount of decent songs. So I have decided to try it myself. Anyone who has been paying attention to me at length (only person in question: my roommate) will know I've been going through a huge experimental/instrumental phase. So I'm finding all these great new obscure artists which makes me feel even MORE pretentious and cool which makes me a happy little clam. Because sometimes I am a clam. So yes. I am definitely a fan.

something I don't hate: Pandora

OKAY IT JUST PLAYED PORCUPINE TREE AND PINK FLOYD ON THE SAME STATION. OFFICIALLY AMAZING.