You can't make this stuff up

brenna: ...celeste i have the dumbest trivia request
alessandriana: ok
brenna: picture a guy singing a blues song
brenna: one line at a time with the little harmonica bits in between
alessandriana: k
alessandriana: k
brenna: i want to make an http://instantrimshot.com/ type thing with that harmonica sound
brenna: but i can't find a good example of it - just general harmonica lessons
alessandriana: yeah
alessandriana: --and?
brenna: does it perhaps have a name that would make these searches easier?
brenna: or do you know of one of those on youtube or something that i could clip it from?
alessandriana: ummm
alessandriana: not off the top of my head
brenna: dang
alessandriana: let me do some searching

[...]

alessandriana: this isn't what you mean by the harmonica bit, right?
alessandriana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFRMBWgyH-M
brenna: not quite, but who cares
alessandriana: lol
brenna: *enjoys* :3
alessandriana: are you talking about the one where they just play one-- not one note, but not changing pitch or anything?
brenna: well they do change pitch, but um
brenna: ooof >_>;
alessandriana: lol
alessandriana: yeah
alessandriana: difficult to describe
brenna: YOU KNOW, THAT THING
brenna: "WELL I WOKE UP THIS MORNIN-" *WREUW WRAAAEEW WREW WRUOOR*
alessandriana: lol
brenna: "AND I [DID SOMETHIN ELSE]"
alessandriana: hmm
alessandriana: well, this prolly isn't it, but:
alessandriana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUGXOxs6p0&feature=related
brenna: ...that is a a piano
alessandriana: lol, skip forward a bit
brenna: oh

Strangely, Mercury did not attempt to join me on the computer even once during this exercise. Hmm.

Messaged by a random (Florida-dwelling) OKCupid user out of the blue:

( can I ask you for advice? :D )

The last two posts in a row I was GOING to make would have been semi-epic minicomics so obviously I never finished them because I also couldn't bring myself to do them as text instead.

As to the last one, at least, LOOK EVERYBODY I'M ON THE INTERNETS

LOOK LOOK I'm the one on the right, because I was at this party and it was greeeeeeeat. :D Amazingly, for the first time ever, I MADE FRIENDS AND HAD FUN at an event that was mostly about free drinks and where I knew no one! Gooooooo me

---

TODAY, I cleaned up the apartment finally, and when I went outside to throw out the trash I found a I had a doormat! It was not there when I went to bed last night. In fact, I have never seen it anywhere before. So I guess someone was getting rid of theirs in a non-wasteful way, or someone sneaky thought I looked like I could use one, or something. I don't know.

Also, today I might get my very first cat! Maybe! I know they're supposed to be independent, but are they "amuse themselves indoors while I work full time" independent? WE SHALL MAY SEE.

My goodness me, I have been lazy about making this post. I had a photo of a receipt I got with an item abbreviated as "LOL BUTTER," but it's not really worth posting, so I won't after all. Just a few things, then, rather than try to remember all the stuff I've wanted to post about since last time:

1. Someone dropped a link to Babbitt on Google Books a couple of weeks ago, and I got really absorbed in reading it (until I left it to go do something else and forgot to pick it back up again ever). I identified with it much more strongly than I expected to, which is kind of embarrassing since it's the story of a shallow middle-aged man with no self-awareness who's kind of a mundanely terrible person. Especially the way it describes mental and emotional states being entirely dependent on on whatever is going on at the time with apparently no relation to any larger overall self, or even to anything from five minutes ago. I feel exactly like that a fair amount of the time - like my mind has gone from pet to stray. I'm starting to wonder how much of my sense-of-purposefulness boost over the holidays was actual progress, and how much was just me enjoying the fact that I was on break for a while, because it's kind of leaving me again now that I'm back at work.

ON A DIFFERENT NOTE

2. Microsoft Courier Microsoft Courier Microsoft Courier! I will own this thing, and not the iPad because it sucks, and it will belong to me and we will be best friends, and I will call it Nicole, because it will be my magical foldy minicomputer that goes everywhere with me and does everything.

3. Thinking of changing my journal font to this; y/n? Still just a little bit too lazy to figure out exactly how to do that, though.

4. I've just finished a batch of sugar cookies with delicious icing and toppings and stuff, and I may have to make another one. They're just the pre-made cookies that come in a tube, but at least I make the icing myself! I have a bunch of different flavors of extract in my pantry now (almond, mint, orange, lemon, raspberry, strawberry...), and candy sprinkles and colored-sugar sprinkles and chocolate chips and coconut shavings and pecans, and I discovered it's much easier to not eat them all at once if you fancy them up one at a time as you eat them, and not all in advance. And orange icing and coconut shavings taste really good together.

5. A couple of recent YouTube favorites for you:
Feather Starfish Swimming <- SO PRETTY; I may yet get over my fear of marine life before I die
and
The Royal Nightmare <- If you see only one ingenious and creepy short animation that has won awards at at least 10 film festivals worldwide this year, make it this one.

FIRST, out of chronological order: renshai! Aaaaaaaa! I checked my mailbox the other night!

Your doodly little copper flower thing went on my keyring immediately. And I never decorate my keyrings.



Thank you vurry much I loff you c'mere. *hug*

NOW THEN.
My Christmas 2009 was a Christmas that will be passed down in legends. I spent it with the immediate family and no one else, and it lasted three days. I ate delicious foods and relaxed and was happy.

( longcut is loooooooooong )

Today, Archibald Edmund Binns wonders: Is it a grand gesture to anonymously give a woman I think is beautiful a banjo? A long thread results.

Interneeeeetttt, come here so I can give you many hugs.

So I'd like to be able to say I went on a great quest of self discovery or an awesome long vacation or something, but really I just fell off the Internet for awhile. During that time, some things happened:

n) My brother donated his Katamari games to me after admitting to himself that he will never buy another PS2 to play them on. And I fell in love with this song. It made me wonder what kind of backstage dealings, if any, are involved in getting your song placed in REALLY HARD LEVELS and benefiting from the increased exposure of a stage people have to play LIKE FIFTY TIMES to pass.

But the music is good!

Now I'm finally trying out Okami (I KNOW, I NEVER PLAYED OKAMI), and... what? What was this hype for? This game is Zelda in every respect, except that the decisions about where its difficulties should lie are wrong instead of right. Thanks, but I think I'll just play Zelda. Yes, it is very pretty, but my failure to love almost anything else about it made me finally notice I'm so familiar with running-around-games in general that I hardly see them as visuals anymore (a very helpful mode that I still can't get into with rhythm games)-- and even then, some people manage to do the 2d drawing effect without putting all the decorative field objects in camera-synchronous orbit. I may return it and get 3 of my 15 dollars back.

c) I am participating in MetaFilter's Mix CD Swap this year! I probably need to commit to a track list pretty dang soon, but the second half flows together so much better than the first half, and there's only one song with any words in it and I don't know if it's too jarring when you're halfway through the CD and someone suddenly starts singing, and these are the things that bother me :< ....So the booklet and packaging aren't finished either because of this, and yeah I have many woes, I guess.

c.2) Speaking of MetaFilter, I also attended the tenth anniversary party! I had a fun time despite my handicap of being completely unknown because I am a relentless lurker, and there was surprise belly dancing, and themed cake, and afterwards bardom* which I bailed on after about 20 minutes because that is how I roll, and the promise of a pool party which has not yet materialized and I need to stop failing at keeping in touch with the people I met!

The next totally awesome thing I will be attending is Dr. Sketchy's burlesque life drawing EXTRAVAGANZA, where I suspect I will end up being all "mm, fascinating, yezz, *drawdrawdrawmissthepoint*"-- but maybe not! And, hey, either way.

f) My old Mac died on Monday (the 3rd). I got it in 2003 to go to college with... I never named it. There just wasn't a name there, that I could find. But I loved it, until I kind of started to hate it, but I still loved it, just differently, like a difficult grandmother. I choked it with chat logs from IRC-- I know I should stop thinking of them as my boys since I haven't spoken to them in years, but I just can't-- and roleplays where I was a well-adjusted average human with no powers or anything-- I don't roleplay anymore, but if I did I can't imagine ever doing it any other way-- and ill-gotten cool things, as I learned how, and photos I took, exactly one of which I still think is impressive, and interesting free software to assist in hobbies I never developed. I'd sort of been willing it to go on and get out of my life for a while, with its no DVD burner and USB 1.0 (!) and less than 1GB of memory and no working left Shift key and only 15GB of empty hard drive space. But I'm not sure I'd even know how to process it if it turned out to be unrecoverable. I've made great progress this last year or so in letting things go and not fetishizing my personal history, but this I want to keep. My ever-cluttered desktop, the why-didn't-I-think-of-this-sooner Things To Put Somewhere folder, torrents in plain sight and stupidly highlighted in bright green-- even the Date Added metadata in iTunes, telling me when I started liking what. I must continue to have it.

r) Ugh, Calabash! Do something


*Hello?-- OH that's right I turned off spell checker on my laptop Firefox.

I just went downstairs and discovered that apparently, I left my front door standing open all night??...

Nothing seems to have happened! Not even crawly animals. I guess it got so un-air-conditioned in here it wasn't all that appealing. But yeah, that is really unlike me, and... uh.

BLARGH BLARGHITY BLARGH I need a real picture to draw :|

This beautiful little bug is now rooming with me! I assume that's okay. I don't actually know what it is. It's the size of a popcorn kernel. It'll watch over me while I sleep and protect me, right?

I'm not normally the international-news type, but yesterday I was poking around the Big Picture blog and looked through this post on the Iranian presidential election. It was full of lovely pictures of people with ribbons and flags and signs and things (you should really go look). There were only six comments at the time, with a note that the election results would come out the next day, so I had to check this morning to see how it turned out.

It turned out that Ahmadinejad was declared the winner via many levels of insultingly obvious, over-the-top fraud. The results came in too fast for the tens of millions of paper ballots to have been counted at all, bypassed the mandatory waiting period for checking the figures before the officially-official announcement, and were not consistent with any prior polls or demographics or statistics or logic of any kind. The government came prepared for the massive crying of shenanigans by cutting off all text messaging service before the results were even announced (with phone lines and most of the internet soon to follow), house-arresting the main challengers immediately afterward for no reason, and meeting the protesters with police violence.

Apparently, hopes had been much higher for this election than normal. Whereas once the streets might have been merely loud, this time they are shut down and on fire. Literal shouting from the rooftops, as encouraged by the last round of Twitter messages before it was blocked altogether, continued well past midnight local time. People who know these things say the last public outcry of this magnitude was during Iran's actual revolution.

Overall liveblogs/roundups:
The Lede (NYT)

Andrew Sullivan collects, filters, and comments

Tehran Bureau - tons of articles

Individual items of note:
Look at this graph. No, ignore it. No, look at it. No, don't. And so on.

Beatings.

Riots.

Perspective.

I have only ever spent one hour of my life seriously thinking my government was all a giant lie that I would never get to participate in in any honest, meaningful way. It was a more awful feeling than I would have believed I could have about politics, and one of the most memorably terrible hours of my life. But then I learned some more information I had been missing, and it was over. I can't imagine what today has been like for the people of Iran, and I'm scared for them.