2014
11.02
11.02
2012
07.25
07.25
The second piece from my Harmonizing a Han Dynasty Urn triptych will appear in the Kentucky.7 Biennial from July 27th to September 9th.
More information is available here: http://www.lexingtonartleague.org/current.html
2012
05.20
05.20
Meine ekstatische Mutter
Die ekstatische Jungfrau Katharina Emmerich
Gabriel Von Max 1885
The first in my series of erasures.
2012
03.16
03.16
2012
02.14
02.14
I realized I never posted pictures of the pieces since they were framed:
2011
06.21
06.21
color removed, color readded:
eyck + hubble
2011
06.17
06.17
yet more tests in making paintings monochromatic
foggy night?
(I fucking hate Van Gogh, but am studying too much to have anything else to post, sorry)
2011
06.12
06.12
“negating everything good and pure: love of life and love of nature”
part of a malevich collaged with oil stained cement, water stained ceiling tiles, microscopy of urate crystals, and some random 18th century nature painting I forgot to record the name of from some museum
(basically all of the separate things I tried for some project I’m working on stuck together)
2011
06.10
06.10
a collage of photos from a party for a coworker who took a new job, and a tunnel at the office
2011
06.04
06.04
an entirely unnecessary reworking of leanne shapton’s original from here
2011
06.02
06.02
from a friend’s cell phone picture of a McDonald’s in Ringold, GA after the recent storms
2011
05.30
05.30
a botched print-out that I had on my wall in college
original post
2011
05.27
05.27
On April 3rd, 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained while leaving China on business.
While the claim is that he is being held because of tax evasion, very few people believe that is the real reason.
The series I was working on at the time (and am still working on) was digitally erasing things from other works, so that lead to progressively removing Weiwei from his ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn‘ triptych.
My reworkings were complete on the 16th of April.
China restricts information about its unpopular people, so even though in the rest of the world Ai Weiwei is China’s most famous artist, very few people within China have heard of him. After his arrest this was further curtailed, so that Internet searches for his name, behind the great firewall, do not produce results.
Instead of having my reworkings of his photographs printed as photos, I chose instead to have them turned into oil paints. For my other erasures, I had explored the ‘oil painting factory’ phenomenon in China, but mostly out of convenience. In this instance however, the idea of commissioning someone to paint something that they are not supposed to know about appealed to me. I had hoped through this process the artist might begin to wonder both ‘Who is this man?’ (especially as he is obviously Chinese) as well as ‘Where has he gone?’ (as we were all wondering).
I found an artist on a Chinese auction site who sells the service of painting reproductions of photos; most of the work shown was of families and pets. I hired her to do the work. She had never heard of Ai Weiwei. Though warned that there might be some risk in accepting this commission, she was excited for the opportunity and to have a foreign client.
The finished versions of the pieces were completed today, 5/27, and the images she sent me of them are below. They are the same size as the originals (148 × 121 cm each). Please join me in hoping that they make it out of China quickly and easily.
During the month it took her to repaint the works, she did come to know who Ai Weiwei is.
In the first version of the ‘finished’ paintings I received, it appeared that the third was half finished, the bricks at the top had some definition, and the rest of the painting was very rough. It was almost as if her finding out what she was repainting had occurred halfway through, and she had stopped and tried to represent it as finished. This impression was strengthened as the images were accompanied by a request for a letter stating that these were my ideas and that she was responsible for none of the content. I was happy to provide such a letter, and she was gracious enough to finish the work properly without complaint.
Even though we have a brief report of Ai Weiwei’s situation, he is still being detained almost entirely without contact, and nothing has been heard from his assistants at all. It is extremely important that we stand with them, and engage the issue in as many ways as we can. A China that erases people who are working only towards what is best for the Chinese people is in no one’s best interest, and they must not be allowed to do so.
Make sure to check out pictures of the framed version here.
Part of this is on display at the Kentucky.7 Biennial.
2011
04.29
04.29
they’re a little harder to see at this resolution, but I don’t really understand where all of the eyes came from
I do like this one though
2011
04.08
04.08
I was raised to believe martyring one’s self is noble and courageous and best.
I probably still believe this. Good job, we are all behind you.
2011
04.07
04.07
In the background of the so-called Jonestown Death Tape one can hear music, playing at quarter speed. As if it weren’t fucking creepy enough. Part of this music is the Delfonic’s ‘I’m Sorry’. If I’m making stupid remixes(?) of songs for some project I’m working on anyway, I had to do one of this:
If you want the rest of your day to be weird, I recommend the Death Tapes. Also recommended is this documentary.
2011
03.31
03.31
canv.as is going to eat the world, just as my cat wants to do
2011
03.31
03.31
I’ve been listening to too much witch house apparently
I’m also becoming addicted to camera noise (just in case you aren’t paying attention)
2011
01.20
01.20
I love my new macro lens, but I really don’t need to see some of the things it wants to show me:
2010
09.23
09.23
I hate that facebook exposes me to Internet memes that I’d completely miss otherwise.
Especially when its all marketing bullshit for terrible terrible things.
2010
09.21
09.21
One of my favorite thrift-store finds of all time is the copy of Final Exit that I found for $2.50.
I’ve never actually read the book, but what made my copy remarkable is that, at some point, a previous owner actually had read the book, and underlined the parts that they felt were most promising. For me, this raises this particular copy of the book from slightly interesting to being an almost poignant document of someone’s decision to end their life (or at least their debate about it). I do always wonder if it ended up in a pile of things to be delivered to charity after this person’s death, it seems somehow too personal for someone to want to donate on their own. As much as I’m intrigued by it, it isn’t something I need to carry around forever, so I scanned the interesting parts to archive for myself and thought I’d share them here.
Um, do keep in mind there were 2 corrected editions after this one, so it is probably worth the < $10 (and reading the entire thing) if you’re in a place where you need to take the advice the book gives.
2010
07.05
07.05
I’m glad I brought a camera to the 4th of July festivities, because fireworks don’t really interest me at all any longer.
2010
07.02
07.02
are all sparklers this terrible these days?
and thanks to Gui for the idea
[spoiler show=”.” hide=”hide”]
[/spoiler]
2010
06.21
06.21
OK, so maybe running on a treadmill in Vibram Five Fingers does not translate as directly to walking outside on asphalt as I assumed…
2010
06.16
06.16
As much as I like a lot of minimal wave, most of Xeno & Oaklander’s music has struck me as synth wankery.
I am by no means a purist, so the fact that they only use analog equipment and actually play it all themselves means absolutely nothing to me, so interviews such as this one come off as kind of pretentious and tiresome to me.
Given this, I don’t have any idea how I even ended up listening to their latest album, but I was shocked that it was terrific. Especially considering that my favorite song on the album was the one I couldn’t even make it all the way through on the interview video. I get the DIY aesthetic most of the time, but sometimes there certainly is something to be said for production.
Here’s video from the album release party, set to skip past the annoying nothing (and babble from the band):
2010
04.22
04.22
I’ve been listening to a lot of music on shuffle recently, and it ended up playing the Tim Exile song from the Warp 20 box set entitled “A Little Bit More”. I had avoided listening to that track, I haven’t listened to a whole lot of the box set, but I especially skipped Tim Exile’s track as I found “Nuisance Gabbaret Lounge” to mostly live up to its title. “A Little More” was really good though, so I eventually ended up tracking down his last album “Listening Tree”. How one goes from making uninspiring, if not unoriginal, breakcore to making something this great (at its best moments at least) is not something I easily understand.
(pardon the stupid video, the song’s good)
I’m really enjoying watching the gradual development of a new genre as the more experimental and minimal electronic music genres get vocalized and become ever so slightly pop. Matthew Dear’s “Asa Breed” would’ve been really incredible except for the slight issue of obnoxiously stupid lyrics. Feel free to suggest other music like this, if I missed this album for more than a year, I’m sure there are several others I’m missing.
2010
04.22
04.22
Last night I finished the first day of week 7 of the Couch to 5k plan, which means I officially made it further than I was last October when I stopped running when mother died. Yesterday apparently was also the six month anniversary of her death, which I wouldn’t’ve known if it weren’t also my brother’s birthday (he mentioned it at his birthday dinner).
Hopefully running becomes easier soon, the plan has one continually pushing further, hopefully when that stops it will become less unpleasant. My hip is still sort of bitchy…
2010
04.20
04.20
2010
04.16
04.16
Thursday I signed the acceptance letter of the job I hinted at in February’s last post, my official start date is the beginning of next month.
My initial intent was to make a post that is a laundry list of the things I am never going to have to do again, but when I start one it is harder to write than it seems like it should be. It is beginning to sink in slowly just how different my life is about to become, but the difficulty I have in making that list says to me that I really don’t understand yet. After years and years of being on-call most of the time, I have acclimated emotionally and mentally to being restricted in the things I can do after hours and on the weekends. I recognize that it is a fact that I could get in my car and spend the weekend somewhere else entirely, but I somehow don’t believe or comprehend that that fact is going to be true almost every weekend for the foreseeable future. Add to that the idea that I’ve spent almost the last 8 years of my life implementing and supporting computer systems of different sorts, and while I am certainly horrifically sick of that and ready to do something else, I don’t know that I can really imagine what doing something else full-time is going to be like. I don’t mind the travelling that I’ve done, but travelling 1/4th of my time, especially to the middle-of-nowhere places that my company owns hospitals in, might end up being less than ideally exciting. I’ll probably also net less money this year than I would’ve otherwise, but I thought I’d give this work-life balance thing that others seem to have a shot, at very least because it will give me a better chance at getting the other things done that I need to be doing.
Here’s an attempt at the list anyway, because I think the exercise is probably a good one for me:
• No more being responsible for fixing things that I am powerless to actually influence or fix.
• No more having to reverse engineer why a system is broken without documentation or support from the vendor (or anyone, really).
• No more endless fighting with vendors because their systems are broken and they know it is easier to blame us than to take responsibility.
• No more being woken up in the middle of the night over stupid shit (or any shit at all).
• No more having to rebuild servers because they are so old that they have rusted to the point where they’ve stopped working.
• No more having to explain to people that don’t really understand what a network is, that our network is functioning perfectly and they need to look elsewhere for their problems, and then having to repeat that to them the next week, and the next month, and forever.
• No more fucking printers ever again for any reason at all.
• No more endless parade of dying UPSs taking down entire sections of our network in the middle of the night.
• No more spending my nights and weekends fixing things that people were too incompetent to fix during daytime hours.
Apparently it was time for me to find something else to do, making this list is just activating my almost bottomless bitterness and resentment that I feel about many of these issues.
I will however, miss the total catastrophes, I always did love it best when all of the shit hit the fan at the same time (at least the ones that don’t involve issues with computer systems while patients are cut open on operating tables).
Here’s hoping.
2010
03.16
03.16
I lost the month of February.
Give me enough time and I might be able to piece the individual parts together and eventually tell you most of the things that happened during the month. Maybe.
The only things I clearly remember are the things that broke at work, starting with this, on our storage array on one of our sequel clusters:
That failure wouldn’t’ve been so bad if not for 2 things:
a) a 4 hour replacement contract doesn’t mean shit in the middle of a snowstorm
b) it would’ve been entirely avoided if my coworkers had bothered to google that error message when it first appeared
I had gotten the bluray of Amelie imported from Australia that evening, so I spent a lot of the night watching it (while waiting for DHL next-flight-out’s shipment of our replacement controller (DHL still exists in some fashion?!)). I remember being glad I wasn’t one of the people who were busy clearing the parking lot all night in said snowstorm, which means I wasn’t that bad off at the beginning of the month.
Unfortunately, at the end of that week vendors who came out to fix our flaky microwave connection to one of our buildings up the street killed the hell out of all of it. We managed to frankenstein something together that same weekend, but it never worked well.
When you give people an imperfect solution, they just see the faults in the solution. They don’t really understand what the alternatives would’ve been. It didn’t matter that we’d put in 20+ hours of work during the weekend so they’d have connectivity of some sort come Monday, it just mattered that their shit was slow. Granted it really was pretty bad (apparently the window coating or something interfered with the signal during the day, when we tested at night it was really decent), but the alternative was complete work stoppage.
All I really remember after that is many many hours of standing on roofs in the cold.
2010
02.24
02.24
I fucked up my hip somehow. I don’t know if I sat on it wrong, or slept on it wrong, or what, but it is amazingly painful to sit down, or stand back up, or lay down, or even walk most of the time. Falling asleep with my 25+ lb cat sleeping on my legs was probably a bad idea. It was also probably a bad idea to walk for 2 hours when it was already hurting a bit, its been a lot worse since then, but I really needed to do some sort of exercise as I feel completely disgusting, and a 50 degree night in February was too much to pass up.
One of my grandfather’s legs was a bit shorter than the other, and he was too vain to wear shoes that would compensate for this, so over the years his hip deteriorated more and more to the point where standing up was a few minute long affair that was obviously horrible for him. He also turned down a hip replacement as he was somehow continually convinced that miraculous healing was going to occur. I must admit that I’m somewhat convinced that my hip will soon be miraculously healed as well, but if its like this in another week or so, I’ll begin thinking about talking to some sort of doctor about it.
The idea of miraculous healing was a strange enough one to try to understand, especially as it spread generationally down from my grandfather, even without experiencing a little of what it was like to live with the constant pain he did. Understanding what it takes to maintain that belief through decades of continual pain is not something I can do.
2010
02.19
02.19
This is mostly a test to see if my new webhosting is working, but the cat I like less was underrepresented on this site, anyway.
2010
02.14
02.14
[spoiler show=”notes” hide=”hide”]I’m pretty disappointed in this. I got lackadaisical because I had done a pretest with one of the candles, and it had burned for half an hour, so I overestimated the time I had to mess with things, not taking into account the much smaller percentage of the candle that showed above the litter, and also the increased burn rate from the heat from all of them so close together. The fact that my camera was still set on SD from something else I had been working on the week before, and my complete lack of understanding how to prevent it from adjusting its light compensation also make it much crappier than it otherwise would’ve been. I’m out of candles and out of time, so this is what you get, presumably the end of me doing litter box themed projects.[/spoiler]
2010
02.04
02.04
It is put-up or shut-up time, and I’ve not managed to put-up yet.
Posting here is definitely not putting-up so I’ve not been doing that.
I hate everything.
Here is an old satellite photo of the town I grew up in, I pieced it together square by square from Microsoft’s maps in like 2001.
I never realized how essentially France-shaped it was.
2010
01.24
01.24
I hate Grabba Grabba Tape.
Their last album, “KURT KOBAYA Y G.R.O.X. MAN ODIA NIRVANA”, released in 2006, was freaking incredible. Distilling all of the energy and frenzy (synth-)punk has ever had into a two member band, one on keyboards, one on drums, both singing on vocoder (and only on vocoder). They are quite simply amazing. They long topped my last.fm charts, and only partially because their tracks are so short (their 11 (13 with intro & outro) album clocked in around 17 minutes). Their record label posted an update last April, saying they had completed recording their new album “LOS 8 TROVADORES DEL GOLDEN AXE” and that it would be released as soon as the band decided which label to sign a contract with, and that was the last it was heard of, until a new post last month saying that the album would be released approximately the same time as the end of the world. I’m tired of waiting and I’ve damned near worn out their old album. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I think this video speaks for itself:
I’ve long wanted to see them in concert, but must admit that desire is tempered by the disappointed review someone gave their live show on last.fm. Not that the show wasn’t good, but that travelling 3 hours to see a 15 minute show was disappointing. That it would take me 4 or 5x that to see them in any of the places I’ve seen them have shows so far does give me pause.
2010
01.23
01.23
I found my old Sega Genesis in a box while cleaning this afternoon. You’ll be surprised to learn that it doesn’t work, but what is more surprising is how long it did work after I removed it from its case, spray painted it black, and nailed it to my wall. I’m not really sure what specifically caused it to stop working after a couple of years in that state. I had tried to do the same thing to my SNES, but the case was terrifically more difficult to open and it died in the process. Some things will be harder to discard than others. And while this is worthless now, its current state makes it hard to come up with a spectacular way to destroy it further.
2010
01.22
01.22
This song was the second song in the DJ set I did in February. If nothing else went well that night, playing it loud in the middle of this town in which I live, a town which I hate, was enough to make it worthwhile.
I more and more wonder just how many of the issues I’m having with my life would be solved by living in a place that doesn’t suck.
I haven’t written much this week because I spent all of the last 3 day weekend + an additional day that I took off at the last minute fixing my infrastructure so I was able to edit and post the second in the object series. I ended up thinking I maybe should’ve just bought a mac rather than saving $1400 building my own. I’m going to install Snow Leopard on it soon and see how many of its residual issues that takes care of, I may still buy a real mac yet.
I had intended on posting the recording of my DJ set, but I think I lost it while trying to get my crap working this weekend =/
2010
01.15
01.15
2010
01.12
01.12
I have been a fan of Natalie “Tusia” Beridze since I first heard her album Annulé several years ago.
Her latest release, “Pending” draws more from Annulé than it does her subsequent works, Size and Tears and The Other (both of which are a bit inconsistent but outstanding at their best). I was less engaged with it originally than I expected to be, but once I got past my irrational hopes that it would contain more frantic piano pieces in the vein of Size and Tears’ CD1 (songs which I’ve had on repeat in my car for several months (a bad idea because they make it even harder for me to drive like a reasonable person)), it has grown on me to the point where it’s been on near constant repeat for the past month. Tracks “Don’t Know Why”, “Good Night Tokyo” and “Legotek” are especially excellent.
Also recommended are her releases under the Nate Fisher pseudonym, which range from (less recommended) club tracks to impressively complicated and hard techno (highly recommended) on such releases as donoteatonlsd. These tracks are often attributed to Thomas Brinkmann as several of them were released on his max.ernst label, and were attributed only to T.B., but it should be obvious that it was always her, especially considering the stylistic similarities in her later releases (especially her upcoming -or maybe already released but impossible to find- release “dunno”) and her obvious vocals on some of the tracks. My interpretation is that use of the Nate Fisher name was sort of a Wendy/Walter Carlos thing to get her music fairly judged in the still male-oriented world of dance music. If that’s true, hopefully her apparent abandonment of the name means she’s more confident of being taken as seriously as she should be.
I’m glad she’s moved away from using just TBA as a moniker, as hopefully now I’ll be able figure out where she’s playing to see her live at some point (sorting through lists like this is fairly much impossible), but can we settle on a name? I’ll likely continue renaming her tracks so they all are collected together in last.fm, but it seems that this release, her upcoming EP, and her soon-to-be released album on Monika are all under slightly different permutations. I understand its useful to use slightly different names when releasing music in slightly different genres, but the effort does get a bit tiring sometimes. Maybe a website to make these things easier to track down isn’t too much to ask for? I’m guessing the tracks on her Myspace page are from her upcoming release on Monika as they weren’t on this last one? I really don’t mean to complain too much, as her music is good enough that the time investment is worthwhile…
2010
01.08
01.08
Fuck New Year’s Resolutions.
Just because a new year has started, an arbitrary date has incremented, and you are forced to momentarily pay attention to the fact that your life is quickly circling the drain, you are going to pretend to yourself that you care enough about things that if you really cared about you’d have done already?
Really?
Fuck New Year’s Resolutions and fuck you for having them.
2010
01.06
01.06
I had purchased a 2TB enclosure to do offsite backups with at the beginning of last year, but kept putting off purchasing the new backup system to go with it, as the drives in my computers were largely full (my storage needs had reached the point that the solutions were $$$$). As is the rule, exactly a week before I was to finally purchase said solution (I had been waiting for Black Friday hard drive prices), the enclosure died, taking everything I’d done that year with it (although I did have most of the creative things I’d done in more than one place). If anyone should know better, I should know better, I managed the backups for a large-ish hospital for years, but I was cocky enough to think that things would keep working until I got the new solution in place. Take this as a warning. If you know better, you know better and need to back your stuff up. If you don’t know better:
IF YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR IMPORTANT DATA IN MORE THAN ONE PLACE IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE ITS INEVITABLE LOSS. IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF IF YOU WILL LOSE IT, BUT ONLY A QUESTION OF WHEN.
While some of the fancier enclosures run a version of linux, this particular enclosure, and many of the ones like it that contain two hard drives just use a JMicron (or similar) chipset to treat both of the drives as one drive, writing the first part of the partition on one of them and the last half on the second. This is called spanning or, occasionally, BIG mode. My first thought had been that mine had died because one of the two drives was dead, so was surprised when I ran dd_rescue (apparently the version with the _ is supposed to be better than the one without it) from the System Restore Linux live-cd and it managed to copy off images of both drives without any errors (although it did take a bit of effort to figure out that I had to boot with the restore64 option in order to mount volumes more than 2tb in space with ntfs-3g to be able to mount a volume large enough to dump the images to). The difficult part was what to do with those images. My initial attempts of copying the files together and then mounting them failed miserably. ntfsck ran for 150+ hours before I cancelled it. chkdsk under Windows also bombed spectacularly on this image (I used Mount Image Pro to mount the dd images under Windows as drives). I eventually was going to give up and try to just get what I could from the images, and was going to try to do that with Active@ File Recovery. When I loaded that program I was pleasantly surprised to see a RAID button, that allowed me to select drives and say they were spanned and what order they were initially in. After that I was able to tell it to copy out all of the old data, and even though that took forever, it did so successfully. It did have errors copying one trash MP3 I was embarrassed to even own, I don’t know if that was at the junction point or if the file system was somehow broken where it was, but everything else copied out gloriously.
The hardest point of the process was that I couldn’t find any resources of anyone who had successfully done anything like this, so here you go.
Additionally, I freaking love my DroboPro. I splurged on it because of the angst from my enclosure dying.
edit: Apparently I spoke a bit soon, as Active@ File Recovery doubles as an undelete program, some of the files that had at times existed in more than one place on the drive were messed up when copied off. Booooo. I still don’t know of anything else that would’ve worked. Putting the drives in an enclosure from a different chipset maker certainly is not a solution.
2010
01.05
01.05
I have never really managed role models or heroes that I’ve wanted to emulate. The closest I’ve come is wanting to emulate specific aspects of other people, most notably the more noble or interesting parts of my friends. What I do manage to do however, is to collect people that I most definitely do not want to be like, especially those who I can see myself becoming if I’m not careful.
Among the most notable of these is Valerie Solanas. Especially as what little she did release was great (especially her SCUM Manifesto), her life and actions are tragic. Her shooting of Andy Warhol was bad enough, that it effectively stopped both of them from releasing anything worthwhile again, essentially a murder-suicide in which no one died, is awful.
Things I try to learn from Valerie:
1) I shall acknowledge and respect the potential dangers of creative endeavors to my sanity
2) I will think big, because I may only get one shot at things
3) I will resist the appeal of shock for shock’s sake
4) Keep many copies of things
5) Be careful in business
I am unlikely to ever shoot anyone (though it is awfully fun to think about it sometimes), but there have been times that I could imagine ending up dying in poverty on the streets having accomplished something important and nothing at all.
This is video of her being escorted from court to jail. If you look closely, at times you can tell that the weight of her circumstances has hit her.
Here’s an old desktop background of mine I made from screengrabs from this:
2010
01.04
01.04
to keep me from going crazy
because we are not done
i would like to tell you
that nothing is finished
we did not say our last words
we will shout our despair
in front of misery
i want to give you the forces
i want to give you the forces
save save save save save save
2010
01.02
01.02
I figured it would be best to start off with a sacrifice, so we’ll begin with a lamb from an IKEA farm set.
I bought the set for the horse, so the rest of the animals were never really used except perhaps as cat toys, but this lamb did serve a short stint as the mascot for my ex-girlfriend’s dog when he was in super hero mode.
I’m not really a dog person.
HD is recommended (and is actually larger in resolution than the above player).
2009
12.24
12.24
I hadn’t planned on making a series of these, but I’m not going to turn down inspiration.
The first part of the set will be posted within a couple of days, it’s New Year’s themed.
2009
12.18
12.18
I went to the dermatologist this afternoon, after having my last-hurrah with college in the form of a German final I did too well on in the morning, to have what I thought was a small cyst removed.
It ended up being some terrifying Geiger alien, videodrome-esque thing that was about the size of a rat head. I think it was growing towards my spine. I almost managed to simultaneously pass out and vomit as they tugged and pulled and cut far deeper in my body than I am used to feeling. Whatever the strong unidentified emotion I had been having earlier today, after having finished college after so long, was, it has been replaced by constant pain and a dreary tiredness that won’t let me sleep.
It’s like one of these that got lost and didn’t quite make it to the base of my neck:
Tonight, I’ve also posted a post commemorating my mother’s death and have back dated it to the day she passed. You can see it here.
Pictures of the gore removed from my back after the break.
2009
12.15
12.15
I graduate from college in 60 hours.
I have never been so humiliated.
edit, I guess its official now:
ALL REQUIREMENTS LISTED BELOW HAVE BEEN MET
only took me half my life…
2009
11.09
11.09
At risk of embarrassing myself, here’s my thesis.
Yes, this is what passes for an undergraduate research paper these days.
And yes, I know I cited everything incorrectly, doing it properly takes too long.
2009
10.28
10.28
Forgive the meaningless post, its keeping me distracted while I finish this. A lot has happened recently, and once I finish this I’ll have space to write about it.
This is strangely compelling to me from an information design standpoint in a completely unspecified and useless manner, though.
Progress on my thesis due this weekend, when the white is full, I’m done.
2009
10.21
10.21
May 26, 1946 – October 21, 2009
I love you and I’ll be too mad at you forever to love you.
You were the best and worst mother anyone could ever have.
I miss you and I’m glad you’re dead.
2009
10.04
10.04
I’ve rarely wanted to do anything as much as I wanted to go sit in an airport while wearing a t-shirt that said “TERRORIST’ on Sepetember 12, 2001.
I was concerned for the people I knew that worked in the area of the attack, but how people were reacting 700 miles away, where I lived was just absurd. No one cares about this crap city, no one is going to attack it, and yet people were all freaked out, pretending that people cared enough about our almost a skyscraper to fly things into it. Calling the police in terror because of dropped flour bags in Walmart parking lots.
Really the only thing that stopped me was being really poor then. I wasn’t really fond of the idea of rotting in jail and knew I couldn’t afford bail. Since then, many people have said that it’s probably for the best that I didn’t do this, I remain unconvinced.
That isn’t me, I stole the source picture for from here. This may be a good example of a shortcoming of CC licensing.
2009
10.02
10.02
I am currently procrastinating writing my thesis.
To accomplish this, I have been sorting through boxes I’ve never unpacked, and tonight I took a crack at the lyrics for the song pulp baby by the systematics.
2009
09.07
09.07
My mother has been in the hospital twice in as many weeks, when she went in for the last stay things looked fairly bad. Her cancer has progressed to the point where a lot of fluid is building up on her abdomen, and ended up causing her to be vomiting pretty continually and unable to eat consistently for more than a month. They’ve put a shunt in her so she can drain the fluid herself, and she’s gradually improving, but after vomiting for a month it is hard to get back in the swing of eating normally. She’s able to keep some food down now, but she’s still having some trouble, especially at night.
The first thing she was able to keep down was Dean’s Country Fresh Orange Pops:
She’d started eating almost entirely organic and almost entirely abstaining from sugar after her initial surgery, so the fact that that it was an amalgam of discount frozen chemicals that ended up helping her through, and especially the fact that she came to love them, is telling. I’ve tried to track down somewhere to buy them retail, with the help of friends, but have not had any luck so far.
The first surgery had been hard, especially as it had occurred only a few days after she was diagnosed. (They ended up removing something like 6 lbs. of tissue from her, without anesthetic as she ‘didn’t want to feel weird’). But after she had ended up making what seemed to be an almost complete recovery and a complete relapse, it became kind of normal, and easier.
2009
08.29
08.29
I tried to give this album a chance, but couldn’t make myself interested.
The warp page had a couple of videos posted so I ended up playing them both at the same time, and it was better.
Here are all of them at the same time.
Enjoy.
I tried to give this album a chance, but couldn’t make myself interested.
The warp page had a couple of videos posted so I ended up playing them both at the same time, and it was better.
Here are all of them at the same time.
Enjoy.
2009
08.13
08.13
I feel like I’m not being productive, but its just the combination of withdrawal from the 6 weeks of class everyday I just finished and accomplishing things for others instead of the things I feel I need to be doing. I still feel like this, however:
If that’s too depressing, here’s my favorite song from when I was 8:
2009
08.12
08.12
I love the old picture of me.
It makes me look like I’ll rule the world with an iron-fist and a sneer.
It is from good ol’ http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk//Transformer/index.html of course.
The other is from http://v-room.net/g/daijin/jojoface1.html, albeit with pupils/background/shadow modified.
2009
08.10
08.10
Honestly, this blog is not going to be me posting links to youtube videos. There’s more and better coming soon, really.
I am completely obliterated.
I have a website that I need to finish tonight, as I have one to do tomorrow, and they both need to be live Wednesday.
So, of course, I’m too tired to do either of those and instead I’m endlessly editing old posts and changing video sizes and categories to try to silence the part of me that is uncomfortable with not accomplishing things.
I don’t actually make websites.
2009
07.20
07.20
I am a different person in different places.
I can make new places.
I can make new places to be a new person in.
2009
07.19
07.19
I am living up to my internet potential.
These posters were all over Munich when I was there last summer, but when we tried to go to the exhibit they were closed, and the plans I had to steal one of them were never able to be put into action.
I have finally gotten around to looking for its source.
“Do you have any pointers on how to convince a cat to wear clothes?
Always think about the cat’s personality beforehand, and don’t force the costumes upon them. Try to do it when they’re in a good mood, and say encouraging words to them. Cats love to be complimented. You can’t be half-assed about it either. You’ve got to be like, “OH MY GOD, you are so CUTE, you’re the best cat EVER!!” and they will actually feel it and feel better about wearing the clothes. Compliment your cat, and they will definitely get better at wearing clothes.”
That’s a good life strategy if I’ve ever heard one.
by David Austin
