Moldpotion

I've returned from the grave and updated my LiveJournal.

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EDIT: Wow, you can't see shit in this post. But that's Regina Spektor. And look how fast her left arm's moving!

I read the phrase "mouse support," and just at that moment, I saw a small dark thing scurry across my living room floor past the fireplace. I didn't think it could truly be THAT--for when is life ever so eloquent? But the scurrying thing turned around and again scurried past the fireplace, and it paused just long enough for me to think just hard enough, and then it retraced its initial beeline to some place behind the couch. And surely now I'm sure that it was a mouse (the first I've ever seen in my house).

awful/awesome/a shared root not by chance but by necessity
[period]

I'm writing this on my phone while sitting on a toilet at a house full of psychonauts/psycho-nots who are experiencing what it is *to*see*eye* to eye (the asterisks demarcate a hypersecret code [I'm not just being cheesy for the sake of being cheesy (this time)]), and I'm tripping ballz on Ubuntu, which is at this point not as desirable to me as it once was because it looks so easy with that streamlined GUI--AHHHH WHY AM I BLOGGING RIGHT NOW?!!!!!????!!!!!!!!

If I had the entrepreneurial spirit, I'd design a large, back-friendly, compartmentalized backpack for materialistic object-hoarders (à la yours truly) and call it the Packrat.

I wish there were some simple, efficient, and universal way to ask a question and get an answer. Something like a toll-free international phone number or a platform-independent key combination that opens a question input box and automatically connects you to a service that will answer it. Or a handheld question-asking and answer-receiving device that lets you click a button to broadcast your question and maybe click a few more buttons if you want to attach a file. Maybe, way in the future (or in the world of "Pete & Pete"), you could do it all through a plate in your head.

At bare minimum, an implementation of my Q&A fantasy would eliminate the following ass-pains:
•Usernames
•Passwords
•Confirmation e-mails
•Trying to copy case-sensitive character strings over and over again because you can't tell the difference between a lysergically acidic •M" and a tangled three-way among two "I"s and a "V"
•Scrolling through tons of ads and irrelevant Google search results
•Scrolling through Yahoo! "answers" submitted by 14-year-olds who would never think to use a period except as a birth control method
•"Expert" articles that tell you to contact your local congressman/librarian/doctor/career center/phone book and, if you want even more information, to visit some <a href="dead-Geocities-site-that's-probably-more-useful-now-than-when-it-was-online">link</a>
•Actual expert articles that you have to download as PDF documents and then either delete or complete a master's program in order to understand
•Getting sucked into the vortex of Wikipedia
•Posting on a message board and waiting four days for a response that (A) tells you to post on a different message board, (B) tells you that if you don't know [something you don't know], you shouldn't even be trying to do [something you want to know how to do], (C) provides a link to a previous thread that is vaguely related to your question, and/or (D) provides a "Let Me Google That For You" link
•Being put on hold and listening to elevator music spliced with painfully slow, redundant recordings of: "Please stay on the line"; "Your call is very important to us"; "If you know your party's extension..."; "DID YOU KNOW?!?--that you can get fifty percent off your next purchase if..."; "We're sorry--the number you have entered is invalid. Goodbye."

A better implementation of my Q&A fantasy would not involve a web browser at all, and it would not involve menus in quantities greater than 1.

In a month from now, I'll be 24. What. The. Fuck (?). Didn't I just turn 21? What the hell have I been doing for the past three years?

The thread I pasted below elicits amusement (in me) in upper moderate degrees, occasionally approaching strong degrees. It can also be found at this link.

---

A certain individual talked me into posting on here today. I've wanted to, but my life's been turning into my life as of late. I shan't devote this post to complaining about the stress I'm under from being in publishing school. Rather, I'll post some stuff I did in the 3-D ray-tracing program POV-Ray. These are abstract experiments, mostly sans intention; although the program can be used to make super-realistic images like these, I'm just starting to learn the scripting language and can't do much with it yet. (Zeiki, I think you'd love this program—and it's open source!)


( More under this cut… )

It's 70° in Portland right now. I've exchanged my thermal underwear for sunglasses. I'm making art on my porch and pretending I don't have tons of homework due tomorrow.* Hello, world!

*Sometime over the past few months, grad school really started feeling like grad school. My fall quarter workload was smaller than I'd expected—smaller than the undergrad art major workload I'd gotten used to— and I had enough free time to do all sorts of things outside of school. Now I don't have very much free time, so I stick things in where they don't fit. This results in a nearly constant state of tension that varies only in its shifts from one extreme to another: from perfectionist, tunnel-brain hyperfocusing on one (usually inconsequential) activity† to the sudden, frazzled recognition of all my duties and assignments as one filthy, sticky, tangled wad, each unpleasant component indistinguishable from the others but for minor color variations on the vomit-green-to-shit-brown spectrum; from elated coffee-drinking at 3 p.m., when the day seems barely legal,‡ to frantic coffee-drinking at the foreboding hour of 8 p.m. when the sun waves bye-bye and I realize I've done nothing but drink coffee for five hours; from eagerness to start my next awesome project to dreading its labor-intensive completion.

This was a little experiment I did with a free audio editing program, "Heartbeats" by the Knife, and a free bioterrorism DVD called "The Decontamination of Children." I did this instead of writing a paper. You might have to click on the little icon thingie to make the embedded music player load.

Hi, LiveJournal world! It's been a while since I used this thing. What I want to announce right now is that I have a new hobby. Many of you know about it already because I have had tons of pamphlets and posters sent to your houses, and you may or may not have gotten pissed off about it. Anyway, the new hobby is finding and ordering free government publications (and sometimes other random free things), mostly with educational and/or technical themes.

Some of the free stuff I've gotten—such as the disease fact sheets provided by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases—is interesting to read. Other stuff is just awesomely cheesy, like these:

(Poster from CDC catalog)


(Bumper sticker from Florida HSMV)



(Tuberculosis posters from DTBE)

Those examples are only, like, 2% of the goodness I have so far discovered. I am making stuff out of them. I will probably post again on this topic in the near future!

I think they're in my bed.
-Here we are! they shout almost inaudibly with what sounds like a great effort to be audible.
-I knew it! I whisper. Now what?
- .
-What was that?
- . . .
-Louder, please.
-
-?
-
I'm not sure they're in my bed anymore. If by the time my wakeup alarm goes off my thoughts are still uninf(l)ected, then I will know that the words have all perished. Gone to the compost pile. Gone to the      ▒▓           ╲


[But so what if I sleep without a word?/(—here comes a rhyme—)/I've still got a blob in my bed named Bird.]