Hola! Hello! Hüllo! How sweetly we humans answer our telephones. Sadly for me this week, I have not had a chance to greet anyone so buoyantly, as my cell phone service is kaput due to storm-ravaged towers in my area. Thankfully, I have a never-used landline that came with my cable internet (along with a cheaper rate), so I was able to call and inquire, complain, and get a $25 refund. Woot! Jokes on them, because you know what? I bet zero souls tried calling or texting me all week, so it really wasn't much of an inconvenience. Score! Or not...?
Google Image search term: "I finally used my landline." Pages deep for a cat to appear: 6 Location of first cat:www.girlvtheworld.com
OK, the ridiculousness of this image (and yes, I know it's Photoshopped, but it's decent and they at least transposed real animals into the scene/costumes), made me wanna include this ridiculous song and video. Enjoy (and I'm sorry)!
Yo yo yo! I apologize to my readers (or more likely, my sole reader...hi there, Jacob!) for not having posted a Caturday the past two weeks. Per usual, summer has been busy as a hell. Last weekend there was both Pitchfork Music Fest and the ridiculously fun out-of-town wedding with the party limo bus that hauled all our carless butts down to Indiana where we cityfolk got reunited with our rural side via fireflies, pond-dwelling toads, a giant harvest moon, numerous stars, a local sheriff and a one-room bathroom with two side-by-side toilets.
The weekend before was a day-long birthday party at the beach where my ill-prepared self garnered a solid, and if I do say so myself, deep, sexy tan atop my head, ears and shoulders. Va-va-voom!
This weekend I've got my work summer picnic, where I'm going to do my best to hide my drinking abilities. (Note to self: Talk with your eyes open at all times!)
Hope you're having just as much fun, ciao!
Google Image search term: Unlazy days of summer Pages deep for a cat to appear: 5 Location of first cat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbv/3924086097/
Tonight I was out redeeming Groupons/YouSwoops like a maniac, and while digging though my wallet at Erehwon, the outdoorsy older man who rang me up exclaimed, "You have nice nails!" What a bizarre thing to notice. But, people do notice when I'm too lazy to cut my fast-growing talons.
When I was a 6th grader in middle school, this 8th grade girl who I didn't know stopped me on my way into the library and said, "You're that girl who whistles all the time and has really long nails." Then she told me my (brand new) boots were ugly. I wasn't really aware I whistled all the time, but after she pointed it out I frequently caught myself doing it. Oops. And the nails...well, I stopped thinking my ability to quickly grow long, white-tipped nails was a good thing, and tried not to be the girl with the long nails who whistled. Unconsciously whistling all the time is just damn weird, and long nails are kind of nasty and annoying. Ever been at the grocery store or something where your check-out clerk has freakishly long acrylic nails shellacked with all kinds of baubles and paint, and her nails are all like, "Clickity clack click" on the register while she attempts to use them as fingertips? That wigs me out. Imagine the crud that gets lodged under them. Dirty fingernails...yuck.
Today I'm going to a Brewer's game in Milwaukee, and I'm really stoked that it's not like 50 degrees and raining because it means that the fancy closing roof at Miller Park won't be closed! Woot for going to a baseball game that doesn't feel like it's in a huge fucking gym! I also really hope that I score one of these rad Miller Park hats and a stuffed beer stein, too.
Have you ever wanted to see taut, bulbous breasts get sprayed with massive amounts of milk while you're singing along to your favorite songs in your own private karaoke party room? Well if so, I know just the place for you! A friend made the awesome decision to celebrate his birthday at a local Korean karaoke joint that, among other many wonderful things, serves free bacon with a purchase of two pitchers of beer, and your choice of background scenes to accompany your karaoke words. Obviously we chose the soft core channel. Imagine our delight when we discovered that not only do they feature gorgeous, melon-balled tan female specimens, but you also get to see your greatest fantasies come true in the form of various liquid and/or viscous foodstuffs being poured/sprayed on these natural beauties. Oh yeah! However, I was sad to see that the management didn't have the insight to see how a song such as Pour Some Sugar on Me would round out this evening almost as spectacularly as if they had featured the two lovely specimens above.
OK, so this is a drawing I made illustrating the Caturday search term. See, I heard about Google's new image searching capabilities where you search using a picture instead of words, and I got very excited and created this masterpiece (and yes, I do have an art degree, as you probably presumed). Sadly, when I searched the web with this pic, I only got about 12 images returned, and they were all boring black-and-white logos and stuff. So, until I conjure up another way to utilize this new feature, I'm not going to. However, I feel great art should never go to waste, hence my decision to share this tour de force of illustration.
Today for brunch I finally ate the legendary dish of waffles smothered in butter, topped with fried chicken, and flooded with syrup (with a bonus of candied bacon on top). Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm, chicken 'n waffles, you are delicious! It's the perfect meal for that time in between breakfast and lunch, when you could have lunch, or breakfast, but dammit, you just can't decide! Even better? Going to Ribfest afterwards. Talk about gluttony! I abstained from the ribs though, and instead, opted for dessert of homemade hand-scooped chocolate Guinness ice cream. Yup, it was awesome.
Google Image search term: Chicken n waffles Pages deep for a cat to appear: 5 Location of first cat:http://forums.nasioc.com
I ran 10 miles today, for the first time ever. If you would have told my middle school self that I'd ever run 10 miles, I would have figured you for crazy and schlepped my squishy self off to the corner to continue my dedicated work on reading that huge pile of Christopher Pike books waiting for me at the library. Shit, if you told my five-years-ago self this I still would have figured you for crazy and schlepped my squishy self off to get shitfaced, with a post-night-out meal of gigantic carne asada super burrito. Not to knock getting shitfaced. That's still a perfectly viable entertainment option. Post-drink gigantic carne asada burritos, though? Ever try to run your hangover out with a bigass half-digested burrito in your stomach?! Me either. My current self likes to avoid shitting her pants while on post-drinking, hangover-purging runs.
Google Image search term: "10 miles, I ran" Pages deep for a cat to appear: 3 Location of first cat:hungryhealthyhappy.wordpress.com/
HOLY SHIT YOU'RE STILL HERE?! Me too. Let the good times roll. I was secretly hoping that the rapture would happen, leaving the whole world to the party people so we could get on with the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll in peace. Surprise surprise, it was a whole lotta la de da bullshit.
Tonight I'm going to a Guilty Pleasures Party and I can't wait. My contribution will be nacho cheese (the best non-food food there is) with chips, and Oreos. Oreos rule. If I get a package, I can't help but eat like at least like 15. Mmmm. But now I must go b/c I need to compile a Guilty Pleasures music playlist. Britney Spears, Bee Gees and Eminem, it's your time to shine!
The other day I opened an SVG file with Adobe Illustrator, and I rather enjoyed the amusing error message I received. So much so that it's this week's Caturday. Mr. Grumpy above looks as though he would actually have been a possible contender in a match against my old crazy bitch cat (pictured below, in fine form). Sadly, we'll never know.
Google Image search term: "Clipping will be lost on roundtrip to Tiny" Pages deep for a cat to appear: Four Location of first cat:oldblackcatboo.blogspot.com
I was pretty stoked today to go see the new Werner Herzog film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And then about 5 minutes into it I became very unstoked. 3-D movie + non-professional camera equipment + sweeping camera movements + bright lights in dark cave = holy shit I'm completely nauseous. My love of Herzog and the $15 ticket price enabled me to make it through the entire 1.5 hour film without hurling. And then afterwards...let's just say the second I saw the toilet, I couldn't help myself.
I recommend the movie, but if I were you, I'd opt for the non-3-D version.
As a graphic designer, my job often means fitting groups of text, images and data together clearly, concisely and on deadline. Sometimes I'm confronted with a finite blank page that's supposed to contain far too much data in a wide range of sizes and shapes that a writer (AKA those who cannot visualize information spatially) throws my way. In these instances, I stretch my arms, crack my knuckles, and totally Tetris that shit. And then, because I'm annoying like that, I make anyone in viewing distance look at and be wowed by how fucking Tetris-ized it is.
Well, turns out I'm not the only one who likes to think of things in terms of Tetris. The "Tetris Effect" occurs when people spend so much time doing something that it begins to dominate their thoughts, mental imagery and dreams. In the case of Tetris, it's best described by Australian Garth Kidd in 1996, in one of the first references to the term. He says,
"There's a local (Adelaide, Australia) nickname for the long-term effects of immersion games or simulations -- it's the 'Tetris Effect.' Many people, after playing Tetris for more than an hour straight, report being plagued by after-images of the game for up to days afterwards, an ability to play the game in their head, and a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'."
I think this video might explain it even better.
Later, in 2000, scientist Robert Stickgold utilized Tetris to conduct a study researching how dreams affect learning. The study's subjects were 12 who never played the game, 10 who logged between 50 and 500 hours of play, and five amnesiacs with no short-term memory due to damage in their brain's hippocampus region. All were required to play Tetris for a prescribed amount of time over the course of three days. Of the 27 subjects, 63% (17) reported dreams of falling shapes that moved to fit together, with most of the dreams occurring after the second day of play. The novices reported more Tetris dreams than the experts did, and Stickgold hypothesized that it was because the brain reviewed the material more extensively in those who were learning versus those who weren't.
The amnesiacs failed to recall the game from one day to the next and had to be re-taught, although it was reported that with no instruction they correctly placed their fingers on the keyboard keys required for play on the days after their first training session. It was assumed that since the amnesiacs couldn't recall recent daily episodic events (such as playing a video game), their dreams wouldn't include references to recent events, including playing Tetris. Nonetheless, the amnesiacs also reported dreams of Tetris. And here we have some good old Freudian psychotherapy...our unconscious activities, driven by memory, guide our conscious behavior.
Virus, a poem by Neil Gaiman for Richard Barrett's 1987 book Digital Dreams, describes the phenomenon quite well.
Tetris Effect reminds me of the MarioKart Effect. I experienced this in college with my hippie roommate Jeff. We became utterly obsessed with MarioKart and played it constantly. We couldn't drive or walk anywhere without feeling as if we were zooming around like Toad on Rainbow Road, wishing we could toss out banana peels for those annoyingly slow or erratic people in our way. Life was MarioKart! It was grand. Until his Nintendo 64 broke and he had to send it in for repairs. We practically tore our hair out until I remembered that I had a credit card and Blockbuster rented that shit out by the week. Score! And just like that, we were back to skipping the Zoology class we decided to take together so as to encourage each other to go to class. "I'm the best!"
You know you had a raucous night when you pry open your bleary and mascara-smeared eyes to find yourself on your couch with a half-eaten burrito on the coffee table, your shoes covered in mud, your ears ringing and head pounding, and a text message from your drinking companion that says "Remember when you got held upside down?" Ahh yes, now that you mention it I do remember that! Good times like this are bound to happen when cheap happy hour martinis and mojitos turn into a rock show with cheap beer which turns into a detour at an art gallery -- where one gets held upside down for some reason -- before continuing on to fulfill your always-genius mission of "Hey, let's go to a 4:00 bar!" And I still managed to take the 4-mile jog in the sunny warmth that I had planned today. Take that, hangover!
Google Image search term: "Tie one on" Pages deep for a cat to appear: 19 Location of first cat:www.frayedknotarts.com
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