Monthly Archives: November 2008

bzzz

Posted in nerd by

I’ve had a headache for two days now that is inching ever closer to becoming something that incapacitates me. Naturally, I do not have time for this. In addition to wanting to play video games, I am literally surrounded by fucking routers that need configuring which, in my role as technical writer and training manager, I am clearly responsible for doing.

Some days, I feel an awful lot like Dante (my life is both a Divine Comedy and an Inferno, and I’m not even supposed to be here today).

Last night I traded in Fable II (finished it), Animal Crossing: City Folk (it’s *exactly* the same as Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS) and an extra controller to my favourite EB in exchange for Fallout 3 and Burnout: Paradise. They didn’t have any more Special Edition copies of Fallout, which was kind of a bummer – I wanted the lunch box and bobble head. I haven’t started playing it yet; I have to wait until Saturday for Ed to be in class so I can play without spoiling the story for him and vice versa. We did start in on Burnout: Paradise last night though, and it’s pretty awesome. I had actually pre-ordered Need for Speed: Bro Hugs Undercover, but the horrible reviews it’s getting scared me off. It’s a shame – I genuinely like the NfS series, but the last few offerings have been just awful. B:P has everything I look for in a car game (outside of Mario Kart, I don’t play racing games because I cannot drive in a straight line) with the added bonus of no people. That’s right – there’s no crappy plot, no terrible but hot actresses hamming up my TV, no extended cut scenes of thugs with barbed wire tattoos and pixelated sneers. All there is to do is drive, jump off stuff, drive through stuff, knock other cars off the road, and break billboards. I love it. Destruction is awesome.

die die die

die die die

i kissed the dream police

Posted in everyday kimli by

Has anyone noticed that Katy Perry’s “Hot n Cold” sounds an *awful* lot like Cheap Trick’s “Surrender“?

It totally does.

I’ve had a hideous hybrid of the two songs stuck in my head for two days now.

you’re hot then you’re cold
you’re yes then you’re no
you’re in and you’re out
you’re up and you’re down
your mommy’s alright
your daddy’s alright
they just seem a little weird
surrender

haunted

Posted in everyday kimli by

scrape .. scrape .. scrape .. scrape

The sound jarred me from my sleep and echoed in my ears. I thought it was just a bad dream, so I tried to shake it off and return to my slumber to catch what little sleep I could squeeze out of the morning before duty called.

scrape .. scrape .. scrape .. scrape

I’m more awake now, and I know I’m not dreaming. The sound is real. I fight the rising panic by forcing myself to calm down and think about this rationally. I know where I am. Don’t I? I’m in Vancouver. I’ve been here for four years and one day. I work downtown and ride a scooter. I can see the ocean from my windows. I pay PST and wear yoga pants as formal wear.

scrape .. scrape .. scrape .. scrape

I can’t take it anymore. I leap out of bed and blindly make my way into the living room. Relief floods through me – I AM in Vancouver. What was that sound? It brought a flood of emotions and memories. How many times was I startled out of sleep by that very noise? I never got used to it. The constant, steady scraping – it would end, only for someone else to begin. When I heard that noise, I knew what I was in for. Endless days of brittle cold and frozen eyelashes; bone-deep weariness and an endless lumpy sea of gray ice. Wearing so many layers I can’t count and still losing all feeling in my limbs. Standing at the bus stop for what seems like years, only to have the overcrowded bus pass me by. A barren, frozen landscape to which no life will return until late May if you’re lucky. I peer out the window to a cheerful sea of green, and I am relieved.

scrape .. scrape .. scrape .. scrape

A lone soldier is outside. He is, in fact, scraping his windows; a thin layer of frost has formed and out here, cars do not come equipped with heaters that must be plugged in at night. Once his windows are clear, he drives off towards the ocean. The morning is cold, but it will pass within minutes. Already the frost is melting from the other car windows, appearing as nothing more than morning condensation.

Reassured, I make my way to the bathroom to start my day. I did not wake up in Calgary. I am still in Vancouver. Life is good.

tis a fine barn, english

Posted in everyday kimli by

Last night the gang hit up a couple of thrift stores on the North Shore in preparation for our Secret Holiday Project this weekend. We did quite well for ourselves, but perhaps more fun could have been had if we had more time for the absurd:

Why Josh opted to not purchase this vest, I will never know.

I, too, choose not to purchase a thing or two that really called out to me:


Every single thing about this image is wrong. The tiny festive sombrero adorned with sequins and glitter paint? Wrong. The large nude plastic doll? Wrong. The weird 6-pack torso? Wrong. The position we found her in? So very, very wrong. I could have placed her in a much more dignified position, but then I wouldn’t be able to take pictures and show the internet how scary she was, so I clearly did the right thing.

Then there’s the thing I DID buy, much to Ed’s horror. He tried very hard to talk me out of it, flat out told me that I was not to purchase it, refused to allow it into the car, told me I had to keep it outside, and makes whimpering noises every time he sees it. If I were a better person I would have taken his opinion to heart, but I never claimed to be anything less than an evil mastermind. Also, I needed a new friend:

Won’t you love my one-handed faceless Amish man? He only wants to be your friend.

fog

Posted in everyday kimli by

This morning’s fog freaked me out. At one point I couldn’t clearly see the car directly in front of me, although this was as much due to my dirty glasses as it was the fog itself. I’m still fairly convinced that every time I ride through the fog I’m in danger of time travel, but I can usually stifle my anxiety long enough to get to my destination in tact and in the correct time period.

I used up all my worthwhile content with yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read it already, please do so. I insist that you look inside my head and see what it’s like to be me, because it is a great deal of fun in here.

scenes from a movie ii

Posted in everyday kimli, nerd by

I did a thing.

A bunch of different flavoured nerds got together last month with Stephanie’s idea: pick a director out of a hat and create a photo that captures the style of that director. I got two names – Terry Gilliam and Federico Fellini. While I haven’t done my Fellini project yet, the above link will take you to my Gilliam attempt.

I was especially challenged by this entire thing, given that I do not watch movies and haven’t seen anything, ever. Gilliam is a founding member of Monty Python, but is also an influential director. Some of his films that I have not seen include Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, The Brothers Grimm, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and more. I was pretty much limited to what I could read on the internet, and several things struck me in particular: both Twelve Monkeys and Brazil feature dystopian societies (Brazil is a parody of Orwell’s 1984), and he was responsible for all the weird animations that appear in Python sketches: namely, his shit is fucked up.

I thought for several days about what I wanted to do, and figured my version of dystopia would be somewhat doable. I don’t exactly have a large number of identical people lying around, so I did the next best thing: a barren, hopeless future acted out by dollar store toys. It works, sort of. At any rate, it’s pretty fucked up.

I don’t know that I did Gilliam’s work any justice, but I had a great deal of fun putting toys in bizarre poses. My favourite shot is probably the one of You Tube – to me, nothing could possibly be more depressing and dystopic than a future in which we are all ruled by what we see on You Tube. The 1984 Apple Commercial was my attempt at tongue in cheek – not only did the commercial spoof on the very thing one of my director’s films also play on; but my “Big Brother” is in fact the very computer the 1984 commercial was introducing. Full circle; I haz it.

So, check it out. My Fellini project won’t be quite so many photos, but if I can pull that one off I’ll post it later. I don’t think my entry is nearly as good as some of the others – Shan’s is awesome, and not because I was her model – but I had fun with it, and my own little in-jokes give me a great deal of pleasure.

I’ll post links to the other projects as I find them!

seriously guys

Posted in everyday kimli by

What the hell is Twilight, and why is everybody so excited about it? Every company I’ve ever purchased from online is suddenly sending me spam about Twilight tie-ins, and I have no idea what it is. What is this Twilight thing? Should I be excited or concerned about it? Do I need to know who Belle and Edward are? They sound like jerks. Are they jerks?

I have a headache. It might be related to Twilight.

smashy smashy

Posted in everyday kimli by

Things appear to be getting interesting in our neighbourhood again. This is both good and bad: good because I was frankly getting bored with sleeping through the night, and bad because my levels of contempt for certain strains of humanity are reaching staggering new heights and also I like my car windows whole and unbroken.

There’s been a rash of smashing on our street over the last week or so. The curbs are littered with piles of sparkling glass chips, yet we’ve never seen the targeted vehicles. I’m pretty sure our car was “tested” – the other evening we heard a large thump, immediately followed by our car alarm. I looked out the window and saw a suspicious hooded character slinking away from the scene. He was far too tall to be a Jawa, so I’m thinking cars in the area are being scouted for future burglaring. I haven’t heard any glass being broken, though. You’d think that would make some noise, even without a car alarm. Maybe they’re just playing a prank to make everyone paranoid – get some glass chips, and sprinkle them everywhere. The first thing anyone is going to think is “OH NO CAR BREAK INS!” and scramble to buy clubs and large dogs and flaming pitchforks – perhaps these people are far more crafty than their meth teeth and fetal alcohol syndrome noses let on.

In addition to the upswing of crime, there’s been some wacky hijinks down at our local crack house. It’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy and our neighbourhood tweaker lives there, terrorizing us all with his yells of WOO! WOOOOOOO! at all hours of the night. The fights usually spill out into the alley, and I can hear their sordid tales of abuse and drugs and cheating and baby mama drama. It’s all very sad, but more importantly, it’s all very loud and never happens in the light of day. No, the crazy only comes out after midnight. What good is having a fight if a two-block radius can’t listen in?

To be safe, we’ve removed anything that might be construed as valuable from the Mazdabator. We don’t keep a lot in there as it is, but I had been keeping two routers and a DSL modem in the trunk for work purposes. Juniper SSG5 Routers are totally hot on the black market now, and the last thing I need is some meth head stealing my routers and trading them in for $1500 worth of asthma inhalers and fishnet stockings.

When all is said and done though, I would really prefer people to NOT break into my car or mess with my scooter. If you could be a total waste of skin somewhere else, that would be just super.

mystery

Posted in medical anomaly by

The good news: Yep, there’s definitely something there. It’s kind of squishy. Does it hurt when I pinch it really hard? It does? Huh. Interesting.

The bad news: It’s not what you thought it was – those are usually located lower and on the inside. I don’t actually know WHAT you’ve got there – it’s definitely a cyst, but it’s nothing I know about. I’m not sure what to tell you. Maybe .. take a bath? Yeah, that’ll help. Take a bath, and uh .. massage it? Sure, massage the area. Get right in there and force the toxins out. You can do it!

Great – even the vagina expert doesn’t know what my cyst is, or why they appear. The only advice she could give me basically amounts to a great deal of bathtub masturbation, which while I can absolutely appreciate and plan to follow doctor’s orders to the point of needing an intervention, does not get to the bottom of my mystery. This is no good.

Still, a suggestion is a suggestion. I think some new waterproof toys may be in order. After all, the doctor told me to do it so clearly it’s in my best interests to follow her knowledgeable recommendations to the very best of my ability. I may need help with this.  I should get a bigger bathtub.