I have nothing to say, so watch this stuff instead. I am still erect and throbbing with YouTube rage, but these are too awesome to keep to myself:
Both of these videos make me tingle in my down there: the Old Spice Guy speaking in binary was like a shotgun orgasm, and I am completely in love with Doll from Doll and the Kicks. Enjoy, and it’s okay if you need a moment to yourself. I know I did.
I don’t really have any rules when it comes to blogging. There isn’t a topic I won’t write about if it happens to be on my mind, much to the chagrin of those close to me who think I ought to be a little more discreet. Discretion is for people with something to hide, and my life – like my shirt – is open for all who care to take a look.
So imagine my surprise when Ed put his foot down and FORBADE me from writing about a particular topic. Me! He’s trying to censor ME! NOBODY censors me, not even me! I blog it all, from the state of affairs in my lady garden to my criminal misdeeds and raging post-post-post adolescent angst. There is nothing that I will not discuss, okay? That’s not how I roll.
And yet here we are – Ed has forbidden me from writing about the thing I will call The Incident. The Incident is not naked or risqué; it’s not illegal and does not actually involve Ed in any way. It has nothing to do with genitals (mine or otherwise), and would not get me arrested or placed on a No Fly list. It’s not racist or sexist or any other kind of “ist” – controversial, I suppose, but not more shocking than things I’ve already blogged with sheer abandon. I *hate* being censored, but I’m also masochistically amused by Ed’s insistence that The Incident not make it online. He’s so cute when he tries to stop me from doing things!
So, I’m curious. What do YOU think “The Incident” could be? What topic could be so damning that Ed would take action to keep it quiet; action that appears to actually be working?
Oh, the intrigue!
In the last two hours of my day:
Fucking hell.
I think I might be prejudiced against bananas.
look at this smug motherfucker right here
I hate you, banana.
Last night I went to a Mighty Ugly workshop, and I made a hockey.
this is my hockey
He doesn’t have a name – he is just a hockey. I was accused of making him too cute, and yes – at first glance, he is a little bit lovable. However, the things you DON’T know are what make him truly mighty ugly.
Look at his eyes. See how bloodshot they are.
he is so wasted
In his right hand, a beer – his 7th, at $8 a cup. Yes, he is patriotic and waving his maple leaf around – but when the game is over, he will LITTER that leaf by dropping it in the streets.
Litter is not cute. It is ugly.
fifty six dollars of beer
What about his jersey? Ahh, yes – my hockey is indeed a Canucks fan, and he wears #44 – Todd Bertuzzi‘s number. He’s never gotten over his hero leaving Vancouver, and thinks the suspension handed down for the Steve Moore incident was a “fucking joke”. He is in the minority, but he continues to build his fantasy hockey team with Bertuzzi as captain.
all canucks wear their numbers written in glitter
Did you notice the headphones? They’re connected to a (red) Zune. My hockey is listening to Nickelback.
HOW THE HELL'D WE END UP LIKE THIS WHY WEREN'T WE ABLE
If that isn’t Mighty Ugly, I don’t know what is.
The ugly is in the details, my friends.
There’s a Mental Health Camp going on in Vancouver this weekend. I am not attending, but since I have both mental AND health, I figured I would throw my two cents in on the subject.
The goal of Mental Health Camp appears to be to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness and various discussions on coming out, coping, and celebrating the process. With these topics in mind, I present to you Some Words:
It’s relatively common knowledge (I think) that I’m a little crazy – not the flippant “I’m so crazy, I totally think milk is gross!”, but the “not right in the head/I wonder how long it would take to draw blood” kind of crazy. I’ve been on medication since early 2004, and except for some disastrous experimentation in 2008, will likely be on medication to control my crazy for the rest of my life.
My policy of “share everything” meant that when I finally realized that the way I felt wasn’t normal, my first instinct was to blog about it. I threw out a plea for help online, and a lot of people came to my rescue with their own stories. Never did it occur to me that I was doing something shameful by admitting that I needed help – I reached out to my friends, and they threw me a life line. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?
Maybe I’ve just been really lucky, knowing good people who would never think to give me shit for something like being crazy. I’ve never faced any kind of stigma (or stigmata) because I have to take anti-depressants daily, and I just assume that’s the way things should be. They’re as vital to me as birth control, anti-histamines and caffeine – and no one thinks less of me because of my dependence on those, so why would my brain medication be any different? In my happy little hilarious world, this is the way things work – people accept and support one another through the good AND bad, and everyone just keeps on trucking.
I don’t know what I would if faced with a negative reaction to my crazy and subsequent treatment of it (other than be totally outraged and then blog about it). I’m not kidding when I say I live in a bubble – the few times I’ve experienced racism completely floored me, and for all my jaded “been there, done that” attitude I am truly shocked when I learn of friends doing coke or meth or going a2m. I want to think the best of people, so I do. It’s hard for me to think that there are people out there who would think less of me because I took action to deal with my chemical imbalances – seriously, I tried to make myself better and you look down on that? – but they’re out there, and I’m lucky that I’ve never experienced it.
All that being said, I don’t really feel a need to be celebrated or handled with gloves because I suffer from a mental illness (however minor it may be). It’s there, and I deal with it. It’s a part of me, like having brown eyes and broken feet and a huge rack. I definitely don’t demand special treatment because I have crazy; nor do I feel the need to get together with other crazies and compare scars. This is why I’m not attending Mental Health Camp – I’m dealing with my issues just fine, and don’t feel I could bring anything of value to the table or take anything important away. Coping with my crazy takes very little effort, and I like it that way – I don’t have the time or desire to get bogged down in the details, be they mine or yours.
I feel as though there may be some backlash from the community because I am not really on board with the whole Mental Health Camp idea, but I’m not going to put on a false smile and support something I don’t truly think I believe in just for the sake of appeasing others. I wouldn’t ask you to march in my Mandatory Birth Control for Everyone Parade if it made you uncomfortable, so I’m not going to do the same to myself. My crazy and I get along just fine, thanks. We don’t need a Camp to validate that to anyone.
PANCAKES!! >:E
j_holtslander over on the Twitters linked to a list of 10 Essential Accessories for the Fashionable Geek. This is all well and good, but I’m a little put out – I consider myself a fashionable geek, but I can’t wear the majority of that list because I don’t do sneakers, t-shirts, belts, men’s dress shirts, or trucker hats. Honestly, most of the list can be swapped with the 10 Essential Accessories for the Ironic Hipster and no one would know the difference.
Except ME.
Since I don’t want to do any real work – seriously, fuck global outage procedures – here is MY list of Essential Accessories for Fashionable Geeks Who Just Don’t Do T-Shirts and Trucker Hats:
click to download the original image
I own a great deal of nerd swag that is no longer available (Quake 1 necklace), limited edition (Katamari charm/pouch/puppet; Rockstar keychain) or hand-made (Jet Set Radio Future hoodie), but there is a LOT of awesome stuff out there (do you have any idea how badly I want this) – I could easily be broke but happy and so stylish it would hurt. Nerds everywhere would lustfully chase me down in the street. It would be awesome.
if you prick us, do we not bleed shakespeare quotes?
We’re going on a CRUISE!
.. to VANCOUVER!
We are poor folk (mostly because of my uncontrollable iTunes spending) who can’t really afford to cruise anywhere exotic or far away, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make the most of adventures we CAN take. Stephanie (she of the awesome Domo cake) sent me a link to a series of 1-day cruises in the Pacific Northwest, and I was intrigued. I’ve never been on any kind of cruise outside of my imagination (when the floor was made of lava), so this has the potential to be an epic, affordable weekend of fun.
The 1-day cruises are offered by Holland America, and you can go from Vancouver to Seattle or vice versa on multiple dates in September. That just happens to be our anniversary month, so I booked us in for a cruise that leaves Seattle on Sunday evening and gets into Vancouver early the next morning. We get dinner and an ocean-view stateroom (I’ve never had sex on a boat – solo sex and group sex yes, but never 1v1) as we sail through the night.
If that wasn’t enough fun, we needed a way to get to Seattle that didn’t involve the car – so I booked us on the train. We leave for Seattle on Saturday evening via Amtrak, getting us there late that night. I haven’t decided what we’re going to do before the boat leaves the next day, but I’m hoping it’ll be restful because I don’t really plan to sleep on the boat (bwah chika bwah bwah there’ll be too much to look at). TRAIN! And BOAT! I can’t wait – Ed’s never been on the train before, and I haven’t in a very long time. We’ve always talked about taking the train somewhere but it’s hard to justify the time and cost with the $50 or so in gas it takes to drive the Mazdabator down. A one-way trip, though, was just MADE for train travel.
I am so, so excited. I love the fall and the ocean and the Pacific Northwest and complicated adventures, and this is all of them wrapped up in a relatively cheap little package. Stephanie has awesome ideas, and we’re on the same cruise she is – clearly, #hipstersonaboat will be an excellent time. I’m trying to convince other people to join us, because More People can only make this adventure More Fun.
Is it too early to pack? What does one wear on a boat, anyway?
I know I should be grateful that I work for a company that looks the other way when I do things like this:
do you have any idea how not hard at all it was to find a tech that spoke klingon
click to embiggen
.. but sometimes, I want more.
I was bored last night, so I decided to do some good old fashioned anal retentive data entry.
You see, while iTunes allows you to look at your purchase history, there’s no way to export the information – it’s displayed as a graphic, so you can’t even copy and paste it into a spreadsheet. This is a very smart and devious move by Big Brother, because it keeps you from realizing just how much money you spend on songs and apps $.99 at a time. Unfortunately for Apple, I keep ALL my iTunes receipts in case a device or hard drive barfs on me and I need proof of payment. I throw everything into a folder and never look at it, until I am desperately bored on a Sunday night and decide I truly need to categorize everything.
So, that’s what I did. I took all 300+ iTunes receipts and entered the data into a spreadsheet. I know I buy a lot of apps – I am not an App Whore because I sleep with iPhone developers – but just how bad is my iTunes spending? It can’t be THAT bad; apps and songs are a dollar. I’ve got 190 apps installed on my phone right now, so over the life of my iTunes account I’ve spent, what, $200? $300? Pfft, that’s nothing.
Then I totaled it all up.
I opened my iTunes account on November 22nd, 2007. It’s been active for 32 months, and in that time I’ve spent one thousand ninety three dollars and forty one cents.
That’s over $34 a month; more than a dollar a day. I could have a QUEEN for less than that. Almost $1100 frittered away on digital media and things that go beep and boop or allow me to put mustaches on pictures of my friends.
Holy shit.
Okay, it’s not quite as dire as it seems – I’ve redeemed a number of promo codes that still show up with a dollar amount, but is charged to Store Credit instead of my credit card. Same thing for iTunes gift cards; those purchases are included in my total. Some cards were gifts, but some I had bought on my own so I added them to my total. In the name of Science, I will now recalculate without the Store Credit numbers:
$927.72
Oh, that’s HEAPS better.
As of right now, I am curbing my enthusiasm for throwing money at Mr. Jobs. I will still buy apps, but I will be a little more stringent with my purchases. This process has already begun, but I need cold hard facts to make it stick:
This is no good at ALL – in 2008, I spent almost $20 a month. In 2009, that jumped to over $40 a month. So far in 2010, I’ve averaged over $52 a month – at this rate, I’m on pace to top $625 in iTunes spending this year and THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN! With the internet as my witness, I WILL BEHAVE!
Seriously, I feel dirty.
I did learn some interesting things about iTunes, though:
This is a wakeup call – I had NO IDEA I was throwing this much money away on random. There are some things that are well worth the price I paid for them if not more – the $6 I spent on Hipstamatic comes to mind – but ouch. I’m more than a little convinced that Apple has done this on purpose; given you no real way to look at just how much money you’ve spent in the iTunes Store. After all, $.99 is nothing! But do that 1000 or even 100 times, and you’re looking at some serious money that could be put towards other things like ale and whores.
On the other hand, I’m really glad I don’t drink or smoke or have a Starbucks habit. I couldn’t afford them.
delicious juice dot com 