archive for March of 2005

general :: Unique Cast Glass Monuments, Memorials, Headstones & Signage – designed by Lundgren Monuments ::

:: Unique Cast Glass Monuments, Memorials, Headstones & Signage – designed by Lundgren Monuments :::

I have no intention of being buried or of choosing to bury anyone. Ever. But there is something about a glass grave marker—the fact you can see through it, the way it seems to absorb sunshine and turn it green and calm for you—that kind of works for me.

web amaztype examples

It’s like an art form, in a way. I’m really enjoying putting words into it and seeing what I get out of it.

Perhaps it’s because of the simple words I’m choosing (these are words I expect to give me the results I want), but I am delighted by some of the instantly recognizable book covers that show up. The cover for “Green Eggs and Ham” is red, of course, but it utterly belongs in the second “E” of Green. “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” is yellow, but it’s in several places in Red and prominently in the “B” of Blue.

Red is my best work so far.

Red

web amaztype

amaztype:

This is an amazing piece of Flash. You put in a word or a name (I used “Elaine”; also try “Harry Potter” or “blue,” for instance) and it uses it in an Amazon search query to create an image of your word(s) made out of Amazon book (or DVD or CD) images.

The magic comes when you click on one of the tiny images that makes up the result. You get an elegant little translucent Flash popup that tells you exactly what it is, how much it costs, and how it’s been rated.

It’s like swimming in books. The word-image part of it is icing.

shopping Scents and sensibilities

Cleolinda wrote the other day about Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, which sells essential oil scents. 85% perfume oils, whereas your typical cologne is like 5%.

She was so enthusiastic about it, and the site is so cool, that I cannot resist and just ordered six little sample vials.

The site looks like a Karen Elizabeth Gordon book. Wonderful Gothic horror clipart, spare typesetting, words chosen for aesthetics rather than specific meaning. It’s really enjoyable.

The scents are described pretty much by their ingredients, but another LJ user named dark_geisha has done dozens of reviews of the scents. This was hugely helpful. One scent called “Sea of Glass” sounded perfect until she told me it had a strong lemon note in it. I do not like lemon as a scent, but I want clean, like linen and gardenia. Floral but not too floral, aquatic but not salty.

Can you tell I’ve tried ordering perfume online before? Reflect.com does it, through what I still think is a really wonderful interface (currently down as they “revise” it). You pick colors and images, and they translate that into scent. I got three perfume samples from them years ago, and I hated one of them. One I liked, but I spilled it the second time I opened the little vial. One I liked a little less, but the caps on the vials weren’t tight, and it evaporated. I do love Reflect.com, though. They sold me a lot of stuff back in the day. The best of it was a clay face mask that makes me very, very happy.

Black Phoenix’s stuff comes in cobalt blue glass vials. They had me at hello.

I ordered Desdemona, Goneril, and Queen Gertrude from the Illyria (Shakespeare) collection. I ordered Dirty and Magdalene from the Sin and Salvation section. And I ordered Dragon’s Tears based on dark_geisha’s glowing review.

With names like these, I greatly fear that I will smell like some sort of fallen woman. On the very surface of it, Desdemona may have cheated on her husband. Goneril disowned her father. Gertrude married her brother-in-law. And then you have Mary Magdalene.

Role models.

general My Frappuccino is weird.

The whipped cream is kind of goopy and thick and even slimy. It’s sort of gross. It tastes good, but the texture is all wrong.

Alecia, defend your people.

general Urban Legends Reference Pages: Humor (Jest in Time)

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Humor (Jest in Time):

There was this little boy about 12 years old walking down the sidewalk dragging a flattened frog on a string behind him. He came up to the doorstep of a house of ill repute and knocked on the door.

When the Madam answered it, she saw the little boy and asked what he wanted.

He said, “I want to have sex with one of the women inside. I have the money to buy it, and I’m not leaving until I get it.”

The Madam figured, why not, so she told him to come in. Once in, she told him to pick any of the girls he liked.

He asked, “Do any of the girls have any diseases?” Of course the Madam said no. He said, “I heard all the men talking about having to get shots after making love with Amber. THAT’S the girl I want.”

Since the little boy was so adamant and had the money to pay for it, the Madam told him to go to the first room on the right. He headed down the hall dragging the squashed frog behind him.

Ten minutes later he came back, still dragging the frog, paid the Madam, and headed out the door.

The Madam stopped him and asked, “Why did you pick the only girl in the place with a disease, instead of one of the others?”

He said, “Well, if you must know, tonight when I get home, my parents are going out to a restaurant to eat, leaving me at home with a baby-sitter. After they leave, my baby-sitter will have sex with me because she just happens to be very fond of cute little boys. She will then get the disease that I just caught. When Mom and Dad get back, Dad will take the baby-sitter home. On the way, he’ll jump the baby-sitter’s bones, and he’ll catch the disease. Then when Dad gets home from the baby-sitter’s, he and Mom will go to bed and have sex, and Mom will catch it. In the morning when Dad goes to work, the Milkman will deliver the milk, have a quickie with Mom and catch the disease, and HE’S the son-of-a-bitch who ran over my FROG.”

general now I’m sad

My mommy just left. 🙁

web Web of Letters

Web of Letters:

Takes random image search results based on the letters you type to give you a collage of photos spelling anything you want. It’s different every time.

My favorite so far:
Webletters

general Extremely Detailed Dream

I irresponsibly slept well into the afternoon today. I don’t do this that often; I must have really needed to catch up on the rest. When I sleep for a long time like that (about twelve hours), I have my clearest and most memorable dreams. I’m not sure why.

Anyway. I was friends with Rachel from “Friends,” only really it wasn’t her, it was more like my real friend Lin. We were at my house, and we got in her car and went to her house. Except it wasn’t her house, it was a school. She was a teacher. She taught junior high, except there were also toddlers in her class, in high chairs. I asked about this and was told it was because the toddlers needed bottles in the middle of the day and everyone had to help out. After a few minutes a bell rang and the students left. All the chairs and desks they were sitting in were in a circle, but when they left so did those. It was the last day of school for the summer, I think, because everyone was saying very heartfelt goodbyes to Lin/Rachel. One boy who was rather cute hugged her, and we laughed (there was another friend there, not just me) because it was exactly the sort of hug a teenage boy would want to give a hot teacher. We imagined him high-fiving his friends when he got outside.

Anyway, after the students left it was somehow Lin/Rachel’s apartment again, not the school. It looked sort of like my apartment, with a long, skinny living room with a passthrough window to the kitchen on one end and windows to the deck on the other. Between the living room and the kitchen was a set of stairs going down, with a white iron railing. This is where the kids left.

Next to the stairs were some books on the floor. I picked one up and started reading it. It was erotica, and there was a horse involved. I couldn’t get into it. I also kept going into the kitchen and picking up two bags of tomatoes. One bag had one tomato in it, and the other bag had three. The three tomatoes were soft and mushy and should have been thrown out. The single tomato was fine. I had a small knife, but I don’t remember cutting up the tomato.

Lin/Rachel was wearing a sundress and kept pulling it up and scratching her stomach. I don’t know what the hell THAT means.

After a while I went to the bathroom. It was the bathroom off the master bedroom at Lisa’s house, same window and all. Somehow I left the bathroom and got into the car. I drove and somehow got on the highway. It was interstate 32, which if it exists is nowhere near here. I didn’t mean to get on the highway, so I got off at the next exit intending to turn around. When I got back on going south (yes, 32 would run east and west in the real world) there was a long line of trucks and cars in the left lane. The right and center lanes were clear, so I assumed there’d been an accident but it wasn’t affecting the whole road. On the curving ramp to get off to go back to Lin/Rachel’s, there were watermelons stacked several rows high and deep along the side of the road. A truck driver had unloaded them, or was loading them, and I talked to him. He was very, very concerned that the watermelons were radioactive. I was not concerned.

As I drove around the curve, the watermelons somehow jumped into my car, sort of like when you pick things up on the side in Katamari Damacy.

When I got back to Lin/Rachel’s, I went back in through the bathroom (though I wasn’t clear on how, and the model bathroom at Lisa’s doesn’t open to the outside) and though I’d been gone for hours no one seemed to notice. I left the car running. Later on we were outside discussing the car, because I couldn’t spend the night and Lin/Rachel had to drive me home. She was kind of pissed about the watermelons.

web Massively Multiplayer Personal Productivity

From the blog of Steven of Panic.

Massively Multiplayer Personal Productivity:
It is important to recognize where hypocrisy and double-standards exist in your life. Let me give you an example.
As a video gamer, I outrank role players on the geek hierarchy. It is very easy for me to look down at avid role playing fanatics, and sigh — if only they knew how dorky it all looks from the outside. Then I’d turn right back to my Game Cube without even a moment’s self-reflection.
What makes me a hypocrite is that the world of role playing now solidly intersects the world of video gaming. And despite my best efforts, I love it.
The point I’m trying to make here is: I’m completely addicted to World of Warcraft.
I’m not entirely sure why, either. It’s not the most original game in the history of the world, and in some ways it’s downright repetitive. But still there’s that whole “just one more level” aspect. And playing with a group of friends just multiplies the fun factor. Not to mention that it is visually beautiful, despite humble system requirements, and has quite an extensive mythology lurking below the surface.
So it was in the midst of a marathon WoW session when I had my million-dollar epiphany. Are you ready? I’m throwing this one out for free — just give me a line of credit when the money starts pouring in.
If character development, and a bit of visual gloss can make repetitive and possibly mundane activities into an addiction, then I have the perfect application for it: the world of productivity porn, as spearheaded by such sites as 43 Folders and Lifehacker.
I’ve never had a problem creating to-do lists and I definitely have the organization fetish. My biggest problem is to stop procrastinating and actually do the to-dos. What I need is an incentive!
So, clearly, what I need is a specialized PIM app, where each task can be assigned a certain number of experience points. Maybe if I, say, replace the furnace air filter, I get a chance at a certain amount of gold or silver.
Next, this app checks in with a server and ranks me against other users. What? That guy I work with is level 20 already? I’ve gotta go mow the lawn, that’s worth 500 XP!
Told you it was a great idea. Not only am I getting crap done, but I’m WINNING.
Maybe there could be a collaborative aspect too. Painting the house? You could do it all yourself for 8,000 experience, or recruit three other players to help you and split it, 2,000 each.
So, there you have it. I’ve planted the seed. Who will create LIFEQUEST? Only time will tell…

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