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life uncategorized

Today Our Ceiling Fell In

So today, Holly goes “you should take a lookit this ceiling in here” and i knew it was gonna be something bad. There’s been an open seam running parallel to the wall right above the sofa, underneath the upstairs bedroom closet. This afternoon, it had suddenly open and torn itself roughly perpendicular, in an ‘L’ shape. I immediately called our landslumlord (the guy who refused to fix the downstairs electrical tangle-box, and who doesn’t seem to care much that people who wear sandals over here get their feet cut open because the front door has an entire pane of glass completely shattered and glass is always falling out of it all over everywhere; it’s a good thing Speck hasn’t eaten any – yet), and left a message that he better get someone over here soon, because it’s GOING to fall in.

Why is it that these things always, always, always happen directly above the sofa?

Later that day…

Holly and i go out for supplies. We pull back in to see a van in the driveway. Then, a white-haired figure coming out of our house. It’s our landslumlord. I ask what brings him over, wondering if he got my message, but also wondering just what the hell he was doing in our place. He’s coughing his lungs out and looks bad. He’s also dumping god knows what into the neighbor’s trash can. He tells us that the ceiling had fallen out. We’re like ZOMG WTFH!?!! and he’s telling us that yes, it actually did fall. He tells us to open as many windows as we can, that someone would be out to fix it tomorrow (today now), and hightails it out of there.

So we’re like ZOMFG WTF! and we open the door to see… pure, pure white. A thick powdery haze is everywhere! We’re breathing plaster.

Everything in the downstairs floor was covered in white powder. Everything. The worst, of course, was in the living room, where my PC and the laptop were. And the furniture, and the TV, etc.

We cleaned up as much as we could, and let it air out (none of the windows open, or the ones that do don’t have screens, so we open the doors and i prop a box fan on a chair and point two more to it, directing the coke-like haze to leave at once. It’s approximately breathable again.

Incidentally, we’re pretty sure that it hadn’t crashed down before he arrived. Holly has a giant teddy bear that we keep in a chair. When we got in, the bear was on the floor and wasn’t nearly as dusted up as the chair it had been propped up on. We think he was fucking around with the ceiling and it crashed in on top of him.

Here’s what we have now. I can’t find our Olympus, so these were taken with the laptop’s webcam. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Approximately what we saw when we arrived on the scene (haze added in GIMP 2.0):
ceiling, with an approximation of the powdery haze we had to breathe (done in GIMP)

And here’s what it looks like right now:
ceiling, with giant hole

Close-up:
ceiling, closeup

Incidentally, a black PS2 controller:
detail of PS2 controller... that's a BLACK controller

The black shop-vac that he left for us:
the shop-vac that he left for us... also formerly black in color

How am i feeling? I HAS RILLY ANGRY!1!!!
a little bit upset

Categories
internets media uncategorized

Video: evolution

Dove video, Evolution: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.”

Cheers to that! Above link is a video of a beautiful but freckled model being made up beyond recognition, then photomanipulated to look like… well, to look like the image that we hold up as the standard for beauty for women. The bar is a little on the high side, don’t we think? I absolutely applaud this campaign. The industry in which I currently find myself laboring within could certainly use a little dose of reality. Ok, a whole hell of a lot.

Every day, I see the signs of a scarred self-image in the clients with whom I do business, and I am unnerved by it by much more than a little bit.

Women! Stop doing this to yourselves! You already ARE beautiful! It is necessary to eat healthy; it is unnecessary to starve and try to uphold yourself to a standard which is literally impossible to meet. Who do you fool but yourselves? Who will love you less, who deserves your love in return?

Categories
current events internets uncategorized

link apeshit

National Film Board of Canada: 50 animated shorts – excellent stuff!

Dr. Miracles – short film. Completely juvenile, and hilarious. ER gone badly weird.

This Flash “mind reader” seems spooky at first – until you figure out how it works (but do try it first, following the site’s instructions): Notice that the symbols repeat. Also notice how one number may have different symbols when you repeat the process. Then, notice that you can’t just pick a symbol, you HAVE to do the math. NOW… try this: Do the math for 5 different numbers. Do you see a pattern? They’ll all be the same symbol! So no matter what number you pick, if you do the math and pick the correct symbol, it will ALWAYS be right!

Bizarre fish with human-like teeth caught in Texas lake. (Not just human… British.)

Speaking of which… catfish, um, really get this big?!

Bandai’s hilariously weird “God-Jesus” robot toy from the 1980s.

Experiments in the Revival of Dead Organisms. Fucking creepy. Found via Grey Lodge Podcasting Company’s YouTube link dump.

Mazen Kerboj, musician and artist, blogs from ground zero in Lebanon. Check out his improv piece, Starry Night, during which you can hear bombs and air $raid$ sirens in the background. Beautiful and unsettling, all at once. Read his blog and pass it along. Chilling. I hope that he stays safe. He seems like a good man. He says things like:

“we know you are with us. we know you are seeing us. we know you hear the fucking bombs we are hearing. we know you worry for us. but don’t. because you know we are tough guys. you know that we’ll [survive?] this shit. you know that we survived massacre and we’ll do it again today. you know we’ll see each other soon. keep in touch and stay with us.”

People get ready: all this Middle East violence is giving the End-Timers a serious hard-on for the Rapture. A sicker bunch of fuckwits probably do not exist. Zealots are fools. It is religious zeal that has got the world into the mess that it’s in now. How do you spell worldwide suicide? Z-E-A-L-O-T-R-Y.

Zealots of the world: fuck you. I do hope that you all die the vainglorious deaths that you ridiculous, ignorant fools are all hoping for. So GO APESHIT FOR JESUS/MOSES/MUHAMMED! Kill each other to bloody, pulpy fucking smithereens and let the rest of us get on with our futures!

Categories
Speck

Speck pics

here’s a couple of pictures of our dog, Speck. it’s nothing short of a bizarre, unexplained phenomenon that he was actually still for these shots. these are the inaugural pictures taken with our new Olympus.
Speck, 2/18/06Speck, 2/18/06

Categories
creative life

camera camera!

our new Olympus C740 digital camera arrived today. all i know about it is that it got great reviews on epinions and has 10x optical zoom. optical zoom.

it didn’t, however, come with batteries (AA will do!) or a card :( …so now, after having spent the past few days getting almost no sleep thanks to Civilization IV (my wonderful girlfriend’s Valentine’s gift to me), i have to trek out to get one so i can start taking pictures.

very happy though :)