Simple yet addictive Higher or Lower Game

It's no secret that I'm a bit obsessed with online games. Anything that's fun and easy to pass time away is good by me. For the past couple days, I've been playing this new card game, Higher or Lower by 5in Internet Labs, and it's sucked me in as an addicted participant for more than a few minutes in hopes of beating my highest guessing streak of 29. Perfect way to cure a streak (ha, get it?!) of boredom.

What about you? Play the game and let me know if you were able to beat my score!

90's Fashion - Boy Meets World

One of my ultimate guilty pleasures: Boy Meets World. I have seen every episode at least once and own all the DVD sets that are out. Though most would write off the entire decade of the 90's fashion-wise, I think it has a certain something that's incredibly charming. This is evident especially in the earlier seasons of Boy Meets World. Call me crazy, call me biased, just call me a person who's severely missing her Doc Martens, but if these screen captures don't sway you to my side even in the slightest, I won't know what to say. . .

Miss-Vintage.com

I honestly just became so thrilled with this website that I had to write something about it immediately. Miss Vintage is filled with all things vintage style and beauty. There's a plethora of information there on vintage styles from the 1900's to the 1980's: interviews with old style icons, old fashion and beauty articles, quick pages that describe the styles, makeup and hair of that decade, so you can easily get those looks yourself, profiles on major style icons of the past, how-to's, real snapshots from the decade, and much more. I can wait to spend time reading the site from head to toe, because I'm dying to do so now. You can tell that the webmistress, April, is extremely passionate and extremely well-informed about vintage fashion, and I love her for it.

The Red Paintings - Walls

The Red Paintings's EP, Walls, and the same-titled song never fail to blow me away. I love the video for the song quite a lot as well.

When Do Friends Become "Old Friends"?

(First grade field trip with some old friends. I'm on the left!)

I asked myself this question just yesterday. I first had to think about the definition of an old friend, and why they're called an old friend in the first place. Surely it wasn't how long you've known each other, or how much you like each other or get along, but rather that you were once good friends with them, and now you may not even know them anymore. You either live far away, or have drifted apart, and then instead of introducing them as a friend, you introduce them as an old friend. I've fallen victim to this many times. I guess it's useless to try preventing changes from happening, and drifting from happening.

Thinking about this in regard to my summer-long trip to New Orleans that is coming up, though, just made me sad when I realized that I don't really know any of my old friends any more. We grew apart, moved apart, and now I have a sinking feeling that they're all completely different and I wouldn't be able to recognize a spec of their personality by now.

This just made me wonder whether I'd want to bother trying to get together with old friends there, or not. With this, I thought: Maybe it's not too late to make new friends with my old friends. Get to know them again, however different or the same they might be. Thinking about this just fills me with hope that all of my old friendships are not lost.

I think that perhaps everyone should do this if they ever have a chance.

Coffin Joe: This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse

I caught a few minutes of this Brazilian horror film on IFC Halloween night last year, after a big bottle of wine and watching a French movie with a friend. The title burned in my brain, so I looked to see when they'd air it again, and they did! This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is the follow up to At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, and Coffin Joe is still looking for the perfect woman to create a son with. He puts the women in terrifying situations to see how they react, as he is looking for a fearless woman, apparently. The movie is a great bizarre little movie. One of those old ones where you laugh so hard because it's not very scary, but it's still awesome in any case.

Ice Cube Tray Update

There are many other ice cube options, apparently. In the first five minutes of my searching, I found out that you can make the following: bone shaped ice cubes (for the dog lover in you), star and fairy wand ice cubes, penis ice cubes, female silhouette ice cubes, skull and crossbone ice cubes, and heart and dolphin ice cubes. My personal favorite are the heart ice cube trays.

Smiling Ice Cube Trays

There are a lot of bizarre things you can buy out there, but Frozen Smiles from Urban Outfitters is my recent favorite. Imagine how cool it would be if you were to drop in one of these ice cubes into a guest's water glass or drink. Seeing this makes me wonder how to make these trays; I have an urgent need to explore making the trays and coming up with other cool molds. Ideas for all those ice cube tray makers out there (& I'd like to meet each and every single one of you): hearts, Mickey Mouse ears, bears, stars, lips, and pretzels.

Polanoid Pick of the Day

If you haven't made a visit (or two, or three, or four . . . ) to Polanoid, you are sorely missing out. Here is my favorite polaroid of the day. Shame on them for deciding to discontinue polaroid film; polaroids are so beautiful!

Pringles Can: Macro Lens?

(The tip of a match - Photo taken with a macro lens made out of a Pringles can, by this guy.)

I'm always looking for cool DIY things. Even if I rarely actually do them, just thinking and reading about someone who was able to figure out how to do it yourself is pretty cool. Here's an example: Extreme Macro Photography on a Budget. Will I likely ever try to make a lens out of my Pringles can? Probably not. Just that someone actually can do that messes with my brain in a trippy way, though.

Vedera - Desire on Repeat at El Rey

The more I watch this video, the more I fall in love with Kristen May's voice! Swoon.

Keith Thompson

I just discovered Keith Thompson's art, and wow. It's really beautiful - some a bit eerie, but beautifully eerie. Here are some of my favorites.

Necromancer: Madame Theodosia hearkens from the Aeolian islands and is part of a long lineage of necromancers. Growing up in a family with a long tradition of raising the dead, she was uncharacteristically shaken to learn of her barrenness, and in a rather emotional state vowed to give birth, if not to a new life, then to an already passed life. For this purpose she had found assistance in fashioning a steel, pressurised womb in which the souls of the freshly dead were to be trapped and condensed. This gestating entity came to be referred to in hushed tones as The Collect. The expectant mother now unnerves her followers with a detached resignation towards her eventual agonizing death; a necessity to feed her newborn babe in a self-sacrificial fashion akin to a mother spider.

Judith & Holofernes: Conviction took her as she approached the wretch; he lay swooned from drink and debauchery. She gripped him by the hair as she brought his own weapon down upon his neck. Halfway did it stop and and he lay there breathing quietly from the cleft in his throat. “Beast of land with tough neck as if of knotted wood!” she lamented. Again a blow rained down sending the head of Holofernes rolling from the bed and across the carpeted floor of his tent. “Glory! Glory! Glory!” crooned the scaled cherubs “do not settle as of yet, dear lady, bid your maid do retrieve the head and place it in a ration sack.” This she did, following the urges of the divine voices, and she rolled his body off the bed, and rent the canopy from its posts.

Scribe: A scrivener automaton working in a rather wealthy merchant's library. The arcane procedures for creating automatons are as varied as their appearance and roles in society (servitors, military, labour, prostitution, etc). The taxidermic use of cured human remains is legalised, economical and common place in their construction (similar to how the powdered wigs in our past often used the hair of corpses). However the practice of "rendering" down living persons into an automaton state is outlawed, it is frequently employed since the resultant product tends to outperform the legal alternative. The merchant who owns this particular scribe automaton has some very extensive paperwork detailing her conformity to all applicable regulation. Despite this assurance, those who deal with her have noticed how quickly she learns new tasks, and have caught her smiling when backs are turned.
Patron of Poor Minstrels: Proud arm in the pantheon of misfit gods. Her cacophonous playing offended all but her own misshapen taste. Mutilated, hanged twice, and wrists nailed to tree trunk by the other gods whose ears bled. On she played. And during that playing she gave life to a daughter never meant to tread the earth, and slain before birth.

Siouxsie and the Banshees's Dear Prudence Cover

Rarely do I ever find a cover of a Beatles song that I enjoy, and this one is an exceptional exception. I guess it's no secret that I like Siouxsie and the Banshees a lot, and that I think Siouxsie Sioux is one of the coolest people ever, so I may be biased (just a tad...). Still, this cover gives a twist to the song while still recalling the feel of the original song. It's not all crazy and out there, or too similar, like most people do when covering the Beatles. Il est parfait et la vidéo musique est magnifique! Comment tu trouves ça? Oh, shoot me for using French. No, really, please shoot me: I'm fairly certain that I am butchering even the simplest of sentences.

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins - Quote

"There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E-Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck - the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won't work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together . . . (?!) Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes - only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay - but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure - there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that made more erotic sense than many length marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-month affairs in Paris - but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; an honest caring, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison."

Everything this man says in his novel is making absolute sense to me an extraordinarily lucid fashion.

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines by Dylan Thomas

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Muxtape Stumbler

By now, everyone's surely heard of Muxtape. One of the things I didn't like much about it, although it was still fun, was that I had a hard time finding mixtapes that contained music that I would like. That's why I love Muxtape Stumbler. With this website, you can type in bands that you like, and come up with a list of mixtapes that you will likely enjoy. They show mixtapes that contain bands you type in, and similar artists. There is also an option to uncheck the box that searches for mixtapes with similar artists, and if you do that, it will only show mixtapes containing the artists you typed in.

I hope this is helpful! It sure helped me out a lot.

Also, here is one of my muxtapes, if you care to listen to it, hee.

PJ Harvey - Good Fortune

This video epitomizes everything I'm feeling right now. I really want to walk all over the city, dancing and flailing my arms like crazy, singing at the top of my lungs. This is one of my favorite videos, just because of how spontaneous it seems, and how it really seems to capture a lot about the singer, which usually doesn't ever happen in music videos.

Mother's Day, a Day Late.

(Mom in '79.)

Mother's Day is always something of a tough day for me. My mother passed away two years ago last November. It was so sudden, and because of that, I've struggled with coming to terms of why she was taken, and at such a young age. I miss her a lot. We were best friends, confidants, and always perfectly understood each other. Even though we both had red-hot tempers, and would get into massive fights sometimes, it was always followed with a long, calm talk that would perfectly explain why we were both so angry at each other. I never am able to do that with anyone else, and I wish I did have it.

Usually I try to ignore Mother's Day, but this year I looked through old photos (what's left of them - most were lost in Hurricane Katrina, but that's a whole other story). I wrote some non-blog related things, mostly about or inspired by her. I even wrote a letter, however geeky that may sound, and watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of her favorite movies.

So, Happy Late Mother's Day to all mothers out there. Here are some pictures to further celebrate the day.

(Mom & her mom.

(Me & mom a long, long time ago, thank goodness. I was such a geeky thing.)

Ferenc Cakó - Sand Animation

At the very end of summer last year, I went to the Orange County fair, not expecting much, but just wanted to check it out. Turns out I didn't do much besides ride one ride called Kamikaze (I sometimes blame my love of PJ Harvey for this) because I honestly thought the prices for the rides and food were ridiculous.

Just when I was about to go home and cut my losses, my friend told me that he was sure that Ferenc Cakó, a Hungarian artist who does a thing called sand animation, was going to be performing soon. It sounded interesting, so I stayed, and I'm glad I did! What he does with the sand is really almost unbelievable. He makes such real looking images with the sand, and works so quickly that it really is as if you're watching an animation, seeing a story lay out in front of your eyes.

For more info on Ferenc and videos and pictures of his work, be sure to go to his website.

since feeling is first by e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis