Tag Archives: cyberculture

Sweet 16: presents & possum pedicures



(Happy-Birthday-Chimp-Note-Card-C117, originally uploaded by Z F Soo & made available under a creative commons license)

The oldest restored post from my archives is dated July 22, 1997 so I’m declaring this my blog’s birthday.

I hate the word blogiversary.

After littering my drafts file with post ideas for today, I scrapped them all and decided this: you’re going to get a present.

Not all of you, one of you.

A few of you.

Not sure how many yet.

Leave me a comment with an actual email address I can reach you at (no one else will be able to see it) and FRIDAY I will devise some arbitrary scheme for selecting winners.

update: you have until 5 p.m. EST to leave a comment on this post that will make you eligible for strange and exotic prizes.

The prizes will be groovy, but I’m not going to post pictures here because the contents of each prize might change slightly depending on where I need to ship them.

Then, you can spend the rest of your day celebrating any old way you wish.

Not sure how to celebrate? Start with a how-to video on proper Opossum pedicure techniques from our old friend M.E. Pearl:

I’m not sure if opossums should be pets. Or if you should give them pedicures. I am sure it’s an excellent video to start your day with. Don’t end your day with this video – that way lies nightmares.

If you want to get really crazy, you can encourage all your friends to like my facebook fan page, because facebook popularity plays some arbitrary role in whether a publisher wishes to publish me in dead-tree form.

And what could be more appropriate on a 16th birthday than some angst about popularity?

Without properly installed crown molding, one risks opening a gateway to a demonic dimension

I know my blog is a mess. I really need to remedy the poor categorization and sloppy archives code. Too many exports and imports and re-exports from platform to platform have really done a number on the place.

You’d think that being sick and stuck in bed would afford ample time to do this work. You’d think that if you didn’t know that the cough medicine my doctor added to the pharmacological cornucopia contains a powerful antihistamine and a narcotic.

I have a flipchart page mapping out the blog maintenance, writing, and updating I need to do to bring facebook (personal page + fan page), linkdin, my blog, flickr, pinterest, twitter, and ravelry into some sort of harmonious arrangement. Fuck MySpace. They can send me all the press releases they want, I’m not signing back up for that one.

Yes, I have my own flipchart. It’s the kind that’s sort of like a pack of giganto post-it notes. It’s awesome.

A few months ago Husband realized I have my own flipchart. He was horrified. He tried to cover it with a weak, “That’s nice, Dear,” but in his eyes I could see him thinking, “I don’t even know you anymore.”

I didn’t tell him GhostCat and I hold staff meetings in the afternoons after he leaves for work. We’re going to wait until after the Spring team-building retreat to share that with him, so don’t spoil the surprise, okay?

We haven’t decided whether to invite Husband to the retreat yet. He’s not a team player sometimes.

I didn’t implement anything from the chart yet because I left the cap off the marker and the fumes spaced me out even more than I already was but I didn’t realize this was happening because I couldn’t smell the fumes. Antibiotics have wrecked (temporarily, I hope) my sense of taste and smell. The upside to this is that I can’t taste the cough medicine, which has a rather alarming color and viscosity.

I never get tired of imagining the kind of advice HP Lovecraft would have offered had he ended up as the editor of a Home & Garden-type magazine. I can think about that for hours. Currently, I can’t think about one thing and do anything else at the same time so the whole point of this post seems likely to have to wait.

(405): I just broke up with Liz. I feel awful so I put two free rentals on her Blockbuster account.

EvilAgent sent me a link to textsfromlastnight. She found it at UrbanDaddy:

In short, readers send last night’s drunken exchanges to text@textsfromlastnight.com, and the site posts it, blog-style, along with an area code. And that’s it. Suddenly, your tiny masterpieces of pith and wit (“Do you think they could tell I was high on that conf call?”) can live on in eternal infamy, next to epic tales of hangovers, waking up in bathtubs and the occasional Chewbacca mask.

Of course, you don’t have to participate—you could easily lose an afternoon scrolling through the hundreds of exchanges the site has collected so far. (“I’m half single.” “Please tell me it’s the bottom half”; “Incredible sex, Maddow, more sex, spoon, sex again.”) It’s the best combination of the Internet and voyeurism since Al Gore invented the damn thing in the first place.

Now, where did we put our pants…

The most recently posted txt when I checked out the site was, “(619): Good news! Whoever used this stall at Target earlier…not pregnant!” I suspect the novelty kinda wears off after a few minutes, but it was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes before class.

infected

Today I got to meet the evil geniuses behind Lost Zombies.

IMG_1967

I was afraid my infected sticker was going to get caught in my scarf and fall off so I moved it to my notebook:

IMG_1978

Since I’m zombified, does that get me off the hook vis-a-vis lucid conference coverage? No? Darn. Well, tomorrow I’m going to play a bit of catch-up, I didn’t feel like dragging my laptop around all day today and I’m not the best iphone blogger ever. Or at all.

In the meantime – you can follow some of what’s going on at sxsw at the sxsw interactive + film site. You can search twitter, too, but the s/n is pretty fucking high – it’s driving me crazy and I’m here.

On that note – time to think about heading over to the opening night party.

Friday Five: Blog365 edition, part 1

I was going to post about how I was taking the day off from posting, but that was simultaneously absurd and meta, so instead here’s five randomly chosen blog365 bloggers for you to visit and admire:

Ramblings by Reba features a concept not exactly alien to my own readers: ramblings, by someone named Rebecca. Seriously, Reba doesn’t really ramble, that’s just her blog title. What she does do a lot is share her lifestories through photo-essays. She also wrote the first blog365 roundup I came across and I swiped some links from her. :-)

Suzanne Sez starts out the new year with a hilarious post about lucky underwear. She does have a couple kids, so I was going to make a joke about how she knows of what she speaks, but, no, she doesn’t mean that kind of lucky.

Small Reflections is written by a marathon-blogger who blogs at more sites than I can keep track of!

Ari of Beyond My Slab almost made me snort coffee out of my nose with her summary of the blog365 saga:

Lots of people who signed up dropped out almost immediately. A few months into the year, the feed was full of pompous “I prefer quality over quantity” farewells from people who wanted to make sure that we all knew the reason they couldn’t manage to blog daily was because they were too busy having great sex (btw, if you don’t have the stamina to have great sex and blog in the same 24-hour period, it’s time to see the doctor).

Ever the productive one, Jennifer has already issued a new challenge for the new year to knitters with UFOs (UnFinished Objects): finish or frog it. (with the related ravelry knit-along group, of course.

I think this post undersells the achievements of these 5 uber-bloggers, but perhaps we can pretend a link is worth a thousand words today. Happy Friday!