Kick the Tragedy

Finally got around to uploading this week's doodle...

This is part of the monologue in the middle of "Kick the Tragedy" by the Drop Nineteens, probably the most gorgeous two-chord song ever written. This is the full monologue as I wrote it out. Yes, in my drawing I skipped a line and fucked up a word by accident. Whatever. I had a lot of fun drawing this.

"I think it was the first time I realized that I could change the world, or at least change the way me and my sister hit the clock on every tick just to see what happened. The time has really flown by I guess, and it's hard to think of the way it might have been or remember very specifically the words and all the rest of it. I was down, more than I'll ever be probably, but that isn't what to do with it altogether. Like the orange trees in the backyard and it's Easter and it just won't end. Fucking Phil, he's off on his board somewhere and I'm just sitting here getting more and more lost with everything. That was the thing about it, it's not as if a cousin had promised something and taken it away. It was like nobody could share my so-called dreams, which really meant none of it was happening. And that reach around midnight left you with just about that, nothing. There's not anything particular about it either, and I think that the whole thing gets vaguer every second. But I am too and there's nothing wrong with that. It's even funny when I stop and realize I'm just nineteen, how serious can anything be anyway? Not very."

Their Circular Life

This is a weird artsy Italian website. It's called Their Circular Life (hence the post title) and basically someone set up a camera to take pictures every so often for 24 hours in different places in Italy and put all the pictures together with sounds and a nifty interface. It's pretty cool.

The Best Senior Quote

This is "I Know It's Over" by The Smiths. And you're going to get a free story with it!! It's actually reposted from my tumblr because I want it on my Real Blog.

My high school had all their old yearbooks in the library going back into the fifties, and I used to love looking at them. Up until maybe 15 years ago they let all the seniors have a quote, so those were always fun to look at. And one day while I was paging through the 1988 yearbook, I saw this under one girl’s picture:

"It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind." - The Smiths

Yes. Among the sea of bible quotes, inspirational ballads, Robert Frost, and a million variants of that dumb “if you let it go and it doesn’t come back it was never really yours" proverb, one girl had quoted this song. I went back to look at that so many times after I found it. When you’re desperate for people like you, anything helps, even a quote in an old yearbook proving someone you might have maybe liked went to your high school before you.

A Mystery

I've been wondering about my aunt my whole life, just about.

She's my dad's older sister, and they're far from close. They leave each other phone messages on major holidays and send each other terse cards.

But I've always known she was a hippie.

Still in Hollywood!

This is "Still in Hollywood," by Concrete Blonde. I don't have much to say about the video, but I really like the song. I know a couple people from high school who moved to LA in hopes of becoming actors or musicians or whatever and I always think of them when I hear this song now. I hope they don't end up stuck there forever in dead-end jobs, but they probably will.

Two Ks

I'm quite proud of this doodle. Yes, the band has a stupid name on purpose.

Extreme Accounting, Silly Hat Clubs, and Other Fun Things

Wikipedia's list of Deleted Articles with Freaky Titles (DAFT), presented without comment.

Also, as of now I am officially taking Lamestain to v1, so there won't be any more little decimals next to the title unless I make any changes.

I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.

Happy belated Weird Song Wednesday! I've got a really weird one this time. This is "Israelites," by Desmond Dekker & The Aces. It's a reggae song from 1968 and it was actually a number one hit in the UK and a top ten hit in the US. If only the charts today were as diverse as they were then. Anyway, it was the first reggae song to do that. (Well, it was the second in the US if you count "Red Red Wine," which I do not want to. Sorry, Neil Diamond.) So if you like Bob Marley or ska or if you're curious about the stuff The Clash liked, listen to this. Actually, whatever you're into, listen to this, it's a solid song.

Subbacultchas

In seventh grade, I decided I no longer knew who I was and needed to find out. I thought there was only one way to do that- find a subculture. All I had to do was pick one, listen to the music, and buy the right clothes, and then I would have a ready-made identity and a community of friendly people waiting for me. I was lonely. I had always wanted to be part of something. What could be better?

Hedoban!

This is "Headbanger" by BABYMETAL, a death metal Jpop band. Weird? Yes. Awesome? Hell yes! Seriously, I'm kind of concerned about how much I like this. Other songs of theirs take their metal/pop mash sound even further. In this video, a schoolgirl prays to her Metal Ancestors and becomes a Metal God of some sort herself. The song ends a bit before the video does, but watch until the end.

Tiger Warrior Girl

Here's your Friday doodle. I swear it was actually done by late Friday night, but I was just too lazy to get it off my phone and onto the computer. Yes, I drew and colored this on my iphone with my finger, so please be forgiving...

My idea of this character had a lot more little tiger-y details, along with an actual weapon and, you know, hands, but because of how fucking hard it is to draw on my phone, I gave up on those. I made a better, slightly more realistic pencil drawing of her with most of those details after I finished this, but I don't really want to share any of my attempts at drawings that aren't completely cartoonized yet.

Because ideas are hard

This website has random generators for everything. No, seriously, everything. You could plot an entire book using just randomly-generated stuff from this website. It would be a really weird book, but you could!

I honestly forgot all about this website before stumbling across it in the mysterious realm of my bookmarks folder this morning. (I bookmark things all the time, but I never actually look in the folder because bookmarks show up in the URL bar in Chrome. So it's just full of all this stuff and I don't even know what half of it is.) I think I may use it to randomly-generate some plot points for a ten or fifteen minute timed short story. By the way, you could be getting one of these monstrosities for your text post next Tuesday, so be warned.

Surfin' Cow!

Your Wednesday treat, by the Dead Milkmen, a band I love very much. Their songs with lyrics are hilarious and awesome, but even their mostly instrumental songs like this one are really cool.

I don't even know

I have literally zero ideas for a text post right now. But something weird just happened, so I'll go with that. My mother, who is sitting in the living room downstairs, just texted me to ask me a question. Truly these are the good old days, where man, woman, and child can all log onto the internet and text message each other across their own house.

In which I try to translate something

This Monday's late music video is for "Sage comme une image" by Lio.

Last September, I started taking an accelerated French class for people who've never taken French but want to be able study abroad somewhere that speaks it by their junior year. I actually have no intention of studying abroad anywhere French-speaking, though. I'm just insane enough to take the intense class for the hell of it. Anyway, one day while I was procrastinating I decided it would be kind of like studying if I looked up every French and Québécois band I had any memory of ever hearing. There were quite a few, weirdly enough. I took Spanish for all four years of high school and I only know two Spanish-speaking bands, and that's because I specifically looked for them. I should probably look for more. Anyway, one of the songs I looked up was by Lio, and I got addicted fast. She's Portuguese, but she's from Belgium, and she was a French pop star in the eighties. Her songs are catchy  and very eighties-sounding and I like them a lot.

When I first thought of posting this song, I hunted around for an English translation of the lyrics to link to because I figured surely someone out there had done one. But I didn't find one, so I decided to try it myself. So here you are, everyone- after the jump is my first attempt at translating something out of French. Behold what eight months of truly insane college language classes can do for you. If you think something in this is wrong, please tell me in the comments. The French lyrics are here.

Friday Doodle

It's late, but I hope it's worth it- I drew little kid me meeting me now.

Go the Fuck to Sleep

This website saved my ass at the end of last school year when I had papers and projects in everything and I was scraping by on as little sleep as possible. I was still dead on my feet most of the time, of course, but if nothing else it made sure I got at least 1.5 hours of sleep a night.

Anyway, if you're not interested in going out of your mind the way I did, this site is still super useful. If you're a proactive person and you have a certain time you need to/want to wake up, it'll tell you when to go to bed. If you're like me and incapable of planning when you're going to go to bed, it'll tell you the best times to set your alarm for. If you're taking a nap, you can make sure it's the optimum length. All kinds of wonderful things!

God, just thinking about what the end of the school year was like makes me go a little funny. If you're still in school, you have all my sympathy. I will never again underappreciate the ability to go to sleep when I feel tired and not have to force myself to fight the sleepiness and stay awake to work on something or fight being awake and go to bed before I actually want to. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go to bed now, because I'm tired and I fucking feel like it.

Heaven Hill

Today's song is "The Girl who Lives on Heaven Hill" (how does capitalization work again?) by Hüsker Dü.

I just really like this song. It's so nice. I love how the rhythm guitar sounds like a blast of static for a lot of the song. That's one of my favorite things. Actually, it's the reason I started learning guitar in the first place- not to play a solo or a pretty song, but to be able to make a wall of noise.

Incoming Personal Shit

UPDATE 6/5: I'm in a better place now than when I wrote this, just so the world knows, even though I will leave this up. And I'm not dropping out of college.

This is my situation.

I want to go somewhere. I want to see sunsets and sunrises and take pictures of everything. I want to meet people and make friends but always have somewhere to go to be alone. I want to visit cities and country towns that usually no one bothers to visit. I know if I actually did this, I probably wouldn’t meet anyone because I suck at that. But maybe the traveling would be enough. But it’s pointless because I can’t. I have to work and figure out my major and then go back to college. 

More Music Video Fun

This is the music video for "Stay Useless" by Cloud Nothings, a band/guy I really like. (I say band/guy because it was originally a solo project.) They might have new stuff out by now. I should probably see about that. This is why this is not entirely a music blog- I am exceedingly lazy and can't even be bothered to keep up with bands I like, let alone all the Happenin' New Musicians. Anyway. I have no idea what the fuck is up with this video, but it's pretty cool and I think it fits the song. So here it is.

Nerd Cat

I don't even know.

Concentrated Ads

(What is this? Me, getting behind on posts, already? Perish the thought.)

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if someone took all the shitty ads on the internet- scams, porn, poker, questionable downloads, dating sites, diet miracles, Hot Deals!!!- and compacted them into a 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel space?

Wonder no more.

Of course, it goes without saying: if you value your computer, just look, don't click. Also, I've heard that this site has some popups- I have a pretty intense ad blocker, so I haven't seen them myself if they're there, but yeah. If you don't want to actually go to the site, there are plenty of screenshots out there. Your call.

Wikipedia can explain the creation of this strange cyber junk collage better than I can, but basically, a college kid came up with it to pay off his student loan debt and it inspired a bunch of copycat sites that work in a similar way. (So, yes, there is more weirdness like this out there on the web. But this is The Original.) It's kind of fascinating to look at. Most of the ads are so small that they're pretty cryptic, even though they're as brightly colored and garish as all internet ads are. They only have room for a teeny, intensely pixelated picture or a word/short phrase.