OMG, I have been going nuts with thinking up userpics ideas at work and trying to stop myself from actually making any even though I now have Photoshop in my software suite. FIFTY, 50, five-zero new userpics I can have! Erg!
Some of my trillions of ideas for new icons
– DUNE! (Screen shots, Muad’dib, my name is a killing name?)
– Quilting (needles, thread, sewing machine, grid, rotary cutter, fabric, patterns) [in progess]
– “TV geography vacation spots” (sunnydale/capeside/stars hollow/cicely, alaska/Twin Peaks/Orange County/Smallville)
– girl idols (1 Sigourney Weaver, 2 Tank Girl, 3 Buffy, 4 Rory, 5 Cher in clueless, 6 C.J. from West Wing, 7 Leela, 8 Geena Davis as Pirate/Beetlejuice wife, 9 Kaylee firefly engineer, 10 anne of green gables, 11 queen Elizabeth – blackadder or shak in love?), My Mom (use black&white shot of her on beach)
– tmb.net articles I have written, and not written (check marks and x-es?)
– wooden dinosaur skeletons (“I build dinosaurs!â€)
– disgruntled playmobil office worker #245
– home improvements (my power tools, drywall, caulk, projects in motion)
– reading reports / printed word / glasses / book page (I heart reading)
– Baking/ all pie, all the time – apple, blueberry, pecan (fruits, pastry, recipie)
– “Mystery men” (sherlock,lord peter, poirot, lovejoy, etc)
– “comedy idols” (Eddie Murphy, adam sandler, dave chappelle, will Ferrell, Ali G….)
– fave embarrassing movies (Real Genius, Coming to America, etc)
– opera
– more recent me pics
– grad photo! / gene simmons
– muppets, still shots from season one
– video game voyeur icon (peeping eye, pixellated images) [in progress at home]
– confusion
– clockwork [in progress]
In other news, I baked the best apple-strawberry pie EVER on the weekend, with cheese in the crust and treacle in the filling. It was so delicious, it lived for less than 12 hours in the open air before boyfriend, roommate, and various family members polished it off. I take that as an excellent sign of tastiness.
I finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” today. Weeeiirrd. Really bizarre book. Well written, as usual, but many many unanswered questions left dangling at the end. The setting reminded me of “Resident Evil”, except with less zombies and more pigs and chickens. Definitely a strong ‘Raccoon City’ feel.
One thing I have to say for good old Peggy: she’s not afraid to look evil straight in the eye. The things she was writing about were chillingly current, topical, and although they deviate rather sharply from our current course, they were all too possible. The stark and widening division between gown and town, the bioengineering of everything with no moral boundaries, the horrific uses of the Internet.
It’s all happening, right here, right now. No soothing familiar escapist literature that stretches back into the past or looks at very selective elements of what we term the good life in the present. There are some horrible insights into the mind of an intelligent man who has been pushed beyond his limits, and is suffering from isolation and malnutrition. His collection and protection and listing-off of obscure words is a habit any rabid bibliophile can relate to, and one that I found myself doing as I was reading, in relation to his situation.
An interesting read, and a good rigorous follow-up to the pleasant escapism of “HP and the Half-Blood Prince”. Where to next? Maybe some nice, bulky literature.. Melville, Eco, Thackeray and the like. Today’s train ride home will have to make do with one of Lillian Jackson Braun’s “The Cat Who…” mysteries, though, since it’s all I have in my backpack.
Thank you for putting my feelings about Oryx and Crake into words for me, so I didn’t have to stop being lazy and do it for myself.
You know, if you slapped a paragraph or two onto either side of that, you’d have a nice, tight little review there, suitable for TMB.net publication.
I’m really, really trying to get more book reviews up there. Did you see my potentially clumsy attempt to thematically link several of the last books I read into a multi-book review?
Whaddaya think?
Well, I guess I could try to flesh that out, although it was just a really random jumble of thoughts that I jotted out without editing while at work.
I think it’s going to take me a long, long time to get accustomed to writing things that are 1) less than 20 pages long, and yet still worthwhile, 2) bereft of a thesis or strong path of argument, and yet still worthwhile, and 3) purely ransacked from the floating goo that is my brain, written from a position of opinion and instinct rather than research, and totally non-academic, and yet still worthwhile. School scarred me pretty badly.
I’ve been chewing over the idea of a quilting article, since that seems to be my current all-consuming brain disease. The angle would be “Quilting for the Under-50, Not-Yet-Buried-in-the-Suburbs Set” or “Quilting for the Swingin’ Single Artisan” or “Why Quilt if You Still Have a Life and Unsupported Bi-pedal Mobility”. My argument centers around the idea of quilting as something that young women should reclaim, outside of Mennonite and Shaker communities. I would centre it around four ideas: clutter/practicality, history and sensuality.
I’ll expand more on this later. Hopefully it will expand all the way into a proper TMB article.
ps – I am reading your book review on and off at work, but it will probably have to wait until I get home to do it properly.
Dude, why do I keep having to explain this to people today? Biggest doesn’t mean better! Seriously. The only reason to write something that is 20 pages long is if you need to go into that level of detail (or meet a page number/word count requirement). Brevity is more than just the soul of wit, baybee. Being able to write something short, pithy and to the point is absolutely a worthwile pursuit. As for a thesis, I often have a sort of nebulous thesis when I draft my articles… but there’s something to be said for the occasional straight-up book review, too. Encouraging people to read good books is a high calling!
As for your quilting article, it sounds good! You just have to, you know… stop coming up with cute titles, and actually write it 😉 (says the woman who has been courting a blank article about Closer, entitled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Artistics” for night on eight months now… *cough*)
Maybe we need to have a writing party. Do you still have a laptop?
Nigh on eight months. NIGH on them.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, I *do* still have a laptop.
A writing party sounds spiffy! When do you have the time? My only commitment for this upcoming weekend is‘s birthday dinner on Saturday night.
Otherwise, I’m game… weekend, weeknight, it’s all good.
…best apple-strawberry pie EVER…
Recipe. now. pretty please? with sugah on top?
-caellum
Well, you know there’s very little I won’t do for the promise of sugah.
I promise, I’ll type out the recipie and post it tonight, as soon as I get home from work. I’ll even give pastry tips, in case you are a pastry virgin and are wondering about things like sticky rollers and refrigeration time and crust-protection.
This pie will make you the envy of your peers at the lab, and the object of woman-lust from every hot-blooded female in the state of Colorado. Not that you don’t enjoy such attentions already, but they will be magnified significantly by your mastery of the fried apple cheese-crust pie. I’m almost scared for the ladies on your campus.
Bon appetit! (I’ll also work on making a tasty pastry icon for the recipie posting – my task for the afternoon)
Ah, madam, you presume too much! I have had the honour of declining no less than three marriage proposals, which were spontaneously offered after several lovely young ladies tasted my apple pie.
But my pie crust is lacking cheesy crust, so I will take your recipe and go forth and conquer
the ladies of my campus. With this recipe, and my newly refined chocolate rasberry cheesecake, no woman can withstand my charms!Of course, I’ll probably fall for some frickin’ vegetarian again or some girl who doesnt like sweets. Why do all the weirdos wander in my direction?
-caellum