omg I am up so much later than I meant to be up, but I finally hit the 20000 mark for nanowrimo! That was my goal for today, I'm so proud of myself. That was around 3500 words tonight, in like...2 hours or so. Maybe 3 hours. idk, anyway, I finally hit it!

And now, ( Project Runway Episode 2: My thoughts and stuff! )

OH MY GOD INTERNET

BEATLES ROCK BAND IS EVERYTHING I DREAMED IT WOULD BE

I'm so happy it's finally here! This morning I woke up, remembered that OMG ITS BEATLES DAY, threw off my covers, and got in the shower right away. I drove to Gamestop, playing Beatles music on the way, bought my copy, literally sprinted back to my car, and drove home. On the way home my ipod played "Twist and Shout" and I full-out did the twist while I was driving. And of course I sang at the top of my lungs. And drummed on my steering wheel. It was rather dangerous, actually, considering when I was doing the twist I did not have my hands on the wheel. TEN AND TWO, TEN AND TWO. (Bonus points to Keavy if she gets the reference!)

So I got home, danced my way to my door, tore open the plastic, ran downstairs, put the disc in, and grabbed my guitar. And...MY OWN WORKING WIIMOTE WOULDN'T WORK. I just SOBBED. DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO. I was seriously going to go out and buy a new one if it didn't start working. But eventually I got it...I refused to believe that BOTH of my wiimotes were broken, so I tried some different batteries. The other ones said they were half-charged but the new ones worked, so whatever. The other ones are charging now, we'll see if they manage to hold a charge.

So anyway, IT'S AMAZING. The absolute best part is all the animations. OMG SO GORGEOUS. I want to crawl into that world and live there forever. And doing graphic design for Apple Corps has long been one of my favorite daydreams and those animations are like the EPITOME of what I wish I could do with my life, so it's like OMG SOMEBODY OUT THERE HAS MY DREAM JOB. Ahhh. I seriously think I'm going to have to redo my LJ layout in honor of how AWESOME EVERYTHING LOOKS.

I really like the way the gameplay is organized, too. You earn photos for doing things - if you get 3 stars on a song you get a photo, another one for 5 stars, one for completing all songs in a certain set, and then that unlocks a challenge for that set and you get another photo for completing that. So then you can look through your photo album - the photos are of the boys, of course, and then each photo has a little anecdote to go with it. Nothing groundbreaking, basically all stuff creepy people like me already know, but it's still awesome. And then when you get a certain number of photos, you get a prize, which I guess is some sort of recording or video or whatever. I got one prize so far and it was the 1963 Christmas messages! Yayyy! I don't think I will ever not laugh at George going "I'M GEORGE HARRISON!" But anyway, I really like the whole incentive system, it's nice to have ways to set goals other than just beating all of the songs.

So, in addition to that, Glee premiered tonight! And it was SO good. Better than the pilot, IMO - I loved the pilot, but it seems like they really used it as an opportunity to get feedback and figure out what direction to take the show in. And I'm still drooling over Matthew Morrison. Oh my.

Okay, and now I SWEAR I AM GOING TO DO THAT PROJECT RUNWAY UPDATE RIGHT NOW. Stay tuned. If you care.

Hello lovelies. Long time no see, I think, but this will be the first of at least two posts from me today so you can rejoice about that. Or something.

NYC was very fun! Prepare to be TOLD ABOUT MY DAY YEAH.

( New York, New York is everything they say... )

I was just thinking...I feel like we sort of have a new medium developing in the TV marathon. In recent years there have been a ton of shows that are just made to marathon...very serial things like Lost and Heroes. Not only do they need to be watched in order with the major plot points being remembered throughout in order for them to make any sense, most people seem to find that they get way better if you marathon them. The more you treat the entire series (or a season of it) as one unit, the more addictive and compelling it is.

TV shows never used to be that way - up until relatively recently, each episode basically stood alone. There would be some plotlines that carried through, but for the most part it wouldn't really matter if you missed an episode. Or if you stumbled across one while channel flipping it would be entertaining even out of order. Sitcoms and other shows still work like that, an episode of Friends or Scrubs is always going to be enjoyable. But a single episode of Lost? Not quite as enticing, and it probably won't be much fun at all if you're not an expert on Lost so you can immediately place it into a mental timeline.

So I really feel like these sort of TV shows are a completely different medium. In an episode of a sitcom or a similar "casual" show, you tell a story in half an hour or an hour. In a movie, you tell a story in a couple hours. With these sorts of TV shows, you might be telling a story in 24 hours or longer! Obviously it's a bunch of interrelated smaller stories, but they go together and a lot of times they sort of add up to one big story.

I imagine that these things will become something you'd rewatch the same way we watch movies we've already seen or reread books. Years and years from now you'll decide to rewatch Lost or Heroes or True Blood or whatever and spend a couple months running through it all.

LET ME TELL YOU INTERNETS I AM VERY DISPLEASED

I already tweeted about this but I'm so freaking pissed that I have to vent here too.

Disney is planning to a 3D animation remake of Yellow Submarine.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WOULD YOU DO SUCH A THING. IT WAS A A PERFECTLY FANTASTICALLY FABULOUS MOVIE YOU DO NOT NEED TO REMAKE IT. AND IT IS SO ABSOLUTELY ICONIC OF THE 60S AND POP ART AND PETER MAX'S STYLE AND ALL THAT STUFF. TO REMAKE SOMETHING THAT IS THE EPITOME OF A CERTAIN STYLE IN A DIFFERENT STYLE IS JUST DISRESPECTFUL AND TRAGIC. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GIVE IT A REST WITH THE 3D ANIMATION EVERYBODY IS SICK OF IT AND NOBODY WANTS TO SEE IT ANYMORE. AND WHY WOULD YOU MAKE AN ANIMATED MOVIE OF SOMETHING THAT IS ALREADY AN ANIMATED MOVIE ANYWAY IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

DAMMIT DISNEY WHY ARE YOU SO COMPLETELY CLUELESS ABOUT EVERYTHING? ARE YOU SO ENGROSSED IN YOUR OWN LITTLE BUBBLE DOWN THERE THAT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT ANYBODY WANTS TO SEE OR WHAT ANYBODY IS SAYING ABOUT YOU? I AM SO FREAKING SICK OF THIS.

Oh, and the kicker: it's being directed by Robert Zemeckis, the guy who did Polar Express and the upcoming remake of A Christmas Carol, using the same performance capture technique used in those two. HEY, NEWSFLASH. NOBODY LIKES YOUR PERFORMANCE CAPTURE STUFF, WE FIND IT VERY VERY CREEPY AND NOWHERE NEAR AS COOL AS YOU SEEM TO THINK IT IS.

Here's the link:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/all-aboard-yellow-submarine-remake-in-the-works/

While I'm ranting about Disney's utter cluelessness, let me rant more about The Princess and the Frog in case I haven't ranted enough in here about it. Okay, I'm glad they're finally going back to traditional 2D hand-drawn animation. I'm glad they're going back to fairy tales. I'm glad they're finally making a movie with a black princess. But why, oh why, do they have to be so BAD at it? Firstly, some of the character designs are just awful, they're bland and uninspired and so unoriginal. The frogs, especially. They look like every other cartoon frog ever! But beyond that...

They finally have a black princess. Okay, great. But then...they named her Tiana, she's a waitress in New Orleans. Um, Disney? This is starting to be a little awkwardly stereotypical. Did they really have to give her a "black girl" name?? But oh, it gets SO MUCH WORSE because they couldn't just stick with the traditional story of the frog prince, oh no, of course not, they had to TURN TIANA INTO A FROG TOO. DISNEY, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? ARE YOU COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF WHAT YOU'RE DOING? YOU JUST TURNED YOUR FIRST BLACK PRINCESS INTO AN ANIMAL FOR THE MAJORITY OF THE MOVIE. God, where should we even start? Do we start with the fact that it feels like they didn't actually WANT a black princess so they found a way to not actually have to put the black girl on screen for most of the movie? Do we even want to go NEAR the horribly awkward implications of turning your first black lead into an ANIMAL?

I don't want this to sound worse than it is because I don't for a second think they're doing this stuff on purpose. I'm sure Disney doesn't have any racist agenda or anything. They just don't THINK!

I was reading an article about the movie and it had quotes from some Disney people. One guy said something like "We maybe didn't realize the impact of that. But we made every effort to be as sensitive as possible." (That's probably not the exact quote because I'm doing this from memory, so don't quote me on that.) Um, really? You didn't realize the IMPACT of it? HOW LONG have people been complaining about the lack of a black princess? It's hardly gone unnoticed, it seems to me it's been a pretty big deal. And when they announced this movie, everybody got so excited that they finally WOULD have one. So they just make themselves look stupid by saying they didn't realize it was a big deal. And...they made every effort to be as sensitive as possible? Oh, PLEASE.

In the same article, another guy from Disney said something along the lines of "There was a feeling that people didn't want to see 2D animation anymore." (Again, not an exact quote I'm sure.) And again...WHAT?! People have been pleading for years for a return to 2D animation, to everything that initially made us fall in love with Disney movies. NOBODY could understand WHY ON EARTH they kept churning out 3D things when we were all begging them to go back to 2D! So how oblivious do you have to be to say that you thought people didn't want to see 2D anymore?!

IT'S JUST SO FREAKING FRUSTRATING!

AUGH I cannot decide what to do with my hat and a half that I crocheted.

The one that's finished is pretty lumpy because I didn't use a pattern. The one that's not finished also didn't use a pattern so I'm not sure whether it'll come out right or not. It's also crocheted a little more tightly than the first one, so it's not as soft, and I really like the softness better. And I ran out of yarn. I want to make one that uses both this color yarn and the creamy color of the same thing, so I need to buy the creamy color, but if I don't undo something I'll have to buy more of the raspberry color too. But the yarn is like $6.50 a skein or something like that so I don't want to have to buy two when I've already bought one if I'm basically going to end up with one hat that I'm going to actually wear. And the hook that I'm using is a K which is 6.5 mm and for this yarn it should really be like a 9 or 10 mm one, so I should really buy that too.

SO these are my choices:

1. Undo the finished hat so I can use the yarn to finish off the hat that's half done.
2. Undo the finished hat, start over using that yarn and the correct hook and a pattern and just leave the half done one for now and potentially do something with it in the future.
3. Buy more yarn so I can finish the half done one without having to take anything apart.

Ugh. I'm thinking I should probably take apart the finished one and start over with that yarn. I'm probably not too likely to wear it, especially not after I have a better one that will be sort of similar. I don't wear a ton of hats anyway. But I hate to take it apart, especially since it was my first crochet project!

Today I discovered Ubiquity and OMG I love it soooo much. It makes me feel like I'm living in the future! If you haven't heard of it, you should go here and watch the demo video. SO AWESOME.

In other news, we have a toad living in the little flower bed in front of our house, so today I decided to name him Hercules. Technically, Hercules P. Toad. The P stands for Ptolemy.

I don't know if I've mentioned Ralph in here, but Ralph is a (presumably) stray cat who's been hanging around our house for a long time now. Probably like almost a year, I don't know. At first we just saw him once in a while and he's been around more and more to the point where now he's practically here more often than he's not. We put out food for him but he's a big scaredy cat and won't let anybody near him.

Anyway, today I noticed that Ralph has somehow acquired a swarm of mosquitoes. They're flying all around him, biting and getting in his eyes and all over his face and everything. And he can't seem to get rid of them or kill them or anything, all he can do is kinda twitch them off when they land on his face. I feel so bad for him and I don't know what to do - how can I kill mosquitoes who are hanging around a cat if the cat won't let me near him? I don't know why he has a swarm of mosquitoes anyway. Poor guy.

In other news, I think I have successfully lost a little bit of weight. It's hard to tell because it fluctuates anyway plus I'm not consistent about what time of day I weigh myself, what clothes I'm wearing, etc. But I think I've dropped a couple pounds already. And now that I have running shoes I can actually go running and hopefully that will also help me lose some more pounds and inches.

I've been really trying to eat healthy. I'm eating a small salad for lunch most days. Sometimes I might have a few potato chips or cheetos or something with it but a lot of the time I either just have the salad or I have some fruit with it. And I'm trying to not drink soda with lunches, at least not during the week. I still drink soda with dinner, and sometimes with lunch on the weekend since everyone else is drinking soda, but on weekdays with lunch I either have water or Vitamin Water or like lemonaid or Koolaid or something. Obviously Koolaid or Vitamin Water or whatever is not a whole lot better than soda but I figure it's at least slightly better. And I'm trying to keep myself from snacking on too much unhealthy stuff. I'm basically trying to limit myself to at MOST two "unhealthy" snacks a day - cookies, candy, ice cream, whatever. And for the most part I'm keeping it to one or none of those. Usually all I have is something at night. As much as possible I'm eating healthier snacks if I feel like snacking - fruit, cheese and crackers, stuff like that.

I need to come up with some more ideas for healthy snacks. My sleep schedule is so screwed up that I'm basically eating lunch when I wake up and then I'm up for like 8 hours after dinner, so I definitely get hungry later and it's definitely in my best interest, health-wise, to eat something later, but I'm pretty bad at healthy snacking. And the stupid part is that I really don't have a sweet tooth - if I get hungry late at night, I never actually WANT cookies or candy or whatever, I want real FOOD, but the unhealthy stuff is so much easier. Part of the problem is that I feel weird about eating late at night, especially eating "real food" because it's never been something my family does. So I want stuff that requires little to no preparation because I don't want to make a lot of noise and potentially wake people up, nor do I want to dirty a bunch of dishes that will have to be washed the next day. So fruit works really well, crackers with or without cheese is easy, but beyond that I'm kinda stumped. So if anyone has any ideas for easy yummy snacky things, let me know!

I finished that crochet cupcake a few days back and I never uploaded a picture, so here you go!



It's a little lumpy but I'm still happy with it!

Also, it occurred to me that when I posted those pictures of the cake I made they were friends only so I'm going to post them again just because I hardly ever post anything interesting that isn't f-locked.

( so here they are! )

So I had a creepy dream last night. It appeared to be based on the book Peeps and it featured everybody's favorite Keavy.

( dream! )

So after the news about Lee, I got all distracted for a while searching for pics and news of all the Beatle kids. It's been SO LONG since I looked for recent pics so there were a lot of good ones that I hadn't seen. So I thought I'd do a little Beatle kid picspam, I know at least one person will want to see these! Some are kinda old, from as far back as 2006, so there are probably some you've seen before, but whatever.

I mostly focused on Lee, Jules, and James. But I think pretty much everyone is in here somewhere. Some of the others are way more visible anyway, it's never hard to find pics of Sean or Dhan so I didn't bother with too many of them. And I just stole all of these from Getty Images.

( Beatle kid picspam! )

There are tons more pics beyond what I posted so go search if you want to see more!

So I just watched Dating in the Dark on a whim because it seemed interesting.

OMG NGL I TOTALLY LOVED IT.

I'm going to try to be relatively vague - it's not really the kind of thing where spoilers would be a HUGE deal, but just in case, if you might want to watch it at some point, feel free to keep reading because I'm trying not to give anything major away.

If you haven't heard of it, it's a dating show where people meet and get to know each other in total darkness so they don't know what the others look like. They end up choosing one person that they want to get to know and continue "dating" in the dark room, and then they reveal what each person looks like. The reveal is done with the other person still in the dark - so first they reveal the guy and he can't see the girl's reaction, then vice versa. They can't talk or anything at that time. And at the end, they get the chance to finally meet up, each person can either go to this meeting or just walk away then.

My favorite girl ended up with my favorite guy! Favorite girl seemed SO MUCH like me, and favorite guy.....oh DROOL.

I was surprised at the end because I didn't realize they had it set up so they could see the other people leaving. I thought it would just be like you wait for a while and if the other person doesn't show you eventually give up, but to have to actually watch them walk away...oh man my heart was breaking for someone who had to go through that.

I found it interesting watching how they prepared for the reveal. They showed the girls doing their makeup and fidgeting with their hair and they were clearly trying to pick cute outfits, but their conversation mostly focused on wondering what the guys looked like. Whereas the guys were occasionally wondering what the girls looked like or hoping they were hot, but it seemed like the guys were more concerned with hoping they were attractive enough for the girls and worrying what the girls would think.

I thought it was kinda weird that they never discussed physical appearance; I think they must have been instructed not to. They did the whole face-feeling thing, and there was a fair amount of physical contact, so you're going to know the basics - hair style, height, stuff like that. And they had them describe the other person to a sketch artist who would draw a picture based on what they described so they could "see" them that way. But the stuff you can't feel, like hair color, surprised a lot of people. If you were meeting someone in the dark, wouldn't that naturally be something you'd ask, wanting to form a mental picture? So I think they must have told them not to actually SAY anything about their looks and just let it be based on feeling the person. Haha that sounds creepy.

I enjoyed that because the personality and looks aspects were so distinct, it really forced people to confront their own shallowness. I knew going into it that it would highlight everyone's shallow tendencies but it hadn't occur to me how much people would have to deal with their OWN shallowness. If you have a great connection with someone and then see what they look like and decide to walk away....well, you are now FULLY AWARE that you're being shallow about it.

I also liked when (favorite girl) said that if she hadn't gotten to know (favorite guy) before seeing him, she never would have gotten to know him at all. I assumed a show like this would be about "inner beauty" and that you'd see people falling for people who, um...weren't necessarily stunningly attractive, but I hadn't thought about the opposite - he was actually TOO HOT and she just would have assumed she had no chance. Really interesting. And he was SUCH a cutie pie!

hai LJ halp me plz!

When you send out a resume, do you change the objective to reflect the specific job you're sending it for, or do you just have one standard resume with a more generic objective that you send to everything?

And more specifically...my resume is available on my website. My website URL is also on my resume and I would generally mention the URL in the cover letter as well. My resume which is on my website is obviously going to have a more generic objective - right now it says "An entry level position in the field of graphic design" although I think I might change it to "An entry level position in a field relating to graphic design or web design" or something like that (does that sound good?). So if I did have to change the objective to reflect each specific job, then the resume I send won't match the one that's on my website.

I'm thinking I'll probably just go with one standard resume that I'll send everywhere, but I figured I'd see what you guys think.

I also need to change my resume a little bit...it seems like I'm looking at more web design stuff than I expected to, so where I list relevant coursework I think I might add stuff like HCI, Web Science, Interface Design, maybe Writing for the WWW so that I can show both sides in my resume better.

Augghh. I got an email about a job that might be good - it's a web developer position, which makes me a little nervous, but idk. In the part about what the job entails they mentioned FrontPage and Drupal (and I think maybe a couple other things I'm not familiar with) but in the qualifications bit they basically just said like HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver. So I'm like...well I know that stuff, but not the other stuff you mentioned that I'd be doing, so idk. I guess it can't hurt to apply, I'm just worried I'd end up in one of those situations where they somehow expect me to do things that I don't know how to do.

Alright, time to write a bit about Half Blood Prince!

( my thoughts and experiences under here )

My randoms from shirt.woot came today!

( I got... )

Tiny Things I Hate: The Way Spin Magazine Describes Songs They Think You Should Listen To

In every issue, Spin includes a list of 10 songs that they recommend with a very quick description. One would assume that if you were recommending a song, you would describe it in such a way that the reader might be able to tell if it would be something they'd like. You'd try to place it in a genre or a combination of genres, you'd describe the sound stylistically, you'd name similar bands and artists, something like that.

Well, here are two descriptions that I grabbed randomly out of the issue I was reading when I decided to make this a TTIH:

Josh Reichmann Oracle Band - "Shivering Black" - "A stomping, sparkling sci-fi popscape that hits like a kiss from a starman you suspect is full of shit but still dig for his dance moves."

...um, what? What exactly is a popscape? Is a starman an astronaut? What is it like being kissed by an astronaut, and what does it SOUND like? What the hell does a starman sound like when he's full of shit? Is it different if I only SUSPECT he's full of shit?

And then...Florence and the Machine - "Dog Days Are Over" - "Florence Welch's clear, tuff-dart vocals are the killer constant as bedsit folk gives way to girl-group bomp, dissolves into ethereal Kate Bushisms, and ends on a romping rave-up."

Again, WHAT? Tuff-dart? Bedsit folk? Rave-up? I mean, maybe these things are words, but why do they have to be so pretentious about it? It's really off-putting and definitely not going to entice anybody to listen to the song. If you're trying to describe a song people don't know, you need to describe it as it relates to things people DO know. The "stomping, sparkling" bit from the first one is okay, it's a little purple but I think most people would get the general idea of what that means in regards to a song. And girl-group bomp, that works, people can figure that out. But half the time these things read like there's some sort of contest at Spin headquarters to see who can cram the most metaphors into a 30 word description, and you get bonus points for every obscure music reference you make. Not that I'm calling Kate Bush obscure, but other descriptions make a lot of weird references. If you want to compare to another band/artist, compare to Bowie or Dylan or the Stones, not Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

The makeup I ordered from Everyday Minerals came in the mail today! Yay! I just tried some of it...it looks decent, I'm sure it would be better if I had some good brushes. Or, y'know, if I was capable of applying makeup well. I tried one of the foundations and I didn't want to waste it so I only used a very little bit this time but it seems to have evened out my skin tone a bit and it didn't completely cover up my freckles which is good. My freckles are one of the reasons I never wear makeup, because I hate covering them up. And I tried the concealer which I like a lot. And the blush, too - I really love the color I got, but I'm REALLY bad at applying it - it's so hard to get a small enough amount! But it blends really well, way better than cheap crappy blushes.

So you should all go get a free sample kit from Everyday Minerals. You only pay the shipping which was $3.28 and you get sample sizes of three foundations, one blush, and one concealer. And they're good sizes too - the little jars are a little over an inch across and about 3/4 of an inch high (although the part that actually holds the powder is about 1/2 an inch high). So five of those is pretty decent for $3.28, they're definitely going to last me a while. It's really hard choosing colors, though, but I just went with my best guesses.

Unrelated: shirt.woot had another random shirt day so I ordered three more random shirts. YAY! They won't be here for another week but I'm excited. Still no box of misprints for me though - oh well.