“Banana, Jordana. Not banana, not Jordana. Who, what, when, where, why. Wales is where Chris works. Whales live in the ocean. Tulip, envelope. Don, Don. Yeah, that's how I say things.”
SO this has been about the best week ever, I would say. Things started and ended and things have been set up for a wonderful future. I can't wait to see what unfolds.
This is useful and will be useful in the future. Here.
I watched A Very Long Engagement a few nights ago - I got it for my birthday. :] Allow me to summarize it in a nutsell: A French independent film, from the director of Amélie and featuring many of the same actors (including Audrey Tautou), set during WWI, as both a love story and a mystery.
How could I not love it?
For the French students in the audience, a cute pun: The young lovers in our story are Mathilde and Manech. Wherever they go, they write or carve 'MMM': Mathilde aime Manech. Manech aime Mathilde. Aww.
Highly, highly recommended. I ought to keep my eyes open for the novel.
~Joy should read All Quiet on the Western Front again, or something.
I saw it on the shelf tonight at Borders, and I was just drawn to it.
¡El Principito!
There's just... too much cute.
"Pido perdón a los niños por haber dedicado este libro a una persona mayor." From the first sentence, before the book even starts, there is cute. The Little Prince is absolutely the sweetest book ever. Wish me luck on getting through this without falling into diabetic coma.
The story so far: I have a problem. I suck at conversation. I can go on for quite a while on any given topic I care about, but usually I just cannot think of anything to talk about. Thus, I set out to use the collective wisdom of Teh Internets to remedy my problem. Here is what I learned.
As with so many other things; dancing, foreign accents, writing; confidence is key. Awkward silences and uneasy laughter only feel that way when you're unsure of yourself.
Ask questions. Delve deeper into a topic. Open-ended questions are important, 'fat' questions and not 'skinny' questions.
Have some questions or topics beforehand. Obviously conversation is a flow and can't be scripted, nor can it be a laundry list of interview questions. But it's easier to think up something prior to talking than it is in the heat of the moment, when you're both "Well, what do you want to talk about now?"
A lot of stuff I read about mentioned stuff like eye contact, nodding, body language and all that. That all's pretty important, I'm sure, and I make extensive use of it in my conversations. However I run into more difficulty finding things to talk about on the internet and on the phone.
Another suggestion I see across the board is alcohol, which sadly is not an option. Aheh.
Be observant - again, much more difficult on the internet than in real life. Look around the room, find something out of place or interesting and comment on it. Very easy in bookstores. Very hard in an intangible instant messenger window.
Turn off your internal filter - much like writing, sometimes you just have to put something down even if it might sound stupid. If you're talking to a friend it doesn't really matter anyway. Open up, get comfortable, say something stupid once in a while. It's all right.
Additionally: I have discovered the joy that is AskMetafilter. What an awesome resource.
You know, on Friday we're planning on going to Newport and Elyssa and Jessie have both invited tons of their friends, and I'm getting myself completely pumped up for it. Honest, I'm excited.
Also, here's a stock conversation-starter, which reminds me some of something Doug would say... "If you had to eat one person in this room, which one would it be and how would you cook them?"
~Joy coming out of her shell (if she goes back in, 3 more weeks of winter!)
Style fun. I've been planning this one for a while, to finally get tag support on my Deadjournal, and I figured I'd change up the LJ as well. Turns out S2 doesn't allow for nearly as much control as the S1 system did, which is a damned shame. But it works for what little I was able to do with it.
New Style - V for Vendetta. Much fun.
~Joy
Edit - ok, so s2... basically sucks. Arg! So irritating. I can't do a thing with it and the background can't do much either. So I dunno.
You know what the best way to really memorize hangeul is?
Write a fucking letter in them. Holy god.
I told Paula that I'd learned the Korean alphabet, and she suggests, oh, you should write a letter to Soo Wan. I explain to her I don't actually know any Korean... just the writing. Still, I accept and once I get on a project like this you know I can't just abandon it.
I've scanned my letter. Not that I expect any of you to know Korean, but maybe like me you think it looks cool. Or maybe you want to laugh at my handwriting.
Basically, it's saying Hi Suwan, it's Joy, I don't know Korean but I can read and write it. It's cool. Maybe you could teach me a little.
True proof of learning by doing, 'cos I sure as hell didn't know anything past the first word before tonight. Now I've gained almost mastery of formal verbs. -p[m] ni da! -sup[m] ni da! Woohoo. :D
John Linnell - Will You Love Me In December As You Do In May
]
C'est très chouette.
step 1
step 2
step 3
step 4
step 5 cutting out stencil
step 6 painting
step 7 detailing
step 8
--I've finished. Credit where credit is due, by the way: Feather stencil adapted from this photo, by Angie: flickr.com/photos/aisforangie/78350537/ Owl adapted from the photo at the top of the post, (c) Dan Lockshaw. I meant to use a CC licensed photo, just to put myself in the moral clear, but after a 2-second Flickr search I gave up and just went with this picture 'cos it was perfect. Sorry Danny man.
OK OK so I stole this from Danielle. It was pretty fun. I'd rather they had a version for Deadjournal, though. On DJ I have so many more friends that I know so much better. Oh well.
I decided, in case anyone was avidly wondering, to watch Venue Songs instead of Clockwork Orange last night. Mostly because I was getting tired and since it was a bunch of music videos, I could stop at any point.
Actually, it turned out to be just over a half hour so it was a good choice anyway. Here's a video-by-video review. Take note that I've never heard most of the venue songs before:
1. Dallas - Trees. What on Earth? What. On. Earth. This wasn't a good choice as the starting track (though I guess they were put on chronologically) because it's completely different from all the other songs and videos in mood. It's creepy and crazy. I don't really like it.
2. Albany - The Egg - I *love* this one. The song is pretty catchy, and the video is amazing. It's everything a TMBG video should be. Really snazzy. I heard someone compare it to the Purple Toupee video, and it is similar in style but only to a point.
3. Los Angeles - House of Blues - The Lads and The Blokes. Huh. The animation reminded me of Damn Good Times, which makes sense because they were done by the same person.
4. Anaheim - House of Blues - The song is interesting. It was one of the two or three venue songs that I'd already heard. Still kind of weird.
5. Vancouver - Richard's on Richards - This is a GREAT, catchy song that I wish could have been longer. The video fits the song and has a nice concept but it gets old after a while. The girl is cute.
6. Pittsburgh - Mr. Small's - ADORABLE. Animated Johns are always cute but these are so stylized and I just want to hug them forever.
7. Asheville - The Orange Peel - Haahahaha. How cute. Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm the orange peel.
8. Glasgow - The Garage - Eh. This song features spelling out of THEGARAGE, and I could not for the life of me figure out what they were trying to spell until they actually said 'the garage'.
9. Asbury Park - The Stone Pony - The song is very hard to understand. The video is perfect. The Johns' expresssions are great throughout.
10. Brooklyn - Celebrate Brooklyn - I LOVE IT. I would probably understand it better if I were a Brooklynite, but I still love it. The video is simply charming, in a collage/cutout style. It's like viewing a prehistoric animutation.
Bonus videos:
11. Damn Good Times - I love this song and everything about this song, from the great storytelling lyrics to the impossible-to-sing-along-with (but-I'm-getting-better-at-it) chorus. The video is weird but fun, but I wish it had more to do with the song. It starts out great and then goes off on some creepy vampire tangent.
12. Experimental Film - Good to have it on DVD. It's cute. I'm not really a Homestar fan.
13. Bastard Wants to Hit Me - I love this song also. The vocoder is bloody perfect and the tune is way<3too<3catchy for the random subject matter. The video is new and interesting. The animation is really fun and I watched the video online before I got the DVD - Seeing it on my TV, I noticed that the characters are semi-transparent. It gives it a really nice look.
14. I'm All You Can Think About - Amusing song, yes. Linnell animated the video. Teee.
After the videos, there are some bumps from the TMBG webpage by John Hodgman telling viewers to tune in next week. One even tells viewers to buy the DVD. There are three or four of these in a row that are essentially the same and they get old fast. It would have been better to leave them in a bonus section rather than have them play at the end of the DVD.
In between all the videos are more interstitials with Hodgman, and these are great. They feature Hitchhiker's Guide-esque computer animations and John Hodgman being himself and awesome like he is.
~Joy would, were she reviewing it for the Torch, give Venue Songs an 8/10 - it could have been longer but the songs were all great.
I wrote an editorial about Intelligent Design for the school newspaper. It's a little jumbled and ranting because I wrote it at 5 in the morning, and it's certainly no scientific paper, but I'm sort of proud of it because it's the first editorial I've written...
Soo, recommend me some more. I plan on ripping my Trans-Siberian Orchestra CD, but other than that I don't think I have anything. Tell me anything you want as long as it's good and it's got a winter, holiday (if you have Hanukkah songs that aren't by Adam Sandler, that's a plus), or Christmas theme.
And, what's that song they played all the goddamn time last year? For The Polar Express? I think it was Josh Groban. It was a good song.
FSM bless whoever's bright idea it was to put a 'remember me' checkbox on the LJ top-of-page login box. God it was so annoying to have to click through a blank login just to select the 'never log me out plzthx' thingy.
Behind the cut lies many large-ish (800x600 and lower) (OK, Flickr resized them) photos. Dialup beware. ( PENS! )
So, am I glad I read about the Signo Bit in Wired? Heck yes. Am I going to be using these things every day? Probably not. They're fun, but not really practical. You have to make an effort to write that small (though I enjoy trying to write small with normal pens and it's cool for it to actually be readable), and the occasionally clog up. They're really spiffy though and I'm going to keep a pocket notebook around and use it as if it were a journal. Because I CAN.
^_^
And I've found some V masks on Ebay. Apparently they were given out at Comic Con. So that solves that problem. =D
Went to a Halloween store today, and I was finally INSPIRED. I didn't trick-or-treat last year, but I think I want to this year and due to my recent, how should I say, obsession, I want to go as V/Guy Fawkes.
It should be a pretty simple costume - a cloak, some books, a hat, and a mask. The mask might be tricky though. So I'm sending out an APB:
If you see around anymasksthatlooklikethis, definitley let me know. It would be no big deal to paint on the features, I just need something smiling like that.
Online or in real life - even if a mask exists in New Jersey, I can keep my eyes peeled for it out here.
Hopefully this won't be like a really stupid homemade costume... Springs to mind the time I made a Sailor Saturn outfit out of an old t-shirt, some purple cloth and a princess crown (along with a wrapping-paper-tube glaive...) -- a bitter reminder how should should never, ever ever cosplay. Ever.
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joyuna's journal
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