Joy's journal

Voice Post

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 20:33:07 GMT

Voice Post

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 23:25:12 GMT

Voice Post

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:13:14 GMT

Thu, 25 May 2006 22:58:06 GMT

Happy Towel Day!

Sleep, and you end up sleeping your life away

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:52:10 GMT

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.

Je veux comprendre..!

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:38:12 GMT

Great article:
Shakespeare is like sex.

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.

What have I done?

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 01:27:28 GMT

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.

~Joy

On conversation and what I have learned

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 03:24:33 GMT

The Cliff's Notes version.

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!)

VVVVV

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:22:17 GMT

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.

Way to waste my evening

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 04:28:50 GMT

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

Making a shirt

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 16:17:11 GMT

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.

Photos of the shirt, and stuff:
http://flickr.com/photos/joyuna/tags/stencil/
I'm extremely pleased with how it came out. I'm going to wear it tomorrow. ^^

I'm sorry.

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 21:28:13 GMT

Wow, what's this all about? Crazy!

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:47:26 GMT

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.

Click here.
Take the quiz.
Post your results.
1) What is the_tingler's favorite color? Donno :(
2) Which of your friends should iownyouboth go out with? DOUG.
3) Thoughts on tuftedpuffin? I enjoy her entries. And she's tres spiffy.
4) Is shand2001 1337? Shand was leet before leet existed.
5) Would radio_cure go out with fortyxtwo? Omg 3way now.
6) How would ebilness conquer the world? With an infectious song to get stuck in our heads.
7) What would ompimec give cutieco8 for his/her birthday? Some crazy Spanish thing for Augusto...wait did they break up or not?
8) How many monkeys could radio_cure fight at once and win against? Last time I spoke with her, 8.
9) Is bourguiba a high school student? Should be.
10) Is bourguiba dead sexy? He was.
11) What flavor of jello would shand2001 be? Lemon.
12) What planet should starfisch be from? Rupert.
13) Are akselwestlund and the_tingler married? No...um...no.
14) Do you think shand2001 is hot? :D
15) Would iownyouboth and fortyxtwo make a good couple? They would be good friends I think.
16) What animal should shand2001 be combined with? WOLVERINE!
17) Would you wrestle shand2001 in jello? What's with the jello q's? Also, yeah.
18) What do you disagree with shadoxx428 about? ...techno >_>;;
19) One thing you can't stand about akselwestlund? He's not updated in forever.
20) What is shadoxx428's favorite game? Annoy people with leet coding skills.
21) Have you flirted with shand2001? Nah.
22) Does shand2001 travel a lot? Don't think so.
23) Does radio_cure have a big secret? Possibly.
24) What would you do if you found out the_tingler has a crush on you? Giggle and make a sandwich.
25) If starfisch were hanging off a cliff, what would shadoxx428 do? Let him FALL MWAHAHAAHHA
26) What is iownyouboth's favorite band/artist? hahaha I have no idea...no wait... I think it starts with a T. Or something.
27) Would you ever date akselwestlund? Nah, I hardly know him. =\
28) What exotic animal would shand2001 like as a pet? A guitar.
29) Have you ever dated the_tingler? Nope.
30) Does bourguiba smoke? I hope not.

Also a few people I haven't stayed in touch with that well. Sigh.

Silly putty!!

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 03:59:50 GMT

I bought one pound of silly putty. Photo-heavy.

My silly putty came today! Yes, a few days ago I ordered a 1-pound bulk block of putty (from here). Today the lovely (albeit plain) box arrived at my doorstep.

Inside, along with some various papers and whatnot, was a bag - the bag. Of putty.

Not that bulk silly putty is a new idea or anthing...

But really, it was fun. And beautiful. Even my cat grew curious about it.

The color was labeled as "amber", even though it looks pretty dull right now - it's glow in the dark, so it glows orange.

I bought a blacklight keychain along with it, to create some pretty neat effects in the dark that I sadly couldn't photograph.

Left it on my hand, sort of forgot about it for a few minutes and found myself with a brand new glove.

So how big is one pound of silly putty, you're wondering? Here's a size comparison with the simplest most available object, as US quarter:

Now, the [more] fun starts!

What fun, what fun. So highly recommended.

~Joy

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 21:56:35 GMT

Amazon Mechanical Turk put up a very odd HIT today - Elvish translation. For ten cents, one had to translate an Elvish sentence into English.

Lucky for me, it was just English transcribed into Tengwar. I win.

RHPS deemed culturally significant

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 04:06:54 GMT

Rocky Horror Picture Show added to the National Registry

A collaboration between 3 awesome Johns

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 18:11:05 GMT

They Might Be Giants - Venue Songs

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.

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:46:45 GMT

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...

A heated debate is going on around science, education, and constitutionality, and it all centers around Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design (ID), as defined by the Intelligent Design Network website, "holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection." Essentially, proponents of ID say that because things in the universe appear too complicated to have evolved on their own, they must have been created in their present-day form by an "intelligent designer" - not necessarily God, but a being with all the powers of a god that created the universe.
In the news recently, ID has been under attack in Dover, Pennsylvania. Last year, a law was passed in Dover requiring Intelligent Design in their 9th grade biology classes. Some parents of Dover school students sued, and the trial was held in September of 2005. Results of the election are expected early next year. In November, all members of the Dover school board in favor of ID were voted off the board and evolution supporters were elected. In Ohio, ID is allowed to be taught as science but is not required.
Because of the debate over Intelligent Design, the Kansas State Board of Education has recently added criticisms of evolution into their curriculum, as well as expanded their definition of science. Under Kansas' new standards, everything from ghosts and ESP to astrology is to be taught in science class.
The fact that the creator in ID is not technically God is their excuse for arguing that it is science and not religion. However, one of the leading supporters of ID, William A. Dembski, has openly admitted that Intelligent Design "is just the logos of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of Information Theory."
Because ID is simply religious ideas, it has no place in a science class. It's certainly okay to expose students to a variety of religions and origin ideas, but those belong in a religion or social studies class.
There are very few scientists that support Intelligent Design rather than evolution. The US National Academy of Sciences has said, "Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science." As an attempt to gain credibility, the Discovery Institute supporting Intelligent Design collected 400 signatures of scientists rejecting evolution over a period of four years. In contrast, a petition rejecting ID collected 7,733 scientists' signatures in four days.
Science, as the word is defined by scientists, must follow these criteria: a. It is falsifiable (it can be proven wrong if the right evidence turns up), b. it can be tested through observation and experimentation, and c. it can make predictions. If a fossil were unearthed of a Chihuahua alongside a dinosaur, evolution as we know it today would likely be proven false. Through the fossil record and observation of natural selection within our lifetimes (microevolution), we can see that organisms change over time. As a prediction, scientists can conjecture that when an environment changes, the plants and animals living there will probably adapt to better live there.
Intelligent Design can do none of these things - how could anyone definitively prove that there was nothing that created life? How can we experiment to show that organisms are the same as they have always been? How can scientists predict the will of an intelligent designer?
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what you believe about the origin of life. The reason that Intelligent Design should not be taught as science is that it simply is not science. You don't teach trigonometry in English class, and you don't teach religion in science class.

Tried not to come off so much as "ranting atheist" as "logical scientist". Don't know if it worked.

~Joy

I love December

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 03:54:30 GMT

It's December! Christmas season! With Christmas season comes Christmas songs! Behind the cut is my current collection.

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.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 09:30:21 GMT

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.

PENS! TINY PENS!

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 23:15:31 GMT

My pens are here!
*grin*

Behind the cut lies many ~~large-ish (800x600 and lower)~~ (OK, Flickr resized them) photos. Dialup beware.

My whole order: A box of 8 different colour Signo Bits, a purple Pilot Petit1 fountain pen, and two cheap pens for the heck of it.

The Signos came in a spiffy box.

A swatch of the pens I bought, and two grains of rice I wrote on. They say "AWESOME!" and "Joy".
See how tiny the Signo bits are in comparison to the other pens. .5 and .7mm are ordinary mechanical pencil widths.

All the Signo Bits together.

My $5 fountain pen =O

It's fun to write with, but I'm afraid I'll bend the tip each time I put it on the paper. I try to write really lightly.

This was way too fun to draw. Again marvel at the tinyness of the Signos (I switched from the Petit1 to the purple Signo halfway through drawing).

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

~Joy

Halloween yays

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:35:54 GMT

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 any masks that look like this, 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.

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:04:33 GMT

So for English, we have these vocabulary books.
While every leet haxxor out there knows what "emulate" means, it's pretty useful I guess and I'm not familiar with maybe half of the words on our list. There was one excercise, however...

Students who seek high grades must learn to eschew the joys of the one-eyed monster, the TV set.

Strange, that's a different monster than the one that jumps to mind. *snicker*

I want a Beckoning Meowth. You just KNOW that there's one out there somewhere.

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 00:50:10 GMT

We went to a Chinese restaurant this evening, and due to my mom's irresistable love for trinkets she bought a Maneki Neko there. I asked for the box to it once we left, because it was all in Chinese.

...Well, almost all in Chinese. On the side was one English blurb:

Along with that bit of Engrish, they had an ice cream flavor (from a local, English-speaking company) called "Heavenly Hash". Maybe it had brownie chunks in it...?

Plug plug plug

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:43:33 GMT

http://www.jonathancoulton.com

JC is a full-time musician now. You should go buy his CD.

I should go buy his other CD.

Thanks all for your kind words of support. This blog thing is a nice cheap form of therapy isn’t it? I fear that I have become addicted to positive responses from the ether - without the steady infusion of thumbs-ups from everyone who’s emailed and commented over the last few months, I might well have decided to stay forever inside the soft velvet cage of gainful employment. It’s because of you guys that I will soon be penniless and alone.

Hey, wait a minute…

If you're just joining in on the party; if I haven't assaulted you with his lovely songs yet; it's rock/pop/acoustic/folk/nerd. Some songs are startlingly TMBG-esque (I'm a Mason Now is Spy's bass, mixed with Santa's Beard's chorus, with lyrics of the Stonecutter's song from The Simpsons. It's this crazy delicious nerd love child. And it rocks hard.). Some songs would deserve to be on Top 40 radio if they weren't about mathematics (Mandelbrot Set, you're a Rorschach test on fire!).

And some songs are about Europe and are hilarious.
Over there, you can eat
a lot of mayonnaise with your frites
and no one will say "Hey, that's too much mayonnaise!"

http://www.jonathancoulton.com