Stories, skinning rats, insomnia, awesome designs, and osmosis
Internet | July 20, 2010
My inspiration well is drier than the Sahara. I could write about the gash in my foot that’s making me hobble around like I’m 186 years old because I stepped on a sharp rock while swimming in a natural pool under a waterfall, or about the supremely meditative hour or so I spent driving around the entire beltway surrounding my city because I needed to blow off steam, or about seeing skinned rats and splashes of rat blood at the lab, or about unsuccessful shopping trips and the evils of suburban malls, but you know what? I don’t feel capable of spinning stories into better tales than they are right now.
Aww, that makes it sound as if the stories aren’t good enough the way they are. I hope that doesn’t hurt their feelings. Don’t worry, stories, I love you, and please please please don’t ever coat yourself in forty layers of makeup or get bad plastic surgery. Stories at the bottom of the bad story basket are just as good and deserve just as much love as the ones at the top or the overachiever ones that never made it in there.
That last paragraph was a shining example of what insomnia does to poor, undeserving people.
ANYWAY. We all know that “featuring the latest awesome designs/blog posts/funny pictures I’ve come across!!!” posts on personal blogs are the product of boredom or lack of inspiration 103.2% of the time, so I’m not even going to do any pretending here. I’m just going to do a “designs I like” type of thing because I’m not as awesome as some people and my uninspired-ness doesn’t disguise itself as a series of awesome tutorials.
So, yeah, layouts I like as of late (like the unintentional alliteration? I know I do):
I used to read Cy’s blog. I don’t know why I stopped. Stumbling upon Cyniquentially again via someone’s link list after I don’t know how many months really gave me a fresh perspective on the layout. The title font, the Louboutin heel illustration, the cute feed bubble, the style of the link lists, the style and placement of the search bar — why didn’t I come up with any of that?
Even if you don’t love pink like I do, you’ve gotta love this simple, typography-based layout. It’s proof positive that layouts don’t need flashy illustrations and intricate doodads to be awesome. My favorite parts: the hover effects and the blog posts (not part of the layout, but too awesome not to mention). I’m kinda obsessed. With this site and with the word “awesome.”
Owls have only recently (within the last year…that’s recent, right?) started to enthrall me. I know, I was missing out on life before. This particular owl illustration is TOTES ADORBS, as is the way its eyes move when you hover over it. Hovering over the site title is fun, too. AND the person who designed this site just happens to have the best name ever (but it’d be even better without the first “a”).
I believe the owner of this site used to own Angel Kizz the doll site, and I admired her layouts back then, but this one is way better, no question. LOVE the sketched watercolor style and how it matches the site name. The site title, paintbrush, bird, heart, iMac, search box, and social media icons are particularly cute. Actually, no, you know what, everything is cute. Yay pastel colors!
I like the airplane, dolphin tail area, treasure chest, colors, headers, sidebar boxes, textured background, and look of the secondary navigation on the side. Ignore this sentence: Blah, I’m tired now, and I can’t think of anything else to say about this site, so let’s just hope this useless sentence fills up enough space for the format to look okay…hey, didn’t I tell you to ignore this sentence?
This is kind of a bonus. My tumblr sports a lovely bare and simple layout that places the focus on the content, which consists of funny or inspiring tidbits that I didn’t create but wish I had. Am I seizing the opportunity to shamelessly promote at an inopportune moment? You decide. I didn’t make the layout, though, and I legitimately love its simplicity, so I’m not totally tooting my own horn!
Maybe if I stare at these designs long enough, I’ll absorb some of the talent through osmosis? No? Does it not work that way? Way to burst my bubble. Okay, good night.
Food stereotypes
Food | July 13, 2010
When I blog, it’s usually spontaneous. Something vaguely interesting happens or an idea strikes me like lightning, I open up my shiny but obese WordPress admin panel, my fingers fumble around on my keyboard, and fifteen or fifty minutes (depending on how distracted I get by the rest of the internetz) later, after I’ve paid my dues to the Grammar Nazi Party and checked my spelling and grammar meticulously, an entry baby is borne of my cerebral uterus.
Sometimes, however, it’s different. Sometimes, something actually comes out of my long list of “things to blog about,” which currently rests in a bloated blue box on the right side of my laptop screen when I open Stickies and has encompassed the same few ideas for months on end. Among those ideas are: my thoughts on curry (which probably doesn’t deserve its own entry, so I’ll just tell you now: curry has held a long-standing animosity with both my taste buds and my sense of smell), my questioning of the idea that anyone still wears watches, and things that confuse me (why people have dubbed Beijing “The Big Cabbage,” why people wear Uggs and shorts in 85-degree weather, why “pescetarian” is spelled the way it is, why I think about weird things like this, etc.).
This is one of those times. This entry has actually been sitting as a bullet-pointed draft since June 16 (so I guess you could say the part of my brain that contains the ideas for this entry has been in labor for almost a month), and the conversation that sparked this entry happened I have no idea how long ago, buuut I’m writing about it now because I like food and I want to talk about food all day and I think all you little monsters (ignore that if you hate Lady Gaga, and I promise I won’t borrow her terms of endearment again) should talk about food with me.
I think every country has its stereotypical meal(s) or type(s) of food — sometimes the stereotype is accurate and describes the food the people of Country X eat most often, and sometimes it’s totally fictitious and the people of Country Y have the right to get offended.
So, here’s what some people and I have come up with as stereotypes or typical meals for several countries:
- United States: French toast or pancakes with eggs and bacon and orange juice for breakfast, burgers or hot dogs and fries for lunch, steak or meat loaf for dinner
- China: Bao zi for breakfast, wonton or some kind of noodle soup or dimsum for lunch, looots of rice and vegetables for dinner
- Italy: Pasta, pizza, gelato, tiramisu
- India: Naan and curry
- Japan: Sushi and tempura
- Spain: Paella
- Canada: Poutine
- Argentina: Good steak
- Korea: Kimchi
- UK: Bland food
- Mexico: Tacos, burritos, quesadillas, churros, anything that ends in -os
- Thailand: Pad thai, curry
- Greece: Gyros
- Turkey: Lentil soup, kebabs, baklava
- France: Croissants, ratatouille, crepes, escargot, anything Americans can’t spell very well
- Germany: Bratwurst, sauerkraut
Do you agree? Disagree? Take offense and think I’m a raging lunatic idiot? Have any other countries to add?
Bad parking jobs, bad movies, and even worse gelati hurt my daughter/cousin’s feelings
Books, Food, Photos, TV & Movies, Thoughts | July 10, 2010
Most spectacular parking job I’ve seen in quite a while:
Upon closer inspection, I saw the “FOR SALE” sign in the rear windshield. So I guess it wasn’t really a parking job; it was a “oh, I’m going to randomly sell my car in a random parking lot and take up lots of space so people will notice” job. Still, was it necessary to make use of FOUR parking spots? You don’t steal valuable movie theater parking spots on a Friday night, contributing to the fullness of the lot and making moviegoers park in front of Walmart instead. You just don’t.
Unsurprisingly, my friends and I aren’t the only ones who think so, as evidenced by the note we saw on the front windshield:
Bwahahahaha. “…You hurt my daughter/cousin’s feelings. FUCK YOUR ‘FOR-SALE’ SIGN! I NEED A PARKING SPOT.” Most spectacular note I’ve seen in a while.
If you’re wondering what movie we saw, it was Splice, the most spectacularly disturbing movie I’ve seen in a while. Highlight for spoilers: People playing God? Incest? Abuse? Voyeurism? Bestiality? Killing a poor, innocent, ADORABLE CAT? All in one movie?
Parts of the movie were hilarious, though, I’ll give it that, even if I’m not sure they were hilarious by intention.
The part that keeps infiltrating my thoughts hours after the movie is the part where the protagonists talk about right and wrong and crossing the line between them. Where is that line, and which lines do we not cross? This subject has come up in the books I’ve read (mainly The Little Girl and The Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre) and the TV shows (mainly Lie to Me) I’ve watched this week, and I just cannot stop thinking about it. Where’s the line between legislation that protects people and laws that exercise excessive control over people’s lives, as the world in Duteurtre’s book perhaps crosses by making cigarettes illegal nearly everywhere? Is there a line between good deception and bad deception, both of which Lie to Me deals with in nearly every episode? Where’s the line between caring and prying? Between learning and finding out information we just shouldn’t know? Between attaining a healthy degree of control and messing with others’ lives? Is it the intentions? Are intentions ever clear?
Mind-boggling.
I’ll leave you all with an important public service announcement (and I hope you know by now that by “public service announcement” I really always mean “my opinions that I think are important but you probably don’t and maybe disagree but shouldn’t because my tastes are far superior to yours but not really”): Rita’s = spectacularly disgusting. Especially the gelati, which is nothing like gelato. Maybe that’s where it goes wrong in the first place. But really, custard that tastes like plastic combined with piña colada slush that tastes like how I imagine window cleaner to taste? No thanks. That really hurts my daughter/cousin’s feelings. In a spectacular way.