Write or Die by Dr Wicked

Write or Die by Dr Wicked:

It sounds rather extreme, and maybe it is. A tool for those of us (I'm looking at Me, Self...) that can spend an entire day crafting and re crafting a single paragraph in the futile search for perfection. Or perhaps there's a hidden fear that the finished work won't be any good, so we're loathe to get the damn thing done. Or end up with a million word opus.

Anyhow, this nifty little program (free online, ten bucks for the desktop edition) is designed to help you keep putting words on the page. If you get distracted, or agonize over a word for too long, the screen turns red and an alarm sounds, in normal mode. I believe in Kamikaze, your words start unwriting themselves. I'm too chicken to try it, even for random words just filling a page.

Since I signed up for NaNoRiMo again this year, I need something to shut up the inner editor. My goal for writing is 1500 words in a day. I suspect a third of them will be readable, but I need to get into the habit. For those people without evil inner editors or the attention span of a chipmunk, this bit of software is pretty useless.

For people like me, it might just be the bit of a push that they need to get them moving. I'm going to try it for a month. If it does the trick, I'll thank the creator by purchasing the software.

Here goes nuthin...

I found the picture of the two Jack Sparrows!!

OMG I found it!!!

Remember that story I told about watching two Jack Sparrows get into a fist fight? I FOUND THE PHOTOS. Well, not of the fist fight, but the moments before. I can't make this stuff up.

Hope this makes your day, they certainly made mine.

Porn Star Kareoke - How did I not know about this???

How do you make a tacky thing awesome?

Multiplication. It works for anything, really. One garden gnome, tacky. An army of creepy, smiling plaster constructs staring vapidly at the neighbors from your front yard = kind of awesome.

A single cheap stuffed animal carnival prize jammed into the corner of a teen girl's bedroom is just kind of sad. However, sewing a hundred of these little things onto a suit and roller skating down Main Street, USA sounds pretty amazing. (Disclaimer: I have not done this. Yet. I don't have the carnival prizes. If anyone wants to hook me up with them, I WILL do this. And take pictures. And post them here.)

Another great thing I didn't know about until recently was the customization of My Little Ponies. You might remember these smiling little rubber horse shaped toys with nylon hair and a graphic on their butt - I had a collection myself when I was a kid. Until I discovered Breyer horses, but that's another story. (Yes, I was a little girl obsessed with horses. Imagine that.)

Dragons, The Borg, oh heck - pretty much any pop icon you can imagine. Who knew this was a thing? Aren't you glad you read this now? (Proof that one, anything can be elevated to an art form if the creator is good enough at it, and two - you can make a living doing anything.)

But that's not what I wanted to talk about (remember, I warned you about those tangents...).

What I wanted to talk about is potentially the most amazing marriage of tacky that has ever been conceived. Porn stars doing karaoke. I shit you not. Personally, I feel like this is the true spirit of Los Angeles wrapped up, packaged, and presented with a cheap satin and lace neon pink bow. And I'm excited. I must see this before I die, so be aware, LA friends - I'm going to beg to go to this.

Porn stars sing at Sardos.

I think this will be an experience on par with watching the two Jack Sparrows duke it out on the Walk of Fame. I think I'm starting to miss LA.

Buying with intent, and the excitement of it all.

I purchased a comforter cover.  A brand new, custom printed comforter cover from DENY designs.  It came yesterday, and I've been excited about it for a solid 24 hours now.

Which led to a bit of navel gazing: why on Earth is this blanket cover such a thrill?

It finally hit me.

Every other bit of furnishing that I've ever owned has been one of these:

Free. (Either discards from relations, friends moving, or clever curbside rescue.  I sleep on Chevy Chase's old mattress - but that's another story for another time.)

Thrift/yardsale.

Semi disposable.  You know the stuff.  Plastic, cardboard, pressboard, usually found in big box discount stores, ubiquitous denizens of college dorm rooms; purchased with the understanding that once one graduates, that stuff will be replaced.  Um.  Some of my plastic drawers date to the college years.

If it weren't for the cat, much of my furniture would be inflatable.  It's cheap, fuss resistant, and incredibly portable.

With the life I've led, that last bit used to be incredibly important - between travelling a great deal and moving about once a year, there's a lot to be said for not being tied down to a lot of nice furniture.

This summer marked the first one in over a decade that wasn't spent frantically shoving things into boxes, which in turn were crammed into my twelve year old hatchback to be carted to the next location.  Not moving is a thrill in itself, and we celebrated.  But it also marked a subtle, if deep change in our lives.

Roots.  For the first time, we started thinking about chairs that didn't double as rubbermaid bins with fabric draped over them.  But the thought of building a 'proper' home space, with decor, and thought, and (eek) money put into it, was more than a little off putting.

Our old comforter died.  It was fairly horrid to begin with - some nasty synthetic fabric that pilled almost immediately, sewn together with what appeared to be fishing line, a pattern that would have felt at home in a 1970's log cabin, lumpily filled with some polyester spin that did absolutely nothing but remind one of how cold the room actually was, and think about getting a new blanket the second that time and money have met.

We didn't actually know that it was sewn together with clear, stiff, nylon 'thread', until it started unraveling.  The cat helped.  So in addition to the pilling, fading, and other attributes, the blanket now sported lots of little pokey bits that had a supernatural power in regard to finding sensitive flesh.

The new comforter itself was a sort of impulse - we found it on clearance after a mark down, and it came with two pillows! So I gulped and paid for it.

It changed the whole bed - suddenly, we felt like our little sleeping alcove had been transported to some luxury B&B.  So I highly recommend not waiting as long as we did on a new blanket.

However, it didn't come with a cover - that proper comforters even needed one came as a bit of a surprise.

So, began the quest for a cover to protect the new investment.  This would be the second non essential purchase related to building a home that I've ever made, and I was determined to do it right.  For weeks, I scoured every place I could find.  These things were either horrible, or insanely expensive.

Seduced by thread count, frazzled by reviews, I came upon the Deny site randomly after weeks of searching. They had some nice looking designs, not too expensive...then I saw it.

Custom design - you send them an image, they put it on the item of your choice!  If I was going to do this 'making a home' thing, I'll do it exactly how I want, and see exactly what I want to see.  Honestly, if I'm paying anything above a thrift store price, I just can't settle.

So I gulped, paid, and waited.

The results are even cooler than anything I'd imagined:

For the first time in my entire life,  I'm turning a living space into a home.  I'm decorating!  Oh yes, there will be more of this in the coming year.

New Tumblr page, and stuff

It's been a busy time, and as usual, I inflict most of it upon myself. Firstly, I got myself one of those new fangled tumblr things.http://digitalis-vitae.tumblr.com/

 Don't worry, this blog will stay right here. Even better, it will be focused more on the writer end of the artistic process. (That's what I'm currently designating my Rorschach pattern of wank - it sounds much more impressive that way, doesn't it?)

 Tumblr is prettier for hosting photos, so all of my discussions about photography, photo postings, and visual epherma will happen there from now on, leaving this space free to talk about making word strings that evoke emotions. I'm trying to be organized about this stuff for once.

 There's also a new Facebook group, Authors Helping Authors. It's dedicated to educating writers about scams, and helping the victims of writing scams - hence the moniker of 'Authors' rather than 'writers'.

 Um, what else. Theater has been busy, and most of the 'net news has been dedicated to Occupy Wall Street. It's unfortunate that major news groups are now just corporate holdings, so all of the coverage has been from citizens like you and me

. I am planning to explore the scene. Just like Spider, only with hair. This protest is probably the biggest civilian political action that we'll see in the states in our lifetime. It's something that I'm not surprised to see, though I am shocked that it took this long.

 We've been legislated into a controlled state, our rights stripped from us one strand at a time for years, but creature comforts have kept the masses distracted for a long time. It's finally gotten bad enough that the public is pissed. The normal channels (voting, town hall) are so mired in kickbacks and bribery that they're no longer effective.

 The public is tired of being treated like chattel - of having their homes, employment, and opportunities to make a life siphoned away, that they will no longer be distracted by shiny toys, shiny celebrities, shiny lies disguised as political rhetoric. Catchphrases and double speak that ultimately mean only that a politician is jumping from one pocket to the next.


 I'm not usually political on this blog. But I'm inspired. And angry. Inspired by the thousands of people making noise. Angry that so many people still swallow the lines they've been fed. Wake up, Tea Party. You are not part of a grass roots organization. Never were. It's a scheme funded by some of the biggest corporate players - the Koch brothers. They sent corporate shills into town centers to gain support for a 'movement' with catchphrases that mean nothing, and the goal is to dump even more money into BILLIONAIRES' pockets.


 They hold up teachers, fire fighters, bus drivers as the enemy, for making a living wage with health benefits. Guess what? Teachers generally get paid crap. I can't count how many times I've heard 'well, city worker x makes $100,000 a year, I wish I was rich like that'. Wake up, dumb ass. That bus driver makes a salary like that on a base pay rate of $14.00 an hour, by working 100 hours a week.

It's a distraction. A shiny statement to take attention off the CEO who gets a five million dollar bonus for running a company into the ground. That's the scum you need to pay attention to - not the guy who never sees his wife and children, overworked at a menial job.

 Please, please.

 Wake the fuck up.