The EPICWIN app (a todo-list-meets-RPG iPhone app) is out.
The ironing board has, after its brief time in the media spotlight, gone back to its first love: the theatre. It will shortly be appearing in a new run of ‘Equus’ in the West End, playing the part of the horse’s penis. It will not be available for questions and will not be signing autographs.
I woke up this morning with a headache and a Vimeo Pro account.
Video Test, Or, “The Aristrocrats”, Or, “‘And, uhhh…’”
I decided to shoot my first video with my new camera and I wanted to tell a joke, only I kinda screwed up the focus and the joke and I was a little drunk but I promised myself I would post the first thing I shot with it and oh god this is terrible.
Focus on the ironing board if you decide to watch this terrible, terrible video. It might help.
Japandroids - “Wet Hair”
Fucken noisy, wonderful, shitty garage rock, man. Love it.
This American Life: Horses in North Philly
This is pretty great.
No small part of my life quite sums up the entirety of my life like the 15 seconds I spent today quizzically waving an XBox Live Gamer Points Card at my gym’s keycarded entrance.
“The Magician and The Snake” by Mike Mignola and his daughter Katie Mignola (io9)
This whole thing is beautiful. Only six pages. Go read now.
Beautiful. Mike Mignola’s artwork was what got me into Hellboy.
From The Bumper Dictionary Of Terrible Days
Pitfall Programmer (n.): A developer who creates seemingly working code that compiles just fine, only to have it do something entirely arbitrary and wrong when someone tries to build anything with / on it.
Yes.
It is, though, right? It is the perfect goddamn crime.
Okay, right, I’ll shut up now.
Honest to god, the fruit thing actually happened.
The perfect crime
It was a banana-shaped maraca. It was a banana-shaped maraca and I wanted it.
It was in the back of a small shop named “All Things Percussion” and, to be fair, they’d lived up to their name.
The shopkeeper was large and slow and, I thought, perhaps a little drunk.
“‘s a funny thing,” he muttered, as he tried to ring my purchase up. “(Bloody thing’s curved, lookit the barcode, ‘s all bent.) ‘s a funny thing.”
“Is it?” I said, unsure.
“I used to have all of ‘em, see. A lot bunch of fruit… wotsits. Msracas. Ma. Racas.” He pinched his large, red nose thoughtfully, and gazed upward as if in search of inspiration.
“A whole fruit basket, see. Apples and pears and… thingies. Wotsits. Grapefruit, like. Maracas. All in a basket, right there,” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction I’d found the bright yellow instrument.
“Then one day, right, someone nicked ‘em. Someone stole ‘em all. All of ‘em. At once.”
I nodded, uncertain.
“They wandered in here, right. They came in here, bold as brass, right in the middle of the day. And - and this is genius, right - they brought fruit.”
He’d leaned forward now, whispering in conspiratorial, whiskey-soaked tones.
“They’d came in here and replaced them all, see. They replaced each apple wotsit, maraca, with an actual apple, so I wouldn’t notice. And bananas, and pears, and thingies. Wotsits. Grapefruits. One by bloody one. While I was watching. Right from here.”
He leaned back, pinched his nose again; stared at me, as if to make sure I grasped the fullness of the situation.
“Every damn piece. All of ‘em. They replaced the maracas with stuff from under their coat and then they just left. In broad daylight. Bold as brass.”
I just nodded.
“Amazing, really, in’t it,” he said. “I didn’t realise until I went to polish ‘em up that they were real fruit. And they just… walked outta here. With all my fruit maracas under their coat.”
He sniffed again, pinched his nose.
“‘Cept this one, I guess. Guess they didn’t have enough bananas. Still… it’s like the perfect crime, though, in’t it?”
Sounds #2
an intermittent series about sounds from the author’s life
There was a show on MTV about 10 years ago called “Undressed.” Pictured above is Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, who had an early-career appearance on the show.
It was a program that followed various young people staggering blankly through various romantic entanglements; kind of like a Robert Altman movie, except nothing at all like a Robert Altman movie. It was shot and staged like a soap opera, but also with the clinical eye of a hard-core pornographic film - but in this case the acts depicted were that of nonchalantly stripping to skivvies.
It was, at its core, a program about young people’s underwear.
A person who appeared on the show on their way to a bigger and better career (or perhaps instead to a wakeup call and Jesus and five kids in the suburbs) would expect to have a week or so’s worth of story (the show ran daily, astonishingly), punctuated by some chaste making out, and 2 or 3 narrative mandates to disrobe.
I had a friend who appeared on the show during its run (the show ran for six seasons, astonishingly). She threw a big party at her parents’ house to watch the first episode. It was the summertime, so she was staying with them between semesters at college.
There were twenty or so of us in the front room watching the program on television. There were appetizers and soda pops. Her mother and father were watching the program in the other room; I didn’t understand why at first.
She appeared onscreen a few minutes in, impeccably dressed and made up. I think there was conversation with her scene partner about a boy of some kind. Then, the other person left and she needed to change her clothes, for some reason, and so the camera cut to a wide shot, previously all closeups and two-shots - creepier still as the camera was set too high and looking down, like a surveillance camera -and she took off her dress out of nowhere.
It was a sudden, shocking strip, I remember. It was like, “Whoa, where did this come from?” It was silly and stupid. She had a great body. Still does. There were catcalls and roars of encouragement from us as her friends.
Our roar died down, but then we heard her father’s voice in the other room, watching the same program as us, watching his daughter disrobe on the television, and he yelled out, “Nooooooo!” and then he yelled it again, this time with an anguished “ah” sound preceding, “Ahhh noooooo!”
It was a ragged and surprised cry of disbelief and pain, and it was passed off in the moment as a joke but it was not. I have never forgotten the sound of that voice in that moment, nor do I suspect I ever will.
(via epic)
