Randoms I November 2, 2008

Mom #1: (watching her boy): We originally chose the name Eric, but now I’m thinking we should just call him Rick.
Mom #2: But then he would be… Rick James?
Mom #1: Yes. I think it suits him better.
Little boy (running by): I’m Rick James, bitch!
Mom #1: Maybe we should just stay with Eric.

–overheard at the beach

I have listened to over 20,000 songs on my computer since March 06. Put end to end, the length of all these songs would circle the earth 70 times, which is supposed to make you say “wow that’s pretty darn far” but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never traveled around the world and therefore the comparison is a little irrelevant to me.


an acquaintance of mine once wrote a poem:
“the flowers in your garden lunged at me
one morning”
he read it aloud to the rest of the class and I liked it,
though I felt thoroughly disappointed later in the day
when a daffodil outside my window
would have nothing to do with me.

– the big sleep

My father, if you don’t mind my telling you this, ate the bagel.

– wikipedia

+ fluidity.of.movement +

For anyone visually inclined… October 6, 2008

If you are working on a story, research paper, poem, thesis, game design document or just like discovering cool web apps, you should take two minutes and check out bubbl.us.  Now.  Seriously.  Go!

You start off with a thought bubble that contains your core idea, and from there you can expand this idea with further levels of bubbles, all color coded and connected to each other.  You can also share thought maps with other people and let them collaborate with you.  It’s useful for team virtual, visual brainstorming when you would otherwise be stuck sharing ideas through Google docs or something.

I used bubbl.us to map out a web of all the characters in a story I am writing, and then connected each character with a bubble that explained the character’s relationship to each other, such as how they know and feel about each other.  The main characters and the larger, more complex plots they’re involved in naturally tended to drift to the center of the web, and side characters and side plots got pushed out further.  Additionally, I color coded the “relationship” bubbles so character connections that were very important to the overall story were brightly saturated, and sub plots and extra details less so.  It was cool to see it naturally evolve before my eyes.

My map had about 12 characters and over 30 bubbles connecting everyone together (and I still have more things to add!), but it was so helpful for me to see everything laid out cleanly as opposed to organizing and updating something monstrous like that on paper.  Hope this program is useful to someone else!

Oh yeah April 6, 2008

Hitchhiking: The Greatest Game I’ve Ever Played – loved the title to this article, which is an interesting read the whole way through.

The Tale of the Worst MMORPG Ever – illustrated with pretty pictures

I finally got a new cell phone after months of fighting (literally) with my old one.  Anyone who ever saw me frantically pressing buttons on my Chocolate and yelling “stop calling that person!!” knows how epic these battles could be.  I got a Samsung Gleam and it’s the most luxurious thing to open the phone and know it won’t randomly call people or have the keypad lock me out 75% of the time when I try to set my alarm late at night.  I like the idea of donating unused phones to charity but I wouldn’t wish the agony and pain I endured with my Chocolate on anybody.