brightly_lit | Entries tagged with yes this is important

Let's talk about vids, specifically one of the vids I made for gishwhes. The item said "At gishwhes headquarters, we do almost everything right, with one glaring exception: we have not yet commissioned a gishwhes theme-song. We need a catchy, 10-second jingle that we can play every time the Slangaroo takes the stage."

Here's what I did with it:

Initially, I had very ambitious plans for this video, with a loooooong caveat at the end, read like in those commercials where someone who can speak incredibly quickly is trying to get all the limitations and conditions in really fast, but I was struggling mightily with depression that day, and then I discovered the video was only supposed to be ten seconds, and simpler is usually better, so I hewed it down to the basics, and voila!

I knew exactly what I wanted for the graphic, and

septembers_coda thought she might be able to pull something together in PowerPoint.

PowerPoint ... I could tell you stories about PowerPoint, but in sum, I've always thought of it as the lol MS Office program because, well, I've never given a slide-show presentation to anyone and never expect to, and the slides you can create in PowerPoint often seem to boil down to "This is a slide. The slide says I'm talking about _____. And indeed, now listen to me talk about _____."

Al Gore doll

The amount of information you can actually fit on one of those slides seems negligible and is generally a repetition of the most basic aspect of whatever the speaker is saying that, uh, probably didn't need a slide to be communicated or remembered. But enough about my prejudices! I can snicker about the uselessness of PowerPoint on my own time (but loooool).

ANYWAY

I tease

septembers_coda because she uses MS Office for EVERYTHING. For gishwhes items that call for images, or a collage of images, or anything to do with images, I use an image editing program. She uses MS Word. Whatever the item calls for, she can come up with a way to use MS Office to complete it. I like to tell her that one day she'll create a full-length feature film using MS Office, because by gum if she didn't put together not one but two animated graphics for my videos in PowerPoint!

I asked her for the slangaroo (this year's gishwhes mascot) on some sort of rainbow-y or glittery background, hopping into the frame, and then sort of zooming in/coming out at the viewer. I figured out how to make it hop, and she did all the rest.

Meanwhile, back on the audio end of things ....

My image editing program might be hilariously outdated (but at least it's not a word processor! ;->), but I DO have good audio editing software! So I put together a little jingle, complete with tuba and xylophone (would any jingle be complete without them?), sang it as cheesily as I could muster, sped up the graphic, called attention to the asterisk in the best way MovieMaker would let me, and WE HAVE LAUNCH.

OKAY, POWERPOINT, I grant that you're not completely useless!

I MAY have made last night's series of posts in a state of manic giddiness that has now been followed by a crash of ongoing wakefulness and threatening illness, but hey, you take whatever leads to productivity when life's been sitting on your neck punching you in the head ... or at least dramatically demonstrating doing so, WWE-style.

So I really like watermelon. There's this thing they sometimes do at the store that they call a "premium cut," which I call a "watermelon filet" because it looks and is packaged exactly like a steak, in the styrofoam tray, with even the absorbent pad at the bottom. So after I ate it, it looked like I left a rotting tray of blood sitting around in my room. CLASSY.

Another thing we bought during our epic outing last night was lipstick, something I haven't bought in approximately 1.87 billion years. Not because I don't like lipstick--there was a time when I put some on every time I went out, particularly this one color I had that seemed like it shouldn't work and was really sparkly but also subtle and somehow worked really well. I got that lipstick from my mom, who loved buying Clinique stuff (one lotion in particular), which is so ^&*($# expensive that they pretty much always gave you a free gift when you bought something, which she often passed along to me. This lipstick was one of those freebies. I just wore it 'cos I had it and it wasn't hard to wear like so many of them are, requiring lots of blending or whatever (I'm lookin at you, Wet 'n' Wild); just put it on and go.

And I tell you what, this lipstick lives on. Though I haven't laid eyes on such a color in decades, it inspired then, and continues to inspire. Multiple people, after regarding it a while, would finally conclude they really liked it (that seemed-like-it-shouldn't-work thing), that indeed, it had some sort of mysterious, intriguing appeal. My sister, who had never been a lipstick or even a makeup wearer, started experimenting at that point. More pertinently, P never particularly liked lipstick until recently, and she's now a good-lipstick fiend, and when I brought up that lipstick that was the main lipstick I wore, she said it's the whole reason she's into lipstick now! Which is finally coming full circle, as she's getting me back into lipstick again after all these years.

So never let anyone tell you you amounted to nothing, because maybe you wore a free lipstick or something that had consequences that are still manifesting in multiple variations twenty years later. I AND MY LIPSTICK, WE STAND TALL.

I thought I might want fries for dinner, but we were out of potatoes, so one thing led to another, you know how it is, and after four hours and two grocery stores, we returned home with a new vacuum cleaner and a wok.

It's Throwback Thursday at

amilliondays, where you post about something that USED to make you happy, even if you can't imagine ever being into it now! (Or even if you can.)

Here is mine:

HE-MAN AND SHE-RA. I used to watch both shows religiously every day when I got home from middle school. (Then, Voltron, but that's another post.) I even got my (much older) brother into them. She-Ra was probably the better show, but they were both all kinds of cheesy and ridiculous. (And imagine our delight when a live-action He-Man movie, starring Dolph Lundgren, came out not long later! Except it turned out to be really quite, uhhmmm ... S & M.)

I won't subject you to lots of pictures of He-Man (although please do yourself a favor and google "he-man cosplay" images); rather, I will share with you two videos, one a hilarious spoof video from a few years ago somebody made and put online of He-Man and friends singing a modern dance song:

And on what for me is a more poignant note, the full-length song from the pilot episode of She-Ra, a song which my brother hunted down on tape and got for me (not an easy feat, and he did it partly because he simply thought it was a great song), and which, years later, a friend in college was just as into (having gotten into it on his own, also being a big He-Man/She-Ra fan). It really is musically great, if you can get past all the silly sound effects and the Casiotone production:

( Read more... )

SUMMERGEN IS BACK. YAAAY!!!

My favorite book for a time as a kid was The House of Thirty Cats. Well,

septembers_coda found it for us at the library and we're reading it aloud right now. It's really quite good, and almost distressingly me. Like, was I already like that and that's why I was so attracted to that book? Or did it significantly form me? It's a bit disturbing.

Anyway, typical of me, it's extremely obscure. I somehow managed to convince my teacher to read it aloud to the class, and everyone was so bored and not into it that she stopped after only a few pages, no matter how much I lobbied the whole class to keep it going and insisted it got much better after the first chapter (which it does, adult-me can confirm!). Those plebeians in my elementary-school class didn't know great literature when they heard it! But s_c is lovin' it. :-) I'm always delighted when I find something I loved in my youth holds up later on, because Bill and Ted ... not so much.

Today I thought, maybe I will be the person who writes the first House of Thirty Cats fanfic and puts it on the internet. And then maybe someone who likes my other fic will see it and give it a try and it'll bring a little more attention to this strange, brutal, vivid, wonderful novel.

... And then I see that my favorite musician is tweeting about the notorious "milk fic" and encouraging his fans to write the most horrifying fic about him they want, that he dgaf.

I got my second (hopefully last) root canal this morning, and learned that these abcesses have been weighing on my immune system a very long time. When you walk out of the endodontist's office feeling better--like, all over--and then you run an errand you meant to run eight months ago and you get to drive around in a different car from usual hearing new music and it's all rainy and your favorite musician is tweeting about obscene fanfic featuring himself ... it's a good day.

s_c and I have a longstanding tradition of making up songs to the tune of other songs. Vegas might not have been much fun for us, but I DID come up with this ode to spaghetti, to the tune of "Sound of Silence." (This is not in fact my first ode to spaghetti, nor, I'm sure, will it be my last.)

Hello pasta my old friend
I've come to chow on you again
with the noodles softly glistening
and the meat gently sizzling.
And the sweet of the pasta is a counterpoint to the beef
and basil leaf ...
Amid the sounds of slurping.

The traffic must have been GREAT in y'all's towns today, because it was ALL HERE. AND we had to go to the store twice! Every single time we go to the grocery store near our house, I swear I'll never go back there again (generally we go way out of our way to an area of town we quite enjoy and just have fun listening to music during the drive). Then months pass and I start to think, Aww, how bad could it really be? I was probably just in a sensitive mood that day. I'll give it another shot--it's so close to home! And then I come out of there swearing yet again never to return. CURSE YOU, STORE, TO THE DEPTHS OF HELL! Oh, wait, you ARE the depths of hell; never mind.

So the reason we had to go to the store twice was because that evil store under the incompetent management of Crowley sucks so much we couldn't even find half of what we came for!

But we did FINALLY manage to run our three minor errands--it only took THREE HOURS.

Ahem.

Anyway, how are y'all's days going?

If I could still write fanfic, I'd be writing me some Isaac/Scott/Derek RIGHT NOW. Bravo, guys. BRAVO.

This has been a rare non-SPN-related post. As you were.

SUMMERGEN IS HAPPENING, and I get to mod! ~~*evil cackle*~~ Only two days left to fill out the form--signups close Friday evening. Summergen is glorious--all gen fic, all summer long, only 1,000 word minimum, some of the greatest writers in fandom participating, anonymous until the end, working from a prompt set we do our best to cater to your preferences--it's so fun!! You can participate, or you can just join/follow the comm and read all the wonderful stories that come out of it.

Any o' yous guys out there who have been thinking about trying an exchange, or who write gen fic, I highly recommend this exchange. Lo all those months ago when I first dipped a toe into reading fic, the fic rec page I found had a ton of fics from summergen, which was my first glimmer of a desire to become a part of fandom, so truly, I have summergen to thank for bringing me to you and all this fandom wonder.

Here, a beautiful pic for you to whet your appetite for Sam and Dean in the summertime ...