Neat Things I Saw This Week: Fourth Week of May

Number 1:

Awesome Japanese manhole covers: http://www.booooooom.com/2012/05/16/beautiful-japanese-manhole-covers/

I Like This Because: There is absolutely no reason why cities have to be ugly just because they're cities, and there's even less reason why something totally utilitarian has to be unadorned. There's all this talk about making cities better places to live, but I think just making them prettier would go a long way toward making people happier--it's why people lust after those gorgeous Italian espresso machines and all the charmingly beautiful Swedish rugs and so on: something that you see every day, that has a defined purpose, really should be something beautiful, too.

Number 2:

Trees in someone's back yard acting like a hundred pinhole cameras for the eclipse this past Sunday: http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/23463228044/uselaine-solar-eclipse-projected-through-the

I Like This Because: How awesome it is! We weren't in the path of the eclipse, so I didn't get to see it, but the internet is full of amazing pictures of it from those who were and did. I never even would have thought of this, but look how well it works!

Wes Anderson Bingo

To be taken to the new movie:

 

Link to a printable version here: http://biblioklept.org/2012/05/29/wes-anderson-bingo/)

Thought Question #810: Every person needs______?

(From Thought Questions: http://thoughtquestions.com/archives/2760)

I think every person needs food, shelter, water and safety. That's Maslowe's old Hierarchy of Needs. But after that, there's the peak of the needs pyramid, and we get into the more interesting answers to this question. I think everyone needs love. People who aren't loved early and often (in the emotional sense, get your mind out of the gutter!) come out wrong, missing some vital part of themselves, unstable. Sociopaths and psychopaths, and not the the nice, clean, useful way of, say, Sherlock or Dexter.

I think everyone needs a passion, something they like doing, whether they're good at it or not, something other than how they pay their bills and whether they can afford three square meals, and all the other dumb things that clutter up a life and use up attention spans--something that they truly believe in, that raises them up above the mess of daily life.

I think everyone needs acceptance--both for themselves and for others. Everyone should be allowed to be who they are, and they should be able to extend the same acceptance to everyone else; I think the whole world would be a better, happier, calmer place that way. Governments would be forced to unwind from meddling with people's lives, and religions would have to be more open and caring, and everyone, everywhere would be much, much happier.

I think everyone needs progress, or at least a sense of forward momentum. Humans are built on change, adaptation and novelty; if nothing moves forward, we stagnate. If we feel like we aren't getting anywhere, we frustrate. If we feel like we're losing ground or going backward or sliding down, we lash out and get possessive. Grand Progress For the Human Race is probably not something viable anymore, in the broadest senses, because there are just too many people around now, with too many definitions of Grand Progress, but each individual in the world needs to feel like things are getting better. Like they're getting somewhere. Like there's something to hope for.

What do you think every person needs?

What's Been Eating My Brain: Third Week of May, 2012

1. Everything is Ending
Each year, at the end of TV season, everything sort of ends at the same time, and I get about a week of unfinished questions, cliffhangers, and the wasteland that is summer viewing until I come up with something else to watch. I don't do well with unfinished stories, and cliffhangers kill me in new and interesting ways every year. It takes up a lot of space in my head until something else takes over.

2. Supernatural
Most of this term, I've been watching my way through the first six years of Supernatural to unwind at night--but now that I'm up to season six and staring down being caught up with what's available on Netflix, it's  gone and made itself a full-on fandom. Dean and Cas? Yeah, like I really needed another couple to root for*.

3. School is done!
I just have one more thing to turn in, ten pages for the workshop crits, which I have to finish typing before midnight tonight, and then I'm relatively free. Well, free of things I'll be graded on immediately. I still need to read The Hunger Games (and see the movie so I can comment on both) for in-class discussion, and I need to plan my Teaching Module, but I have maybe a week off where I can read whatever I want and I don't have to do anything that isn't self-directed.

I just started The Book of Lost Fragrances by MJ Rose, and four chapters in, it inspired me to see what I could cobble together with the very few fragrance oils I have laying around the house. So I made the first Beta of my own personal birthday scent, so it can have a week or so to marry and I can still have time to try again if it comes out weird. Which is related to...

4. Nailpolish!
I really am in love with it. I mean, I always was, but this past year, not working, with no one telling me that it's a health-risk to wear nail polish, I've been doing my nails every couple of days. And now that I've decided to start manufacturing my own colors, that's what I've been doing between other things. I've made a retro-sort-of purple, a birthday color, two test runs for a Married to the Wind color, one that came out a sort of glittery zombie green, and that bright yellow I posted before. I'm just itching for the spare money to get my proper supplies so I can really make them from scratch. And in the meantime, I've been making page after page of ideas and lists and notes.

5. Revisions
Soon, precious, I have to print up the entirety of the Monsterbeast and get someone other than me to read it, and then start really chopping and rearranging and rewriting. I don't even really know how big it's gotten, since I haven't made the end-of-term consolidated draft yet, but it's got to be pretty hefty by now, and I just want to get into it. I want to be done writing it so I can revise it, so I can sent it off and let someone else worry about it for a while. And then I can write Ember or Beacon and be back in the fun part of writing, when everything is new and anything is possible.



*on top of Jane and Lisbon, Castle and Beckett (who finally hooked up, and did it exactly as you should on TV!), Finch and Reese (or Reese and Carter, either's good for me). Actually, now that I think about it, Booth and Bones are happily together, Peter and Olivia are meh-ly together, and I don't watch NCIS enough to keep up on Ziva and Tony, so, yeah, I do have space for a new couple. Also, I think the fear of women / fear of loving relationships Hawaii Five-0 has is why I have trouble hooking into it as much as I might.

Late night rambling

-I sloshed rose oil over my hand while attempting to mix a personal perfume for my birthday, and now I sort of smell like roses all over. I keep sniffing my own arms like a weirdo. -I kind of want to make a cup of tea even though that will defitely keep me up and it's almost 2am. -Somebody just roared past the house at alarming speed. There's a curve about a half block from us, and they were headed there. It's scary! -Tonight's Supernatural episodes made Souless!Sam look pretty awesome, then made him really creepy, then gave him his soul back and he's back to being riddled with guilt about everything. Also, I think someone needs to really give Cas a hug. He's been fighting a losing war all season, and still comes to help the boys when they need him. -I mixed a sparkly, summery birthday nail polish for myself today! I might tweak it some, but I like how it turned out. -That is all.

Video: Why The Star Trek Universe is Secretly Horrifying

Why The Star Trek Universe is Secretly Horrifying -- powered by Cracked.com

Packing

I just started filling boxes so that I can be a little more organized than usual when I actually get moving in a little over two months, and just as I was labeling the first box, my music player (which I keep on almost-permanent shuffle) decided to play, like, the saddest and most poignant song from Enya's entire songlist. It was like that part in a fem-flick where everything is sad and changing and I expected at any moment to have to leave the room, turn out a light, and look back one last time before we cut to three months later.

Frankenpolish Swatching: The Yellow Eyed Demon Beta 1

This is The Yellow Eyed Demon on my accent nails, with Sinful Color's Happy Ending (the green) on the rest, which I thought coordinated nicely and also is named ironically*. This is four coats of Yellow (which I think is really too many), and as you can see, you can still see the nail line under it. I think it needs some duochrome-ness added to it, but I don't have anything to duo it and all the starter colors were pretty sheer, so that's how it is. Beta 1 is counted as a partial success, as I like how it's going and it's more than wearable, but I think it still needs work. I think, after I manage to order the supplies, I'm going to try recreating it from scratch and see if I can't fix the issues this franken has.

The Happy Ending is not quite glossy, went on sheer, and though it's a pretty color, I think I need to stop buying SC's bright greens--they're always so thin. What am I saying? I'll keep buying them even knowing that.

So what do you think?



*This being named after The Yellow Eyed Demon from Supernatural, which doesn't really have much in the way of Happy Endings at all, ever.

Incidental Twin: Announcement!

I'm going to start a cosmetics company. By the time I graduate, I'm going to have several coordinated lines of custom-made nail polish and eyeshadow, and then I'm going to start mixing perfumes to match, and from there, I'll expand into solid perfume, lipstick, other makeup things like blush and foundations. I'll revive my henna-tea selling initiative and make henna kits. After that, when it's established and I'm graduated and have the time, I'll expand into things to beautify the home as well as the self--pillows, jewelry, posters, handbound notebooks. But the main focus will stay on my home-made nail polish, and I will build it into a company I can take to shows and stuff.

The themes will be largely geeky--the first line is going to be Doctor Who, and a special edition for Married to the Wind, my novel. After that will probably be Sherlock. After that, I have a list five pages long of books, genres, jokes, people, movies, TV shows and general geekery that I'm going to figure out stuff for.

I figure I can start up the nail polish for between $200-300 for the supplies and the bottles and stuff. Probably something similar for the eyeshadow. The perfume will cost more because the oils already cost more, but that's why I'm working my way up to that. It'll be glorious, I'm telling you.

So after I move, after I get settled and find a job and figure out what my income is going to be, I'm going to start collecting supplies and testing ideas, and sometime earlyish next year, I'm going to launch Incidental Twin on Etsy (and maybe on Artfire and Goodsie), and build a webpage for it and a forum and then I'll have a home-based business of my very own.

So who's excited as I am?

10,000 Things That Make Me Happy #2: Nail polish!

 I'm waiting on the mail for the little pens that will let me clean up the cuticles easily, and I'm still a little spastic with the whole thing, but I'm getting better at basic nail art, glitter and composition. I love buying new nail polish--there's always a new color, even just in the Sinful Colors, Wet-n-Wild and Sally Hanson range that's usually all I can afford. And I've recently discovered that it's possible to make your own nail polish! I always wanted to when I was a kid, and I used to mix and blend and layer to get interesting effects, but now it's possible to start from scratch and blend entirely custom colors, and I am so on that.

(really bad mess on this one, but I like how the nails themselves came out.)

10,000 Things That Make Me Happy #1: New Books!

(From my own Instagram: pirategirljack)

Almost any book will brighten my day if I haven't read it, but the best days are when I get to get my hands on a book I've been looking for for ages. Or when I get to branch out and read nonfic that catches my interest. Or when I get free books. Or...

ThoughtQuestion #793: What's a song that contains a lesson you live by?

I don't know that I have only one song that I live by, but I do know that there's a handful of songs that continue to speak to me as the years pass, songs that I will replay whenever they come up on shuffle.

Right now, the inside of my head looks an awful lot like a Florence + The Machine music video, and I'm totally alright with that. She speaks to something that needs to be spoken to inside me, and we seem to have similar ideas of how fantasy and reality intersect.

But here's a playlist of songs to know the inside of my head, in whatever order I think of them in:

Florence + The Machine - What the Water Gave Me
Florence + The Machine - Howl
Florence + The Machine - Heavy in Your Arms
Florence + The Machine - Drumming Song
Depeche Mode and Glezpik - Macrocosm
Depeche Mode and Glezpik - John the Revelator
Rufus Wainright - Halleuja
David Bowie - Within You
David Bowie - Be My Wife
Deathcab for Cutie - Meet Me At the Equinox
Deathcab for Cutie - Soul Meets Body
Echo and the Bunnymen - Killing Moon
Splashdown - Karma Slave
Eliza Carthy - Train Song
Garbage - #1Crush
Nick Cave - Do You Love Me
Nick Cave - Into My Arms
Nick Cave - Weeping Song
The White Stripes - Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
VAST - Touched
Nick Cave - Red Right Hand
VAST - Pretty When You Cry
Nine Inch Nails - The Day the Whole World Went Away
Poe - Angry Johnny
Nine Inch Nails - We're In This Together
Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug
Rasputina - All Tomorrow's Parties
VAST - Somewhere Else To Be
Rasputina - Crosswalk
Gary Jules - Mad World
Rasputina - Hunter's Kiss
Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence
MIA - Paper Planes
Lykke Li - I'm Good, I'm Gone
Slashdown - A Charming Spell
Wolfsheim - A Million Miles
Beborn Beton - Another World
Bright Eyes - A Perfect Sonnet
Voltaire - Almost Human
KT Tunstall - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree
Voltaire - Bachelor(ette)
Peter Murphy - I'll Fall With Your Knife


...and this is getting long enough