ans99

I feel like my internet presence has been disjointed and confusing, so I've been trying to merge more things together. I'm going to run down a list of things I have to make it easier to follow what I've been up to. For those who have been playing the game to win, this list will (mostly) seem a bit redundant:

1. MUSIC

First off, my new band's sites. We've just bought a domain name:

http://www.neverrightnow.com

which right now just redirects to our BandCamp site:

http://neverrightnow.bandcamp.com

The BandCamp site has better quality streams of our music, and you can also download the songs we have up there (and when we have an album, it'll be available for download/purchase there).

We've also got a Myspace at:

http://myspace.com/neverrightnow

where we'll be posting songs and gigs (when we have 'em) and where you can friend us if you have a Myspace.

You can also become a fan of Never Right Now on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Never-Right-Now/326417010926?ref=ts

For good measure we'll be uploading our songs and announcing gigs here as well. There's also the added community aspect of Facebook, because we get to post discussions and links, which I find so super neat.

We hope to get up an actual site soon at our new domain, with lyrics and bio/press kit stuff and blog links and such. In the works: a blog (probably Wordpress, Twitter, a spot at ReverbNation, and (once we begin to amass some video content), YouTube.

2. ART IN GENERAL

My nifty-difty (it's a word now that I've typed it) art blog is at:

http://ans99.wordpress.com/

And there is an LJ feed located at:

http://hieratic_art.livejournal.com

Here I'll post my photos, drawings, fanvids, writing, and of course any developments in the band or music in general. It's DEFINITELY worth following if you like what I do at all, because it'll probably all get mentioned and then linked from there.

I've also got Hieratic updates being crossposted automatically to Twitter.

3. TUMBLR

My Tumblog is at:

http://ans99.tumblr.com

I used to have to ship Twitter to LJ (which is apparently an incredible social faux pas) in order to bring my Tumblr posts to my friends list. Now I've created a direct LJ feed:

http://ans99tumblr.livejournal.com/

In my personal Tumblog, I reblog and post all sorts of things 'round the Internet that make me smile, weep, get angry, and, last but not least, think. It's a nice collection of what inspires me on the 'Net, but also of interesting tidbits from sources that might not make the mainstream news. I also tend to post pertinent updates from my other blogs when I remember.

In addition, because of all the inane book covers I run across in the course of my job (which at least in part has me putting up book reviews on a website), I created an additional Tumblr mocking said book covers:

http://wtfbookcovers.tumblr.com

The LJ feed is here:

http://wtfbookcovers.livejournal.com

Some of these seriously have to be seen to be believed.

4. TWITTER

My Twitter is at:

http://twitter.com/ans99

Twitter is kind of a dumping ground and I'm scared to go there much because with my day and my rampant Internet addiction as full blown as it already is, I really cannot keep up with what kind of sandwich Adam Savage ate for lunch or what Neil Gaiman said to Amanda Palmer over the phone. So this is not used for much more than notifying any readers of Tumblr posts, and now Hieratic posts, that I've made. OCCASIONALLY I will do an actual Tweet. Also our British cell phone has texting capabilities so when I go overseas I'll probably use it again for trip updates.

I think that's it.

OH. Before I forget:

If you have a site (for art, or writing, or whatever) and you'd like to be linked from any of my sites, please let me know. I'd love to include you. I'm especially interested in rebuilding the blogroll for Hieratic. Most of the links from Digitalis will be rolled over but I know some of you might have some new stuff you want to share.

****

So in other news, today I've got some sort of eyelid swelling going on. It's burny and obnoxious, and I don't want to go out in public. I woke up this way, so I'm not sure what happened. Took some Tavist, which did NOTHING, and applied an icepack to the eye. Nothing is really beating it too well though :(

Also, all my Neko Case arrived, as well as the Doctor Who 2009 specials. The Neko Case is of course awesome, and I've been listening to it all afternoon.

But the specials artwork... ugh. Ok, First off, not enough Master! I'm rather incensed that Wilf gets the other CD for End of Time (Doctor gets the other of course). WTF. The story is about TIME LORDS. Not some doofy old person who... well, maybe that's a spoiler. But he doesn't deserve the Master's place, that's for dang sure. He just got in the way the entire story!

Also, the inside cover art for it is just entirely too melodramatic:



Give me a flippin' break.

ok, is anyone else seeing pop-up automatically playing video ads in livejournal lately (kind of like they have on salon.com)? doesn't this go against their ad policy (audio/video must be user initiated, no pop-ups)?

oh, also, new art blog to replace the old: http://ans99.wordpress.com

anyone feel like making a feed (again)? 0:D

currently i am giving my cat a forced handshake and trying really hard to remember what i've been doing for the past whatever.

oof, she just hurtled over me. i'm pretty sure from the way she gave me a Significant Look afterwards it was punishment.

anyway, we got another camcorder about 1.5 weeks ago. it's a panasonic gs400, which is basically the only camera under $1000 that i ever wanted. it has that green line the last one did, so we're just assuming they're all like that and most prosumers have just been too dumb to notice. we can just crop a few pixels off the side if we don't shoot in widescreen, because other than that it's an awesome camera for the price ($700 used, i think, including tax, etc.).

fourth of july weekend didn't go exactly as planned, but it wasn't that bad. i had just convinced alan we really really should just go to bodie and art out for the fourth, when a couple of quick calls to campgrounds in the area revealed that apparently EVERYONE had the idea to go to mono lake and yosemite that weekend, so even if we found a campsite we would have been miserable, and there were absolutely no guarantees. even the "first come first served" sites were full by thursday afternoon. i guess everyone else was much more firmly ensconced in their plans than we were; we bailed and decided to take a day trip out to point reyes instead the friday before. although the campsites there looked absolutely fanfuckingtastic, and we'll have to go back on a less crowded weekend and stay overnight.

point reyes was pretty beautiful, and although it really seemed to emo alan out, i felt at peace there, and it was a not really "despite" the fog thing so much as "especially with". we saw our share of dead things and live things and soon to be dead (probably) things, including:

-tule deer, first through a telescope and then right outside our car window
-bird trapped in a historic farmhouse, bashing its head against the window and completely ignoring the crack in the door. we laid down some tortillas for it in the hopes it'd find them and eat its way out but i would not be surprised in the slightest if it died. of course alan and i completely capitalized on its pain and took loads of pictures, because we are the paparazzi for suffering animals. ken took the high road and refused to film such things with the camcorder for very long.
-beached seal, that we were warned to stay away from but we guessed nobody would ever come rescue (alan's quote of the day: "that's cold comfort to a dead seal. i want to pet it!")
-dead seabird of some sort on the beach, and lots more in the sky

it was a pretty fun time, the three of us road tripping it and listening to mostly my music, and a smidge of alan's horrible music. it was cool to take the video camera too; ken used it the most, and every scene subsequently ends with an extreme zoom or the camera doing a 180-degree roll. i guess that's ken's signature filming style :)

after hiking on tomales point (no tamales to be found, unfortunately) we drove around the point a little before heading to find something to eat. ended up at this standard-looking restaurant with above-average food, almost seasons-like. i had a buttered rum that was pretty fantastic, but got stiffed on a veggie burger even though our table neighbors were able to order one. etc etc.

((kitsune cute-report: she's twitching her nose and paws now, deep in dreamland next to me on the futon :D this cat likes to lay out all floppy paws; i guess she hasn't quite grown into her body yet. it saddens me that she's probably dreaming about eating our other pets :/))

i took something like 3 GB of pictures, and i want to start uploading them soon but i've run across another problem-- i am out of space on my c drive. so basically i need another hard drive to backup my pictures before i feel comfortable working with them. and the only way i can have three hard drives is if i upgrade my case to one my parents gave me. all this involves work and time we really haven't been able to afford yet, so no pictures for a while :(

the rest of the weekend we did errands mostly. we decided cat condos are way too expensive these days so we're building our own. lowe's is a damn frustrating place in that it sells 4 x 4s too long to fit in our car but do not have the ability to CUT DOWN 4 x 4s. i find that pathetic. it's funny how some hardware stores are good for some items but lousy for others.

i'm also planning on knitting kits a collar (will be velcro for breakaway purposes), a cat toy and a pet bed.

hooping is going okay. i can vortex now, and also shimmy up to and hoop at the chest. sometimes i can hoop at the knees for a couple of rotations. i'm working on vertical hooping. i really need to practice more often, and learn some new moves, since i've started tentatively working on a routine to "time is running out" by muse.

july 4th itself we spent playing rock band with mario, and succeeded again in completely missing the fireworks. i think it's the second year in a row we've done that.

our rats got names (bruce and harvey) and lost their balls this week, and we've started introducing them to wilson. the going is slow; last night was the first time and basically wilson puffed up so much he looked like he was going into anaphylactic shock, then aggressively groomed harvey. at that point we were afraid he'd actually BITTEN harvey so we took the babies out.

after reading up a bit more and wising up on some issues today, i stuck their cages next to each other and switched them for a while. wilson spent the whole time ransacking their cage like someone sneaking into the enemy's office and searching for Hard Evidence in a conspiracy movie, while bruce and harvey pulled a goldilocks and hung out in wilson's bed. wilson then proceeded to one-up THAT by eating their food. i'm not sure who was more passive aggressive.

this weekend was pretty uneventful. we tried fuzio's new location and had a great dinner, and then crashed early friday night. saturday was 7/11 so we got a free slurpee with mario, then played some rock band. we're going to enter pepsi's rock band video contest, so we "rehearsed" our song a little, made avatars that actually looked somewhat like us, and talked about the video and how/when/what we were going to film. i think next weekend we're going to either film down in stockton or kidnap mario for the day and bring him back up here; either way it should be an adventure.

sunday i got the best jeans and skirts ever and then pretended to do art.

today i had an animation class at the cc, taught by the very inspiring and extremely awesome kevin okulolo of leafworthy.com. i already have an awesome idea for an animated series/film. can't wait to get started on it!

actually lately i've been bursting with ideas, so many and so fast i find i don't have time to write them down. i don't know if it's this 2xcreative thing i'm participating in, or just thinking about my future more and more, or finally finding a balance between work and life, or not getting enough life in so my mind's been wandering. or you know, maybe i angered the dream king. either way it's pretty cool, because i never really had many ideas (that i actually liked or thought were any good). most of them came from ken or others much more witty than i, and i always saw it as my biggest failing and the most frustrating roadblock in my art. now they're finally starting to come. :)

work, by the way, is going aight. i'm being randomly social enough i hope to not earn anyone's ire, and they seem to really appreciate my work. it's a little weird having to use a WYSIWYG, but fortunately when it acts up i can fall back on my CSS/HTML hardcoding knowledge (one of the few things i'm truly grateful to henk for, actually). and i'm starting to see the convenience of WYSIWYG, although i really think ultimately depending solely on one and never learning how to code is extremely detrimental to website maintenance and design.

eh, could be worse. we use PCs ;P

tonight we tried round 2 of rat thunderdome. unfortunately the babies remembered wilson's "King Rat RAWRRAWR" routine from last time and guess what? we learned tonight that they are capable of leaping out of the tub! we kept them in there as much as we could though, and wilson got a lot of his dominance displays in. including nosing their abdomens, sniffing around them carefully as if they were military recruits up for inspection, and sidling his butt to their butts to scent mark them. of course through all this the babies squeaked vociferously and jumped out of the tub at every opportunity presented. eventually though they learned there was one stance that did not offend King Rat, and that was staying in a sort of bent over half-standing position on their hind legs, their front legs in front of them, and freezing like the tanuki statue in super mario 3.

i found the whole thing much more amusing than i probably should. rats are so ridiculous.

afterwards they all got chickpeas.

i'll have to steal a sentiment from kyle cassidy here-- i love my life right now.

ah. i also quit my diet. i suck.

so here's our new kitty. she's a firecracker, just a year old, and her name is kitsune. i knew the first time i held her what her name would be, and even though we "auditioned" six or so cats on sunday she was the obvious one. loves to be petted, this cat. ye gods, she'll hit her head against anything trying to get a head rub out of it. including a metal file cabinet. yeech.

( more pictures )
the only problem we've run into thus far is that she's way too interested in wilson. so interested, in fact, that we went to watch battlestar galactica for 40 minutes in ken's room and when we came out she'd reached into the rat cage with her paw as far as she could and wilson was just cowering in his house. i guess some rats nip cats, but wilson is apparently far too polite. we squirted her with vinegar twice and she jumped down. we're moving his cage to our bedroom and making it off limits to cats tonight. it's a shame. i'm with wilson right now, in my art room with the door closed, and he is so upset and i feel awful.

i realize i haven't been keeping you all abreast of my animals. that's in part because something happened this weekend that made me feel like a total jerk.

basically we decided dot and dash were far too sick to introduce to wilson, and in fact far too sick to have ever been adopted out in the first place. so we returned them. the waiting room was awful. there was this old couple that came in with their two (or more? i only saw two carriers at the least) cats, and the lady at the front desk basically said 'we have no space for these cats.' i was silently pleading the whole time that they wouldn't just leave them there to be possibly euth'ed anyway, and finally the old couple took the cats away to be brought back at a later date. i'm surprised they weren't directed to another shelter, actually.

the thing is, we did something we shouldn't have done and we adopted rats that were on vet check. someone had seen them "sneezing blood"-- we had no idea what myco was at the time because it just doesn't come up in conversation with friends, seeing as none of them own rats. and i've only dealt with lab rats, which are usually myco-free. so we thought nothing of it, and took them after the swiftest vet check ever. we should have waited, because the entire time with us they kept getting sicker. we waited a week, and then we returned them. if it had been stress i would have expected constant improvement as they adjusted, not one rat already sick then the other.

it's another shame, because i really liked them. it's just we felt they were too big a risk to him in their debilitated state. i'd get them in an instant, again, once they were better and fully checked out and monitored in a stable environment. i guess we'll keep an eye out and see.

we're still going to get wilson a companion, because there is no way in hell he could possibly be myco-free. we carry it in our nasal passages and he's no longer in a barrier facility. so we're going to get back to the shelter, or get in touch with a rat adoption agency, and try again. maybe with buddies he'll toughen up and nip that cat. we'll see, i guess. i hope we find him a suitable buddy soon.

in other news, what have i been up to... hm. the diet is running me ragged and i'm not getting enough sleep, so i haven't really lost anything yet but i feel tired and hungry all the time. last weekend alan and adrienne showed us grand hotel, the movie with the line "i want to be alone." it was pretty funny, unintentionally, and it was telling that even with a murder and attempted suicide, the most disturbing thing for us was not knowing what happened to the deceased's schnauzer. that and the pasted-in-after-the-fact overly dramatic closeups of greta garbo. i want to hang out with them again soon, because it was a really good time. and i want to see more old movies!

i think i did more but i'm so tired i have no idea what it was. time for bed.

i hope kitsune can find the litter box tonight.

yoinked from frozenrhino;

street photography in nyc is now Officially ok

in other news, i'm doing well. we saw slumdog millionaire over the weekend. i liked it, but still can't believe the oscar people did.

looking at new camcorders to replace the old, and by hook or by crook this time we're going to get something on the level of the panasonic gs-400. i cannot wait to get my hands on one again. i guess next month will have to be vlogaday or shortaweek or whatever. rrr.

this weekend i helped davis media access film a conference on-campus-- it was so much fun, even just standing there behind a mess of tripods and occasionally zooming in/out or panning. when i got to be on the closeup camera, it was a lot more fun (and a lot more work, because when people stand up and lecture to a hall they tend to nervously walk/shift around a bit).

my arm is healing nicely, which is a relief. now i can get back to working on eyeteeth's picture.

in general, learning more about me and the world and the reactions i have to it and it to me. learning what keeps me happy and what needs to be let go. realizing the good things i already have and how lucky that makes me. in general, despite the depression, pretty content. it's weird.

and i've almost got my "professional" photo/sketch website finished. just putting the finishing touches on today probably and then it goes live. yay!

i know there's stuff i'm leaving out, but it's probably not that important, or if it is i'll have to remember to talk about it later.

because i'm pretty sure i've done this meme before. oh well. i'm supposed to tag some of you but i think everyone who would have done this has done it. so do it if you want to, i guess.


1. i've been fully cognizant of my bisexuality for a decade and still i have never kissed a girl.

2. generally, i feel more of a rapport with animals than people.

3. i have never been burned by a flame but i have such an intense fear of fire that it's taken me until last year to feel comfortable even lighting a match. conversely, i have been sliced open by numerous metal objects in my lifetime and feel perfectly comfortable around knives.

4. i have not knowingly eaten beef since i did a research paper on mad cow disease during my college days.

5. male suffering really turns me on. sorry guys.

6. for a short time in my youth i took dance and gymnastics classes. i quit gymnastics because i got some sort of pseudo-feminism going on and didn't like feeling like they were trying to get me to contort into a specific body image/feminine ideal-- and that i was failing miserably at it.

7. i'm a chronically late person and have been for as long as i can remember.

8. artistic inspiration is why i inevitably give the world one more chance. it's also why i love teaching. people just come up with the most amazing ideas sometimes, and it's all i can do to wonder why i never thought of them because they're just so obvious and wonderful and brilliant.

9. my high school friends and i used to pretend we were the beatles. i was john.

10. in middle school these same friends and i used to hide out in the art room during lunchtime so we wouldn't have to deal with any of the other students harassing us. i suppose in a way we formed our own reactive clique.

11. the reason i started photographing things was due to my fascination that you could print a memory. because of this i find it almost unbearably difficult to throw any of them away.

12. http://thedreamatists.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/dalis-dream-of-a-virgin.jpg
this is my favorite dali painting. sometimes i like to tell people he painted it for me.

13. some of the best times of my life were spent sneaking away from college for the weekend, taking a bus alone to nyc and spending that weekend with this guy i barely knew. i've never been able to see the city in the same way since, so i've always been disappointed when i've returned there.

14. i have not seen most of my extended family in a Very Long Time. there's no obvious tension, we're all just horrible at correspondence.

15. i was an avid reader as a child-- i mean like, i'd get multiple BOXES of 'em from scholastic. by the time i was in second grade they were giving me "special" spelling tests because the regular ones were too easy for me. i remember quibbling with the teacher over the correct spelling of "moustache" (she insisted it only "mustache" was acceptable until we checked the dictionary together)

16. i'm now a blue belt in kempo karate but i have a ridiculously low pain tolerance so i'm still pretty much useless at defending myself.

17. i worked on a dairy farm for a summer, and so i'm privileged enough to know the unbeatable feeling of a cow crapping on your head.

18. just about every night i have really vivid, horrifyingly fascinating dreams that could easily be horror/sci-fi b-movie plots. as a rule i'm usually left shaken from these dreams for the rest of the day.

19. when i encounter incompetence from the world i automatically want to kill myself.

20. i almost got a gig in high school doing english as a second language instructional audio tapes for i think hispanic students. i got all the way into the studio for recording before they decided i made too many "mouth noises"-- clicks and such like when you open your mouth to start talking and your tongue unsticks from the roof and so on. anyway the guy canned me right then and there. now when i hear all the voice personalities on the radio i go crazy pointing out all the mouth noises i hear. jerks.

21. i check the ceilings wherever i'm eating because i'm paranoid that a bug is going to fall from it and into my food. this is based on a true story from my childhood, where i was at a food court with a friend and a very giant, very dead hornet plummeted from above and landed smack in the middle of our table.

22. i'm so argumentative that i once wrote a five-page appeal for a parking ticket. whether they're still reading it, decided it wasn't worth it, lost my paperwork, decided that if i lost i might come after them with a shotgun, or lost track of me once i moved i'm not sure-- but i never heard from the
parking people again.

23. i have a hard time hiding my true emotions. they're written right across my face at all times, and this has gotten me into trouble time and time again.

24. all of the animals i own right now were laboratory rescues. two of them, my rats, are from my own behavioral experiment.

25. i co-starred in some doctor who fan films written and produced by james a few years ago.