ans99

also, terrific news; my x3 fanvid set to a nine inch nails song now has sound again. yay for youtube's workaround agreement with music labels! now i don't have to hate them! watch here, if you didn't get a chance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKEvqyGOKow

i'm inordinately proud of it since it took me the longest of anything film-related to complete.

remember this? this is where i objectify women in a horribly lascivious manner and post other people's portraits of them with abandon (don't worry guys, you get your turn next). anyhoo, here are hot chix #50-26 in the countdown (and for 100-76 and 75-51, click the appropriate links):

( offense commence! )

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.

we bought a new camcorder today to replace our dead optura 50!

well, technically it's used off ebay, so hopefully it will show up with all its parts attached. it's a panasonic gs-400, one of the better prosumer camcorders out there for our price range. it was actually kind of funny (and depressing)-- the original buy it now! price was 900 dollars, but we made a counterbid of 800 dollars, which was automatically accepted. so i guess that means that we could have probably gone lower... argh. everything is so expensive in the tech world, even used tech.

yeah, so expect to have a sorta kickass camcorder shoved in your face next time we meet.

in other news, we had two movie nights with friends in a row. last night we watched tokyo zombie and repo! the genetic opera with mario. leave it to mario to pick the weirdest titles (although i'm not blaming him for repo!, since that was technically my idea). i'm not sure which movie was odder, to be honest, although i will say that anthony stewart head (now and forever known as "tony head" for some reason on whedonesque) was the hottest thing ever in that movie, and his harmonizations with sarah brightman made me glad to be alive. thank you, darren whateveryourlastnamewas, director of saw 3 and 4, for making that special moment happen.

he also bought us ice cream as a belated birthday thing. that is, mario did, not darren wossisname.

tonight we watched happy-go-lucky with anna and anthony, and i was pretty similarly perplexed. i think we all were, honestly? the movie didn't seem to have a plot, and the main character was pretty much a carbon copy of pre-doctor donna noble except her job actually helped people. anna was annoyed with her within about five seconds flat it seemed. but we stuck with it, and we were rewarded with... meh, a non-ending for all intents and purposes. it was still entertaining and i liked the characters quite a bit.

after that we hung around a little while longer and ended up snarking and making up dialogue for a few dollars more, which is just... why did nobody tell me clint eastwood used to be that hot???

also, earlier today we stopped by central park (not the one in nyc, confused non-local readers) for some sort of hula hooping party that was going on. just tons of homemade hoops all over the green, and hippies (who owned the hoops, i'd suppose) wandering around showing people tricks. i've almost learned how to guide the hoop up above my head and back down, and how to shoulder hoop just by watching others get instructed. tomorrow we might go to ace and get the materials to build our own. i am far too excited about this, i know, but hoop dancing just looks so cool. for reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juBHmLVYwD0 (lol, the first thing mario said to this was "she should get better taste in music" but i think he was mainly just jealous)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQRkWvMa_Zg (the girl i would marry in a heartbeat)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdm3LJxLxTM (hokay, that's some contortion work too, but still)

tomorrow ken and i are also going to the sspca, and who knows what we'll return with..... ?

finally, still taking feedback on my fauxpro website with drawings and photos mentioned in my previous post... http://ansate.moosheep.org/hieroglyphs/

things i'd particularly love feedback on:
-the directory name (i have been agonizing over this*)
-the functionality (can you find everything ok?)
-the art (do you think it's salable? is it ok to put up sketches of other people's photographs these days? and should the collection that's already up be refined more? i'm looking at you for this one alan)
-the bio (do you think it's too long and whiny?)

*you don't know how tempted i was to call the directory "buysomethinwillya"

this weekend our camcorder broke again, and seems completely unfixable. unfortunately it broke during this month, which was supposed to be short-a-week. so that's disappointing, but at least it means we will be getting a newer, better camcorder that does not blow fuses while rewinding tapes (????)

then i kind of broke myself by trying a simple goddamn side vault over a bike rack, getting tripped up, and landing very hard on my left side on concrete. that was sunday, and i'm still in pain-- mostly from my left shoulder to my elbow. it feels like a muscle strain plus something else, and i'm worried there's some tendon pulling or something going on. hopefully no fractures anywhere, but it's a pretty chronic pain and there's not much i can do with the arm. so today i'm off from work because yesterday was Miserable Hell Day and i felt like i wanted to die every time i moved.

on saturday aj brought over tombstone, which i'd never seen. that is a pretty amazingly funny movie. first off, the mustaches are incredible and huge. kurt russell with a mustache will be my lj icon, if i can find some stills from this one particular scene. what i love most about big mustaches is that they end up being an exaggerated mirror of facial expressions, and there is this one part where kurt russell's character was lying down sad, and his mustache was this incredible droop, like a clown's sad face. epic.

john locke was also in this movie, and a yong billy bob thornton and the guy from terminator (easily the hottest bad guy). and val kilmer, whom i'm sort of predisposed to hate after the batman fiasco, but honestly this role (doc holliday) he managed to shine in. throughout the movie the character is dying from tuberculosis, but still manages to spout this hilarious snarky even toned dialogue. when he first came on i had no idea who he was and thought he was the villain, he was so chill. but no, just an incredibly badass good guy. thoroughly entertaining movie.

then we watched some of suzanne vega's videos from the 80's, with her commentary, which is really the only way to watch them because for a few of them you can tell she is so incredibly disappointed in how they turned out. and she'll comment derisively on the clothes and hair, and it's just really cute. makes me wish i'd kept my gloria estefan video collection :(

this weekend ken's parents visited. things seemed to go smoothly enough, and we ate at some pretty fantastic restaurants-- seasons, and that boat hotel in old sac. if i hadn't been in so much pain i would have enjoyed it more. it meant we missed house's season finale though, so avoiding the hotbed of apathetic spoilers until we do see it should be interesting.

the day i got injured, like right after, i rested while going on this used laptop ken refurbished for me (because he is awesome) and ran across exquisitegeek's post about hula hooping. i hadn't realized what some people are doing with this, and it made me sad i was injured because i wanted to run right out then and buy a hula hoop. perhaps once i heal up.

oh, finally, i have had a twitter since the england trip last fall, but i'm actually starting to spend more time on it. i find it fascinating that a social networking site can turn even vaunted celebrities into ... well... us. and i don't mean "regular joes" like mario suggested-- i mean for all intents and purposes, giggly 20-somethings. i find it adorable. even trent reznor is on there, being all cute with rob sheridan and giving away free tickets to his concerts. brent spiner tells (extremely) short stories. stephen fry posts little audio challenges (guess who this is, guess what these people are saying, etc). neil gaiman and warren ellis just snark. dichen lachman twits while drunk. etc etc etc. although in a way it's a little dismaying, because they generally only interact with each other, it's nice to see them being able to keep up with their colleagues for once, and at the same time generally be able to keep their fans abreast of their doings and thoughts. it must be a really nice time for them, now this tool is available.

but anyway, yeah, i'm ans99 on twitter. add me if you're there!

YEP this is what happens when you star in a saw movie

also, this is the cutest music video i have ever seen. isaac brock looks like he has gotten fat and content, and i'm so happy for the motherfucker, i really am.

yesterday was my birthday, so i had a joint celebration with ken (whose bday was earlier in the month). we went wine tasting in sonoma valley with a few lucky people who could happen to make it. it was a pretty epic time-- i had a mushroom burger with mushrooms, we visited ravenswood and got a bunch of free swag (including a button in french that roughly translated to "no wet chicken wine"-- "wet chicken" is apparently an idiom for "wimpy" in french!), ken made us look even more like tourists with his (sometimes mischievously misleading) tom-tom, several of us trespassed on a piece of machinery, aj and james saw a hummingbird fight, i sang depeche mode's "enjoy the silence" for a cheesemonger, james and i molested marilyn monroe, gretchen got told she looked like she was 12, we bought some truffles, alan almost got raped by some casual wine guys, everyone posed for pictures with odd statues (including a dogdragon, a t-rex and a bronzed redwood tree root), and we tried many, many wines-- among them a zinfandel port that was hands-down honestly the best wine i ever tasted (much like the woman in keswick who had the best chips ever, the guy at the counter did not believe me. i might have looked very drunk at this point, but still, have a little pride and faith in your product yo). i also took many many pictures with the nifty new lens ken got me (a canon 18-55 mm with image stabilization). it garners more light, takes less blurry pictures in the dark, and has a wider angle of view-- all wins for indoor photography, which is the bane of my existence normally).

after all that, we went to kathmandu for dinner where even more people showed up, and i clumsily introduced everyone to each other, and we had a nice meal. then back to our house for the best birthday cake in the world (a two-layer ice cream cake from cold stone, with a koala-guinea pig hybrid drawn on top-- the thing weighed at least 15 pounds). i finally met alan's girlfriend, and anna gave me yarn, and mike gave me a gorilla pod for my camera. james gave me the dianetics book on tape (?) and some sort of sheep knitting needle holders (guess which one i appreciated more, lol). :) sara and karl came up too, yay! and everyone met wilson (karl was constantly being tickled by the little guy walking all over him, and in one case the poor thing made it down the back of his shirt! karl just has bad luck with animals i guess). toward the end of the evening, our party of course degenerated into watching youtube videos, mostly the doctor who fanvids we'd done with james. ken made the apt point that they're sort of like our version of slides-- y'know, the kind that people used pull out when they had unwitting guests.

i had a wonderful day yesterday. my philosophy has long been that there is no point to doing anything if there is not a touch of the absurd involved. thanks for helping me fulfill that, guys, by making the day as unique and fun as possible :)

nothing really to report-- just wanted to show off my new icon.

had a pretty good weekend-- watched saw 3 and 4 with mario while aj looked the other way, and tonight watched the golden compass with aj while wilson gnawed on a hitler bagel (i filmed him).

vis a vis golden compass, i'm very disappointed at a) the lack of sufficient daniel craig bum and b) the intercision of the gut-punch ending that ended up being the best thing about the damn book. saw 3 and 4 were better than i remember, though. we made mario stay for what turned out to be a 30-minute filmmaking diary in the special features of saw 4, and it just made me that much more sure that i want to go into film. it was incredible. those transition shots that look fake? they were filmed in realtime, on the fly. if you don't understand how cool that is then i guess you don't share my love of filmmaking?

also, i need to learn to go to bed on time.