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Showing posts from 2014

TIPS FOR DEALING WITH EXTROVERTS

On the Achewood Facebook page , someone commented that many of the listicles and cartoons floating around about introversion tend to be somewhat condescending, treating introverts as fragile beings who can't learn the simplest social skills: Yes, I actually can make small talk when entering a room, I don't require total silence after a single greeting. I thought it might be fun to turn it around for the purpose of parody. I know, dear extroverts, that only rude extroverts do these things. Or worse, introverts pretending to be extroverts in hopes of financial/romantic success (I see you brother, and it hurts my heart). Extroverts have trouble understanding that social outings have to be planned in advance, so tell them that you will make other plans if you don't hear from them by a certain time (they don't have to know that the plan is reading a book). Shock and stun extroverts by mentioning the name of their family members or referencing their hobbies...

I MADE SOME SOUP & DIDN'T SAVE YOU ANY

I'm a lazy cook. I tend to get obsessed with one simple dish and make it until I get tired of it & move to the next one: spicy Indian green beans, pasta with ham & tomatoes, scrambled eggs with fried potatoes. So, when I read in Lifehacker about a guy who had an idea for homemade "instant ramen" with fresh ingredients, I was excited because I love soup, but it seems hard to make. Plus, I had some soup containers already (plastic ones, those glass ones in the article are very cute, but wouldn't survive a trip with me on the bus). Getting the noodles half-cooked seemed like a challenge, so I bought rice noodles, which.the author said would cook in the boiling water straight from the package (actually, after trial & error I found it worked best to completely immerse them in cold water for an hour first). Rice noodles made me want to try pho, one of my favorites. I added snap peas because I had some frozen ones, which I rinsed in cold water first. Meat is ...

I MADE YOU AN INFOGRAPHIC

Infographics are all the rage, so I decided to make one too. I tried to make it with the I Visual Info Touch app, but I couldn't get it exactly how I wanted it, so I ended up using Pages, which worked pretty well. I don't even know if it makes any sense, but I enjoyed making it. Finding the silhouette clip art was my favorite part. The sunburst and skull symbolize the combination of spaciness and heaviness of stoner rock. I kind of stole the idea from Doogie Horner's Heavy Metal Band Name Flowchart , but I added a certain 6th-grade-science-fair cheesiness.

I MADE YOU A GIF

 This GIF brought to you by andythebeagle , Gfycat , and Memecenter . I was looking for a reaction GIF of obscure Looney Tunes character Sniffles the Mouse and I couldn't find one I liked, so I made this one. Sniffles the Mouse was the DJ name I gave myself because my voice is so lousy for radio. Now that I know how, I must keep creating them to ensure that 90% of GIFs are no longer from Disney's Frozen . What will they be from? Flash Future Kung Fu? 1990: The Bronx Warriors? Sweet Smell of Success? The Valley of Gwangi? The Masque of the Red Death? Garzey's Wing? Any requests, dear readers?

MY CONVERGENCE DIARY

Photos from Convergence.     Thursday: 12:30 Making Lanyards . Failed to make a lanyard, but no-one else was doing well, either, so we commiserated with each other. Met someone from Hennepin County Library who remembered me from Anime Detour. 2:00 Hung out at the free book room with M_ and B_. 3:00 Art Show. 5:00 Crafty Geek Meetup. I made a fairy crown. I'm not used to working with dried flowers, but it actually came out decent . 6:30 Burgers on the patio with M_ and B_. 8:30 Fractured Fairy Tales. Panel discussion of media that puts a twist on traditional tales. White As Snow sounds intriguing. 10:00 Just a Minute.   Speaking for one minute without hesitation, deviation or repetition is surprisingly hard. Panelists cheat, insult each other, and make stuff up. Their suffering is our amusement. Thank you, sirs and madams! 11:30 Nescaflowne. Hilarious fan dub of one of my favorite anime, Vision of Escaflowne. An ordinary girl from Japan m...

THE WONDER OF MICROSOFT PAINT

The Wonder Of Microsoft Paint. - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires Although I consider myself a Mac person, I'm not slavish about it. Microsoft does a few good things. Publisher is good, Excel is good, Word is good (although the latter's gotten bloated lately). I even have a Microsoft webcam (it doesn't require drivers and works with every program you throw at it). But my favorite Microsoft is free - Paint. It's light and simple and just does what you need it to do, no frills. One of Apple's dumbest decisions was to get rid of MacPaint, although you can download a free app called Paintbrush that is similar. But, at work I can't install anything, so Paint is a real lifesaver when working on flyers or presentations. I even wrote this little ode to Paint in presentation form. Do you guys have any little programs that don't get a lot of hype, but save your bacon?

TOP TEN LIPSYNCH FOR YOUR LIFE SONGS FOR A DRAG KING EQUIVALENT OF RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE

 The Advocate has suggested that the greatest (i.e. only good) reality show ever, Rupaul's Drag Race , have a drag king contestant.  That's fine, but it would be much more entertaining to have a whole drag king competition. One of the best parts of Drag Race is seeing all the different types of queens compete: beauty queens, funny queens, conceptual queens, androgynous queens, scary queens, singing and dancing queens.  I want to see punk kings, gangsta rap kings, cock-rocking metal kings, panty-dropping R & B kings, country kings, baggy-pants burlesque comic kings, and of course, Elvis. I picked out some songs that make me think of different aspects of masculinity:  swaggering men, heartbroken men, lustful men, romantic men, philosophical men, and suicidally depressed men (interesting fact: I can think of dozens of songs by men about suicide, but only one female one: "Gloomy Sunday". What's up with that?) "That's Life" - Frank Sinatra...

MY IPAD APPS, PART TWO

  Part two of a two-part series. Part one is here. Gaming Although I'm on record as being more about game mechanics than visuals, some games are more fun if you can see the characters facial expressions and some are too complex to work well on a smaller device. I can play Chuzzle or Bejeweled Blitz fine on the iPod Touch, but Plants vs. Zombies is just more fun on the iPad. World of Goo is hard to do on a small devices as you end up pinching and zooming a lot. I've been playing tabletop role-playing games for several years now (Current game: Interface Zero 2.0 ). I started old-school with pen and paper, but now I am almost fully digital thanks to the iPad. I still enjoy the feel of rolling real dice, although my co-gamer Rawen uses the Real Dice Roll app. For my character sheet, I use a fill-able PDF and the PDF Reader app. I tried other PDF apps and none were as good, they were hard to move around in and blurry, PDF Reader has a nice folder organizing system (as a libr...

JFRO'S BEST OF 2013 MIX

Jfro's 2013 from ash966 on 8tracks Radio . This was a pretty diverse year for my music listening, so I hope people enjoyed their New Year's mix CDs. For those who didn't get one (free by request), here's a mix of recent stuff (2012-2013). This was a year where my taste actually matched the general public at a few points (Daft Punk, M.I.A., Janelle Monae). Shoegaze continued to be big, with new bands (Chatham Rise, A Place to Bury Strangers), a new album by the codifiers (My Bloody Valentine), and even an all-Japanese cover of Loveless . Speaking of covers, DJing in Johnny Urgh's 3-D House of Covers on the late, lamented Turntable.fm got me back into my weird covers obsession (SHONEN Knife, Melvins, Martha Wash). I hope to get back into it on Plug.dj Stoner rock continued to be big (Windhand, Vista Chino, Dark Earth, Devil to Pay, Orange Goblin, The Quill, Nightstalker). I was glad to discover Red Desert , the Twin Cities' own contributio...

ALL YOUR STREAMS ARE BELONG TO ME

  So, Jthbeaux and I are now officially an all-streaming household.  Those Netflix discs were just sitting there for months lately, the evil Comcast finally turned off my cable entirely, the antenna doesn't get NBC, and the EyeTV just stopped working. The Apple TV is working fine, but the first generation has only YouTube and Flickr as apps, so it's mostly an iTunes content delivery device. I thought I'd try something new, so I bought a Chromecast , since it was only $35. I have my iPad Mini by my side all the time, anyway.  We decided to get Huluplus, since the Chromecast supports it and it's actually $2 less than the Netflix disc subscription, so a net savings. Finally, I can watch new shows on my schedule without the risk of the recording going wrong, and without a lot of space taken up on my hard drive. You do have annoying commercials, but the HD is great, and since I'm addicted to The Colbert Report and The Daily Show , it also saves me money no...