MOVING DAY!!!

I'm moving my blog to Wordpress. I know, it's going to be hard to remember another URL, but look on the bright side. You're the only one who reads this anyway.

http://www.tervelandrews.wordpress.com

...We had fun, right?

WRITING EXERCISE

Everything about me felt tired. I was sure that people could tell when they made a point of looking away from me. I got dragged into a methadone clinic and twice into churches. My car was full of unread Watchtowers and Narcotics Anonymous fliers. There was room for improvement. But I couldn't help feel that everyone I met was overreacting. I'd been dumped.

ON YOUTUBE

When you want to hear, or rip, a song that you just can't see yourself running into anywhere else without paying for it, Youtube has for the past 5 or more years (that's 150 years in internet time) been the go-to guy. But the legal bandwagon started by Viacom has all the higher quality material being taken out behind the shed and shot, leaving nothing but the shitty teenage covers and camera phone live recordings. Those don't make good mp3's (which is obviously the point). So you find yourself searching for your dream track, going several pages in and coming out sticky, but unsatisfied. And then, off to the right side, in related videos, you see it. You see that thing you were looking for, that one song that makes all this work worthwhile. It's attached to a Naruto or Bleach or Inu-Yasha video, but you don't care because the song is sure to be intact and album quality. As you click the link and it starts to load, an angelic chorus rings out, but you can't hear it because you're going to hell for theft and piracy. But for the next 4 minutes...it's worth it.

Always go for the AMV (anime music video).

I'M GOING TO MISS BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Anyone with any sense will, also.

"These things, they will not hold water. They are like a boat, fired at from a tower. And we are like the crew that by the grace of god alone have escaped once again with only flesh wounds. But now we have to face the sea. I will not say "brave" it, because there's nothing brave about self-preservation. We will live if we want to badly enough. If only to see the edge of the earth as we fall off into that mythology." ~Tervel Andrews

WALLIES CHALK BOARD APPLIQUE SET



Found these on Amazon. They turn your wall into chalk board for making notes, keeping a schedule, etc. It's a pretty good idea aside from the reason people started using dry erase instead of chalk: chalk is just fucking messy. That flaw aside, I have been looking for something like this. I think I'd be happy in my room, insanely scrawling notes and ideas for whatever I'm working on onto the chalky sections of my walls, scratching my face and wiping my brow, then forgetting to check a mirror before running out to get some food and wondering why everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy. I could imagine they sense my genius and it repels them, a subconscious act of self preservation.

No, but I could get a lot of work done this way. Plus, I was already planning on writing notes on my wall and painting over them once I didn't need them anymore. This is still messy, but less so. Maybe I'll pick some up.

You should, too. Yeah, you. (Aqui)

This helps. Crayola Non-toxic Dust-free Chalk (Aqui)

GLOW GRAFFITI TOOLSET









The product description for this is pretty vague, so I'm not really sure how it works. But I do know its awesome and I want to waste money on it.

NOTES ON A SCANDAL

I posted this comment on someone's blog a while back about the fact that I was leaving Heroes. I'm a little full of it, though because I sort of checked in the next week, hoping maybe Heroes was missing me enough that it was reflecting and trying to get its act together. That...was miles away from reality. So here's my comment about episode 15 of the third (and possible last) season of Heroes.

I just watched it on Hulu. I feel similar to a woman who received a diamond tennis bracelet and a black eye for her anniversary. I know I SHOULD leave, but I'm more than a bit materialistic. It wasn't half bad, which is to say that it wasn't half good, either. The last minute of the episode will make you want to drink lye. They managed to fall into a sinkhole approximately the same size as Isaac Mendez' loft, which apparently holds the most airtight lease in the history of real estate. It always bothered me that people kept doing things there, even though the place has been wired for sound and video since the first season. Everyone's seen the camera feed, but nobody ever goes over there until it's too late? And people still go back there to paint the future in an artsy, bohemian environment? Wow. This is a clusterfuck of continuity errors. I love the Heroes writers as people (when they showed up Daphne's apartment that she never cared to return to again), and we'll always have Paris , but I can't help but feel that they just don't care about my feelings. And if they don't care about mine, I can't care about theirs. I'll begin plotting my Heroes fanfic now.

"DECADES AFTER PEOPLE STOPPED WONDERING ABOUT THEIR ONE HIT

the rapper would go on to be one of the most famous actors in Hollywood, while the DJ would end up spending the next twenty years touring, bitterly showing up to small club gigs and turning out an ensemble cast of illegitimate children." ~Tervel

PHOTOFUNIA













I've been editing photos of Yoshi (in his DINOSAUR logo incarnation) on Photofunia.

Good times, cool effects. I'm at a party though, so...blogging is frowned upon.

Anyway, Photofunia. Feel free to play with it.

I SAID THIS TO A FRIEND, IN CHAT

"...and somewhere in this field of white noise, I will find a door into your dreams. I will creep under beds in your subconscious, planting seeds of doubt in your mind about your safety as you find yourself double-checking corners in your waking hours, aware that your house treats sound like a game. And when you finally get to a point when you dig out your old night light and check for weeping angels, I will take that small opportunity to scratch at your brain, violate your personal space, and make you do something you wish you hadn't."

MONATANA 94



Montana Spray Paint released their new "94" (the year they were established) series of low pressure spray paints, which promise to revolutionize the use of spray paint. And since its Montana, I'm willing to believe them.

I can't wait to get mine. The first thing I'm tagging is your clean, white dog.

YE OLDE FACEBOOK



I changed my Facebook language to Pirate English last night. Here's a sample of the emails it sends me now.

DEAR, HEROES (I FINALLY KNOW HOW TO QUIT YOU)...



It's gotten to the point that Heroes is like the alcoholic girlfriend I constantly have to defend to my friends, knowing that I have no business in this situation. There have been incidents and continuity errors and lazy writing for, literally, years. How am I expected to stay in this situation, knowing that there's something better out there?

Yep, I think we're taking a break, Heroes. Besides, I've been seeing Battlestar Galactica behind your back. Now there's a show that knows how to treat a man. Also, Lost is looking pretty good in that skirt. Talk about backstory.

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS (AND OTHER THINGS YOU LOOK DOWN ON)

At what age do you become too old to read a young adult novel? I know people scoff heavily at the idea of reading them, even in their teens, when they are the target demographic, but honestly, I've never seen this magical cutoff point when you become too old for a form of media. As long as it appeals to you in some way, what difference does it make? I'm all for growing the fuck up and taking responsibility for your own life, but I don't get how that somehow means that cartoons and lighthearted reading are beneath you once you meet a certain age. A woman who just happens to have been molested as a child and just happens to like the Harry Potter series is not exhibiting signs of regression in order to deal with childhood trauma. Or not necessarily. She might be. But she may also just like the writing, the story, the subject matter. Maybe the part of her subconscious that is drawn to a book series about a teen wizard is really just the part of her that appreciates the themes of responsibility on a deeper level and admires the way they're introduced to their target audience through metaphors they can easily connect to and carry into adulthood. Maybe the 25 year-old artist who watches cartoons for hours a day has an indescribable creative process that you, in your infinite stuffiness just can't understand, because who's really wired exactly like someone else?

Besides, you spent so much time trying to be a grown up in every way that you drove yourself to neurosis and paranoia. You need to loosen up. Everyone says so behind your back.

WRITING EXERCISE: EXPLODED MOMENT

I always smell my drinks at parties. This was something I'd learned through repeat near-misses over the years. With this in mind, I went out to the freezing garage and took from the bag of ice, filling my cup so I could end the night of substance abuse with a beer pong cup full of Sprite. Too selfish to care about the noise I made when people were sleeping all around the house, I'd just spent the last hour or more watching Youtube videos of spoken-word poets. Now it was too quiet, not easy to adjust to hardcore silence.

I set up in what was still the guest room the last time I was here, where a girl was sleeping deeply as possible without a breathing tube being necessary and plugged in my laptop, settling down on the clean carpet. The sleeping girl's bed turned out to be a massage table, skewed diagonal, hipster-intentional style. It was one of only three pieces of furniture in the room.

Keeping quiet while typing near a sleeping person is always a challenge, so it helps if you just don't care if they wake up. I didn't. I couldn't think of anything silent to do online while high, and I didn't have my notes with me, so I browsed My Documents and chose a rough, "stream of consciousness" draft I'd thrown together the night before about a dream I never had, about a girl I'd never meet:

With no expectations, just a sense of how appropriate it was for the dead to speak on the dead, I found myself running unfamiliar streets, running through doorways that led to places miles away, and being chased by my dead grandfather, head of a lion on his shoulders like it used to be when I had this recurring nightmare as a child. The difference was that he'd never been a prophet before, trying to force me to accept his foresight as universal law. Fuck that. That's what physics is for. Yet, out of deference to his memory and the clips of insight you always carry in dreams, I sat down "Indian style" on the floor. It was dirty, or maybe just dirt.

HIPSTERS

There are tribes made up of strings of genres, separated by commas, and willing to fight tooth and nailgun for their beliefs.

With true love based on trust funds, armies of exclusionist revolutionaries launch molotov cocktails made of PBR cans, hoping to keep the mainstream at bay.

All this war is chronicled on the blogs. See for yourself.

WHAT/WHY OF HUMANITY



People are interesting. It's a fact. Even in the lives of the most boring person, there's bound to be something or some interaction that has cause a chain events in their lives that helped shape who they are today. The problem is that you can't always understand how small actions in a series of small actions that a have been directed at a person can change them one way or another.

This makes people interesting to study, to observe. Oliver, the main character of IED Tokyo, spends a huge part of his life studying and watching people, trying to understand why people do the things they do and hopefully use it all as a tool for creating stronger characters and stories in his writing. He fixates on lives and aspects of them, trying to work out people's actions in relation to their motivations, and in return, what they would do when placed in a particular situation.

This is what writers like Brian K. Vaughan are amazing at; taking a character and making them a person through their decisions and indecisions, and building their story so that no matter how unexpected and tragic or brilliant their actions are, there's always a firm link that allows you to believe that a character's actions were within them. This is something that the writers of Heroes didn't do a good enough job with when they overhauled Sylar in Volume 3. It's also what makes it believable, yet completely fucking unbelievable!, that Alter would kill 355 in Y: The Last Man (and don't even get me started on her motivations for EVERYTHING she put the world through).

There's a difference between writing a story and writing people into existence. When you write people, its easily possible to become emotionally invested in their lives and deaths (Skins, I love you).

And that's what I hope to be able to do in my own writing. Because what's the point of creating a person if no one cries hysterically when they die?

WRITING EXERCISE (CONT'D)

A chinese restaurant owner puts the 23rd consecutive angry call on hold and goes to check, once again, if there are bugs in his kitchen. There aren't. He always gets an A on his health inspections, and his bleach, so concentrated that it's illegal outside the virology industry, is only sold on the black market. So what the fuck are people talking about when they say they found termites in their fortune cookies, causing words to be eaten away, changing the messages from fortunes to threats? At this point he would be willing to personally deliver to anyone calling him to place an order, even to the black neighborhoods.

This is not related to the other events. This is just shitty luck. But across town,...zombies.

THE DARK ARTS (THERE IS NO DEFENSE)



After a long hiatus and motivational drought, I've decided it may be time for me to give in to my immoral urge to stencil and spray...and huff (no, not huff). In between being a shitty writer who can't meet personal deadlines, I've begun the process of planning for a new series of mediocre canvas stencil graffiti pieces. And this time, I'm inviting wheat paste along for the ride. For my one dedicated reader, there's even a recipe for wheat paste somewhere on this blog. Can you find it? I'll give you a hint: It's marked by a blue paw print

WRITING EXERCISE

Strings of beads break apart and fall down stone steps in Japan, while a vision quest leads a teenager to certain death in California, while a cross is inverted to signal the start of mass in New England, while an a life-long and career psychic in Reykjavik lights a candle and covers it with a lacquered skull, and asks it about what it means that she’s stopped dreaming. Even on the dangerous amounts of LSD she’s downed with her ice water, all she can hear is nothing. And this is the first time she’s feared the future.

A vision quest leads a teenager to certain death in California, while a cross is inverted to signal the start of mass in New England, while a candle flickers dully through the eyes of a skull in Iceland, while a family of Shinto shrine keepers ascend to the highest mountainside in their region of Japan to divine the annual lunar forecasting, using the beads, strung on the hair of a goddess, and passed down through countless generations. As the eldest male rubs the beads in his hand, this god-hair twine snaps with a chalky sound and the beads that make their lives worth living are taken by gravity to the edge of the high stone stairway. And the fall.

A cross is inverted to signal the start of mass in New England, while a candle flickers dully through the eyes of a skull in Iceland, while strings of beads breaks apart and fall down stone steps in Japan, while a young Native American boy with no clue what to do with his life, and dreams that extend beyond the reservation, sets out on a vision quest, hoping to get signs and advice from his gods and ancestors. He does everything right, entering his trance and wandering into the desert, beyond the recent tracks of man, but nothing expected happens. He doesn’t see his future, his gods, his past, or the edge of the cliff he’s walking toward. All he sees is black.

A candle flickers dully through the eyes of a skull in Iceland, while strings of beads break apart and fall down stone steps in Japan, while a vision quest leads a teenager to certain death in California, while a Satanic church prepares to start their Saturday mass, inverting a cross in the function room of the Catholic church they’re renting for the night as a sign of respect for their beliefs. They follow one another in prayer, then take communion of fresh goat blood, not knowing that they’ve all just been infected with rabies. They pop hallucinogenic mushrooms, partly to disrespect the premises, but mostly to prove they’re more fun than the stuck-up Satanists across town. And as they take effect, the congregation doesn’t feel any of the usual sensations associated with mushroom use. All they feel is an overwhelming urge to help people, because something bad is going to happen.

All these things are related, and thus can not be mentioned without one another. Seriously. Try to mention just one event. You can’t. You took a deep breath and it all poured into your head as one. All these things are related, and thus can not be mentioned without one another.