Dammit, I Need Answers!

kungfufool — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:17:40 +0000

When writing a comment on the great and powerful Henceblog, I wondered (aloud) if naked dry-humping is still dry-humping or something else. Like I always do (and could very well be the reason why I am very much alone in this world), I asked the Internet instead of an actual human being. Needless to say, I got an answer. More specifically, a Yahoo! Answer.

Click to expand

Needless to say, this question was much more interesting than the answers. I actually forgot for a moment how wonderful of a time waster Yahoo! Answers was. For tech/hardware solutions its a reliable resource. It has held my hand through many a BSOD. It has taught me how to play high-end games on my pitiful home PC. It opened it’s arms, embraced me, and let me blow my nose and wipe my wet eyes on its shirt, when I busted the case of my beloved Macbook. Unfortunately, it is also a reminder of how poor our education system is. I don’t see a single comma in that bitch.

Unlike venues such as YouTube, where criticisms of video content and are buried underneath other people’s arguments, juvenile asides, racism, and protests of other internet users alleged mental disabilities, people on Yahoo! Answers actually do what is asked of them. They answer your question. This makes me wonder. No question I have ever searched has not had an answer. Everybody is helpful, few give poor advice or wrong information. So, while I had to search “naked dry-humping” to see if there were more appropriate synonyms, do people actually look through the forums, look to see what they were experts at, and answer the question, to simply answer them. Yes you will, you say. That’s the whole point.

It’s weird as hell. Say I am an expert at something. Let’s say something I often experience, like staring at a blank space in the wall and feeling passing emotions of fear and sadness. If someone asks something about it, like why-am-i-experiencing-this-oh-my-god-someone-as-paranoid-as-me-plz-answer, I’m not going to post. I would probably read it to see that I am not alone, but come on. I’m not that desperate to feel like an expert.

But I suppose its better to have these inane questions answered than letting them fester in one’s head. Take for example this one question, “I’m in love with this guy, and he’s my best friend for life’s brother…what should I do?” It’s followed up a minute or two later with “HELP ME!!!!!I’m in love with this guy, and he’s my best friend for life’s brother…what should I do?!?!?!?!?!?”.

I can only imagine the emotional turmoil this poor girl is experiencing. Her best friend for life…his brother…Holy shit.

There’s some more great stuff, if you do a little random clicking. I’m especially proud of finding this gem.

Click to expand

Back Home and Distracted

kungfufool — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:14:37 +0000

While trying to get some catch-up sleep from the very last semester of the College of Santa Fe (R.I.P.), I’ve been trying my best to keep busy. However, I’m trying to find a job, trying to add sound to my animation (the hardest thing I’ve ever done), trying to finish the screenplay I’ve been working on for school, trying to figure out financial aid stuff with my new school, yet I find myself completely wasting my time.

The number one distraction: Facebook.

I never really checked this site during school, but because I miss my college friends, and because I’m an incredibly lonely individual, I’ve spent hours meandering through the god damn facebook. I found myself figuring answers for Pick Five:

The only problem is that there aren’t a lot of Pick Five lists that warrant a nonsense response and the ones that do don’t have great responses. Ah well.

Also there’s this game Scramble, where you are given a board of tiles and you have to link letters, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally to make words. I can’t get past 67 points. By the summer, I intend to beat Robin’s 118 points, just so I can feel pretty good about myself. Sadly, I am learning more words by stumbling onto them in the game instead of, you know, knowing words before I go into it. I need to read more.

The second thing has been following artist blogs and videos. Looking through the Drawn archives, I stumbled across some truly inspired and/or bizarre projects, namely Justine Lai’s mission to paint herself having sex with each U.S. president in chronological order:

You should see the one with Abraham Lincoln

Thinking that looking at other people’s art and animation would inspire finishing my own was completely misguided. After watching Koda by Reza Dolatabadi, I wonder why I even bother:

This is probably one of the more singularly beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time. It took Dolatabadi two and a half years to make it. The animation is composed from over 6000 paintings(!). It’s incredible and the hard work really paid off. Check out his website.

I will get my animation up sometime this month. That’s sort of my big project before I go onto designing a little animated introduction for my next video projects and resume working on my writing (I’m twenty, dammit! No more totally unproductive summers!). I hoped to have the audio-less version up today, but I wanted to set it up so it would be embedded directly from my computer. I’m a little hesitant to put it through a video sharing site in its current state.

A Quoi Ca Sert L’Amour

kungfufool — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:52:44 +0000

by Louis Clichy (via Drawn)

Work, the Killdozer, and You

kungfufool — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:22:29 +0000

Earlier in the summer, me and my friends were at an Evanston restaurant, named FlatTop, an Asian fusion place. The food there is good, and they do this thing where you leave your order with your name on the stick and they come back to you with your food. A couple of my friends work at a restaurant where some of the staff at FlatTop hold their second jobs. They play this contest where they try to write or draw “balls” or “penis” on each other’s food, or sometimes just point at their genitals when in each other’s eyelines. When they got there food back, one of my friends got “balls” in his food. We all had a laugh.

I secretly desired having this type of relationship with somebody I worked with. I have never held a paying job and only once made money off a service I provided. When volunteering at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, I got a ten dollar tip for helping a Mexican immigrant with two small children move a dented sink into his old van. I tried refusing it, but the man insisted. After some awkward smiles and hand waving, I accepted. I still regret taking it. I regret spending the money on mini-golf and a slushee even more, but then again, the local arcade needed the patronage. Nobody went, probably because the games sucked and the glow-in-the-dark mini-golf course carried the potential for rape*.

I am reminded of this, because a couple of months ago, I went to a Lannan reading given by the fantastic Junot Diaz (already mentioned here). In his Q&A he brought up the concept of “work,” which many young writer’s avoid in their writing as effectively as the actual thing. While my short fiction and this blog are mainly based around work and working, I nearly cried when I realized that I still haven’t recieved a paycheck. I wished I was like my friends in Illinois, calling out co-worker’s names and pointing at my nuts.

This brings me back to that night at FlatTop. My friend was talking about the Killdozer. Long story short, Marvin Heemeyer, a Travis Bickle-type, gets screwed by the man and evicted. In frustration, he declared “Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.” And did he do something unreasonable:

He poured concrete on a bulldozer and drove it around.

The process of making this thing is fascinating to me. That is the ultimate machine, a moving building that’s intention is to destroy other buildings. There are also guns mounted on it. It’s like a G4 commentator’s wet dream.

So how was this thing not seen? Well, Heemeyer had people visit his house and they didn’t question it. I think it was cognitive dissonance, like how Americans settling the west died of dehydration and starvation as they couldn’t judge distance (no moisture meant no atmospheric hazing on items far away). Or that theory (ridiculous as it is) that Native Americans couldn’t see Colombus’ ships because it was outside of their experience. People probably couldn’t tell that they were looking at a bulldozer covered in concrete because nobody was, you know, used to something like that.

And nobody was used to it. Heemeyer took revenge on the people who he thought screwed him over by running over their houses. The police tried everything, shooting at it, ramming it off the road with their cars. Someone rode it. They even drove another bulldozer at it, which would have looked totally awesome. Thankfully, nobody was killed or injured except for Heemeyer, who shot his brains out when the thing just stopped working. Somehow, which is the big mystery, he had sealed himself in the giant bulldozer with concrete. I wonder if that was an accident. I can imagine him happily walking up to his killdozer and getting in and munching on a Nutrigrain bar. “This is gonna take me all day, and I’m sure gonna get hungry…” then, “Aw, fuck! No!” I know this wasn’t the case. The man considered himself a martyr…for himself. He wrote wierd shit on the wall of his shed.

As ridiculous as this ordeal was, it’s still horrible. People were nearly killed, property was destroyed, and lives were ruined. And by a bulldozer. Covered in concrete.

While we may not be paranoid bastards with axes to grind and access to heavy duty construction vehicles, the amount of dedication put into the killdozer is admirable. After all, we don’t have explanations for why we do the things we do, but we do it. Often, when we can’t come up with a reason we just give up or go about it half-assed. There is no way you can slather a bulldozer in concrete and not ask, “why am I doing this?”. But Heemeyer pulled through, and for what he created, the result is incredible.

Notes:

*They played Kidz Bop on loop. After hearing a kid-covered version of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” for the fortieth time, my Slushee-addled brain finally realized that Kidz Bop is music for pedophiles.

Also, how awesome would it be to drive that thing?

Oh God!

kungfufool — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:36:53 +0000

Another faux Lichtenstein. If he saw that I was vaguely jacking his style to make crummy art he would strangle me with a violin string. But he’s dead, rest his soul. So I’m going to continue using his style to learn PhotoShop. From Tough Guys Don’t Dance, written and directed by Norman Mailer:

A Little Photoshop Thing

kungfufool — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:14:43 +0000

When I got frustrated on my animation (going nowhere), I got frustrated doing something else. This is going back to the last post. It’s a Lichtenstein-esque Photoshop of Tommy Wiseau. It’s really, really crappy, but I mean…come on. I’m learning.

You can find a tutorial for the process here.

Caught You Creepin’

kungfufool — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:23:49 +0000

This week, from some, perhaps cosmic, force, I have been completely inundated with romance. Not on a personal level, but worse–the cultural. If the New Age simplification of quantum mechanics is supposed to believe, it is operating on both. My need for some kind of significant other is manifesting itself in the ugly and wierd interpretation of romance I have been seeing in the American media. It’s also probably in my water (which if frozen, probably looks like the broken faces of orphaned children when put under a microscope). My frustrations are also propogating the Sri Lankan civil war.

But anyways: love, that quality that bad poets insist on writing about, that thing TV-referencing college kids breaking twenty say couldn’t possibly exist because they know so goddamn much, has been forcing itself upon me like a drunk football player. It comes (hurhur) notably in the form of The Dream, who Ronald Metellus, has introduced me to and that wonderful fucking movie The Room. The Dream, sculptor, painter, songwriter, lover… I have listened to his song “Put it Down”, a love song with a title Gene Shalit would have had a field day with, probably ten times this last few days.

Its not good. In fact, it kind of sucks, but my God it’s catchy. It’s also sublimely cavalier:

O baby stop whatcha doing
And bring your little body up up in this bed
Have you ever had somebody
Do it to you while they were
playing in your hair

You want it from the front or the back
On your side just relax
And let me lay between your legs
I see ya running like a track meet
With your baton saying catch me
Baby don’t be scared (don’t be scared)

These are important questions. (more after the jump)Realizing now, if you included The Dream’s moaning as part of the song, this first verse would be a sonnet. The Dream is all up on love, especially that moment before that love is consummated into freaky, adventurous sex. After taking a poetry class in college, I found that that moment is rarely talked about. Much of it is about the what if or about the time after. With The Dream, sex will happen. After all, he says, “I’m all up on you like a monster truck / I’m all up on you like shawty what’s up / I’m all up on you like a white tee on a thug.”

Not to sound creepy, but I sort of wish sex just happened. Honestly, isn’t that what we all want? But like all wishes, if they happened in reality, life would probably suck. Look at The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s tragic love story, reviewed by Vvinni at the Great and Powerful Henceblog. In the first twenty minutes, there are four sex scenes, not to mention a suggested blowjob an attractive woman gives a total bro:

They are definitely the only sort-of-attractive coupling (relative to the gratuitous amounts of ugly people sex) and even then, it’s really, really fucking disgusting.

Oh and I forgot to mention that this couple breaks into Johnny’s (Tommy Wiseau) condo. To have sex on his couch. And Johnny’s cool with it. This is the world they live in. Sex will happen. People cheat. Then they talk about cheating, in forced and incoherent sentences. And they all pay for it in the end.

I’m not going to go into the quality of the movie, seeing as its been making its way around the internet, and its almost ubiquitous. So here are some clips:

If that doesn’t make you want to go out and watch this movie, then you have no pulse.

Notes:

I have seen The Room twice and I look forward to seeing it again.

I have to thank Nick for introducing me to Little Brother:

The Wonderful World of Meth

kungfufool — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:55:56 +0000

I remember reading this article, written by Cory Doctorow, which might interest all you writerly types (actually all of you, since only a few people actually know about this blog and all are writerly types). His highly acclaimed young adult novel, Little Brother, came out last year and I have been meaning to read it. You can download it off his site, but its really, really weird reading a book on a screen. The book sounds interesting, tapping into that Bush-era paranoia (that I refuse to get over) and putting that suspicion and mistrust in government into the heads of kids (which I am all for). It’s kind of like this: In the article Doctorow talks about research, and how its a huge distraction from the writing process. And it is. Researching while writing a creative piece really only leads to more researching. Ninety percent of the trivia I compiled is from being distracted while trying to write something. Which brings me to a project I have undertaken for school–a feature-length screenplay. I won’t go into the details of the story, but I am currently three pages under the quota for my screenwriting class tomorrow and I am at an impasse. Needless to say, I wasted much of the time looking shit up. Gang crime in Chicago. Credit fraud. Embezzlement. Cantonese slang. And meth.

Meth has consumed me.

Meth. The main drug trafficked by Asian gangs in big cities, is meth, namely in the form of ice, which to steal from Stephen Leavitt, is meth “extra chunky.” It requires factory-like conditions for the transformation to take place, and indeed, there are hidden factories in Mexico, Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, just to make it. Meth also comes in the form of mass-produced pills, called yaa baa or shabu. Then its sent over here, to be used and abused. To me, this is all profoundly interesting. What used to be the narcotic staple of hilarious Californian rednecks, is making its way into the mainstream.

I have spent my day with meth information and meth statistics. I found out that a small sugar packet sized amount sells for ten to twenty dollars. Smoking meth gives you a high that can last half a day. I found that a man kept a meth lab in his condo and despite laws preventing purchases of Sudafed and other meth ingredients off the shelves and despite having a fucking meth lab in his condo, nobody noticed. I also found out that meth heads are probably making our almonds expensive. That answers the long-simmering question I had when watching an episode of Cops, where a strung-out man was caught pulling copper wiring from power lines with his bare hands. I wondered, why? Now I know.

So the question comes up: What can I do with this in my screenplay? I have no clue. I want to include a meth lab in a condo, but its so rare and ridiculous that it won’t be believable in a movie. The gangsters in my story would only import from other countries. And besides, meth isn’t delivered in dramatic shipments. It’s not like cocaine. There’s no giant crate for my characters to pop open and find a load of meth resting under coffee or bananas. But it needs to be in there, just because meth is so damn interesting. It’s nasty and grimy, its side effects sad and disgusting (click if you dare), but under the facade of economics, it almost seems civil.

Also meth labs have huge explosions and explosions are awesome. I am convinced that the meth lab is like Chekhov’s pistol. If its in the story, it has to blow up. There’s that expectation the audience has, and while I want to surprise them, I fear disappointing them. Hopefully, I will have a solution.

Looking For Ashley

kungfufool — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:25:35 +0000

Earlier tonight, I looked out of my Santa Fe dorm room and upon seeing the depressing springtime snowfall, realized that I should be listening to T-Pain. So I went to YouTube, looked up the AutoTune maestro himself and put on “Freeze” off his album Three Ringz–the one with Rihanna-abuser Chris Brown. The two (not Rihanna, she isn’t in the video) dance around and sing about their surprise that you would try to dance like them. At key points, they announce that they are going to freeze, and advise you to do the same. Also, it turns out that Chris Brown is only a few months younger than me. To this I ask, what the hell? Where is my record deal? Where are my famous-ass friends? My empty, but pulpy, romances? I digress.

So I was watching the video, and reading the proudly inane comments. It never ceases to amaze me how, on the YouTube boards, racial and homophobic epithets get tossed around like JuJu Beans at a middle school dance. Or how everybody insist on writing without plural. But anyways, I stumbled upon this comment:

ladybug102894 (3 hours ago)

hey what’s up i am looking for a girl named ashley anderson do you know who she is?

(More after the jump)

As I read this comment I imagined a fedora’d private eye, bags under his eyes, Johnnie Walker on his breath, tar in his lungs. A distraught woman walks needing information on a name. Ashley Anderson, she says. The private eye goes onto his laptop, looks up T-Pain on YouTube. He spins the computer monitor around, and says, “Ma’am, I have no clue, but I left a comment on the message board and I should hear back from someone sometime soon.” The woman blinks at him and asks, “What? How would they…” The man interrupts, “Then I’ll just keep on asking”. He smiles his bastard smile. He lights a cigarette.

And ladybug102894 has kept on asking. As of this writing, he or she (there are male ladybugs too–think about it) has asked two other times. So, I did some preliminary work. I googled Ashley Anderson. It turns out that its a common name. The best I could find was someone on American Idol.

So I stopped. I felt like I had already dug too deep in the muck. I sifted through the lies and scum to get at the truth, but it wasn’t there. I am now a changed man, of darker character, haunted by guilt, and crippled by worry. In the end, I couldn’t find Ashley Anderson, and ladybug102894 will continue to walk the miserable streets searching. Like I have done with so many other people in my life, I have failed ladybug102894. It’s hard work being a detective.

Some notes:

Seriously, ladybug102894 is not a good username. I could already figure out sex and age without even trying.

I remember when I was in high school, and a good friend of mine said that he had a relative whose name was Ladybug. When I went home, I genuflected by my bed and prayed so that that poor girl wouldn’t get shit from bullies because of her name. It was one of the few times I opened myself up to the divine.

Speaking of divine, check out these hats:

He Runs, Dammit!

kungfufool — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:28:49 +0000

Click after the break to see the man run.

Yeeaaaaahhhh!