Spontaneity

A group of brilliant scientists once attempted to study how and why people had bouts of extreme creativity during periods of sleep deprivation. Sadly, the study never reached a conclusion as all the involved researchers passed out during pivotal moments. Funny how the world works, isn't it? Maybe the sad part is that those scientists were studying themselves. How arrogant does someone need to be to make themselves the subject of their own experiment?

Even worse: how bored does someone need to be to fabricate an anecdote such as the one above?

Forget boredom, talk about necessity. I just stumbled upon a list of ten incredible self surgeries. Don't read any of them if you're the slightest bit squeamish. If you want the gist of the article without the gruesome details, here it is: Don't ever use heavy machinery or attempt to further the progress of medical science on your own. Take a guinea pig with you wherever you go!

Aww, look at those cute little whiskers. Forget the medical progress altogether.

If you have to perform anatomical experiments, only do use things that can't feel pain. And while you're at it, use something that will punish you severely for messing up:
Operation. I don't know how people, kids or adults, can play this game without developing a nervous disorder. "Okay, be very careful. You need to remove the wrench from the patient's ankle. If you mess up the punishment will be an electrical shock for you, and the patient will never walk again."

No pressure, huh? Just goes to show that you should only preform surgery on really big animals so there are fewer small parts to lose. It works that way, right?

Phrases That Annoy Me - Part 1

Y'all knew it was coming; yet another post about things that annoy me.

Lately one thing that's been grating on my nerves in a severe way has been language. That's right, good ol' English. As long as it's used properly, well formed and grammatically correct English prose is quite entertaining to me. When people choose to ignore the rules of grammar; that's annoying. But it's not what I'm talking about today. I can be a quirky person sometimes (sometimes?).

Lately I find myself annoyed by something I'll refer to as 'trendy vocab'. You know, those words or phrases that seem to sprout up into common usage seemingly overnight? Some examples from the past would be 'dot com', 'bling' or 'wazzup'.

Here's my top 3 for today:

'RFD' - Rear Flank Downdraft.

Rear Flank Downdraft

This really only makes sense if A) you regularly watch Stormchasers on the Discovery channel, or B) you are a tornado expert. If you do neither of those things, rear flank downdraft is an impressive part of a tornadic thunderstorm that generates extremely strong winds. It annoys me because one of the people on the show, Reed Timmer, always shouts terminology to make himself sound intelligent.

Maybe it's not the term that annoys me, but Reed. Sheesh, that guy is an idiot.



'Webinar'
Wow, who came up with this one? If I had to guess it was some old guy who mashed two words together in an attempt to sound 'hip'. What is it? It's a conference that usually involves a laptop with Internet capability and some tech person, from afar, showing you something on a software program. How exactly that's different from a good old fashioned 'teleconference' or even a standard 'meeting', I couldn't tell you.

No matter who's there or what we're supposed to be learning, the term 'webinar' always leaves me cringing.

Pew Pew Pew
Good grief I hate this term. I hate it. I hate it. I. Hate. It.

I'm not sure how it came to popularity, exactly; we don't need to know. It's some sort of slang phrase used to describe the sounds of lasers and whatnot. Some associate it with Star Wars (never!), others with video games, and still others a SNL spoof on Sarah Palin. No, I don't get it either.

As annoying and stupid as the term looks, is spelled and how it sounds, you can't deny that this picture is totally cute:
So did I just lose any and all hints of credibility there? Yeah I was afraid of that. Oh well. Stay tuned until next time! Or don't. See what I care. You know you can't resist me. My writing that is. If this blog was a book, you wouldn't be able to put it down. You should print out a page or two, just so you can carry it everywhere you go. Yeah...

You've already read my blog; you can't un-read it! Mwa-ha ha haaaa....

Pumpkinstravaganza '09 - Part I

It sure seems like it's taken me forever to get around to posting this... We actually carved our pumpkins last Tuesday; 5 days ago. Life events have prevented me from sharing more about it until now. Well, life events and my uncooperative computer. Stupid thing did not want me to edit any pictures this morning... it took about 2 hours and 2 restarts to do what should've taken 25 minutes and no restarts.

For our first round of pumpkin carving, I don't think we had the same enthusiasm that we did last year. It's not that we weren't excited; I think we were just tired. You ask why? 'A Whole Lotta Happy', that's why. Yes, that is the motto for 2009's NC State Fair. We went on Monday morning through early afternoon. I suppose NC's state fair is much like any other state's fair. It certainly had its fair share of attendees:

While it didn't have the awesome butter cow that's present at Illinois' State Fair, it did have a tank. Specifically, it had an M2 Bradley. Once my eyes spotted it, I was all over it like white on rice. I just had to climb all over it. How could I not? I ignored the fact there were around 3 other kids in my immediate vicinity; I wanted to play in the tank, darn it! All the little kids in the world couldn't have stopped me from getting to the driver's seat:

Monday + State Fair = Tired.

Tuesday + day off = Pumpkin carving.

While I'd already decided that I would carve Up's Dug into my first pumpkin, I hadn't settled on the picture. After a little more searching I came across this one:
After running it through some nifty filters in Photoshop, I had the template for my pumpkin. The white areas are cut all the way through, the gray areas only have half the pumpkin flesh removed, and the black remains untouched (except for the outline, of course). This is the finished pattern:
Mandy wanted to carve Stitch. We couldn't find a fitting image anywhere online, so I ended up taking a screen capture from the movie:

And the finished template:
When carving these intricate designs, it's pretty easy to lose your place. does this look like an adorable Pixar character to you?

After about a few hours of scooping, cutting, scraping, and almost smashing my fist through the whole thing by accident, it looked like this:

It's not quite done there, as I still had to even out the 'gray' areas so they let light through evenly. Mandy worked on her design a lot longer than I did, stretching over a period of two days:

Once again, they looked even better all lit up:



So that concludes part I of Pumpkinstravaganza '09! Stay tuned over the next few days to see what designs are being considered for round II!



For a better tutorial on how to make your own patterns, click here. It's link to a tutorial on the Pumpkin Wizard's website.

Pumpkinstravaganza '09 - Preview

It's that time again. Overpriced, oversize, over-orange produce is hitting all the local retailers as some sort of vegetable-y artist's canvas. You read that right: pumpkins are in town. No matter what you think of Halloween, fall or even produce in general you'd have a hard time disliking pumpkins. They're just all big and orange and round and full of ridges and stuff. Don't you just naturally think about hollowing them out, carving intricate designs on 'em and then lighting them from the inside?


No? Really? What's wrong with you?

In case you missed it, check out the highlights from Pumpkinstravaganza '08:
Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part 1
Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part II

Officially, we're a little behind schedule when compared to last year. That's okay though, since Mandy and I have a long weekend coming up. I anticipate a produce run sometime either on Friday night or Saturday morning. The wheels of my mind have been stuck together for a long time. No, wait... that's not what I meant to say... I've been planning what would be on this year's pumpkins for a long time. There we go. That had to come out correctly sooner or later!

One of the designs has been cemented in my mind since the Pixar movie, Up, came out in late May. That's right, the first subject of Pumpkinstravaganza '09 will be none other than Dug:

Pumpkin number two has proven to be a little bit more complicated, mainly since I'm a major geek (Geekus Major, ha!). If you don't know it by now, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is coming out this November, and I've wanted to commemorate the occasion with an appropriately carved pumpkin. The task is proving more difficult than I'd originally thought. It's not necessarily a matter of the subject being to complex, but rather of finding a suitable source image that has a good contrast ratio to it.

As it is, this is the leading candidate for pumpkin-ification:

Purists may note that this is actually a screen shot from the original Modern Warfare, not the sequel. If you think you can do better, do it. There's still a good change that I'll go for a design featuring the box art from the game, silhouetted against the game's logo. Stay tuned for details!

Writer's Block?

So have you ever had one of those days when you're feeling creative, or at least the leanings towards being so? It's one of those moments where you feel like all you needs is some kind of blank canvas to create something. That's been me on and off the past few days.

It's late right now; almost midnight. Can't sleep for whatever reason, though I suspect the weather may be the culprit. For the past week and a half or so, we've been able to keep the windows open and get those crisp, cool fall nights to fall asleep to. Today it was in the mid-eighties and humid enough for you to squeeze the air and produce drops of water. It hasn't cooled down yet...

In my late night insomnia I had a vision to renew the theme of my blog. Not just the visual theme, but the content theme. See, I thought I'd "simplify" and try to stick to posting about one type of subject, but that just wasn't working. My plan was to come up here to the office, put the finishing touches on the new look and then put up a commencement post for the re-launch of the blog.

My computer had other ideas. Instead of being a 'tool' like most good computers, mine has decided to act more like a paperweight that carries a monthly fee. It doesn't just sit there and do nothing, it consumes power and does nothing at the same time. Woo. 15 minutes after attempting to use my computer, I'm almost finished typing this post on Mandy's computer and my creative urge is fading with the onset of drowsiness.

I think humans as a species are too technologically advanced as a species to be truly creative anymore. The only way to come up with new ideas is to ignore all scientific advances made over the past 20 years.

Either that, or invent a time machine and go back to the 80's and 'invent' all of today's cool stuff for yourself, sell it all and then retire with some few extra dough padding the bank account. Hmm... Time machines...