Category Archives: goodness

goodness, nerd

Nerd gifts!

 

If you don’t know what to get your nerd girlfriend this year (ahem), remember that women do occasionally wear jewelry, and Legos never go out of style.  Hence, Lego ring from Giant Robot!

If you’re really hard-pressed for gift ideas for your favorite nerd, check out This Is Why I’m Broke.  It has everything your little geek heart could ever want, including:

looks a little... sharp

A Space Invaders couch!  Every nerd has played Space Invaders, but since it came out in 1978, no one my age would think of this game as their first love.  Still, it’s a classic.

swish and flick

A wand remote control!  For all your Harry Potter fanatics, this wand remote looks like it would get really tiring really fast.  But who doesn’t want one of these?  I mean… I think I want one.

"kill me."

A hoodie for your cat!  My last boyfriend (Nebraska McBaldy Fat) was exactly what he sounds like: a balding, overweight, pasty-white middle-America, computer-worshiping nerd in every sense of the word.  So of course he got two cats, both of which SUCK, and should be punished by stuffing them into hilarious little outfits.

light bike!

A fully functional Tron light bike!  This puppy has a Suzuki 996cc engine, and is street legal, so it’s not just a $55,000 souvenir.  It’s also the best way to distract your fellow drivers and cause an accident.

pretty horrifying

The creepiest body pillow ever!  As if snuggling a person-sized pillow wasn’t weird enough, some lonely nerd decided said pillow should snuggle you back.  Yikes.

 

 

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goodness, humor, martial arts

Tae Kwon Do

This video has been making the rounds the past couple of days.  Instant classic.  Look at these kids, bouncing around like little bunnies.  Notice they have a pretty standard fighting stance before the fight starts, but as soon as it starts, their hands drop like all Tae Kwon Do trained fighters do, because they’re waiting for their opponent to kick them so they can dodge and kick back.  No hands involved, just lightning-fast feet and brutally strong legs.  Unless you’re an adorable child, like one of these little monsters.

hop hop *twirl* hop hop hop

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goodness, humor

If only…

If parents pulled shit like this on their kids, OMG I might die laughing.  Some kids are so out of control, they need a good scare to remember that the only thing between them and some horrible monster is the spineless parents they treat so shamefully.

genius

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goodness

A sample of Art History

by Maxfield Parrish

If you’ve never taken an art history class, here’s your chance to see what it’s like.

Turn off the lights, and watch this short narrative about how trees affect this curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My mind tends to enter a mode of hyper-interaction when I’m online, so I have to remind myself of the key phrase that re-focused me whenever my mind started to wander in my own art history classes during collage: “Shhh.  Look closely.”

It’s tough looking at pictures of art for hours at a time, in the dark, while a soothing voice drones on about this emperor or that goddesses, why this type of marble was used and how paints are made.  A silent, sharp mind is necessary, and mine was not always either one.  But art history is the best!  It’s a picture book of human history.  Super cool!

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family, goodness, life

Lunar eclipse

I woke up at 4:45am to go watch the lunar eclipse with my dad the other day.  He brought a home-made coffee service in a basket.  We sat on the beach in our sleeping bags and watched a white moon turn rusty orange/red before disappearing behind so much atmosphere as the sun rose.

There weren’t many people out there, but of those people, everyone was in twos or threes because waking up before dawn to stare at the moon for over an hour in the biting cold would be unbearable without company.  Dad and I laid down and chatted between binocular viewings of the eclipse, which looked somewhat apocalyptic.  I was warm and tired, but happy to be chatting with my dad, participating in something he was enthusiastic about.

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anime, goodness, nerd

Spooky manga!

nothing like a creepy doll peeking through the window to keep you up at night

I showed Diminutive Roommate some manga the other night, specifically Mail of the horror genre, and let me tell you: she is freaked out.  It’s about a detective whose clients hire him to exorcise ghosts.  Spooky!  Diminutive Roommate is currently reading through the second issue in as many days.  She came into my room last night to sit on my bed with me while we both read our respective ghost stories because she didn’t want to read it alone.

One chapter involves a little girl who was stuck in an elevator.  As she climbed out, the elevator drops and chops off her legs.  At first, the ghost of just her legs is occasionally seen standing around in the elevator.  But the little girl dies a few years later, and a ghost of just her upper half can be seen dragging itself around the building in search of her legs.  Yikes.

Naturally, there was an article in the LA Times this morning about a woman who was in an elevator that got stuck between floors.  Apparently, she “climbed out of the elevator, but the car started moving again…The car dropped onto her, crushing her.”  She died.  I sent the article to Diminutive Roommate.  We may or may not be sleeping with the lights on tonight.

The Mail series is really excellent.  If you want to be spooked without too much gore, this is perfect.  There is, of course, death, and some murders, but the majority of the stories center around the mysterious circumstances surrounding the hauntings.  The author, Housui Yamazaki, is also the illustrator, so he gets to do exactly what he wants with each page.  The result is some of the scariest page-turns I’ve ever experienced.  Once, I was so spooked, I literally burst out laughing and had to put the book down for a minute while my heart hammered in my chest.  And it wasn’t gross or gory, it was just a well-done story arc that climaxed at a page turn and freaked me out.  Highly recommended.

heeeeere kitty kitty kitty

As long as we’re on the topic, I have to mention The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.  Housui Yamazaki illustrates this one, too, and it’s pretty great.  It has more gore than Mail, but there’s a surprising amount of humor in it.  I found myself laughing aloud at the dialog in every issue.  The premise is that a group of college graduates are having trouble finding work, so they group together to use their weird abilities (dowsing for bodies, speaking to the dead, etc.) to help the dead reach a place where their souls can rest, often resulting in shenanigans and various tom-foolery.  It’s a good, spooky time.

If you’re not into manga, I understand, really.  But these two are worth a shot.

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goodness, humor

Xmas: Always a hilarious semi-disaster

wait until there are presents!!

My hands smell like a pine tree!  We just bought, carried upstairs (via freight elevator), and decorated our 6-foot tree with white and red lights, and gold and red ornaments.  Also, little Gregory (a felt gingerbread man I bought at the fabric store) almost made it to the top of the tree this year, but was usurped by a cheap, glittery, plastic gold star we use every year, which really tops the whole thing off nicely.  We figured out how to punch a whole in it and wind some twine through it and thereby affix it to the top of the tree so we didn’t have to hot-glue it this year.  Yep.  Classy shit.

Diminutive Roommate’s cat, Calico, is fweaking out, as usual.  It’s an annual ritual: the tree comes up, she investigates, goes medieval on the white twine that was used to tie it down to the roof of the car, then tears around the house when we hiss at her for attacking the lights.  It’s quite a little show.

The first year we lived at the old place (2008), it seemed like everyone was out of town with family: all my friends, both my roommates, even Sister I think.  I was pretty alone at home, and a few days before Xmas, I decided to spruce the place up, and bought myself a tree.  It was pretty tiny, only three or four feet high.  I threw it on top of the Pontiac, grabbed a stand to put it on, bought some seriously discounted lights at the local grocery store, and went home.  The guys at the lot gave me one giant nail with which to secure said tree to the wooden pieces of the stand, plus a plastic bowl for water.  It’s a pretty simple formula:

simple enough... for some

And yet somehow I was so excited about putting the tree up that I forgot about the bowl, and nailed the ever-loving shit out of those boards onto the bottom of the tree.  I stood it up and immediately realized my problem: I had fucked it all up.  And I could not for the life of me get the nail out of the boards or the tree stump.  I had done a world class job of securing them together, and it was going to take some creativity and muscle to separate them.

First I tried using the other side of the hammer.  No dice.  I tried standing on the wooden stand and pulling.  Painful and fruitless.  I realized I would have to apply all the force I could muster against something with more resistance than my body was capable of.

I came up with a brilliant, obnoxious plan.

The rear door to the building was made of metal, and opened up on an alley.  I decided to place just the portion of the tree with the stand on it outside the door, then close the door just enough so that when I YANKED on the tree, the stand would be forced off.  It seemed like a simple, if absurd plan.  I was pretty sure it was going to work.  What I didn’t count on was the noise, and the number of times I would have to repeat this amazing strategy to get that fucking stand off my goddamn tree.

mad genius

It must have been 2am by the time I started hurling the stand against the door and its frame.  The alley provided for some horrifyingly efficient acoustics.  I pitied anyone who lived within fifty yards.  After the first ten or so swings, I really got the hang of it, and threw my whole body into it.  A few minutes in, I took a break to laugh hysterically at the sweaty absurdity of my situation, then got back to work.

Eventually I succeeded, and none of my neighbors complained about the racket I had made (maybe because they were CRAZY).  I affixed the stand properly, decorated the tree sparsely, and placed it in an empty corner where it sat, looking warm, yet lonely, which described that Xmas perfectly.

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badness, family, goodness, life, nerd

Thanksgiving grade: B+

I had a blast with my cousins over Thanksgiving.  I’ve come to discover that my mom and her siblings enjoy each other’s company while my cousins and I enjoy each other just as much, but for different reasons.  We got drunk a bunch while the adults stayed (mostly) sober for obvious reasons including Alcoholics Anonymous.  We had fun sober, too, and Chinese Friend from Office Job got to stay for two nights and experience a big American Thanksgiving before she leaves to go back to Shanghai.  She seemed to really enjoy herself, and everyone loved her.  She got invited back by everyone.  I hope she can make it, she’s pretty great.

Friday night with the cousins was epic.  I had four shots of Patron and a beer (Negro Modelo!) before promptly forgetting my phone in the bathroom where it was stolen before I realized it was gone a half-hour later.  So my iPhone 4 is totally gone.  Tragic.

We tracked it down via GPS the next day via iCloud and set off the alarm remotely after locking it, but the asshole who stole it (let’s call him Dirty Thief) turned it off, so we had to give up our search.  So sad.  I was bummed.  Now I have to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone.  Please help.  It’s the only reason this year wasn’t a solid A in my book.

WTF this couple should be neutered. seriously, of all the HP shit to get permanently affixed to your personhood... the killing curse? really? fail.

I’m optimistic this will turn out ok.  Maybe I’ll get the 4s!  Maybe something magical will happen.  Maybe Dumbledore will come flying out of my butt holding Dirty Thief so I can pummel him before we green-flashy Avada Kedavra his ass.

If only I could pour my molten nerd-dom into the shape of a dwarven hammer, and just pummel people with it.  But then, maybe that’s what it’s like to hear me talk at all.  Huh.

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goodness

Gingerbread massacre

DIE, COOKIEMAN

I’m not a cookie person, or even a sweets person in general.  I don’t crave chocolate, I don’t order sugary, fruity drinks.  But PUT A GINGERBREAD MAN IN FRONT OF ME AND HE WILL BE CONSUMED AND DIE IMMEDIATELY.  I like to eat the legs first to keep him from getting away, and as a lesson to the other gingerbread men who might be watching to demonstrate that escape is impossible.

Do you have any idea how much self-control it took to bring this cookie up to my desk so I could put it down and photograph it for this blog post?  Do you have.  ANY.  Idea.

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badness, goodness, humor

Ultimate internet thing

Diminutive Roommate was nice enough to show me this truly horrifying video: Welcome to Kitty City.  It has many cats.  And when I say cats, I don’t mean “Aww, so cute,” or “Wtf is that cat doing?  Weirdo.”  I mean I stared at the screen with a confused, I-can’t-look-away kind of face.

There are no cats getting eaten alive or anything horribly violent like that.  This video is what happens when the internet is focused by a giant magnifying glass, and that tiny point of concentrated interwebz hits your brain and makes it hurt.  That’s what this video is: dehydrated meme, force-fed into your eyeballs with terrifying efficiency and a hypnotizing broken-down carnival-ride soundtrack.

Here’s the creator’s website.

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