So photogenic, yet so consumed with ennui.

From the Bygone Bureau: Domestic Conflict, Explained by Stock Photos.

Conflicts are even more difficult when more than two people involved. Here, Ellen and Andrew argue about what to do with the small girl that wandered in their home.

links to writers smarter than I

At The Sexist: a fascinating interview with Courtney Stoker on Feminist Geek. [via TigerBeatdown]

In the narratives about Growing Up Geek, geeks often frame their geekiness as a disability; these narratives make it sound like the vast majority of geeks grow up without any institutional power, even when the geeks in question are white, straight, cis-gendered, abled, middle- to upper-class, and male. The responses to the oft-asked, "Why are geek communities so goddamn sexist all the time?" often begin with the special case of Growing Up (a Male) Geek. The narrative goes something like this: Geeks are smarter than everyone else, and ladies like hot, not smart, so geek men have almost no contact with women until they become adults. They’re socially stunted and bitter about their lifelong rejection by women, so they lash out at women to make themselves feel better. The cause of their sexism is their sexual frustration, not mainstream misogyny, even though many tellers of the Growing Up (a Male) Geek narrative will admit that male geeks often find the hypermasculine standard of our misogynist culture to be an obstacle to their social acceptance.

Brilliant. Absolutely effing brilliant. Sometimes the world makes me so depressed.

And at sixpence, it's a good deal too

The Wondermark comic from the 23rd was awesome.

The Wondermark blog also pointed the way to These Are Their Stories [I can't hear those words without hearing the orchestral boh-boh-boh that accompanies them], an art show where artists illustrate the Law & Order synopses provided by the DirecTV program guide. Some of them are wonderful: The detectives look for a racist, Lawyer is secretly a stripper.

[my love affair with the Internet is thus rekindled.]

and by "ironic," i actually mean "depressing"

How deliciously ironic that Canadian author Yann Martel has been trying stubbornly and fruitlessly for YEARS to get Prime Minister Stephen Harper to think about literature via his project What Is Stephen Harper Reading? and meanwhile he received a very thoughtful handwritten note about his book Life of Pi from President Obama. One out of two heads of state isn't bad, I guess.

3 interviews, 1 incredible house, 1 link

I shall follow the structure described above.

i. Bill Murray @ GQ.

Okay. Well, how about Garfield? Can you explain that to me? Did you just do it for the dough?
No! I didn't make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I'd never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, "So-and-so and Joel Coen." And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They're funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I'd like to do that. I had these agents at the time, and I said, "What do they give you to do one of these things?" And they said, "Oh, they give you $50,000." So I said, "Okay, well, I don't even leave the fuckin' driveway for that kind of money."

And it's not like you're helping out an indie director by playing Garfield.
Exactly. He's in 3,000 newspapers every day; he's not hurtin'. Then this studio guy calls me up out of nowhere, and I had a nice conversation with him. No bullshit, no schmooze, none of that stuff. We just talked for a long time about the movie. And my agents called on Monday and said, "Well, they came back with another offer, and it was nowhere near $50,000." And I said, "That's more befitting of the work I expect to do!" So they went off and shot the movie, and I forgot all about it. Finally, I went out to L.A. to record my lines. And usually when you're looping a movie, if it takes two days, that's a lot. I don't know if I should even tell this story, because it's kind of mean. [beat] What the hell? It's interesting. So I worked all day and kept going, "That's the line? Well, I can't say that." And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, "Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with." So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?" And then they explained it to me: It wasn't written by that Joel Coen. 

ii. This is an oldie: director Nicole Holofcener @ truthdig. I just watched her film Please Give a few weeks ago and really liked it. She also directed Friends With Money which is one of my favourite movies.

Would you see these films as feminist or political?

Gosh, to me it just seems like I'm really self-involved. I write about what I go through, what my friends go through, what I find interesting, what movies I go see—isn't that sort of narcissistic?

Can you really be narcissistic and political at the same time?

iii. Novelist Gary Shteyngart @ the NY Times. Ok, I have never read any of this guy's books, but the trailer for the new one was funny enough to make me put it on hold at my library.

You were educated at Oberlin College.
I majored in myself, in Gary Studies. You’re allowed to do that.

On Freshome I loved this Fab Lab House:

It creates three times the energy it uses. It has incredible, fort-like interior spaces. Plus this particular picture made me grin like a dummy:

It has a plant-stoop!

Finally, 1 link: Know Your Meme. I read about this impromptu science fair to teach science to Insane Clown Posse fans on boingboing. And I didn't understand why that was funny. Know Your Meme to the rescue with F*cking Magnets, How Do They Work? This website can also explain to you about I Dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯, You Have Died of Dysentery, and every other thing a digital immigrant (or n00b) might encounter in a forum.

I really want to develop a series of training sessions on memes for my staff meetings at work. It seems like as a "virtual services librarian" this is within my area of responsibility. It would be like, OK, adult services. Here's the deal with, like, that OK Go video where they're on treadmills. Here's what it means if someone painstakingly writes out "ROFLCOPTER" in ASCII text. And what is rickrolling? Hey, you hired me to explain the Internet! <3.

Sooo, what am I doing, both the empty Twitter and Facebook boxes are asking me?

a. Getting ready to go on holidays! This means, not that I am actually GOING anywhere, but that I am not going to work for at least six (6) consecutive days. And I am trying to pick out books to read. And some of these books are not in my library, so I am having to buy them from Chapters. I don't want to buy them. But I have to. Because of  holidays, you see?

b. Going to my garden. Except that it has been raining, like Noah-level raining, for days and days here so actually going outside is not fun, and when I tried it on Tuesday, I fell down my front stairs in my slippery flip-flops and ended up with these bright purple bumpy bruises on various parts of my body. It's like Edmonton was reminding me, Stay inside, or something even worse will happen. (This sounds funny, but actually it was terrible, because of the pain; and also, I'm well aware that limping around after claiming to have fallen down some stairs is basically a covert way to beg your co-workers to call social services. The fact that one of the bruises is the exact size of my porch railing is good evidence for the truth, though.) So instead I have been working my way through The Alberta Native Plants Council's Native Plants Source List and compiling my own garden wishlist and figuring out where I can get the plants on that list and where I should plant them. Surprisingly, my husband does not want to drive to Black Diamond, Alberta this weekend to pick up plants for me. I have no idea why. I thought he loved me.

c. Reading this essay from the New Yorker, Advanced Placement, about the Gossip Girl books, and it is kind of making me want to read them again, which is weird. I read the first six or seven books in the series and then grew kind of disgusted with myself and there were even a couple paperbacks I had bought (because I was not willing to wait for them to be returned to the library, shame on me) and I even donated those TO the library because I kind of didn't want the evidence of my compulsion to exist anymore. But now it seems like perhaps I was missing whole layers.

d. Thinking about fonts, because in addition to the Comic Sans shout-out I posted from McSweeney's a couple weeks ago, I recently encountered The Helvetica Killer, about Aktiv Grotesk, which (its designer hopes) could be the font to bring Helvetica down. (I know that on the Internet, this is equivalent to posting that you hate the iPhone or orphans or cute puppies, but I've never understood what all the fuss was about, Helvetica-wise.) And Papyrus Watch, which reports on Papyrus spottings in the wild. I used Papyrus once for some shirts I screenprinted (they read "I'll be in my bunk") and ever since then I see it EVERYWHERE. The hierarchy of fonts is complex, Internet. You never know who you might offend with your typeface. At this point, 30% of my original readers have jumped ship due to the verdana overload.

Man, seeing this blog entry you would think I was a total nerd, and you wouldn't know I'm actually, as Veronica Mars would say, 30% danger-loving girl-touching rock star.

i can be a shark

I am really enjoying the photostream of flickr user Balokov. The shark image at right caught my eye today, but really they're all good. Legos! Living in the world!

I do love the Guardian's Digested Read.

Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms, digested:

"You're looking very thin Clay. I guess it didn't work out with Meghan," Blair says. I've no intention of ever explaining anything so I shrug in a cool sort of way and hope the critics will love the empty unreliability of my narration.

Is it true that you support the escalation of formality in everyday life?

Absolutely.

So is the trend toward casualness an unfortunate event?

Yes, I would say. It makes me unhappy. To some extent, it's on purpose, so I don't know if I would call it unfortunate in the sense of unlucky. There's a casual agenda, and I think it's winning. The pros of formality are forethought put into word and action, spiffier clothing and fetishization of everyday occurrences.

-Daniel Handler (author of the Lemony Snicket books), in The Sunday Conversation interview

I just want to make out with the Internet, or at least take it out for coffee.

Couch Cushion Architecture: A Critical Analysis on the Build blog.

Benefiting from the life work of structural engineer Heinz Isler, this lightweight roof shell structure creates a graceful span while fully sheltering the interiors. Massive counter-weights keep the structure taught while an entire façade remains open to the exterior. 

From McSweeney's: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.

You think I'm pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don't all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I'm standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once. 

From The Atlantic: Rent a White Guy. Totally surreal.

An interesting project: an eighteeen-year-old high school student tries to live according to Seventeen magazine at The Seventeen Magazine Project. Again, totally surreal.

And one more new blog, more of the crafty/DIY variety: The Art of Doing Stuff. This woman, seemingly, can do anything good.

In Jocelyn-world, I finally updated Dispatches from Zone 3a after only one month's absence. I mean, I can garden or I can blog about gardening. It's pretty easy to figure out which I am going to do.

LINKS FROM THE INTERNET

I dip in and out of rss feeds all day at work, most of them (well, ok, some of them) related -- at least tangentially -- to my job. Today I did a Bloglines audit and added some new ones, including these five: 

1000 awesome things
the hypothetical library
information is beautiful
daily interesting photos
letters of note

in a new folder called "good for my brain." I'm not sure how you determine whether something is good for your brain. I'm looking for the answer. I feel like my neurons are not as sparkly as they once were. DO YOU THINK THE INTERNET CAN HELP?

I like adding new blogs I discover to my rss reader and trying them out for a few weeks. The best test of whether I am ACTUALLY interested in a blog's content is whether I stop to read it when it publishes a few items among hundreds. I'm prioritizing without intending to, which is kind of the point. For example, I subscribe to both MeFi and Slashdot but I very rarely read them. (However, they survived this audit, maybe because I don't want to compromise my nerd cred.) Other new additions on this round:

The Bygone Bureau
Lapham's Quarterly
Cheap Healthy Good
Tiger Beatdown (proving that a pithy title will get you at least one feed subscriber)
Toothpaste for Dinner

I declare June to be "rss audit month." Also "Eating the weird leftover food in your freezer month." Party ever-harder.

Holy cow, I love the Guardian's Digested read. This week: Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22.

I find I have written nothing of my wives, save that they are fortunate to have been married to me, and nothing of my emotional life. That is because I don't have one. The only feeling I have is of being right, and that has been with me all my life. I would also like to point out that drinking half a bottle of scotch and a bottle of wine a day does not make me an alcoholic. I drink to make other people seem less tedious; something you might consider when reading this.

Of my pathetic brother Peter, whom I adore, I say only this. I admire the persistence with which he maintains his ignorance. And as I leave you with the conceit of my non-Jewish Jewishness, I retire to converse with Richard Dawkins and read Yellow Dog, the finest work of my brilliant friend Martin.

I find Christopher Hitchens pretty despicable, so I guess it's not surprisingly that I enjoy a good chuckle at his expense.

Abandon ship!

I know I'm lame, but lately all I feel like writing about is my garden. So I decided to try one of those specialty blogs I keep hearing about. I know, right? Apaprently people like reading blogs all about a single topic! So: Dispatches From Zone 3a. I'll still be here, maybe, from time to time, if I have anything non-gardening-related to contribute.

in which in congratulate myself for being a responsibility champion, and admit my love of the internet

Did you know that I am obsessed with the idea of five bucks? It's true. Five dollars is the magic amount that determines whether something is cheap or expensive. I will buy almost anything if it costs less than $5. So I was delighted to discover Fiverr, where people post projects or tasks they are willing to undertake for $5. Getting any photo turned into ASCII art, for example, seems like a pretty awesome way to spend $5.

Earlier, on the subject of $5: Safety first, link to the five dollar comparison.


My sister sent me a link to the blog Hyperbole and a Half, with the correct prediction that I would enjoy it. It's very funny--I had to send the entry I Find. to James since it pretty much describes our very lives--but what really pushes it into the awesomeness stratosphere are the MS-Paint-esque illustrations (see RESPONSIBILITY CHAMPION, above). Almost any website can be made better by low-budget art. Like this:

My blog just got more awesome, right? like, how much more? 50%? Yep. I KNOW. And that only took me about 15 seconds to make.

linky monday!

Types of Bitches. I know this has travelled all around the Internet by now and I can't imagine it's new to anyone. But it's just so amazing that I had to re-post it. I loved seeing how many of these categories I fit into (the answer: a lot, but especially "pajamas outside bitch". (And one day I aspire to be an "instigating bitch," although I can't really say I consider myself one now.) James and I have been adapting this to everyday use. For example, a WoW application: look out for that coming-up-behind-you bitch.

I know I've seen them before, but I kind of forgot about the Home Inspection Nightmares galleries on the This Old House website. Here is the handy MeFi link that led me back to them. Some of them are amazing. The MeFi thread is aptly named "Yes, that potato is being used as a cap for an active gas line." Every safety-oriented bone in my body quivers at these.

This has also been making the rounds: a trailer for every Academy Award winning movie [cracked.com]. So funny. Catchphrase! [I used to be really into the Oscars, but I got to the point where all they did was make me mad. Now I'm almost at the point where I can ignore them completely. I live in my own little world in many ways. It's great over here! We have brownies!]

Last: The Book Seer. This site just retrieves LibraryThing and Amazon recommendations for a title, as in, you just finished (and enjoyed) this, try that. It's handy. I like testing these things with my own wanton reading habits.

Plus it kind of looks like you're getting a book recommendation from Freud or Nietzsche or something, which is cool! The idea appeals to me-- possibly mostly because I think neither Freud nor Nietzsche had any interest whatsoever in women's reading, so it seems a bit revisionist. Revisionist IN MY FAVOUR.

Also, LEARN RADIO!

Haha! Unhappy Hipsters [At right: You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modern architecture and postmodern ornamentation] is a collection of photos from the pages of Dwell magazine, with the discontented captions they appear to have been waiting their whole lives for. [Link from Ouno Design.]

On my brain's to do list: dream of spring [and specifically, how to eliminate all the grass from my front yard], buy a netbook, change around my interfaces [rendering them temporarily more confusing but, hopefully, permanently more efficient], compile a home emergency kit, find old ads from Popular Science magazine on google books and use them as my desktop wallpaper [at left: LEARN RADIO!], collect those all-consuming frost badges, read the entire blog archives of YA author Maureen Johnson, make something. Toward this end, at lunchtime I went and bought some nice new fine-tip Sharpies. Sometimes all I need to see the world in a new way is some new pens.

Finally, one note from Avatar that did not warrant its own entry.
1. unobtainium? really? You guys know you didn't make that up, right? I felt like they meant to substitute a different word in the script before they actually shot that scene, but then they couldn't think of anything.

a few links:

1. Craftster best of 2009. I think I link to this every year, but that's because it is frakkin amazing, every year.

2. Mission Amy K. R. Amy Krouse Rosenthal is a writer and she comes up with these amazing interactive projects. For example: what if ATM stood for Always Trust Magic? Yeah. Exactly. Awesome.

3. Search Harper's Index. Stats from the archive of Harper's magazine with a particular keyword. Just try it, it's more fun than I can explain.

and no more posts about number of followers. too meta.

I am really, really enjoying the twitterfeed of the personal ads in the London Review of Books:

LRB Personals (LRBpersonals) on Twitter via kwout

This is what twitter should be used for. Only this.

of course, everyone wearing vintage clothes looks awesome...

Fran and Dan - submitted by Erica

My Parents Were Awesome

books! [surprise]

Omnivoracious is doing a Personal Shopper feature where they make book recommendations for readers. It's kind of readers' advisory by proxy. I'm not sure why I like Omnivoracious so much. I guess because it seems to be corporate blogging done right, the writing is authentic and the bloggers clearly love books.

I have Warcraft on the brain lately as a new content patch drops today and I can't believe I'm at work writing this when I should be at home DOWNLOADING IT.