Birthstravaganza 2k5!

Oh yes indeed, it is my birthday for one more minute.

Instead of presents for me, here’s a present for you!

Freaky.

I love MythBusters

If you’ve never seen the show MythBusters on the Discovery Channel, you really don’t know what you’re missing. Simply put, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (and crew!) bust and prove myths from the common to the bizzare in the most amazing and hilarious ways possible–all in the name of science of course. It’s almost as if two of the kids from Mr. Wizard’s World grew up (minus those weird really short shorts from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.. which I still occasionally see people wearing *shiver*) and are slowly and surely taking over the world, one science experiment at a time. I don’t think you can claim yourself to be a geek without an appreciation of MythBusters.

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I always feel as if I need to write a meaningful title

first off, I think I’m going to stop capitalizing what I type. except the I’s.. just because I like to type that way. I got to thinkin’ and you know, I really haven’t capitalized anything properly for my last, oh, 8 or 9 years of internet use. for the first few years, I damn well started out using proper capitalization, puntuation and the lot, but I think somewhere along the way I realized it had no real purpose. it’s really not natural for me to use all the time, so from this point on:

capitalized I = semi-formal text

uncapitalized (non-capitalized?) I = casual text

capitalized everything = whoops, I forgot I wasn’t capitalizing

so, gonad.org gets the semi-formal treatment (whatever that means). I’m glad I’ve had a chance to resolve this fake content creating pressing issue.

IN OTHER NEWS

I’m sure many of you have experienced the wonder of music blogs (or whatever else you might call them), but for those who haven’t, here’s a couple I’ve found and enjoy:

• My Old Kentucky Blog - wow, what a selection! from rap to indie, you’ll find some of the best music around. old, new, and in between.

  I discovered Tom Thumb & The Latter Day Saints here, and have been thankful ever since. Check out the Tom Thumb post for links to some songs (”Boot(y) Camps” is my personal favorite :)).

• stereogum - I stumbled upon this site after a couple failed obscure “David Byrne” Google searches. the article I found there featured a no-longer-availible link to a live cover of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Byrne. luckily, I’ve found it elsewhere for your listening pleasures!

there’s a lot of these music blogs around. theres a couple more really good ones, but I was told to keep them a secret (hoho! a secret on the intarweb!). I was almost consindering the concept myself, for this site, but I got sidetracked with this great idea I had for a WordPress plugin to post mp3s with the automated finesse of an automatic meat grinder (which I’m sure I will never start nor finish), so you can most likely count that one out.

lastely, I fixed quote-spewing Stimpy, so he’ll be better displayed at low resolutions. should I allow people to submit quotes? very tiny, tiny quotes..

Tonight.

I’m going to get enough sleep.

Though 14 hours would be optimal, 7 will do.

ps: kitties <3

The art of dramatic…

…pause.

RIP Robert Moog.

Y’know, I had the free time..

I just couldn’t make myself write a post this weekend. I wanted to, oh yes. I had a bunch of links hanging out as shortcuts on my desktop. I was a-thinkin’ “god damn, look at all that content! This will be a post to remember!” Unfortunately, somewhere between the clicking the “Write” button and writing this post-to-remember, I became disenchanted. I thought to myself, “why should I bother? No one goes to gonad.org. Why waste my time?!”

Fortunately, I now think I was wrong.

You may recall my post on the Evangenitals (well, I recall it at least). Well, Juli Crockett (or is that Julio? My attempt at stalking didn’t provide much other than the fact that Juli(o) is female. I don’t know any girls named Julio, but then again..) from the band was nice enough to visit and comment on the post. This strikes me as an important milestone. Never before has any damn thing ever linked on this site actually drawn the attention of whoever/whatever it was linked to. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true… I think the dude from Wacky Weasel World posted a comment in the old shoutbox since I probably sent a lot of confused vistors to his site from here with our “we suck so bad, we were gonna steal the tagline from wackyweaselworld.com” tagline Although, they techincally no longer have a tagline (nor do we!), so that makes little sense… ANYWAY!

I know neither the Evangenitals nor Juli are big stars, or anyone I should be getting overly excited over, but I think this is exactly what I’ve really wanted gonad.org to be about. So much of the internet is churned out of crazy stories and unique ideas, all backed by the drive, determination or boredom of so many interesting people. And every piece of it is somehow interconnected and related, and most importantly it has to be shared. The good part is learning out what those links are–figuring out just how everything is related.

I don’t think having this ideal as a goal for gonad.org is far fetched. I think its easy to do: just let people tell you what they like, what they found funny, what pisses them off, but I think the important part is that these opinions get back to the source! Not criticism, constructive or otherwise, but just an indication that one person read what you wrote, or heard what you played, or saw what you made. Just a head nod to confirm what you put your efforts into meant something to someone.

So, yeah, I’m nuts.

Although it seems a bit sad that I’m writing a post on, uh, comments from another post.. I might as well continue with more of the same!

Also featured in the comments of this Evangenitals post that I’ve only mentioned like 65 times, is a “stimulating” comment from Chris Blais from the band Beautiful Mess. He was nice enough to plug the Evangenitals’ CD “We Are The Evangenitals” which can be bought at CD Baby. The site also features streaming clips of all of the tracks on the album (track 3 is a great cover of “Hey Ya” by Outkast, retitled “Hey Ya’ll” appropriately).

Be sure to also check out Beautiful Mess on MySpace. I really dig their song “Cigarettes.”

(And to think I wanted to keep this short and sweet..)

I’ve made a slightly useful plugin for WordPress!

I get really annoyed with a long line of text with no breaks (spaces, carriage returns etc) gets all up in my koolaid… er. When long lines don’t wrap it sucks. They’ll go all nutty and flop outside of your nicely dsigned CSS containers and such. If you don’t know what I mean, you arn’t quite anal-retentive enough yet. I shall demonstrate.

This_is_an_example_of_a_really_long_and_annoying_link_text_which_would_normally_not_wrap_correctly_and_mess_something_up_but_don’t_take_my_word_for_it_god_I_love_LeVar_Burton_Mmmm

Normally, such a long link would hopefully not find its way onto your site or blog or whatever, but if it did… I don’t know what might happen. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats… living together… mass hysteria!

I’ve been using methods similar to this plugin for fixing this problem for a few years, but always using some clunky regular expressions I never quite got right. This time, however, I found a neatly written PHP function called htmlwrap() v1.3 by Brian Huisman.

So.. yep. I wrote a solid 5 or 6 lines of code and his function does the rest.

I couldn’t find any plugins like this for WordPress (which makes me think I wasn’t searching hard enough), so enjoy.

Break Lines v1.0 - Download

10-12-05 — Ugh, this thing has some kind of bug I haven’t taken time to figure out yet. It seems to cause certain posts to not be displayed. Use at your own risk for the moment!

Oh no! You erased so much of your memory that you remember everything!

Wow.

I follow quite a few webcomics regularly, probably around a dozen or so at the moment. Since they all update on different days and whatnot, I usually check all of them every day or so. Basically, this is the full extent of my excitement for the day. What a sad life I lead… boohoohoohoohohoohhgdfbadongdg.

So anyway, I was checking out No 4th Wall to Break, which I’ve been following for a bit, and decided to check out some of the comics linked from there.

And then I found it–complete and utter genius, unbounded and unclassifiable. If I had to pick one webcomic that matched what I think is going on inside my head at any instant this would be it. My friends, I insist you check out A Lesson Is Leanred But The Damage Is Irreversible.

I could link to some of my favorites, but every single panel of every strip is my favorite. The storylines (if you can call them that, I think “pieces of entirely purified perfection” is closer) are simply amazing. The art is completely unique and refreshing. I could go on and on. Even the comments from the writer/artist that accompany each story hold my interest. In any case CHECK IT OUT NOW!

It’s amazing how I notice typos days later. I swear–really swear–I proofread it so well.

Do Not Disturb

Well now, this is fancy.
Do you like long hours, cramped accomodations, sub-par food, customers with a stick in their ass and more stress than you can shovel?
Do what I did, go to a local job agency and ask about working on a cruise ship. I’m a stateroom steward, sort of an unholy hybrid between an airline attendant and a hotel maid.
In most customer service jobs, you see the customer, you deal with the customer, and the customer leaves. On a cruise ship, the passenger hunts you down to bitch at you the moment they get on board, keeps bitching at you throughout the week, finds or creates more reasons to bitch and then stiffs you a tip and leaves the room an EPA hotzone “because they’re paying thousands of dollars to be here and we need to make it special.” Dumbasses.
In most land-based jobs, you throw your trash in a dumpster and forget about it. Onboard a cruise ship, you seperate the trash into plaastics, paper, bottles, glass bottles, cans etc. Which means as a steward, you seperate the trash you pull out of people’s rooms and since you can’t flush anything besides “bodily wastes” through our vacuum toilets, we get a smorgasbord of human filth to sift through. Condoms (I’ve only SEEN six so far), razors, tampons, catheter tubes, diapers, syringes…
In almost all other jobs, you go home at the end of the day. Here, you go downstairs and live with the same asshole who just threw 17 pounds of shit into your garbage bag and walked away laughing.
Do yourself a favor, if it ever comes down to choice between this job and being a hobo, grab your bindlestiff and porkpie hat and start walking.

Hi, I’m George Zimmer, founder and CEO of the Men’s Warehouse…

“I guarantee it!”