chaka chaka

a  whole day off. what did you do?

i startled my cat. she gave me scratches, i gave her a bath. take that!

then, i conquered a tiny anxiety, 272 concrete steps, and this ennui that has been steadily building up over the past few months.

Was showing ming my new camera effects. What better subject than his highness.

“Look at those sculpted cheeks without makeup.”

“You need a big idea.”

Sure that’s a relevant statement for our industry.

Or it used to be. ATL. Digital. It’s not the same animal.

I’m going to get shot, drawn and quartered by a few old dogs for saying this, but sometimes you don’t need a big idea.

“What’s the big idea?” maybe it’s more just “What’s the great idea?”

It’s an execution idea. It’s a tech idea. It’s a social idea. It’s an awesome interaction idea. It’s a crowdsourcing idea. It’s a viral idea. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. It’s experiential.

Don’t force us to fit our ideas under some generic “big” line. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, it even stops working that way. Hold on to a new media idea too hard, try to tame it, box it in, give it a collar and it’ll just wither away and die.

What’s the big idea here?

It’s a guy. On a bike. And it’s just fucking awesome.

There are few cloying acts of coupledom that still have the power to raise my eyebrows. From the unconventional: Lining up for hours to purchase shitty fast food premiums that spell out your beloved’s name; Gunning it to Cameron to lug back 1,000 red roses; Starting a joint blog co-authored by The Princess and her Atilla. Or we could take the road well-travelled: moving in together, deciding on what shade the curtains will be (will we have matching curtain loops?), getting married, having pets etc.

Has it yet occured to you that the biggest ode to commitment is something we’re so desensitized to that it’s such a non-issue?

It’s just amazing when two people one day think “hey, you. I like you a lot. Let’s stop splitting hairs and start splitting genes. Let’s bring our DNA to the table and see what happens.”

Then BOOM! MOTHERFUCKER! Nine months later, there’s an irreversible, this is it, bundle of (what we fervently hope is) joy. No returns, no exchanges, no “sorry ma’am I’ve changed my mind”, no money-back guarantees.

Simply a-fucking-mazing. And of course, I haven’t quite yet decided if I’m terribly impressed or appalled.

I have the sweetest friends and colleagues.

3 birthday meals (lunch, lunch, dinner) presents and failed surprises.

Lot of laughs and jibes about me being 24. You’re all too kind <3

With liy’s words of warning ringing in my head, I was super wary about giving manja a bath.

Would she bite, scratch, hate me for life?

She mewed piteously: “I knew this day would come…” but she was a good girl.

Now time to get the stench of shampoo off.

Meme time!
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (plus all the others!)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis (isn’t this IN the chronicles of narnia?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (if i’d finished this, i think i’d be dead)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

this just warm fuzzy feeling all the way to my toes. how can it not, really? after a whole day looking at retardes (HANGOVER!) and weirdos, to be greeted by sweet kitty innocence…

have i become “that cat lady”? i think photos of just one cat hardly counts.

read the trainyard story and decided to play my part in supporting indie developers (since i’ve been samun’ing other stuff online like a fucker). am getting a cheap thrill uploading solutions and tearing my hair out getting stuck on other levels. and no joke, this game will make your grey matter hurt. very awesome simple gameplay which as we all know is the first step towards complete addiction.

am still on trainyard express, though i have purchased trainyard which is on sale for 99 cents. go play.

p/s i love how the lite version is called “express”. it also contains 60 levels so it’s not exactly lite by any means.