Fizzle & Pop The sound my brain makes in milk.

Random Observation : Oh that wonderful feeling.

(This may double post because I tried to email post, but I was informed that the email would be delayed until sometime Saturday(

That feeling you get when you're finally able to work free a wee piece of something that's been stuck between your teeth for some time. For me it's usually that shell/skin thing that you'll find in popcorn. Like a little razor blade buried in an apple made of popcorn, it hides and waits for the time when it can wedge itself between my teeth and cause me no end of annoyance throughout a movie that I would have paid good money to see if I didn't have a pass. It wouldn't be so bad if, at the end of the movie as the credits rolled, they would spontaneously leap free from my teeth so I could spit them out. But no. Those little fuckers have been known to bug me for days. I never seem to have a toothpick handy, so I try my fingernails, but it's usually too hard to find the spot with a finger. My tongue always seems to know the spot though. So I give up on my fingernail and probe away with my tongue, trying to find that sweet spot that'll lever that sucker loose. I wedge and wiggle until eventually I'm rewarded with that wonderful feeling. You regular flossers are really missing out.

A piggy-back pondering: Do they sell popcorn at adult movie theaters? You know, places like where Paul Ruebens met his downfall. I've honestly never been in one, but if they do it's not one of the selling points on the marquee: "Hot Lesbo Action! XXX Threesomes! Popcorn!" It would be great if they did though. That way the patrons could have something to throw at the screen during the boring periods of "plot development," and it might help absorb "spills" between the aisles.

Have a great weekend.

Illustration Friday : "Geeky"

For now, this is going to be where I post during the day. For some reason I'm having trouble connecting to Blogger. When I can, I'll repost this at my normal Fizzle and Pop blog.

So, geeky.

Here's my last minute geeky.

Poorly done, but then this is also the first thing I've drawn in over a month. I've just been terribly uninspired lately. Anytime I try to draw anything it feels horrible. It was a struggle to even get this done. But there you go. Sometimes it's just that way.

Update : I have a better idea where my hits are coming from.

Thanks to "Rule the Web", I've installed a better stat tracker than what I was using. It's called StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) and you can see it, and my stats, if you scroll down my sidebar until you see its icon. Don't click on the icon for the stats, however. Click on "view my stats". Anyhow, this is quite an impressive tracker. With it I've been able to determine that 217 of the last 488 visitors stayed for less than 5 seconds. 100 of those visitors hit my December, 2005 archive page. Damn near all of them came by way of a google image search. What image? Near as I can figure, this image:

It's the drawing I did of GIR from Invader Zim for Heather ages ago. Those of you unfamiliar with Invader Zim or GIR, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia entry for it.

Funny thing; the image was hosted at Flickr, however it was one of the things I purged in order to fix my NIPSA (Not in public search area) status last year. Yet it's still there if you look at that archive page, as are several others that I cleared out. Some other things are gone. Very strange. Well, now it's hosted back at SmugMug and it's not just buried deep in the archive anymore. It'll be interesting to see if the hits shift.

Time to eat my lunch. Brick microwave oven pizza. Do I live the high life or what?

Update : It’s Windy here in Colorado Springs.

And there are changes in it. The wind, that is. The first of which is changing my site's feed over to feedburner.com. There's a button at the top left of the page below my bio that you can use to subscribe. Much like my dad and DVD players, I've thought the idea of feeds was nifty but a bit too newfangled for me. On the old blogger I had set up a feed button, but it was just something I put there. I had no solid idea what it did, how it worked or why I'd want to take advantage of feeds myself. I'm older than I thought. Where's my Metamucil, galdarnit? No. Seriously. I think I might need to start taking it before it's too fucking late. That and other old people preservatives.

Yesterday a book I'd ordered arrived from Amazon:

If you click the cover it'll take you to the home site of the book where you can get more of an idea what you'll find inside. Alternatively, here's a direct link to the Amazon page. When I bought it last week the price was $8.95, down from $14.95. Now I see the price has risen to $10.17. Odd, that. I wonder if it's slowly rising to full price? It just came out on June 12th, so the discount might be a temporary thing.

I really cannot recommend getting this book enough. I'm only 45 pages in and I've already learned quite a lot. Like about feeds. How they work, why they're important, how to set them up, a good aggregator to use (if you're on a Mac, the author recommends Shrook, for Windows users: FeedDemon), etc. I'm positive I now know more about feeds than my dad knows about DVD players. Of course, feeds aren't all this book is about. You can check out the table of contents if you go to the Amazon link and click "Search inside this book" (top left, under the picture).

Something else covered in the book in the section about blogs was to write about what you enjoy. Direct quote: "The cardinal rule of blogging is to write about things that fascinate you." Lately I haven't been doing that. Heck, I've barely been posting at all since 2005. This is partly due to the fact that I have no idea what the people who come by my site are looking for. So, rather than try to figure it out anymore – or even worry about it – I'm just going to post something every day. Something I enjoy. If you enjoy it as well, fantastic! If not, come back tomorrow. Unless it's Friday or Saturday; I won't likely be posting then.

Another change is going to work in conjunction with feeds and writing about what I enjoy. I'm going to develop one-to-two-word categories that each post is going to fall within, and it's going to lead the title for the post. So, if you've subscribed to the feed for my site and you see the post title for that day is "Games : What I'm obsessed with today." and you have no interest in games, you can skip it. If it's "Video Tutorial : Vector vs. Raster in Photoshop, why Vectors kick ASS!" and that's more up your alley, you'll be able to read/view the entire thing in your feed reader without ever having to stop by the site. But by all means, if you have a comment that you would like to leave after reading any of the posts in your reader, stop by.

Yet another, more distant goal, is to set up an actual, honest to Cthulhu web site where I can doooooo things. What things? Shiny things. I need to find out if the domain I registered through Yahoo (www.fizzleandpop.com) is tied to Yahoo, or if I can use it at another web hosting service. I'm considering getting an account at laughingsquid.net. I'd possibly be willing to host through Yahoo, however every hosting package I see that they offer requires building the site through their templates and I want my site to be all custom, baby. You see, for my job we're having to learn web design pretty much on our own. It's slow going; at least it has been for me. So if I have my own site upon which I could inflict my developing "mad dope skillz", it might help speed the learning process and maintain my motivation. Having my own site would also mean I could make things available that I currently can't, like Photoshop Actions, Brushes and Shapes, or working PSDs that I use in video tutorials so that you all can play along. Stuff like that. It's what I really want to do and I think it'll be fun. I hope you guys will enjoy it too.

That's it for today. See you tomorrow.

Drive-by near the drive-thru

I stopped on the way in this morning to get a breakfast burrito at the LaCasita near my work and on the way out of the parking lot I see a woman in an old 80's Cadillac driving toward me. As we get closer she sticks her head and arm out the window and starts waving to me to get my attention. She's smiling so I think, "Do I know you?" We stop side-by-side and I roll down my window. She says, "Do you have any money that you can give me?"

...?

A drive-by panhandler.

"No. Sorry," I shake my head and drive on wondering if that ever works. Who on earth drives around looking for free money? I guess she does. Good luck with that, although you might want to switch to a bicycle so you don't waste so much gas.

Have a great 4th of July tomorrow, my American readers. As for my foreign readers, have a great Hump Day.

Got no art, but I’m filled with story

So this is, what? Two or three weeks since I last did anything for Illustration Friday? Time flies.

I did think of a story to share.

Growing up when I did, we kids didn't have video games to occupy our time, but that doesn't mean we didn't have fun. I remember when I was in elementary school one kid – let's call him Bobby – showed several of us other kids something pretty neat. He had one of those needles with a colored ball on the end that are used in sewing. This was probably fourth grade to give you an age idea. And no, the needle wasn't the neat part. The neat part was after he turned his back with the needle, did something, turned back around, held up his hand fingernail side toward us and fingers apart. There was the needle sticking across his index finger about halfway down. He waved his hand around like crazy and the needle didn't fall off. We were awed. No video games, remember? We had to know how he did it.

Since he was a sharing kind of Bobby, he showed us. It turned out he took the needle and carefully stuck it through the skin on his finger, going across the padded area on the palm side so that it just went under one or two layers of skin but didn't go far enough to cause bleeding. Ooooo! How cool is that? Hey! My mom sews! She has DOZENS of those needles! Thus began the plan. The plan to be the cool kid on Monday.

I went home, found my mom's needle stash – a.k.a. "pincushion" – and practiced. The nice thing about this is your body will tell you when you're doing it wrong. Too deep and it hurts, to shallow and the skin tears. I learned quickly and on Monday I snuck my mom's pincushion with me to school. At recess I started putting pins through my fingers.

When I was done, I went to the other kids and presented my hand the same way Bobby had. I had six needles going through each finger, two per pad. Ooooooo! Then I turned my hand around and showed them that I also had crossed six more needles on the fleshy part of my palm at the base of my fingers. Ahhhhhhh! King for a day.

I also found, later on, that if you insert a needle into that fleshy part of your palm and don't push it all the way though, but instead wiggle it around back and forth a bit, you could make a pocket in your hand large enough to hold a dime. That was walking around money in those days, and nothing impresses a cashier like pulling a dime from your hand pocket.

---

Two movies that I've seen lately that I highly recommend: "Knocked Up" and "1408". However I will say that you'll get much more scare out of "1408" if you haven't seen the previews.

My daughter blabbering.

Going… going…

going on vacation. I may post something over the next week, but don't count on it. In the meantime, if you like tangrams, check out this game for both the Mac and Windows:

It's the best Tangram game that I've played on the computer in 14 years.

As for Illustration Friday... "Suit"? I think not. Maybe next time.

This amused me. Derek told me yesterday that he spoke with a former co-worker of ours named Tony while attending a wedding. To be honest, I always thought Tony was grating and didn't care to be around him. During their conversation I was mentioned and Tony said, "Now there's somebody you have to worry about. There's somebody who looks at you and you think, 'Jesus Christ! Where are the bodies hidden?' Better check his basement!" after which Derek said, "He's dating my sister."

"Check the basement." Please. Like I'd be that uncreative.

Have a great week everyone.