Did you have a good Valentine’s Day? Was it filled with the company of one who adores you, flowers, choccies, and expensive baubles in tiny velvet boxes? Yes?
Well, fuck you.
Ah, Valentine’s Day: that time of the year when smug couples magically up their smugness by a factor of twenty but somehow, appallingly, you are still not allowed to garrote them with the tawdry pink ribbons from their bouquets. The world is not yet just, as Immanuel Kant could have told us. HE wouldn’t have lorded it over singletons; HE surely wouldn’t have ragged on Jesus for being dateless every damn February 14th.
Which brings me to my point: me. Well, I certainly can’t complain about the company I had for Valentine’s Day (me) and unlike most of those couples, I was never for a moment in any uncertainty whatsoever about whether or not I was getting laid that night.
Which reminds me of the time I was at the drugstore buying, get this, Virgin Springs mineral water, and I realized it was Valentine’s Day.
But that was so long ago now…three years goes by in a heartbeat.
In any case, because Valentine’s Day posts are mega hit bringers in this day and age where you may not care enough to send the very best, but you care just enough to send an e-card, here is a roundup of the very very bestest commemorative Valentine’s Day thingies I saw on the internet yesterday.
Read ’em and weep.
A ten tentacle salute to love!
Because the thing about stock Valentine’s Day cards is: not enough tentacles. Hat tip to MistressCowfish
I DID get a Valentine of sorts in the comments on Gawker:
TWO headlines and one picture (headline chopped off) is all the new format allows me to see in the sidebar. TWO headlines. How the fuck is anyone supposed to read Gawker that way??? Don’t you know how many people you lose with every forced click??? You lose eighty percent.
Jesus Christ, when even raincoaster is driven to a) comment elsewhere b) refer to herself in the third person, you know you’ve alienated people.
I still like the look of it. I just cannot use it. BRING BACK THE ENDLESS SCROLL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
Wow, nice to see a familiar face (since there are fewer and fewer here). Have you realized that Denton, based on his published remarks and leaks, is actually trying to reduce comments?
Five days in, and the absence of most of the critical social intranetworking tools (hearting, messaging, and comment notification) speaks volumes.
This post (“Welcome to the New Gawker”) has been removed from the front page of this new newspaper. And I hear the death rattle of the former, enjoyable brouhaha that we knew as commenting.
I can’t comment at all now. Doubt this will go through. Every time I try to go to Gawker.com I get redirected to ca.gawker.com and FUCK THAT WITH A CHAINSAW.
I love the clean look. I just cannot use this shit. Also, I appear to be banned again, as all my comments get “Post failed” notifications. Reducing comments? If he’d banned me last year, he would have cut back on them 50%~!
You don’t appear to have be banned. In fact, your screen name in your reply to which I am replying still bears your star. I think that the coding problems are still around and might account for your difficulty with posting a comment.
I know we weren’t especially close, but it seems like only yesterday we were connecting effortlessly every month or so. I recall a story about your meeting William Gibson, I think, but it would be so difficult now to go back through the comments and find it. It’s so odd to have lost so many connections so quickly.
I still come back here from time to time, I think because Gawker played a big part in my life for a while. I haven’t read any articles because it’s such a different approach visually and maybe editorially. If I want serious content, I am going to go to a major newspaper site like economist.com or unplug and read something pressed onto paper.
PS Gawker has really gotten you worked up–I’ve never seen you scream in caps before. You’re gorgeous when you’re angry.
If I had known this was a date, I would have washed off the trail dust and brushed my hair with a frying pan. Maybe you’re earthy, though, and okay with it all.
Here, love, I took my Bowie knife and carved a slice of Logan bread into the shape of a heart just for you.
Awwww. Are we sure this isn’t Gawker Dating?
Welcome to the Satellite of Love
Geek Valentine’s cards! A whole gallery of Time Lordian and Han-shot-firstian goodness.
A little love song from Tom Lehrer: I Hold Your Hand in Mine, Love:
Valentines for those who have stopped pretending, from MyConfinedSpace:
The confined space is between my ears
Valentines for Hopeless Realists (I’d actually send these)
I am ALL OVER the baseball one
The social media fallout of an iconic romantic moment: This chick is SO not getting a backstage pass.
I never would have gone out with that mope in the first place
Sissydude Valentines! I think this brand has a lot of potential.
Isn't that cute, he sent his valentine to a pony. I think???
A Valentine from Godzilla:
Does anything say Love In Post-Modern Japan like Haiku and Godzilla?
When you think of passionate romantic attachment, who do you think of? That’s right:
Noam Chomsky.
Alone Noam Moar!
Something for cat ladies:
and your Morrissey albums. There's that too.
The New York City department of Health just launched an iPhone app that shows you where you can get free condoms:
Now THAT is servicey!
This Valentine is…touching.
The Human Centipede Valentine: From your lips to ... never mind, don't think about that part
For the bookish, there are NPR Valentines:
This Valentine was brought to you by National Public Radio, and by listeners like you
The New Yorker brings you a selection of dirty pictures with intellectual pretensions, so it’s okay to look if it’s by Ellen Unwerth, etc. Here’s Nan Goldin’s image, perfect for the one who plays Nancy Spungen to your Sid Vicious.
Be My ... collateral damage
A roundup of the most uncomfortable screen kisses of all time (and yeah, they even got Howard the Duck in there):
Ben Kling does nifty series of dictator valentines, including the least flexible dictator ever, HAL:
The linear-thinking National Post presents a flow chart of how to buy flowers for Valentine’s Day:
If you need this, you shouldn't be having sex in the first place. You might reproduce
Salon brings us Valentine Candy Hearts of the Stars.
Or it would have been, if he had exact change
Here’s to Valentine’s Day!
Bottom's Up!
If all of this has you bummed out and feeling hopeless, HAVE I GOT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU!!!
If you’ve read this far in a Valentine’s Day post posted the day AFTER Valentine’s Day, I know one thing: You, my friend, have a deep and abiding interest in romantic pursuits, or at least cheap sex. Wouldn’t you like to support a cause that combines them both, plus patriotism? Sure you would.
What’s this about? Take a heart and turn it upside down, and that’ll give you a clue:
I heard on Vancouver is Awesome‘s 100.5 The Peak segment this weekend that a campaign is underway to save Beaver Lake that would see an investment of $100,000 for dredging and restoration by the Vancouver Park Board. Without these efforts, the Stanley Park Ecology Society says the lake could dry up within the next decade or two.
We haven’t had a good Youtube in quite some time (days), nor a good Mylene Farmer youtube in even longer, so here’s a nice little AIDs allegorical one (which should, incidentally, put me back on the top of the WP.com Allegory tag page) called Que Mon Coeur Lâche, and which dates from the days in which she was young and pretty and had unfortunate haircuts, ie 1992, as you will see:
And, incidentally, if this doesn’t get me back on the Michael Jackson Haterfan Juggernaut, nothing will.
[Some parts of ‘Que mon coeur lache’ are missing in the english version ‘My soul is slashed’, so …]
Too much brutal
the mixing
the dance of bodies
the death of love
poisonous love
collision
the fear beats down
on our frolic
You between us
rubber
you seep into
our intercourse
It’s not easy
the pleasure
to tame your iced body
My heart gives up
my dreams of kinky love
do not have paste anymore
my stress about love
is so sad
My heart gives up
please harm me
misuse of bonds and lilies
times are loose
love is in pain
times are plastic love
what nasty angel
came up to crucify my liberties
Me, poor devil
It hurts so much
love fever, hurt love
For today, I was awoken at about 6am after falling asleep at 4, and awoken in my least favorite way at that: by someone else’s cat galloping across my face and, specifically, over my eyelid, with its claws out, a fact which anyone nearby can determine by looking at the five long scratch marks on my face right now. They’re extra-super-visible because of the glossy antibiotic cream I’ve spread over them in a layer thick enough to double as an air bag, in case of car crash. And as yesterday I was awoken at 6am by galloping cats as well, after falling asleep again at 4 like any decent, normal, non-cat-owning person, this does not take me to my happy place. It takes me to that place where I can stare at people, listening intently to what they’re saying to me, and actually comprehend not one syllable; nay, not even so much as to be able to identify the language except after careful reverse-thought-engineering.
“Well, it was Doug who was talking to me, and Doug only speaks English, therefore it must have been English!” I think with a great deal of relief once I finally work it out. “Now, I wonder what in hell he was talking about?”
But enough about me (can you ever get enough?). It’s time to talk about Brian Atene, Superman Vodka, Trigger, Google, AOL, and me (again).
Longtime readers of the ol’ raincoaster blog will be familiar with our longtime Ateniac status, dating all the way back since 2006, when the vintage Good Day Mister Kubrick audition tape hit the internet, and hit it hard. I’ve posted his more contemporary videos on this blog and virtually any other blog I could get my hands on even so much as the comments section. So far, so what, right? You either love Atene or you identify with him so strongly you can’t stand the sight of him because all those things about yourself that you’d change if you were a better, stronger, richer, younger person? He is all about those things, three cheers and pass the Nembutal.
And, about once every two years, he signs in to YouTube, finds a camel’s-back-breaking-straw comment and deletes all his videos, leaving me with vast holes in whatever of my blogs I’ve put them into, obviously. BUT I’M SO OVER THAT. Anyway, the one with the shout-out to me is no more, and has not been re-uploaded to the new account.
Cognitive dissociative moment (been having a lot of those recently). Change of subject, slightly.
So I’m looking at the stats for my professional website, raincoaster media, and it appears the blog has suddenly gone from a respectable 100 daily hits to 350, all courtesy of this post on, yes, Brian Atene on the subjects of personal, thespianal, and alcoholic marketing, which outranks every other Brian Atene post on Earth except the one on BoingBoing, even though there are about a dozen Atene posts on THIS blog, as opposed to a simple two on that one. Referrers? I can see three clicks from an AOL search for “Brian Atene” but nothing else. No Google, no Yahoo, nothing else shows up on the referrers. Are people pulling this out of thin air, or is it a hidden link of some sort?Why this post? And why now?
Did he marry a Kardashian today? Get a tv show? Carry a full hot water bottle onto an airplane?
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
For now, we have this. We have, instead of The Atene Button, Atene Talks Trigger.
raincoaster 