Category Archives: raincoaster

and drink your milkshake, too

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funny pictures of cats with captions

If at first you don’t succeed, lose your temper. Hey, it has always worked for me!

For Nobody In Particular

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I may have used that title before. And yeah, I was lying then, too.

Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

That old dog has chained you up alright
Give you everything you need
To live inside a twisted cage
Sleep beside an empty rage
I had a dream I was your hero

Damn, I wish I was your lover
I’ll rock you till the daylight comes
Make sure you are smiling and warm
I am everything
Tonight I’ll be your mother I will
And I’ll do such things to ease your pain
Free your mind and you won’t feel ashamed,

This monkey can’t stand to see you black and blue
I give you something sweet each time you
Come inside my jungle book
What is it just too good
Don’t say you’ll stay
‘Cause then you go away

Chorus

Shucks, for me there is no other
You’re the only shoe that fits
I can’t imagine I’ll grow out of it
Damn I wish I was your lover

If I was your girl believe me
I’d turn on the Rolling Stones
We could groove along and feel much better
I could do it forever and ever
Give me an hour to kiss you
Walk through heaven’s door, I’m sure
We don’t need no doctor to feel much better
Let me in
Forever and ever and ever and ever…

I sat on the mountainside with peace of mind
And I lay by the ocean making love to her
with visions clear
Walked for days with no one near
And I return as chained and bound to you

Technical Difficulties of the Third Kind

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Tonight my computer actually made me cry.

Does anyone have a secondhand laptop with decent speed? I’m definitely buying.

I hope I may be forgiven a rant under the circumstances. If that’s not what you want to read, click here for the raincoaster randomizer and have fun.

Moving on…

I’ve been sick since the end of August, nearly got sent to the hospital for it, am trying eight different ways to get the mold situation in my apartment dealt with, got a super new currently-undiagnosed thing that could be nothing or could be a big deal, we will have to wait and see, started two new jobs this month neither of which I have been able to do well enough at in my opinion, my grandmother is in the hospital and barely hanging on, I have worked about 60 hours in the last four days, quite a lot of it on my feet, and the computer is so slow that in order to move the cursor you click where you want it to go and walk away, wash a couple of mugs and start the tea brewing, come back and watch it appear.

Tomorrow I am trucking out to Surrey (two hours on transit each way) to cover for a friend who has to leave a conference early. Then, after about an hour and a half, I am trucking all the way back to downtown to meet with some blogging clients and teach them all about WordPress (if I can talk past all the coughing). Then I am coming home and posting on TeenyManolo and Ayyy and, if tomorrow is anything like today, that will take me till about three in the morning. Then I will think about posting to raincoaster, realize I haven’t done the affiliate links for the Manolosphere, sigh and think about crying again, and then go do the damn links.

And the day after that I’m in for about twelve hours of work outdoors and three miles of walking, minimum, and hopefully it won’t rain because I’m supposed to be liveblogging. IF they have a computer for me, which they probably won’t. I don’t get the impression it’s considered a priority. Mind you, if they don’t have one the one I have certainly won’t be able to handle liveblogging, so I can just turn around and come home. And get a reputation as someone who doesn’t do her work.

Swell.

Got to go, got six affiliate links to do…

UPDATE: and the post for Ayyyy. The Teenymanolo one took me five hours or so, thanks to this computer and the fact that the version of WordPress we’ve got doesn’t seem to work properly. If I collapse at the conference I hope they take me to the hospital in New West, not the one in Surrey.

UPDATE 2.5 hours later: Ayyyy post done. On to affiliate linking. There is now no possibility of my getting eight hours of sleep.

Downtown Eastside Artist Opportunity

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Fearless City Logo

**please post and forward

Fearless City Mobile Call for Participants
Short-term contracts for Downtown Eastside Residents,

We are fast approaching Fearless City Mobile’s exciting upcoming project-
Parade of Lost Souls, on Saturday October 25th, and are looking for 10 people to bring the Mobile Souls and Digital Shrine to life.

The Parade of the Lost Souls is a Grandview-Woodland’s Community
Halloween event that celebrates the cycle of life & death, and
encourages us to face our fears in order to live life to its fullest.
It is a time and a place to share losses at one of the many shrines
and celebrate life and to enrich our community. It takes Place on
Saturday October 25th, beginning at Grandview Park at 6:30pm. A
parade/procession will snake throughout the commercial drive area,
beginning at the NE corner of the park at 7pm.

Mobile Souls is a montage of live streaming video of the Parade and
installations along the route, as well as ‘mms’ texts and digital cell
phone images from festival attendees, that will be sifted, VJ’d and
projected. The montage will be projected on a screen at the corner of
Kitchener and Commercial and animated by live shadow puppet performers.

Fearless City Mobile will also be supporting the Digital Shrine
installation in Grandview Park. The shrine consists of digital images,
text and video sent in by community members in advance, as well as
mms texts sent in throughout the event.

Parade of Lost Souls is produced by the Public Dreams Society. For
more information on the event you can visit www.publicdreams.org.

Fearless City Mobile is a project of the Fearless Media Cluster of the
DTES Community Arts Network. For more information visit
www.fearlesscity.ca.

———

We are looking for 10 people in total to fill the following positions.

You do not need to have any experience with the following equipment,
software, or technology to apply for this opportunity.
**** All technical
equipment will be provided by Fearless city Mobile:

a) 1x VJ Assistant (Mobile Souls): Assisting VJ Jesse Scott in sorting
through incoming live streamed mobile video, still images and text. Text
will be manipulated in Livetype and exported into Modul8, the software
that will mix the video, text and still images.

b) 1x VJ Assistant (Digital Shrine): Assisting VJ Suez Holland and
Cultural Curator Flick Harrison in sorting through incoming live streamed
still images and text. Text will be manipulated in Livetype and exported
into Modul8, the software that will mix the text and still images with the
video material that flick has collected prior to the event. Video will not
be live streamed to this station.

c) 4x Mobile Videographers: Shooting mobile video of the event and
live-streaming it to the Mobile Souls VJ Station via Livecast.
Videographers will be positioned throughout the parade.

d) 4x Mobile SMS/MMS Outreachers: Outreaching to Parade of Lost
Souls attendees and introducing them to the Mobile Souls cell phone
texting platform. Instructing attendees on how to text in their
thoughts,
reflections and comments about the event to a specified Mobile
Souls phone number. These texts will be downloaded by a sift tool to
the VJ Stations.

You are also required to offer to text peoples comments for them
on your own phone, and to demonstrate the process.

The responsibilities for this contract include:

1. Attending an orientation workshop on Wednesday October 22 from
1-6pm at the Lori Krill Co-op at 65 W. Cordova

2. Attending the event on Saturday October 25th from setup at
5:00pm until the event ends at 12am. Wearing Halloween Costumes is
encouraged.

3. Completing a participant feedback form.

The Artist Fee for each position is $200.00.

Please submit a short paragraph stating your interest in the
project and a position to amy at fearlessmedia.ca by Tuesday October 21
at 12noon.

Amy Kazymerchyk
Fearless City Mobile
DTES Community Arts Network.

Operation Recuperation: the raincoaster situation

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I’m feeling better (well enough, in fact, to blog!) and thought I’d give my millions of devoted readers (both of you; did I mention I had two million readers? Well, two million people of whom one point seven came here looking for Beaver Shots and went away confused, which is something, anyway) some clue as to what I’ve been going through.

As happens each year at the turning of the seasons, when the sun looks at Vancouver and turns, in fact, away completely, tossing a heartless “see you in May” over its shoulder as it heads to California, the rains have set in and that means that the mold, the mildew, the emos and the creepy-crawlies are ascendant.

All of these, with the exception of emos (because I hate clove cigarettes) can, according to my doctor, be found in my lungs at the present time.

My lungs, in fact, look something like this:

The fungus Pilobolus fires off its sporangiophore using a water cannon or “squirt gun,” reaching accelerations that are among the fastest in nature.

Here we present a montage of high-speed video clips showing sporangiophore discharge in the fungus Pilobolus kleinii. The videos were obtained at camera frame rates of up to 250,000 fps. Each discharge is completed in less than 0.25 milliseconds; an eye blink takes 100 milliseconds, or 400 times longer! The music is Verdi’s Anvil Chorus.

For more information, click here.

Anvil Chorus and all.

Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention that yesterday, when I sat down to blog, I was bitten on the ass by an Aggressive House Spider. They don’t call them that for nothing, and that was the reason I ended up smearing toothpaste on my butt at two in the morning.

What? What? It draws the poison out.

Although the Co-op where I live has improved things somewhat in the last year, tacking a new roof on so the water hardly ever wells up through my carpet anymore and disposing of the large areas of ceiling which had rotted through and caved in on the second floor (it’s a four-story building) and even carting away some of the drywall in the lobby where the mildew had eaten through, things here cannot be said to be spore-free.

And my lungs, scarred by some mystery illness when I was a baby, have never been the best (every time I get a chest X-ray they look all concerned until I say “oh, is this about the scar tissue? Check the records”). And there is, as there always is, a flu/cold/virus of doom going around Vancouver which knocks everyone on their asses for a week or so.

And so.

Put all these things together and you get someone who’s been running a temperature for nearly three weeks, appears to be unable to fully digest food of any kind, has essentially no appetite, produces her own body weight in mucus every eighteen hours, and coughs like that guy…that guy at the theatre…that one everyone hated by fifteen minutes into the flick. If I ever get this money I’m owed, I’m trotting straight down to Canadian Tire and buying one of those combo heater/dehumidifiers/air filters, and there goes three hundred bucks but it’s worth it.

Which is why I’m staying home tonight instead of going out to a social activist/geek event three blocks from my house featuring free booze.

Yes. I said free booze.

That’s how sick I am.