I designed these and got an entire box made. For a single joke.

Totally worth it.

Life, Movies, Photos blue, film noir, funny, graphic design, joke, jon lovitz, loaded weapon 1, matchbook, national lampoon, samuel l. jackson, silver ink, what recession?

I just got a couple of the new TypeMatrix keyboards. I’m friends with the owners, and years ago I made their promo video:

The new version is great, but some of the keys have been switched around, and I’m very picky. Luckily, autohotkey allows you to remap keys very easily (I always have a script running anyway). AHK can do tons of amazing things, but for our purposes we’re just going to do some simple remapping. The basics are:

• Download and install AHK
• Create a new text file (with notepad or whatever), and add the code below. Save it with the extension “.ahk”
• Double-click on the .ahk file you just saved, to launch it

It may seem confusing at first, because AHK is not a program you launch. You simply install it, and then launch each script individually. You can also create .exe files so you don’t need AHK installed, but I prefer to keep them .ahk so I can keep editing them at any time easily (I change my mind a lot).
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Coding, Life

On October 10th, 2010 I attended “The Beckoning of Lovely”:

The Beckoning of Lovely is an expanding film project involving hundreds of strangers from around the world. Amy Krouse Rosenthal initiated the project last fall by filming a spontaneous public gathering on 8/08/08 at “The Bean” in Millennium Park. The event was a beautiful testament to the power of community, cooperation, and hope amongst strangers in the name of all things lovely. The project has since evolved into the making of a full-length feature film.

What exactly the event would entail remained vague, but my girlfriend wanted to go, and it sounded like it could be cool. I watched the 08/08/08 video, and it seemed like it could be something akin to the mp3 experiment (except with more art, and no mp3). Here’s the 08/08/08 video:

Before the event started, people started singing “We’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re hereeeeeee!” to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (as heard in the ’08 video). What seemed at first to be a mildly amusing tautology proved to be chillingly accurate.

As mentioned in the description above, the beckoning was created by Amy. Her invitation video asked everyone to wear a white shirt with their first name on the front, and “beckoning of lovely 10/10/10″ on the back. I didn’t want to do it because 1) I don’t wear white, and 2) it made it seem a bit too cultish. But I figured maybe something interesting would be done with them (e.g., “go find someone with the same name as you!”). But the only thing that even remotely required them was when Amy told everyone to “turn to your neighbor and give them a high five while saying their name.” It seems the real reason for the shirts was simply to make the event seem more important and organized than it really was.

There was a guy “warming up” the crowd at the beginning, who later explained he had no idea he would be standing up there, he was just there for the event and somehow got picked to help out. At first that seemed kind of cool, like we’d all be participating in some way, but no, it really just showed the lack of planning that went into it. There was a funny moment when he asked the crowd, “How many people here came to the Beckoning last year?” (No one raised their hand.) “NO ONE?! Wow!” (I later found out there was no ’09 beckoning, just Amy by herself, but perhaps I should have taken that foreshadowing to heart.)

Finally Amy arrived, and explained that there would be “ten moments.” Amy talked about kindred spirits, and how the word “kindred” was what this event was all about. She had two people rip a sign in half, showing that kindred was also “KIND” and “RED.” Red was the theme, which allowed her to shoe-horn in all sorts of things for no other reason. There were also tons of needless puns, such as:

“Who has recently learned to tell time?” (a little girl comes up and Amy sits her on a stool) “This is your lookout tower, you have to watch and make sure everyone is having a good time.” (That was moment number 1. A girl sitting on a stool. That’s it. Nothing else happened.)

Then someone brought up a “red carpet” (which was actually just a red towel). Amy: “This is Matt. Thanks for the mat, Matt!” Clearly, he was chosen for his name only.

She brought up all the redheads for one of the moments, then had them sit back down. She released a red balloon into the sky for another. She read letters from people who had “red” in their last name.

But what really bothered me was how many of the moments were based on previous beckonings. In the ’08 video you saw someone give a flower to a stranger. Well she had him back, and had a bunch of people give him a flower.

In ’09 there was a guy who asked for a “moment of peace” and she played him a song on her ipod. This time she had the actual band there to play their song live. It would have been great, but the instruments weren’t miked, and the singer stood too far away from his mike to be heard even by us, and we were five feet from the speaker. After the song was over Amy asked if the volume was too low, and everyone (except the people right in front of her/them) shouted “YES!” Then she asked, “could you hear it?”, and we all shouted, “NO!” But the only people she could hear were the ones right in front of her, so she replied, “good!” without realizing that only about ten people could actually hear it.

Then she read a letter from a 14-year-old girl who couldn’t come. She had everyone say hi to her on camera, so that we could all be with her in spirit. While that’s all fine and good, Amy, there are hundreds of people here right now wanting to be involved in something! What happened to the “we’re going to make a bunch of stuff together” mentality from ’08? Why aren’t we doing something, anything? The whole event seemed less like a gathering to share a moment with strangers, and more of a platform for Amy to speak to a large audience about her art project.

There were a few cool moments. At one point she had everyone take out their cell phones, and hold them up (which is a wholly unoriginal idea, but it was still neat to see). Then there were two guys in old diving suits who slowly walked around (like they were underwater) handing stuff out. They had bubbles blowing out behind them. The best thing was when she had kids hand out tiny letters, which are simply adorable:

But aside from that, we were incredibly disappointed. My girlfriend (who is an artist) later described the event as “insultingly cliche” and “offensive.”[1] I read that Amy did some other things as part of the beckoning (in book stores), and maybe those are nice. It seemed like this event was the final chapter, so it was her just wrapping up the story. However, that really wasn’t clear to all the people attending, and since nearly everyone was there for the first time, it didn’t make any sense.

Seeing clips of the event online will probably seem nice, and you may think I’m crazy to be writing such a negative review. The final film may be neat. People loved the ’08 video, and will probably love the ’10 video, but that just proves that with pretty music, slow motion, and soft narration, you can make almost anything seem more special than it really was.

[1] Edit: she clarifies “I didn’t mean anything about it was particularly offensive – just offended that she wasted my time.”

Events, Life

At Pitchfork I found a cool lost cellphone, but instead of keeping it we were able to track down the guy and give it back. I liked it so much that I bought the same model on ebay. Yesterday it came, AND SOMEONE STOLE IT from my doorstep. All I found was an empty, ripped-open box. Awesome. Just further proof that there’s no such thing as karma.

Life

Wait, so, uh…should we cross? Everyone is shopping on this side.

Life, Random

I found this at the local dollar store. Boooo.

Life, Vegan

The city of Chicago is full of bars, clubs, theaters, and other interesting ways to spend your time and money. A few months ago, I paid a stranger from craigslist $70 for this:

If you can’t tell, that’s a badly photocopied piece of paper wrapped up in Scotch tape. Seventy. Dollars. He told me they’re worth $100 though, so I got a good deal, right? Let me start at the beginning.
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Life mst3k

My relatives were visiting this week, so I took the train out to the suburbs to see them. The next day they drove me back to Chicago, and during the car ride my aunt and uncle were discussing the difference between gregarious and loquacious.

I wish I could hang out with them all the time.

Life, Random

Yesterday was the Pride Parade in Chicago, and the day before that was Pride Fest. pliSkiNAKE had stuff to do nearby, so I walked around the Fest. I found it pretty boring, but I’m hardly the key demographic. There was lots of food I didn’t want, loud music I didn’t particularly like, and awful, awful t-shirts for sale*. They had nothing to do with GLBT pride, they were just white shirts with terrible airbrushed neon animals on them. What. The ’90s say hello.

So I gave up on walking around and instead stood on the corner and yo-yoed. Some people watched, and over the next ten minutes these things happened:

1. A black guy around my age asked if it was a Duncan, and I said no, it’s a YoYoJam. “YoYoJam! No way!” he exclaimed, saying they were great. I wasn’t sure if he was serious, or putting me on. He started telling me about how Duncans weren’t very good because they get knots a lot quicker. I told him I “didn’t think that was true.” He went on a rant about Yo-Yo Balls, and something about doing tricks with them. I told him they really weren’t made for tricks, and he walked away never to return. He seemed genuine.
2. A girl walked up and took my picture, and when I looked up she ran away. It was a terrible picture too, I had just messed up a trick. I wanted to tell her to take another, but she was gone.
3. An almost-skinhead guy walked up to me, inches from my face, and stared angrily at me. “What’s up?” I asked. He pointed devil horns at me with his left hand, nodded, and then walked away. It made exactly as much sense as you think it did. We had nothing in common that I could tell.

Weird day.

* There were some cool shirts in other booths, and I’m sure it was fun for most people. This post really isn’t about the Fest itself.

Life

I moved to Chicago a couple weeks ago, and a few days ago we bought a used pleather couch. It’s big. It’s difficult to get through doorways…

…but we make it:

The next problem is actually getting it up into our second floor apartment. We try carrying it up the back stairs, but it’s too big to fit. We have to use some other method, so we try pulling it up with a carabiner.

No good (as we expected).

It’s getting late, and we don’t have any pulleys, so we have to leave the couch outside until the next day.

We buy three pulleys and rig it up on the left side of the building. Here’s pliSkiNAKE on the second floor railing:

We have lift-off! Photo taken from the basement:

A little higher…

Close-up of the pulley system; the couch is as high as we can get it:

Long exposure from the ground:

Time to rig up something new in order to get it all the way up. Ratchet straps hold the couch up while we move the pulleys:

We release the straps while pulling it over the railing:

…and we’ve done it! (We don’t normally sit this close together. :P)

The final struggle is to get it through the doorway. Does this look like it’s too big to fit through? Because it totally is. But we made it fit.

We may have cuts and bruises, and the couch may have tears and scratches, but we triumphed!

Life