My instinct is to knit up a weird costume/uniform and wear it every day. When I don’t instantly know the name of an article of clothing, I seem to interpret it as having some qualities of a costume. This is a ruff, I suppose. I feel it is festive.
Tag: project ideas
Orange and brown, knitted mitts
I’ve seen many versions of Eunny Jang’s endpaper mitts online, but this is the first pair that made me want to knit some. Good colours! I previously experienced that diamond pattern as kind of fussy and fancy, but the orange and brown version is more my speed. Geometric and, you know, orange. I would knit these, and then I would make kung fu hands like craftster mozilla in the photo there.
Further evidence that I’m not really in a target demographic for normal businesses
Name shack
Last night at a screening of short films, I was being introduced to a new guy who kept claiming bad hearing and getting everyone’s name wrong.
(1) This would be a good gimmick for business men who obsess about remembering everyone’s name. You’d have an excuse to repeat the names a lot, plus you could “jokingly” get them wrong and everyone would find you charming. (2) This guy’s misheard names were way better than our normal names (Sarah = Sierra. Jessica = Destiny. Galen = Hayden. We are instantly teen idols or brands of vodka!).
I think he should go into business in some way. Maybe you could call him up and tell him your ideas for naming your pets or the characters in your new novel, and he could just repeat them back to you through his auditory filter of awesomeness. Maybe he could deliver some sort of televised oral history newscast.
Surprise! Hope you’re more vain than paranoid!
Two nights ago, I was talking about web design rates with my friend Michael, who is making a site for a private detective. His ladyfriend Erin suggested he just trade services, and then we were all sort of hoping to be the subject of Michael’s bartered private investigation, just so we could get some weird surveillance photos of ourselves. And now I think that should be a business of its own: just the surveillance photos.
Real detectives probably don’t take big, black and white glossies anymore (nope), but my non-investigative, non-incriminating surveillance photography service sure would. And we’d make a special effort to get shots of the subject holding up her collar against the wind while stepping into a taxi, laughing in a restaurant with an unseen dinner companion, or generally looking over his shoulder all the time. If surveillance is going to be biased and weird, it might as well be biased towards glamour and intrigue.
I can’t stop thinking about what a great (weird, confusing) birthday present that would be for an unsuspecting friend. “It’s… is this a threat?”
Internet wish: find likely pornographic typos
Any page offering advice on choosing a domain name will insist you consider common typos and misunderstandings. No need to end up the latest sexchange URL (lawyersexchange.com, editorsexchange.com…). And nobody wants to end up a typo away from hardcore porn. Especially if your website features Christian hymns.
So why can’t I find a tool to check these things?
I just got an email from a web design client (who really does make Christian hymns) saying that one of their customers had accidentally found porn while trying to type in their website address. “They probably just made a typo.”
But darned if I can figure out where this typo porn actually is. None of my misspelled attempts are registered domains, and I can’t find a tool that suggests similarly spelled URLs that exist.
There are lots of tools to find websites with similar content, but none to find websites with similar addresses. This second tool is what I wish for.
Namin’ names
- Someday, maybe I will start a sysadmin dance band called Deee-link.
- I hope someone starts selling eels or eggs online, before it becomes completely gauche to add ‘e’ to the front of a word, to denote online commerce. eeggs.com would be pretty awesome, probably.
Magic Boxer Shorts
Overheard while rehydrating this product:
- Yessss
- Are my dehydrated underwear ready to go?
- Happy! Pepper! Crotch!
Galen keeps threatening to start a Goblingram business, where he’d preside over a coven of goblins and send them out on bikes to deliver telegrams (“Blarrrgh! Zorg has message! Time to die!”). I like to think the green guys would aspire to the posture in that last photo. Just add a little tin hat and maybe a furry loincloth instead of the magic boxershorts.
A project I’d like to make*
I’d like to collect stories and descriptions of people’s epiphanies. How they snapped out of depression, or figured out their life’s work, or fixed their relationships, understood parenthood or life or sex or death or generally how to deal with reality. People’s answers to “What’s the secret?”
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, occasionally stoked by articles like this one, but I had assumed it would be hard to find enough stories to make a worthwhile collection. Talking to Andrea at our small-business breakfast yesterday, we both had potential contributions to this topic. More than realizing I could find enough contributions, I remembered how totally compelled I am by people solving problems and figuring things out, and dealing with basic tragedies like the fact we’re all going to die. I want to go hunting.
*I can’t believe I don’t post daydream projects more often. It’s my most common conversational topic and constant preoccupation.
Elephant memory
A really long time ago, Justin Hall told a story on links.net about watching his girlfriend Amy collect underwear to pack for a trip. “I have enough underwear here to make a salad,” she said.
Panty salad. Lodged in my brain forever, alongside all the names Rebecca and I have come up with for our fictional lingerie store over the years. Pantymonium, All Tomorrow’s Panties, the usual. I get more excited about the scope of our inventory than the name. We would fit everybody! We would cover a huge footprint on the matrix of fashion and comfort! We would host events. Etc etc.
But on laundry days I make panty salad, not pantymonium, out of all my “lay flat to dry” items.
It would almost be worth having a white wedding to wear this
One more fashion photo.
What is it about women with antlers? Lily Fawn ‘s stage get-up inspired a lot of knitted hat sketches in my notebook. I think I could make some stubby felted prongs that would stand up, if I got around to it.
Jellyfish couture
Many months ago, I borrowed a video about jellyfish from the library. Lucky me, it was one of those upper echelon nature documentaries produced by a specialized research centre with a high budget and a celebrity narrator, in this case Leonard Nemoy.
Dr. Spock narrated in a mesmerizing hypno-voice throughout, and at the exact point in the film where the photography jumped from average jellyfish to mind-bending footage of rare aliens of the deep, our hypnotist narrator compared one especially ruffly, colour-changing, pulsating specimen to an elegant woman, trailing her veils and skirts across the room.
Since then I’ve been percolating on how, exactly, I am going to dress like an elegant jellyfish. Many-layered underskirts? Ruffly legwarmers? Tutus trailing ribbons? Could I knit something? Around Christmas I settled on a ball-shaped skirt, such as you’d see made out of feathers and sequins in the 1920s. Skirts that puff out, then cinch back in. Dresses made from piles of ruffles.
Imagine, then, my delight at finding these diverse, jelly-like creations in the recent catwalk photos at Style.com. (Imagine my delight at finding catwalk photo galleries in general: endless, silly desktop wallpaper.)
Balenciaga
Jean Paul Gaultier
Kenzo
Martin Grant
Alexander McQueen
Pearl of Civilization, private collection
I’ve just finished sewing my own jellyfish dress— out of materials from the Closet of Stash no less. The dress is my surprise contribution to Rock Club tonight (the theme is complicated this time, and involves bringing some kind of art to go with our song). Once it has been officially unveiled I’ll post photos here.
I am very excited. Jellyfish dress!
Today
I started my weekend on Friday, and spent all of today goofing around with Rock Club, and Zoe is coming to visit tomorrow so I know that will be a write-off. I can’t separate my slacking from my fever-induced laziness. I want to be so productive, and not get stuck on predictable tasks, like whenever I have to do the part of design that involves making something pretty, or presentable. I rock the functional part, but the decorating is really hard. Yes I know they work together. I’m stuck on visual stuff on two different projects right now. Three, really. It’s painful. I’m so full of ideas, honest. I can work so hard. Honest. I don’t know how to make the pretty things come out of my head.
This has to be the year that I learn to draw. Studying colours and type and alignment helped, but if I’m aspiring to something other than boxes, I need to have less clumsy hands.
Party in my head
Robin wants to make a porn magazine for straight women. I could get on board with that, mostly because Robin is awesome and has interesting hobbies and ideas. She volunteers with an anti-violence project and a sexual assault centre, and a sexual health clinic. That is all the shit that I should be doing, since I’ve styled myself a purveyor of sex education info. I spend more time thinking about sex as a head trip, and arty possibilities and altered states brought on by orgasms. Porn show’n‘tell discussions with Robin would be reasonable and worthwhile, I imagine, and also fun and out-of-bounds a bit.
I’m really interested in private publishing right now, and I think it would be extra interesting to make this porn magazine for personal consumption only, instead of mass production. Fame and attention is the background of practically everything on the internet; purposely private media is something I haven’t explored a lot. I’m compelled by the idea of publishing and working and producing for my friends only. That’s a very human scale with different social consequences, completely different from international online communities. I’ve been finding Rock Club a lot more intense than other websites that I make, and also more casual. Just like everyday friends. I like it.
When I imagine this porn magazine, it would involve pals bringing some item that they were hot for this week (or this month), to put in the magazine, and then we could talk about the contents while we craft the magazine. That is a real snapshot of my daydreams; Galen would laugh. EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED: THE CRAFT PROJECT AND MEDIA THEORY EXPERIMENT.
Eventually maybe we’d get the magazine figured out enough that it would be fun to publish it for real. Right now I want to call it Perv Unit. Today and yesterday I am an unstoppable daydreamer, coming up with names for porn projects and planning the tiny urban estate of my future family. (I’d like to keep peacocks in the front yard, because they are regal and completely ridiculous, and know how to kill snakes.)