Link Escapism

Rather than post about being melan­choly, about won­der­ing if I will ever be able to give up wor­ry­ing about the pos­si­bil­ity of my life being mean­ing­ful on any sub­stan­tial level, about the fact that, freshly-bathed, I resem­ble a big, pink, fruit-salad-stuffed sea mam­mal, slightly moist and rolled in dog-hair, I will digress through link blogging:

• Merlin’s 5ives Page always deserves a reg­u­lar visit. Cur­rently, my faves are Five things you might do with all that ass, Five ter­ri­ble fake real­ity tv shows, Five things, besides “your ride,” that you might wish to “pimp” and Five nouns from which it can be dif­fi­cult to scrub the scent of utter bull­shit. Espe­cially mean­ing­ful to me in par­tic­u­lar were: “poet” listed under Five titles you shouldn’t be allowed to give your­self and a new hip-hop name for myself, should I ever need one — MC Chalk (because I’m brit­tle and very white).
• What would hap­pen if Charles Bukowski had writ­ten Peanuts? Well, thanks to tal­ented peo­ple and the inter­net, now you can find out. I laughed at this as hard as D laughed at this.
• Today I learned, while perus­ing mor­bid WWI pics, about a car­toon­ist namedAlbert Hahn. He drew many car­toons — around 4000 in his short life — but I felt a con­nec­tion to this one (Orig­i­nally cap­tioned After four years of war — mil­i­tarism speaks: “Have trust in me. I do not work fast, but the peace I will bring even­tu­ally will be very com­plete.”):
  
• I have played with longer expo­sures at night, wang­ing my cam­era about to make light trails, but this Sprint com­mer­cial takes that type of cre­ativ­ity to a whole new level. Here is the creator’s web­site, where there are lots more videos.
• China had it righter, sooner. I will add this map to my list of rea­sons that supe­ri­or­ity should not be assigned to a group sim­ply because they broad­cast best or loudest.
• Speak­ing of maps, when I was lit­tle, my brother, Lax­ity, and I would draw maps — quite elab­o­rate pieces of art­work fully filled in with geo­graph­i­cal and urban land­marks, a key and other infor­ma­tion. This world-building suited me, as I have always liked the cre­ation bet­ter than the use. I love build­ing D&D char­ac­ters, but the play is less grat­i­fy­ing. I used to join MUDs and MOOs and ingra­ti­ate myself to the admins so that I would be allowed to build things. Heck, as some of you know, I can get more caught up in the cre­at­ing or re/designing of this page rather than post­ing on it. All of that aside, how­ever, what I am cur­rently curi­ous about is this: most if not all of the maps I cre­ated as a kid were of islands. What does this say about me? If I were to draw a map now, I believe I would also draw an island more often than not. Per­haps an island within a raft’s life away from another island, but an island nonetheless…
• Donna (with­out whom I would be far less informed on many sub­jects) has pointed out this piece by Richard Bayn­ton that well explains why I am so picky about where I shop. Or, I at least seem picky to some. I should be far, far pickier.
• Cheap-ass summ­bitch that I am, I will prob­a­bly make (rather than buy) one of these and one of these. Sad for the Sig­nals peo­ple that I came upon these two things after just read­ing my recent Ready­Made.

There. Wasn’t that bet­ter than read­ing my night­time neuroticisms?