Geoff Solo

Whoa I been linked

2011-03-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

Just realized that this here blog's been linked to by probably the single one-person blog I read most, Keith "Superballs" Huang's Improv Is Good For You.

If you're a perceptive person of taste, i.e. a fellow reader of Keith's blog, and got here thence, thank you - and please note that what blogging I'm doing I'm mostly doing over at grimwoodimprov.wordpress.com

That said, maybe I'll do more here. Mayyyyyyyyyyyybe.

Either way, thanks Keith!

Affiliate link test

2010-11-28T20:08:00.001-08:00

I'm testing this out, here -- thanks very much for helping!:

Logitech S220 2.1 Speaker System with Subwoofer

Click on that when you're ready to buy the thing. Thanks!

Workday line item blog: 12/17 & 27 '09

2009-12-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

figured i'd try this instead of a dozen fbook statuses

fri 12/17/09

Call me soda popinski. I'm being much more dilligent on the soda-squirreling this week. Gonna be a heavy backpack rest of the day.

I'm hooked on the hip-hop version of the THomas theme song. Do not think I'm joking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETSz0g9KP-Q
Context is key ton understanding this. The original song is sung by a fucking English Boys' Choir, for god's sake. So hearing some weird ambigu-ethnic guy rap it.. sincerely enjoyable.

I've been saying kids are the best since Bingo was born, and yet, it keeps getting better. Better and better and better. We hang out, we tell jokes. We sing songs that are jokes. One of us (and I mean it, it can be either one of us) will come up with a joke or really more often a bit, and the other will redo it, and we'll just do it back and forth for a good long while. And pick it up again a few times later in the day, and over the next couple weeks. It's just the god damn funnest. And he's four. He's four. He's riffin be-bopping and scattin with me and I'm LOSING IT, I mean, enjoying the hell out of it.

PR? Pocket rocket? Purple raincoat? Pauvre Remy?

"Unintentional but still vicious"? What the f are you talking about? Stupid sports commentators.

_____________
Sunday 12/27/09
_____________

The christmas child (christmas child) da nana, da nana, da nana, da nana

Every Krip begins with K.

The fuck does Utah football have TWO players named Zane?
Biblical thing? Or Book of Mormon, whatever?

The mind, the body -- they're in cahoots!

Workday line item blog

2009-12-13T14:29:00.000-08:00

figured i'd try this instead of a dozen fbook statuses

sun 12/13/09

Workday line item blog

Corduroy pants say 'zhoop-zhoop'.

Now as always, i spend probably 4 times more time reading reviews and writeups of videogames than I ever do actually playing them. Playing a game is, for me, often a lot more like reading something than like anything else. Not always; and it's those exceptions that actually keep me attached to the medium and the pursuit, after all these years.

Chaos Overlords... Chaos Overlords.... nostalgia attack!... horck! God that was a great game. And I'd actually win that one once in a while. And it was kind of ok that that happened. Which made it ~extremely~ unique.
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/339/Chaos+Overlords.html

ribs

Especially unwilling to work today.

SCOOP Jardine!

I love anyone named/nicknamed Scoop. There used to be a radio campaign for something or other in CHicago which was always presented by a character named Scoop Jones. For no real reason. They just needed a name, and they went with Scoop Jones.
"Scoop Jones here, drinking some fresh-brewed coffee from White Hen Pantry", e.g. I just always really liked it, mostly b/c that was kind of all they had in those commericals, and it wasn't much.

Sir Finance. Sir Finance!

Why did my belch just taste like cloves? Was it a whiff of bile? Do cloves (the spice) taste/smell like bile?

That scream's no more female than I am.

http://www.sirfinance.com/ <-------------- perfect

Superhero League of Hoboken!!!!!! Now that was a nother GREAT game! Oh man.. oh man. Maybe the best superhero game before Freedom Force (which took like 10-15 more years to come along), despite being delightfully deliberately ridiculous.

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/245/Superhero+League+of+Hoboken.html

The ladies volleyball team patting each other on the ass between plays comes off very differently than when football players do it.

"George Carl's nuggets"

Grandpa's Medicine

2009-12-04T04:45:00.000-08:00

From the AV Club Q&A: "Holiday drinks of choice:":
_________________________________

Genevieve Koski
Holiday boozing has always meant one thing in my family: shots of “Grandpa’s medicine,” or Southern Comfort. Since I was a kid, every family gathering, without fail, would be interrupted by loud, obnoxious, fake coughing from my grandpa, which would be everyone’s cue to gather round and do a shot of SoCo. He died before I was old enough to take part—to anyone’s knowledge, that is—but thankfully, the tradition has lived on, with theatrical “coughing” fits punctuating every family Christmas.

____________________________________

Big families rule.

Deserve is a usefully malleable word

2009-11-01T14:12:00.001-08:00

I really really like it when you can say what you mean because you know the people you're saying it to will hear it the way they want:

Reaching new heights of disinterest

2009-11-01T06:57:00.001-08:00

The peaks are intense, man.

Things I've learned recently

2009-10-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

I need people to care, and make the firstmove. If I fish for it it's useless.

I am afraid of success. The area where my age-old passive-aggressive tendencies survive the strongest is in self-sabotage.

here's a picture of a bucket on an animal's face:

Flashpoint -- Do It Now!!!

2009-10-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

Again, I sincerely love CBS/CTV's "Flashpoint" in a wholly non-ironic way. It's a really good show, for reasons I'll outline later.

But there's no denying this clip.

When should he comply with your requests, officers?

"Shirley, please pass me the salt, do it now.
"Daphne, arms off the table, do it now!
"This is really good, honey, I hope you make this again.

"Do it now."

Add the Audio in Post

2009-10-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

Flashpoint, the Canadian import that will return to CBS midseason this year, is one of my favorite shows on broadcast TV.

That said, it's the delightfully obvious dubbed-in-afterwardness of the Car Crash Guy in this this clip that makes me love it so:

They really let him go to town.

More Flashpoint in a moment.

Bette Midler to Serve Jail Time

2009-10-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, she called me on it.

I shouldn't only post here when I'm sick of work

2009-10-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

But

Here I

go

Perfect Scale

2009-10-03T15:13:00.002-07:00

http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=322198.0

From the builder:

A friend came to my home and saw this scale in my guest bath. She then commissioned me to make one for her daughter in law who has been dealing with an eating disorder for the last 10 years. The only thing I asked before designing it was her favorite color, and that is purple.

This warmth of this action and its post, and the openness and honesty that must most likely be present in the requester, her family, and her daughter-in-law, make me mist. I hope my own young family will be the type that can operate this way, if and when its times of trouble come.

Work crap again

2009-09-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

Aw, man, here it is again. I'm sitting here and I don't want to be here or do this. I have rather a lot to get done in the hour and a half I have left here, which means I've got to really truly get down to it and focus and stay focused.
But I just. don't. want. to.
All I can tell myself is that this job pissed me off a little bit yesterday, on a personal level, and so my resistance today is out of anger and hurt and truculence, and that's not cool, that's no reason to get yourself in actual fucking trouble with the place where you earn the money your family needs.
Let's see if that fucking works.

YOu can't call it dilligence

2009-09-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

If I were a guy who "I write every day, 15 minutes minimum. That's how I make a practice out of it and make it not such a big damn deal. That way, when I've Really Got Something To Say*, it'll come right out, no issues, no snags, har be har bo who ba doo!", then I could say "we've got free time at work, and before I spend the rest of it watching more web videos, I figured I'd do my due dilligence and get my writing for the day done now." But I can't call it due dilligence if it ain't due. And it ain't. Blarp.
--------
Just caught up on my friend Tony's rather successful web series "The Legend of Neil", after a long damn time of being behind, and I really really like it.
--------
Computers are like rails for me, but not rails to anything useful. Rails, instead, immediately away from anything useful. Which is a shame since so many of my useful plans have sitting at a computer as their primary means. Probably, I need to create a lot of active, intense amusements that have nothing to do with screens or electronics or electrics of any kind (i'm pretty much thinking of playing soccer or maybe building lean-tos or something in the woods, here), so that there will be where I have my fun, and the computer won't feel like that. So that when I sit down at a screen, all may parts won't go "Ah! Here be fun and dissolution!".

Because for now, I ain't getting shit done in my copious down time. And by "for now" I mean, like, for the past goddamn 3-8 years. And by "down time" I mean unstructured time.
------

*I went all Nick Hornsby on that one and I knew i was doing it** and decided to do it anyway, telling m'self I'd make it all right with a self-aware asterisk-note. But self-aware goes TOO FAR sometime, doesn't it?

**I don't know that I was doing it. I thought I was. But I don't know for sure that that's Going Nick Hornsby at all. It's who I think of, and since I just read _High Fidelity_ a cuople weeks ago, I may be right. But I'm not sure. You care!

One week later, twitchy again

2009-08-30T09:12:00.001-07:00

Yep, twitchy, twitchy again.

[Edit-- In fact Iw as so twitchy I never got back to this post to finish it. Now it's a week later. Wha har!]

DREADNOKS

2009-08-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

I just realized that the inevitability of there being GI Joe movie sequels means that at some point we are probably going to get to see DREADNOKS.

What made me think of this was that I thought of Dreadnoks for some reason, and then thought up a status update taht involved Dreadnoks, and then it dawned on me.. the above.

The status update was "is drinkin' grape soda like a Dreadnok".

2009-08-24T08:27:00.001-07:00

Yo, CBS: calling "The Good Wife" "TV's most-anticipated new drama" doesn't make it so.

Murderous at the office

2009-08-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

It's time, it's only time, that I'm killing.* And I don't particularly have it to kill. I just get so.. antsy is maybe the closest word to what it is. I feel like I'm gonna burst, like I'm shooting forward with some kind of momentum and every time I attempt to focus my momentum on the work i have to do, I smack right into it and just skid right off its tip and back into the soft stunt cushion of the various online crap.

On the weekends I can literally go into the dining room and do pushups or something to sort of bleed off a bit of the energy and equalize the pressure a bit, but that's not an option here on weekdays b/c it's just too crowded and this isn't Google or Ion Storm or something; eccentricity isn't fostered.

*I like how I felt the need to clarify right up front that I wasn't actually killing or in danger of killing any living thing. How dangerous I expect you to regard me.

Chief Tyrol-- I mean, Chief.. something something

2009-05-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

From IMDB news -

In February, CBS announced it was joining CTV in picking up The Bridge, a procedural crime drama starring Aaron Douglas (Chief Galen Tyrol on Battlestar Galactica) as a former cop turned union boss.

I love Galactica. But after the first season, the Chief rapidly became one of the worst things about the show. He was your go-to guy if you needed your disbelief unsuspended as quick as possible.

Me Angery!

He's fat enough to be a union boss, anyway. If this were a political cartoon from the 1910s!!

Zing.

Chocolate cookies

2009-04-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

The Boy and I made these cookies tonight, more or less. I swung real sloppy on the amounts, and we didn't have any brown sugar so at Jenny's suggestion we just used white sugar for the whole amount and then added some molasses.

I didn't want to leave the kitchen to find the ratio of molasses/sugar for substituting, so I just threw some in there.

They came out really good. Also, we chopped up Easter chocolates in place of choco chips. And Buzzy donated some of his own Reese's Pieces.

Now you know all about our cookies!

Joan Collins

2009-04-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

Reminded, by the 1987 Letterman Top Ten list "Peter Holm's Top 10 Grievances Against Joan Collins," that Joan Collins used to be to "loose woman" as Viagra is to "bone-yab", I Googled her name to see what see looked like back in the day.

Came up with this delightful piece from the Telegraph:

Joan Collins: the day I said no to James Bond

A glimpse of the swanky side of the past from someone you don't hear from all the damn time.

Sutherland/Letterman: Talkin' bout jail

2009-04-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

Here's Keifer Sutherland on Letterman, CBS era, talking about his stint in LA County Jail. He's well candid and human about the whole thing. Strikes the right tone exactly -- not too light, not too serious. Just simultaneously light and serious.

The thumbs bit is hilarious, and he actually answers the #1 question that everyone wants to ask anyone who goes to jail. He does so without Dave even having to ask, which is nice since Dave wouldn't've. Not these days.

The dumb CBS player will throw a commercial at you before and after, I'm afraid.

Letterman Top Ten Lists, 1987-89

2009-04-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

You're 9. You're in bed. You hear your mom laughing downstairs. What is she laughing at?

Maybe the "ashtray" you made in art class and gave her for Mother's Day. She doesn't smoke. If she did, she wouldn't trust her ashes to this lumpy fuchsia monstrosity. What a fool you are. What a fool.

Or maybe she's laughing at one of these Top Ten lists from Late Night with David Letterman on NBC , from June 1987 through December 1989.

lookalikes

2009-02-28T10:25:00.000-08:00

Nothing to add, this is just very nice:

http://www.sweetsauer.com/kristis_bliggitty_blog/2008/08/look-alikes.html

Examples:

Your dj truck ran into my violin truck

2008-02-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

Awesome is as awesome does, motherfuckers.

When they bust into the Roots - dynamite.

via collegehumor

IDIOT TOYS: Tech reviews for the bored: Natalia Bonarenko sacked for lack of effort

2007-12-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

I like to check in now and then at Idiot Toys; they do a thing there where they take the tons of promotional photos they receive and treat them as entries in an ongoing competition. On the right days I find it hysterical. They're fully deadpan.

An excellent example is IDIOT TOYS: Tech reviews for the bored: Natalia Bonarenko sacked for lack of effort

Andrew WK

2007-03-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

That's Andrew WK and me. You know, just hanging out after a good nights' work.

Salesmanship

2006-12-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

From a woot.com product description:

We can throw around terms like “four inputs” and “80 watts”
and “built-in subwoofer” all day, but what good are such bloodless
phrases? Let us put it this way: either the MAINStage Sound System will make your TV, DVD,
iPod, Xwiistation, or laptop sound way, way better, or we’ll drink a
12-oz. glass of our own urine. That’s how much we believe.

How does anyone not love woot?

Testings, testings, 1, 2... 3?

2006-11-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

Hrm.. just testing out this firefox extension ("performancing")... let's see if it works.

i'll store this with the Cheek Squeezers

2006-10-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

Yonder an important product.

The "May we suggest..."s at the bottom complete the perfection.

toast

2006-10-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

This made me laugh out loud. The text, that is. The concept is awesome, and no laughing matter.

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/10/04/toast_printer_i.html

"what the shit is this?"

2006-10-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

Too many awesomes to count in this clip here, but I will add that I've seen this movie at least twice and I didn't ever notice the massive, massive microphone creepage going on. I think my noticing it now is an unfortunate effect of seeing it in this small size, where you can see pretty much the whole image without moving your eye much. Anyway, I could have sworn this was the scene in which Dolemite utters the famous words, "Those aren't my furs", but I guess I was wrong. Please enjoy.

To see it in a bigger size, go here.

(click in the white space to start it)

i know

2006-09-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

yes I realize that last one's up twice. one has the video, one the still. Didn't mean for em both to post, can't decide which of the two to delete. So they're staying.

gui(guitar)tar

2006-09-28T18:32:00.001-07:00

You know what I like? I'll tell you what I like: guys who play guitar who have pictures of guitars around in the space where they play. It's as though they often get to the room and are like, "Hmm... now what did I come in here to.. ah! That's right! Guitar!" and then they get going.

gui(guitar)tar

2006-09-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

I have a new tiny graphics tablet

2006-07-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Jenny's awesome mom, Denise gave me for my birthday the macally "icecad" mini graphics tablet. How Denise osmosed that a graphics tablet was up by the top of my things I want to get list, I do not know, but this one's very nice and allows me to do drawings like this one here. And so the world may now finally move forward, assured that it's need for fine art will no longer go unfulfilled. Drawing is fun.
The device is allegedly for mac only, but in europe it's marketed as mac or windows and if you go to the company's european webisite you can find all the drivers you need to make it work on your xp machine.
The things a little squirrelly yet, but I only tinkered with the settings for 2 minutes before I had to rush into photoshop and get the vision you see above out into the world. I'm confident the little thing and me will get along just fine. Thanks, Denise! Well done, you crafty lady.

the tablet

Placeholder

2006-06-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

Place holder.....here.