Okay, this sucks. Allegedly, the owners of the furniture store building down in HelMel painted over one of my favorite murals in Los Angeles. Now it only exists in pictures…
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Never Forget
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That’s How I Roll Too…
I’m not sure what I like more, the legibility rant or the use of the word “motherfucker”… [via]
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Boba Fett = Pimp
Every so often I feel like I miss out by not making the trek down to Comic-Con. This is one of those times.
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Patchouli and Failure
Well Intentioned, Slightly Grungy Youth: Hey man, got a moment for Greenpeace?
Businessman: Got a moment for a shower, hippie?Oh Greenpeace street team, will you ever catch a break?
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Julia Nunes
For whatever reason, I’ve really been into Julia Nunes lately. Crystal introduced me to her mostly Uke oriented covers on YouTube a few months back and she ping ponged around in my brain until a week ago. While she does some solid originals, the standout tracks — for me at least — are her covers.
Since she doesn’t have any backup singers, she actually records herself singing vocal harmonies where necessary and cuts the videos together to achieve the desired effect. It’s pretty clever and makes me smile a whole bunch — so I’m hopeful that you’ll enjoy it too.
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Downtown’s Secret Community Pool
Today, the coworkers decided to celebrate the birth of our country a day early by grabbing a quick lunch by the pool at The Standard and taking a post nosh dip.
Apparently, all you need to do to swim in the rooftop pool is buy a drink or grab a bite to eat. Had I known this, I’d have tried pulling that little scam off much sooner.
Some hipster girl let us know that she makes it over to The Standard a few times a week despite working at the Bonaventure because it’s not too crowded on the weekdays. Good to know.
With that being said, mojitos run about $13 — and beers are only slightly less expensive — so you might want to take that into consideration.
Still, it’s a fun way to kill an afternoon. You should go try it sometime…
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Shuffling Around
Sorry about the bit of downtime this morning and afternoon, folks! I’ve been trying to spread the hosting for my domains across a few users and I managed to take down my site in the process. Apparently I forgot about the quirks involved in running WordPress under mod_php. D’oh!
Things are back up now tho — PHP as CGI FTW! — so no worries.
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Go Team Venture!
When I realized my brand new Guild of Calamitous Intent tee from AstroBase Go! had a decent sized hole where one shouldn’t be, I decided to mail them about it. Fabric imperfections happen from time to time — especially on American Apparel tees. After a little back and forth with Venture Bros. series creator Jackson Publick — mostly to send photographic evidence that the hole existed — I ended up getting this reply:
We’re happy to send you a replacement shirt which contains only the necessary number of holes to qualify as a shirt.
Hah! Good one! Well played, Mr. Publick…
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Drama Llama
I really wish Boing Boing would say something about what is going on with erasing every mention of Violet Blue from their site. Blog feuds — if that’s what this even is — are fucking retarded and I seriously thought the team over there was better than that.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Violet a few years ago and I’ve hung out with Cory, Xeni and Mark a number of times. From what I know, they’re all pretty reasonable folks. So if there’s a beef, please squash it. And put the posts mentioning Violet back or at least explain what’s going on. Your readers would really appreciate it.
Update: Boing Boing has addressed what is going on.
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Macbook Air vs. Girl Talk
As far as I’m concerned, this video is absolute genius. Of course, I might be a bit partial due to the fact that I’m totally in love with the new Girl Talk album — but that’s really beside the point.
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Vern Fonk
I find that one word sums these commercials up better than anything else: Shipoopi!
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Planning A Jailbreak
Now that it’s a given that I’m buying a 3G iPhone, I need to figure out how to use a jailbroken first gen iPhone to pull traffic data for my TomTom One. It might take a little work tho as Google’s not turning up any solid results.
Anyone on the LazyWeb have any ideas?
P.S. It might be a wise idea to buy .Mac at Amazon (for $69.99) in the next few days if you don’t already have it. That way, when MobileMe replaces .Mac you’ll have saved $30 on your first year of service.
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Bad Gas
It’s gas prices like these (spotted last night on the corner of Cahuenga and Franklin in Hollywood) that make me really glad that I take the Red Line to work.
It should be noted that I filled up on Monday in northernmost Orange County for $4.13 for regular — so this station is likely gouging a bit due to its proximity to the freeway and tourist spots — but that doesn’t really matter. This sign feels like a fairly decent indicator of what’s to come.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it looks like it’s time to go price out a bicycle…
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Embrace The Dork Side
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.
Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot -
Rebel Without A Pause
Dear iTunes,
Just because I have a habit of deleting podcasts from my library before I sync my phone doesn’t mean that I’m not listening to them anymore. So please don’t go and stop updating their feeds for me. I hate having to manually tell you that I want to keep listening to the shows that I love. I understand that you’re trying to be helpful and everything, but it’d be best if you’d just cut it the fuck out.
Love,
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It’s Oh So Quiet
There’s somebody who I care about and love a lot — and I haven’t been giving her the attention she deserves both on this blog and in other aspects of my life.
That person’s name is Sarah.
See? When was the last time I brought her up? It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Shame on me.
You know, when a relationship is fresh and new and you’re just crazy happy to even be in love? You want to sing that shit from the rooftops because it feels so good. That feeling of happiness doesn’t go away — but it does end up becoming something comfortable. It becomes so comfortable in fact, that you start taking the fact that you even have it at all for granted. The frequency of fawning blog posts drops and cameo appearances in your Flickr feed gradually slow to a near standstill as well.
Well, maybe not your Flicrk feed or blog. But that’s what’s happened with mine.
So why did that happen? It’s not like she’s gone somewhere. Hell, save for a few really rough patches where I’ve been a complete jackass, she’s been in my life all this time. And I haven’t stopped loving her or caring about her. In fact, my love for her grows every day. She’s a massive influence on my life and the decisions I make. This is something she’s aware of, but most of you have no idea about what’s going on at all.
As public a person as I am, I’ve been finding that I’m growing this tendency to want to keep parts of my life private. Mostly because the relationship I have with Sarah is just that — a private one. Then again, I could just be making excuses.
Still, I started out talking about her every chance I could get with glowing bits of praise and adoration. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that I never should have stopped doing that. She still lights up my insides with an intensity that is unrivaled — and the world deserves to know that.
So everyone, say hi to Sarah again. You’ll be seeing a lot more of her around these parts.
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The Importance of Being Earnest
A few days ago Michael Arrington dropped a piece of his Silicon Valley into my LA by throwing an absolutely massive party down here. And after talking things over with friends and spending some time thinking about the events of the evening I’ve realized that they are two great tastes that don’t really taste all that great together.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It was great to get some recognition from TechCrunch‘s ringleader that LA is a viable technology player by having him throw a 1500 person event with an open bar and Perry Farrell DJ’ing. As far as I’m concerned, that was totally welcome and downright awesome. Seriously, thank you for that.
But I have a modest request to send your way, Mr. Arrington. If you ever plan on throwing one of these gigantic tech mixers here again, please go ahead and leave the drama at home. Because I don’t know how the folks up your way do things — but your actions on Thursday don’t give me a very encouraging idea of how you handle your business and personal relations. One of the things I love about Los Angeles is the fact that the events that get thrown by the locals are — for the most part, anyway — pretty unpretentious and (to borrow a line from Andrew Warner) more about community than conflict.
A little over a year back, we had an issue with some BarCampLA attendees being problematic. And we’re talking far worse than just being annoying to the event organizers. Excessive and open alcohol and drug abuse, making female attendees feel uncomfortable and badgering speakers to the point where talks turned into one way shouting matches made some attendees leery of coming again. We had a few people who were ruining the community because they couldn’t behave like adults.
Instead of banning the people outright from our events and making a scene tho, we issued a code of conduct. If you couldn’t follow it, you were asked to leave and that was that. Yeah, it’s sort of a hippie thing to do — but it worked. The rules kept a tight enough rein on the people causing problems to the point where they either stopped coming or calmed down considerably. Sure, there were folks who didn’t want the people to have the opportunity to show up at all, but excluding people is not in the spirit of BarCamp.
Of course one could argue that the TechCrunch/PopSugar party was a ticketed, private event. Still, you would think that a quick search over the Excel spreadsheet before it was printed and a few emails to let people know they’re not welcome could have spared everyone involved a bunch of unnecessary bullshit.
Anyhow, if you need any tips for throwing an event down here Mike, just let me know. Even if you don’t want to deal with the likes of me, I can put you in contact with people who can help you save a bit more face and perhaps make you come off better than you managed to the other night.
I’m not a total curmudgeon about the evening by the way. The pre-event dinner at Palms Thai (props to Mike Prasad for putting that together), the people I hung out with at the party and the two afterparties that organized themselves via Twitter were fun as hell. What’s more, they boiled themselves down to the people that make this community great. So while the main event left me a bit drunk, cranky and in need of a shower, the rest of the night left me wonderfully full of hope and optimism for what we’re cooking up here. Our potential is limitless — and we’re just getting started.
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Motivation
“Everybody keeps on talking about it, nobody’s getting it done.”
LCD Soundsystem, “Yeah (Crass Version)“*sigh* I hate being one of those new age douchebags that talk about personal mantras — but I still feel compelled to share this.
I have to confess that every time I find myself hitting a brick wall mentally or I start lacking any sort of motivation, the line above manages to find its way into my head — and always at the right time.
And as cheesy as this might end up sounding, whipping out my iPod and giving the track a quick listen actually ends up pushing me forward. At that very second I want to be the person who stops letting the talk and bullshit cloud my mind and instead be the one who starts doing.
So that’s what I do. Well, for the most part anyway. I mean, it can never really be that simple, can it?
Still, I’ve realized the strength of this song. “Yeah” is my auditory can of spinach. It works really well at giving me short bursts of awesome, and that’s totally fine by me.
So what kicks your ass into high gear? Enquiring minds want to know.
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Movin’ On Your Left
One of the nice things about living in North Hollywood is that I’m less than a mile’s walk from the Red Line station. Because of this, I’ve been taking the subway into work every morning. There’s actually a few benefits to this:
- I get a nice walk at the start and end of my work day. And I’ll still continue to call it nice until Summer hits and the Valley gets over 100° F at 9 AM.
- Work pays for my metro pass. Well, they reimburse me for it whenever I get them the receipt. Still, the fact that they’re willing to pick up any of its cost is really nice of them.
- I find that I’m way less stressed when I don’t have to sit in traffic. Listening to a podcast or some music is way more chill when you don’t have to wonder why the guy in the other lane is drifting over for the nth time.
I do have one gigantic pet peeve tho — people who stand still on the left side of the escalator. Now I know that moving stairs are still a novelty to some, but most regular commuters know that the right is for standers and the left is for the folks who like beating those smug stair climbers out of the station.
I know it’s pompous for me to assume that Los Angeles is listening — especially when I have access to my site’s metrics and I know that my traffic falls well short of the city’s population — but please quit being part of the problem, left-standers. And for God’s sake, kindly get out of the way when someone says “excuse me”. I really hate getting pushy, but I swear that I will if I have to.