huchu

pictures for sad children. Click through for full comic.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:27:38 -0800

pictures for sad children. Click through for full comic.

Today was not so hot.

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:34:00 -0800

So I am going to take my anger out on the English language.

1.) Moisturizer. Bastardizer. Butcherizer.
2.) He said he was French, begging the question, where did he get a German accent?
3.) Jill owned the table, Jack owned the chair.
4.) I don’t know to whom I should address this letter to.
5.) To be or to not be.
6.) Because of its enigmatic origins, the diamond was highly-desired.

Take that, pedantry!

it's my blog and I'll be overwrought and dramatic if I want to

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:49:27 -0800

hnnngggrrghghrr

I AM NOT EVEN REMOTELY QUALIFIED TO DO THINGS

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:04:41 -0800

Phoenix - Lizstomania / One time too many - A Take Away Show

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:05:00 -0800

Phoenix - Lizstomania / One time too many - A Take Away Show

Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:50:00 -0800

Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous

You could also contrue this as a commentary on the writerly habit of using real people as prosaic devices (or shall we say "tools"), but that's an interpretation present only in this title and nowhere else, and only a real jerkface would think that, anyway.

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:44:58 -0800

There’s this unfashionable¹ saying: A gentleman never kisses and tells.

So—not to accuse anyone of ungentlemanly behavior, though that is exactly what I am about to do, I don’t think T has ever heard this saying. And T’s verbose.² It’s his verbosity that makes me think I shouldn’t be surprised at his cavalier kiss-then-tell M.O. But excusing that, then going through the list of situations in which a kiss may be told of and gentlemanhood still retained—and I have, though it is a long list—and then finangling his situation into those situations, you’ll find there are more tells than excuses. Case in point, T has told of a kiss while it was still in progress. He once answered his phone with, “Hey, I’m making out with my girlfriend right now. What’s up?”

Duly noted. Thanks for the update, chief.

What the hell? How are you supposed to respond to that? My first instinct was to straight up walk away from the phone, which was maybe the point of his TMI greeting. But if that’s how it’s gonna be, then why not, like, not be an asshole about it and just let the call go to voicemail?

So maybe unsurprisingly, T’s not too good at healthy romantic relationships. He went through a messy breakup a couple years ago, but his current position relative to that particular ex is unique in that they still hook up regularly. (Again, for emphasis: this is two years after the fact.) It’s not obvious at first what his feelings are for this girl. On the one hand, you can ask him about her (while she’s not around, obviously), and he’ll launch into a faintly misogynistic diatribe on how he doesn’t “get” women.³ On the other hand, he is Jell-O when he talks to her. He gladly goes out of his way to see/do something for her. And this would be sweet in a naïve puppy-love too-eager-to-please way, except this is T we’re talking about. If you catch him after he has a hookup with this girl, and if he happens to be talkative about the matter (which is way more common than you’d expect, even by T standards), he calls her a bitch and swears he hates her, and the sense I get is that T (who is, I won’t lie, probably a total goddamn psychotic) does this just so he can tell everyone that he hatefucks her biweekly, and when he says that the ex is only using him, the hypocrisy is choking.

—

¹ I don’t think it’s any less true these days, mind, but it’s definitely an old person saying, and I’ll bet any youngster who says it dresses in tweed and has one foot in the grave.

² For example: You can ask him a question re.: a certain popular YA fantasy novel, say—although given the sort of topics that come up when T is in the room, that’ll really be a video game question—and rather than getting a brief and reasonable summary (“A kid finds out he’s a wizard and goes on wacky wizard adventures.”), T’ll give you a full description of every little detail (“And the kid knows he’s different because every day strange things happen around him, like when he’s at the zoo for his cousin’s birthday party, the glass on a snake tank disappears suddenly while the cousin’s nose is pressed up against—oh, by the way, the snake is from,” etc.), and if you were to keep a written transcript of this section of the conversation (and honestly this bit is often the conversation killer because T’s verbosity makes further discussion seem exhausting and unappealing), you’d end with with what almost amounts to the CliffNotes of this particular work of fiction. (Except critical analysis of themes/symbols/etc. would be absent because T is logic oriented and comp sci besides, and so he’s convinced that all of that English stuff is a crock-pot of bubbling horse shit. Which is not to say that Harry Potter means much beyond a rollicking good time, but that’s really not the point I’m trying to make.)

³ Not sure if he means “become physically intimate with” or “understand the emotions of”; he rants for minutes, but he somehow never makes it completely clear which. I never feel like asking him to clarify.

A Softer World: 527

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:41:18 -0800

A Softer World: 527

I found this awful, awful comic today. Is there supposed to be a...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:13:00 -0800

I found this awful, awful comic today. Is there supposed to be a joke here? What the fuck?

Aimee Mann - The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:55:35 -0800

Aimee Mann - The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist

In which a Drizzle is Outlasted

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:22:00 -0800

[So—I wrote this a couple days ago for #tumblr52-5, except I chickened out posting it here because posting it here would be an inexcusable breach of the boundaries between cute cats and the mysterious OB, so naturally I posted it on the OB instead (meaning you might’ve already read this), but what I’m trying to say is, everything’s been all kinds of fucked recently anyway, so fuck that rule too, even if it is a little late going up here, and anyway, I like it.]

Monday and the barista smirks but does not call the drink. The half calorie he’d spend shouting “Americano!” would be wasted upon me. His smile had been strained, his tone condescendingly chipper, his espresso pulled from grounds five shots too old. I am at risk of making proud some persnickety old fart who says things like “whippersnapper.” But service is dead—seriously! I need this coffee, my eyes tell him. Help me. And he looks down and says No. Rucking Forschach. Expected better from him than that; I should be in the bad mood, not the ass with access to one hundred-plus pounds of caffeinated dirt. I’m sleeping on my feet. The act of opening eye before noon, surprising. Before ten o’clock, extraordinary. Before eight, superhuman. Before six, mechanical; nothing alive about it. Bones swiveling on X- or Y- or Z-axes. Unruly stairs and gravitational action are the lightning to my Frankensteinian abomination. (Just using words now.) Rain starts when I’m halfway to work. Monday and all is hell. Eight o’clock and sweaty. Lets up by teatime. Fog settles during dinner. The Tacoma Aroma is a combination of wood pulp and flatulence. As if Seattle, weary of Atlas-ing the Puget Sound, takes a restful squat for just a second and ejects an olfactory delight.¹ Over dinner, two others fall in conversational step. Their syllables tangle together in perfect syncopation. I admire that, but jealously; I sound like I have Parkinson’s and a drum set if I try to get a word in. I spend twenty-eight of thirty-six dinner minutes staring into ciabatta and salami, then return to my room to refill my pens and buy more ink, which is a little bit satisfying. The stink always piggybacks the fog. Work boring. Classes unfocused. Something half-hearted about each. All let out early; we’ll do better tomorrow, we agree.

—

¹ Of course, the smell does not come from Seattle but actually Tacoma itself, so it’s more like T-Town is Dutch-ovening itself, although why it puts itself through this torture is hard to say. Anyway, smelly.

There is zero way that Carly Fiorina’s political attack ad...

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:38:00 -0800

There is zero way that Carly Fiorina’s political attack ad on Tom Campbell is not some bizarre metapolitical commentary, and I submit the last minute as proof.

re.: tao lin

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:07:00 -0800

[you can read a passage of tao lin’s recent-ish book, Shoplifting from American Apparel here.]

Maybe I just don’t “get” Tao Lin, but it’s like this: Lin’s got this total thing for youthful (mid-twenties, youthful, that is, not like teens youthful) irony and malaise (because let’s face it who doesn’t), and maybe Lin’s fans will tell me, like, he approaches these themes with irony in order to subvert/deconstruct the sardonicism that’s eating away at modern youth, or something like that. Which means that he’s being ironic about irony, which means he’s actually being sincere, but he’s sincere in an ironic way, or maybe ironically sincere, or sincerely ironic. So here’s the big question: if you have to hide your sincerity behind cynicism, why even bother?

edit: I’m not putting this very well. I mean to say, irony is an effective rhetorical technique and sometimes wicked funny besides, and I don’t have like this seething hatred of it; it’s just, I read Shoplifting and really what’s the goddamn point? Maybe there’s not any point, which would make sense given this book, but then why does the book make it a point (if you will) to make pointlessness so, well, pointless? It’s like not-meaning-what-he’s-saying is the only thing Lin knows, and he knows how utterly vacuous life becomes when you never mean what you say/say what you mean, and so he decided to say what he means by not meaning what he’s saying. Which is a tried-and-true use of rhetorical humor, but when you really consider what Lin is doing, i.e. ironically saying that irony works but really meaning that irony really doesn’t—it’s awfully self-defeating.

Or maybe I just didn’t get it.

Beirut - Scenic World

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:16:12 -0800

Beirut - Scenic World

Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State;...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:06:49 -0800

Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; or, Letters From Me To Charlotte

ΘΘ [photo via]

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:32:00 -0800

ΘΘ

[photo via]

I was thinking of drawing an hourly comic

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:50:50 -0800

I was thinking of drawing an hourly comic:

But I realized half of it would be me reading books in dead silence and the other half me pretending to do homework but actually checking Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook, and even I in all my self-absorbsion could not being myself to read, let alone draw stick figures for, such banality. So. Good story.

Achewood § January 31, 2010

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:35:52 -0800

Achewood § January 31, 2010

Dinosaur Comics - February 1st, 2010 - awesome fun times!

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:25:17 -0800

Dinosaur Comics - February 1st, 2010 - awesome fun times!

i just lost two tumblr followers because of that

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:07:51 -0800

well, i laughed.