Mishaps and Bubble Wrap

Three terms of art history, and it is still almost impossible for me to spell "Renaissance" correctly when writing notes.

I think that it was hilarious. There certainly will be better Superbowl halftime shows, and there certainly will be worse, but XLV's was hilarious because of just how out of control it became:

• Fergie: When you are combined with a bad microphone and trying too hard, you start to sound like Adam Sandler. You are a better singer than that.
• The people or person in control of the sound board: Some of this is partially your fault. Weird lagginess and sound issues shouldn't be happening at an event that is viewed not only nationally but world-wide.
• Weird transition from "I've Gotta Feeling" to "Boom Boom Pow": That was...weird. I don't know if that was supposed to be some sort of attempt to be cultural or they needed a quick transition or what, but that was very weird sounding, and I half expected Fergie and will.i.am to start salsa dancing to it.
• The light up one piece outfits the dancers wore: Those were FUN and kind of really cool. Oh man.
• The four giant green people arrows: I did not understand this. Yes, they imply a forward movement, but they were just random. I understood the giant while people arrow "clicking" on the stage when Slash showed up, but the green arrows were odd.
• All five million dancers on the field: I'm guessing the choreographer was trying for a "Beijing Olympics opening ceremony" feel? There were too many of you and it didn't seem as if there was enough rehearsal time beforehand, and unfortunately it showed. If you are going to make giant concentric circles on the stage, you need to make sure you do it right.
• Taboo: You point your finger and spaceship noises happen. Enough said.
• apl.de.ap: Based on your voice modifier and your mention of Cybertron during "Boom Boom Pow", I have concluded that you are really secretly a Transformer. I feel as if this one-ups Tony Starks announcement that he is Ironman.
• Slash: Uh...you just sort of showed up. Like, you just popped out of the stage. At that point I was honestly expecting more random musicians to show up out of nowher-oh hey, Usher just flew out of the sky on a chain!
• Fergie (again): What are you doing while you walk around Slash. You look confused, like the little kid at the talent show who gets shoved out on stage with her older sibling and doesn't really know what to do when she's not singing. Mind you, he kind of had an air of indifference about him, and you both seemed slightly confused and/or lost, but he pulled it off loads better as he just kept playing. Though, as per my searching, you sing "Sweet Child of Mine" with Slash on a semi-occasional basis (news to me), but you can also can apparently sing it much more successfully than you did here. I guess there's a difference in singing on a stage facing one direction and a stage that is focused on a giant audience in central style staging.
• The random drummers and trumpet players who showed up during "Pump It": You kind of added to the overall clutter of too many people. Shoo!
• Usher: You were lifted up by several dancers in an almost cheerleader-like pose at one point, and then jumped over will.i.am and landed in a sort of split jump.  Many manly points of hilariousness to you. There is also one point where you are dancing and all of your dancers sort of fan out and you pop out and say "oh myyy god". I really want to have this as a gif.
• The stage: Actually kind of great seeing as it was designed to be put together and spell out "LOVE". That's pretty cool. The world always needs more of that. This would have been even cooler if there hadn't been five million dancers running around.
• Lack of audience on the field: Half of the fun is the fact that there are several hundred raving fans who paid some absurd amount of money and probably had to go through a background check to get tickets to be on the field during halftime.
• Watching every person on the entire field do the running man and then multiple heel clicks in sync: Ok. I'll give that one to the choreographer. That was pretty neat.
• Whoever designed the outfits: I fully expect to see these for sale on various websites with two of the search tags being "Steampunk inspired" and "TRONish".

I think if they'd just had the magic transforming stage, the Black Eyed Peas singing, a proper number of dancers that were only on the stage and not on the field, an actual audience surrounding the stage, and I guess we could still throw Slash and Usher in there during their respective appearances, it would have been a lot more successful. It still was quite fun, regardless of how over the top-silly-funny-out of control-ridiculous-hilarious it became.

In other news, Ashton Eaton broke his own heptathlon world record and Yelena Isinbayeva came back after a 11 month hiatus and won the Russian Indoor meet with a vault of 4.91m this morning.

Boyfriend is super adorable to listen to when he's watching the game. Especially when his team wins.

This thing is stupidly difficult to write.

You still haven't written it.-FN

YOU FINALLY WROTE IT.-FFN

Snail helmet.

That image link above is a design I did for a helmet design contest a local bike company was doing. Basically, design a helmet based off of a certain brand of helmet makers helmets (which often "feature whimsical, ironic, sometimes loud, other times just plain pretty designs"), and then we'll pick our favourite and the designer gets a $500 gift card to our store.

Now, this was something I'd heard about a few weeks before, but forgot about until Friday, the day before it was due. So, in a "oh, I have a couple hours this morning and afternoon before track practice. Let's see what I can create in that time....except I don't really have time to do this via pencil or charcoal or paint, sooooooo tablet drawing it is" moment, I gave it a shot. I kind of went into it at that point with the notion that I was doing this for fun as well as a bit of practice with the tablet, seeing as I rarely use it because it feels weirdly confining in comparison to other mediums.

So, imagine my surprise when I came home this evening to an email saying that I'd won. Even better? My mom said that if I won, she'd trade me $500 for the gift card because she's been wanting to get a bike from that company for a while. So, hey there money that will help with maybe buying a new camera body since my Nikon's apparently decided to kick the bucket today after two and a quarter years or maybe making it to one or two of these conventions.

Also, check it. I made some real Bionicles arts with a silly title.

Watch out.

In other news, I am supposed to do a documentary photography project for photojournalism. It is supposed to last for the next nine weeks (until the end of term). Each week I am supposed to shoot at a minimum either one 36 exposure roll of film or the equivalent 75 digital images. The instructions talk about how we are not supposed to choose a subject matter that is too grandiose, or requires traveling (given the amount of bad weather we've been having). My professor gave ideas such as "activities in a campus group", "life in your apartment building", "life in the local laundromat, grocery store, etc." He also talks about how we owe our subjects honesty, honesty in our vision, in what we tell our subjects about our projects and its purpose,  honesty in how we approach our subject, and honesty in what we present to the viewer.

In the end we will have proof sheets from each week, and 20-25 final photos chosen that are titled, as well as a several page paper of explanatory text about the project.

The problem is that I don't really know what to shoot. I would just go and say "I'm going to have my camera with me all the time for the next nine weeks and I will document my surroundings as I go along with each day, but that would mean one week on repeat times nine. I would do something with following the various athletic teams here and shoot photos at various games and meets throughout the term, but I'm trying to do something with that already for an independent photo credit thing, but currently that's sort of falling through, as neither side (the athletic department and my photography professor) seems to have the right info about it to get it started.

So, yeah. Any ideas? This town is small and boring as I'll get out. The last time I did a project about how the overall lack of anything in this town reflected on its surroundings, it kind of got shot down.

DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS DUCKS



We have our secret cue cards, we apparently have LEGO men cheering for us in the stands, we are ready, so let's win this!

Very late posting these to maj, but the mix of a backlog of editing and uploading many other photos and school/other priorities kept them from being posted until now.

I think my only request is if you or anyone wants to use these photos for something (a photo of one of your MOCs, a photo of you, etc.) please message me and ask first. I generally don't mind, but if I start finding my photos being used without my permission, I'll be sad that people are stealing and thinking it's ok and I'll likely request that you remove the image(s). Other than that, enjoy!

My New Year's Eve (aka, the night of the warning signs) was spent at first in a venue with three of my friends. One of them had suggested the venue as it was all ages and one of the bands had graduated in the same high school class as us and they had been pretty good then so we figured it'd be cool to see them again. This was quite fine and dandy until the guy who took our money said:

"Yeah, just head down the stairs to the basement. Careful, the stairs are slippery!" (warning sign #1)

We proceeded to head down to the basement to find a small stage, two '70s era couches, three other people, and the band, who was setting up. We quickly claimed a couch.

And then, we waited. It was supposed to start at 8, but 8 quickly passed as we watched the band set up, and the occasional person wandered downstairs. Then, (warning sign #2), a guy with an electric guitar pulled on a plastic wrestling mask and started to play. His friend joined in quickly on the drums, and proceeded to help his friend create what sounded roughly like a continuous car crash with the occasional melodic rift, complete with large amount of frantic, fish-like flailing on the floor from the guitarist (warning signs #3 and 4). This eventually ended, and while we tried to figure out if that was the first band of the night, the other band (who we presumed was the band we knew from high school, as all of the people on the stage were the ones we knew) decided that it was about time for them to start playing. One of the guys walked out wearing a three piece suit that nearly matched the couch we were sitting on, while the other three members pulled on Halloween monster masks. After the bassist taped the paper chain links that were hooked to giant cardboard dollar signs around his wrists, he yelled a few things into the microphone while hitting some effects pedals, angrily ripped his arms out of the paper chains and they all started playing (warning signs #5, 6, and 7).

This band continued the trend by mainly making lots of noise with the occasional melodic rift, but with the addition of the bassist singing while mashing his 10+ effect buttons (warning sign #8). They made it through their first song as more people trickled in, and after some prompting, they played a second song. Throughout this, the drummer looked like he was about to cry, possibly out of anger of having to play a second song or because he kept having to switch to different wigs that were hanging on his cymbals (warning sign #9).

The band ended and started packing up their stuff and moving it to their van. At that point, we were thoroughly confused on what we had just seen and starting to wonder if those really were two of the three bands we were going to see that night. More people continued to file into the basement, bringing various "mysterious" bottles of liquids hidden in paper bags with them (not really a warning sign for us, but I guess for most others, warning sign #10).

The friend who had originally suggested going to this venue and was sitting on the opposite side of the couch texted me:

Him: These bands suck. Does this make me uncool?
Me: No..? I thought you'd been here before though? Also, if that was band 2 of 3, I will be very angry at this venue.
Him: I've never been here before, I was just picking out all-ages shows. Hopefully it will get better...
Me: The CD of filler music has been better than anything. (it was. Even if it was the same five songs on repeat, one which included a part where a man repeated "JAMES BROOOOWN. JAMES BROWN. JAMES BROOOOWN. JAMES BROWN" for several verses)

A half hour passed. Still no band graced the stage. One friend pulled out her iTouch and the four of us played Trivial Pursuit on it for another 45 minutes. At that point, the basement was full of people and the next band was nowhere in sight (warning sign #11). The time was nearing in on 10pm, and at that point, we said "we're gone", sealing the act with the couch promptly being claimed by several other concert goers the moment we stood up.

We then decided to go to a place downtown called The Roxy, an 24/7 diner, that (as it was first described to me) was a place that had very good food and was covered with framed autographed photos of drag queens with the occasional photo of Oprah or Bill Clinton tossed in. The friend who had suggested the venue said he felt awful about the whole ordeal, so he offered to buy us all drinks, in the "aw, only one out of the four of us is 21 and this place doesn't serve alcohol. Coffee and hot chocolate it is!" sense. We celebrated the New Year while eating pancakes, discussing the merits of a mystery grocery (where all the food would be hidden in plain boxes, leaving the items you bought to be a mystery until you opened them), debating whether one of our friends who was out was dancing on tables yet, listening to the people in the bar next door sing karaoke (they were quite good), and watching people joyously stumble by the window in fancy clothes and high spirits.

We left shortly after a drunk man several table away threw a fork at us. We're still not sure why, and we didn't stay to find out, lest the spoon and knife he still had followed.

It was a really great New Year's Eve.

REALLY good.

Oklahoma is better.

(not the musical)