Last night the most remarkable series of things happened, resulting in a delightful print out just for you!
In #ormgas (the IRC channel for the OCR internet radio broadcast), Leissi pasted the following -

Notice: This Department requires no physical fitness program: everyone gets enough exercise jumping to conclusions, flying off the handle, running down the boss, knifing friends in the back, dodging responsibility, and pushing their luck.

Struck with inspiration, I decided to make a poster from this material. I also decided that the various cautionary signs from the game Portal, with their wet-floor-sign-guy-in-major-peril quality, were the absolute best to give some graphical window dressing to this wry jab at working life. (I realize the quote is rather old, but I’d forgotten all about it until Leissi was kind enough to remind me of it.)

After several fruitless searches (shocking with the amount of slavering Portal fanatics out there) in the ever-convenient Google Image Search, I finally dug up a panel of Portal’s caution signs. It wasn’t very large so I tried to resize it cleverly, but the end result was still fuzzy. Seeing as this was meant to be a five minute haha on my part, I wasn’t terribly concerned.

I did however take the time to change the saying slightly to make it more apropos to my own current working life. Pleased with myself, I saved a copy as a jpg and slapped it up in #ormgas, and in #ectomo.

I left shortly thereafter, and thought nothing of it, until I came in this morning and checked my gmail. What appeared before my eyes, but a white knight from the depths of #ectomo, Maicro, come to clean up the fuzzy Portal images and raise this snarky little geek joke to the next level of professional subversiveness.

Without further ado, a giant jpg for you to print and share with all the people who fill you with levels of contempt that are at best unhealthy and at worst result in much head explodey.

One million thousand thanks to Leissi and Maicro for their invaluable contributions in the field of snarky, passive-aggressive sign leaving technology. If you have opportunity, comment with links to photos of this particular sheet in action.

With all the talk of female body augmentation and supplementation, I felt it was high time somebody treat the subject with the respect it deserves… by turning it into a children’s workbook sheet and making a contest out of it.

Below are 2 PDFs and a JPG version, meant for 8.5×11 standard printing. I opted to keep it black and white so as not to disappoint those sans color printer (like myself). Photoshop and meatspace entries are welcome. Due to an alarming lack of popularity of RKNet, I’ll run this contest for 2 weeks, starting today. (This also gives me time to determine prizes. Reasonable suggestions welcome!) The last entries must be in by February 27th at noon (EST). After that, I and my esteemed colleagues will proceed to pass them around, get piss drunk, and pick one at random. Which means, gentle readers, that it doesn’t matter how “good” or “bad” you actually do at this activity, because winning isn’t so much based on merit, as it is favoritism and inebriated whimsy! Isn’t that great?

• 480k JPG version
• 1.9mb PDF
• 171k lower quality PDF

Edit: I’ve resized some of the images, and added the blog URL to the bottom. Please feel free to print copies and leave them about.

Just to keep things brief:
I dreamt I had a fish tank with a few kinds of viscious, snappy fish in it, and a small octopus and some other kind of shellfish or something. I accidentally screwed up the whole aquairum by collapsing one of the sides leaving only a tiny bit of water at the bottom, and nearly crushing the fish. I set everything back up and added in the appropriate salt water for this collection of pirhana like fish. (One looked like one of those clap-trap deals from Donkey Kong Jr.)
Next time I looked into the fish tank, it was full of irridescent octopi. They would look like small, but relatively normal, bluish and reddish octopi, then they would contract and glow in neon colors with cartoon faces. I watched this in fascination, as more were arrising, born out of the dead bodies of the fish that did in fact die because I had broken the tank.
That’s all I remember now. There was so much more. There has been so much more lately but I unfortunately haven’t had time to record the overall details. I have been told I need to watch Until the End of the World. …I can’t imagine why.

Hard on the heels of my DESU-related discovery, my friend Keith sent me a veritable dragon’s hoard of gamer themed motivational posters! Tabletop game nerds rejoice, because there are a lot of in-joke posters in here for you. A lot of good MMO, RPG and general geek goodness abound in this collection. I think I saved most of the ones I saw. With a staggering collection of 272 of these puppies, if this doesn’t burn out the humor value for you… then it means they really are just that funny!

I was so excited when I found out Wilco had a new album, entitled Sky Blue Sky, just the day after it released. I immediately downloaded it off iTunes and I’m loving every moment of it. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see them in concert this year. (You can subscribe to the tour update RSS feed with this link right here: http://wilcoworld.net/tours/wilcodates.xml) They are absolutely electrifying live, I just wish I’d gotten pictures.

Speaking of the sky and getting electrified, the other day we had some serious storms here in NH, and there was an actual tornado warning for the area. I told the people I was having lunch with (a New England native and a Floridian) that they didn’t really need to worry, because the sky hadn’t turned green yet. Having lived in central Illinois for several years, and having family who lived in the same area, I’d heard the tale that when the sky turns green, it’s time to run for cover. As it turns out, even science isn’t sure about why the sky turns green, and how often it is a true indicator of exceptionally foul weather to come! It does appear to be a common enough trend to be used as a common warning sign of possible tornadoes, though.

Found at least one decent photo over at stormeyes.org:

I sumbit the two images for your comparison:

Exhibit A: The first draft 2012 London Olympic logo. Garish and bizzare, it’s caused a lot of issues with people complaining of epileptic reations and a feeling of general disgust upon seeing it and the related media.

Exhibit B: An Eristic play off the Olympic logo.

Is it really such a stretch? Also, is it 1985? I seem to recall having socks this color when I was a girl. No lie.

Do you long for the days of ‘zines? Running off to follow loud bands who were either extremely concerned or extremely unconcerned with the way of the world? Dressing however you felt like, and sometimes with the express goal of freaking out the normals? Well I more-or-less don’t because I missed the whole thing. I was either too young or too oblivious to know what was up. I was also one of those irritating “good kids” who never really did anything they wanted if it seemed like it might be trouble. …I’ve come a long way, baby, but I digress.

My beloved ToM tipped me off to Operation Phoenix Records, with their already bold “fuck you” attitude towards concise domain names and more up-to-date web design have provided a stunning collection of punk ‘zines. Most of them are donated from kind collectors, and the folks at OPR seem to have dilligently gotten permission to reprint all of them. Whole magazines have been provided as PDFs, and band interviews are provided as regular pages, with acts ranging from GG Alin and Millions of Dead Cops to Black Flag and Nirvana. For your reading pleasure I give you a sneak peek at the GG Alin interview (as it was originally featured in Maximumrocknroll):

MRR: What are your feelings on the bands in NH and Massachusetts?

GG: I don’t fucking know. I’m not in tune to what’s going on at all. I’m not accepted in the scene. I just go about my fuckin’ life and my thing so I don’t really know what’s going on. I can’t even keep track of myself, so how can I know about that?

What’s funny about that is I don’t really know much about the New Hampshire and Massachusetts music scene either, except of course for Turbosloth.

P.S. You should definitely also check out the podcast! Episodes 5-11 of the CDRs Are for Communists Punk Radio Show are available right at the site.

I decided to run a google search for “needs more desu” (sans quotes in search) and I hit upon, through further exploration, the finest collection of user-generated motivation poster image macro items I’ve stumbled across in quite some time!
Enjoy!!

I couldn’t tell you why but I take such a perverse amount of pleasure in the Xs that keep cropping up in place of where my actual “friends” used to be. It’s almost enough to let this account sit here until this site officially implodes in on itself. Unfortunately it’s become such a haven for melodramatic teenagers (Gaia without the cute avatars?), that it is highly unlikely it will ever go away. While it is true some people do seem to use this for what could be claimed is its “original purpose”, based on my experience I think the vast majority are composed of about five types.

1 - Whores - This is a very broad category. This includes spam accounts to generate pay-per-click revenue for any number of ridiculous products, as well as people whose extreme attention seeking behavior earn them the more generic label of Ho. Just to clarify, this category includes:
~ jailbait who put up pictures of themselves in their underwear
~ “scene kids” nee “emo kids”
~ businesses who put up some manner of profile front (I’m looking at you Carlo Rossi),
~ And of course, actual whores and/or sluts (one expects cash and advertises as such, the other just makes you pay for everything then dumps you), etc.

2 - Drama Students - While I applaud the philosophy of “never stop learning”, this does not apply to the kind of overly melodramatic and destructive behavior that one is likely to pick up during the Junior High and High School years of one’s life. Quite frankly I never wanted to use the internet to find out who hates who and why, and it’s largely because I usually don’t give a flying fuck. I disrespect drama in all forms, but internet drama… Stupid to the nth degree. Whatever happened to the good old fist fight? The screaming match in public? People are getting awfully passive aggressive. I blame all that “self-esteem” crap they taught us when we were all little.

3 - Angst (omigod awesome link lol)- It comes from all sides. I’m guilty of a bit myself. It’s that bizzare ritual of self-deprication in public, seeking sympathy, understanding, and/or open communication from any source even if it includes a bunch of people you don’t really like all that much. Angst, drama, and whoring are usually daisy chained together 4lyfe, but this gets its own category because there are career angst-and-woe types out there who absolutely must insist that they are miserable (or perhaps really are miserable) at all times, in the most public ways possible. How many people really give half a thought to you? Probably not as many as you would hope. Learn to bottle and die early of heart disease, if it was good enough for your grandparents and great-grandparents, it’s good enough for you. (Then give me all your meds, maybe there will be something good in that pile of rubbish doctors prescribe for behavioral modification.)

4 - Fledgling Media Breakouts - Before the recent rash of whores through my approval box, the only time I would bother to check this thing is when some manner of small or local band wanted me to rally to their flag. Sure thing guys, more power to you I guess. Someday I might even stop being such a workaholic and find the time to go catch a show. Who knows?

5 - /B/tards and Related - These people of indeterminiate race, religion, quanitity, and quality want you to be a retard who will fill in your password at the drop of a hat, without paying attention as to whether or not you really are still on the myspace servers. Then they’re going to take your brilliantly crafted profile and probably replace it with something involving memes, cuss words, and/or penises. Anonymous is legion, and they really don’t give a shit about you or your friends, so if defiling your profile is going to be funny to anybody, it will be done if you’re stupid enough to give up your information blindly. Quite frankly if you can’t be bothered to monitor your login information, you deserve it. (Besides, I think it’s kind of funny, too. …desu)

I hope I have made both my disgust and my amusement with this Borg-like hive of ridiculousness that is myspace. Please do let me know if I’ve forgotten any key points.