6 posts tagged “qotd”

What is your current computer desktop image? Let's see it!

I actually change my background image once or twice a week.  On the other hand, I only organize and clean up my icons about once every three months or so..  And so I cheated and did both before taking the above screen shot.

What did you do this weekend?

• I worked
• I had my cellular enabled PDA stolen, and possibly destroyed, by a disgruntled and spiteful employee
• I ate some sushi
• I bought and played some XBLA games
• I (almost) finished another building in Taco
• I spent a fair bit of time with Mark
• I broke my plans to see A Scanner Darkly  :( :(
• I broke my plans to see Pirates :) :)
• I discovered a worthwhile purpose for my m4p decryption thingie (playing iTunes songs on my 360), other than having it as a useless novelty
• I made it into a newspaper 3,000 miles from where I actually live
  
• I spent another few days waiting for Dead Rising to hurry its ass up and release

And as of five minutes ago, my weekend finishes itself off with me stepping on a half-melted Reese's Peanutbutter Cup.  Yuck.

What are your three favorite album covers of all-time? Any honorable mentions?

Question submitted by Tamara.

I actually buy a lot of CDs and music based entirely along with how pleasing or interesting the album art is.  And for the most part, my doing such has proven to work out well for me.  Black Utopia, to the left, is an amazing dark-future cityscape, full of blues and purples, with awesome shadowing and foreboding flecks of red.

The album itself is actually pretty kick-ass as well, as Derek Sherinian and his cohorts drive out an awesome display of percussion, synth, and of course, the electric guitar that the album is primarily centered around.

I believe iTunes suggested this to me as one of their 'you might like...' offerings and I immediately dug on the simi-abstract, entirely organic-meets-geometry art style.  There's a lot to look at in this album, including a pair of characters that blend rather well into the artwork and are easily overlooked in the grand view, giving the entire piece an interesting sense of scale and perspective.

Caural is minimalism, which is a total contrast to the weight of the artwork.  Quite often, however, their music builds into a more complex and interesting style, making them one of my favorite selections to listen to while reading - Most of the music in this album has a unique amorphous quality, fitting the current mood of my literature just right and without any track skipping or conscious thought to the tune.

I'd rather not delve too deep into this one, other than stating that my mother had a vast collection of Billy Idol records when I was growing up, and I often spent time idolizing [hah] the covers.

So what if I wanted to grow up to be him; I was a child of the early MTV generation, and there are far worse I could have aimed for.

The QOTD regarding Most Vivid Dreams typo'd one of its automatically assigned tags.

Nothing special - Just a missed 'h' to create 'nigtmares', but the fact that I noticed this at 5:10 in the morning speaks volumes of the power between insomnia and boredom.

What's the most recent vivid dream or nightmare that you remember?

It's not very often that I remember my dreams, and there are a number of suggestions that I've tried over the years, such as getting in the habit of leaving your eyes closed when you wake up, and blindly jotting down what you can, to remind yourself later.  But to no avail.

Instead, I've learned that I really only have vivid, memorable dreams when my brain is being chemically messed with, such as while sick or the like.

Once, when I was likely a preteen, I had a very vivid fever dream of being a Final Fantasy-styled airship captain.  However, during this dream, something went very, very wrong, and the ship was entirely on fire.  The rest of the crew bailed out, but I remained aboard.  I can't honestly remember if it was because of that whole 'captain down with ship' thing, or if I was merely trapped, but the most exciting and horrifying part of the dream was when in the waking world, I fell halfway off my bed.

And in clinging to the bed for dear life during my simi-lucid state, I can plainly remember the entire event mirroring the dream effects of burning up on the ship, while fighting not to fall several hundred feet to the earth bellow.

As sad as it is, I actually enjoy being sick and having fevers for just this reason.  Because otherwise, I'd never dream about anything I'd be able to recall, and dreams are exciting.

When New Year's Day of 2000 came around, there were awesome firework shows everywhere, which seemed to go on forever. And then when the local firework shows stopped (and before, really), there were all the other different timezones to watch on TV.

Seeing the televised fireworks from New York, London, Sydney, and other such places, after watching my own in the Bay Area of California, was pretty awesome...

...Or were they before?  Damn temporal mechanics and a faulty memory.