Chaos Theory: Craft Crap

Quotes

krisjohn:
"I hope we have to go through all of this crap because out of an infinite number of timelines, this is the only one where we survive. Otherwise it's hard to justify."
mightshould:
"I'm coping. That's a major accomplishment. Anything else is bonus."
Mary Rodgers:
"So I asked the shrink: When you're depressed because of actual things that are depressing, are there any drugs that can make you feel better? And he said no, which was even more depressing."
David Sedaris, Happy-Go-Lucky:
"I figured my post-college life would be pretty much like the one I'd been leading for the past decade: work some little job I didn't have to put much into, then come home and do my own stuff. It was the life that most of my friends had, and half my family." "It's a consequence of putting stuff out there--you're going to get reactions."
Kristina Marusic:
"There likely aren’t a ton of people on this planet—let alone within your geography or social circles—whose moral compass, sense of humor, Netflix addictions, dietary restrictions, and idiosyncrasies sync up with yours closely enough to make you want to hitch your wagon to them for the long-haul (and the internet is making us all even picker)."
John Oliver:
"Let this be a lesson that you absolutely don’t want to fuck with someone who has the patience, attention to detail, and sustained anger to crochet their resentment into a handmade garment."
Gail Donovan, quoted in "Knitting Yarns" in the essay "Knitted Goods"
"I love taking what is basically a long string and constructing a three-dimensional object. I love thinking about how somebody figured out how to do that!"
Amber A’Lee Frost:
"It’s not just bad for a person to rely on their weakest skills for survival; it’s unsustainable and immiserating."
Michael Che:
“You know what else makes you do crazy things? Crazy,”
August and Annie/Isaiah, "One Last Stop."
"Does it ever, like...I don't know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can't meet you there?" "Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling?" When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It's good. Even when it's bad, it's good."
Katie Brennan:
"The Office taught me that love isn’t always an immediate burst of rainbows and butterflies; sometimes the best kind of love is a quiet, enduring, and steadfast process. When you really love someone, you know they are worth putting in time and effort. Even if you entertain the thought of someone else during the process, i.e. you get yourself a Karen, you know they can’t compare to your person. No amount of time can make that connection fade, so whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, you wait for your stars to align. It might take your company casually hosting a Casino Night, or a heartfelt post it note attached to an Office Olympics “medal,” but eventually your time comes—and when it does, it’s pretty much the best thing ever."
Jane Tyson Clement:
"We don't notice the strange way things come about while they are coming about. It is only afterwards that we see the pattern..."
"Candace Kahn," Almost Romance:
"You can't blow off a good story just because it's challenging."
Nick Cave:
"I prefer to say that I have made, for reasons of survival, a commitment to the uncertain nature of the world. This is where my heart lies. I suspect it always has."
Ted Lasso:
"I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts."
Ask Amy:
"My point is that you can lay out your plans, but the world might have other ideas."
supercrayon:
"But I kept thinking there’s a future me a week or a month or a year away that is through this. That future me is not plagued by uncertainty, they know what happened and they’re looking back at how things played out. I liked to think that future me was sending strength and love to present me. Sometimes now, present me in fact does send strength and love back towards past me. Your future selves know what happened. The you of a week or a month from now knows, and has already started to plan your next moves. I hope strength and love are rippling up and down the timeline between yourselves."
Christina Long (Washington Post)
“WHY ARE NONE OF MY INTERESTS WORTH ANYTHING IN DOLLARS,”
Michael Diamond:
“People get frustrated when they can’t see the future,” says Diamond. “The future looks scary if you’re telling them it’s just staying at home for the next 12 to 18 months. You shouldn’t really be that surprised when at least a fraction of them get angry."
Seanan McGuire:
"Please stop trying to solve me. I'm not a problem."
Morrie Morgan, in "Work Song" by Ivan Doig:
"I don't know any cure for being myself. The lotion for that hasn't been concocted yet."
Jason Mendoza:
“Sometimes you just gotta huck a Molotov cocktail at a drone and see what happens.”
Augusten Burroughs:
"But impossible is a concept that makes one's heart laugh and throw peanuts at the television."
Augusten Burroughs:
"Even if things aren't catastrophic now, catastrophe has always followed me. Life unfolds, right? All the time, it's unfolding, and I'm going to follow it."
Augusten Burroughs:
"My life has never really been “happily ever after.” I’ve always had conflict and disaster follow me around like a shadow, and I can’t really believe that will suddenly stop now that I’m happily living in Connecticut with three dogs. We’re just going to have to see."
Jacqui:
“If you have a job where you’re not coming home with stories, it’s time to leave. That simply is our qualification. Healthcare helps. Benefits are nice, but oh my god, how do you not come home with stories? It is the easiest qualification, but it’s true. My feeling is if you don’t have a story, it wasn’t a good day."
armeowda:
"Many people can cast their affections broad and bright as floodlights, but others of us are laser beams, and when something actually trips our attraction/affection sensors it can feel like a certain kind of instant precision strike, and it can leave a mark forever."
Stan Tatkin
"There's actually nothing more difficult on the planet than another person."
Lani Diane Rich:
"What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
Heather Havrilesky:
"Do they let me write these words because I’m good at it, or do they let me do it because I’m an entertainingly crazy person who is slowly but surely unraveling before 50,000-to-100,000 sets of eyeballs each week?"
Justin Peters:
"The simple lesson that Millionaire taught me is that if you want to change your life—either by winning a lot of money on television or by some more prosaic means—at some point you are going to have to take a risk. Unless you are John Carpenter, you will eventually have to step into the unknown, bet on yourself, and hope that you are making the right decision."
Leslie Jones
"Women are the same as humans."
Anne Lamott:
“If you’re paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who’s doing the same thing,” she said. “You can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net.” “Never give up, no matter how things look or how long they take. Don’t quit before the miracle.”
Seanan McGuire:
"If what I say doesn’t help you, ask someone else, until you find the person whose reply tells you how to kick the damn door down."
Grangousier:
"It's 2018. There's a realistic chance of pretty much anything happening if it's ridiculous enough."
Joy:
"I feel a constant low level of stress every day, just by virtue of existing in my environment,"
Fancy Feast:
"When she was on a bad date, she would go to the bathroom, hit her nose until she got a nosebleed, and excuse herself, because it was easier to punch herself in the face than suffer the consequences of rejecting a man."
Ber:
"Get your freak on, screw the powers that would deny you."
Lee Bradford:
"Lee? Why does all this weird shit only seem to happen to you? Well, disembodied voice from nowhere-statistically, it has to happen somewhere."
David Neal:
“Nobody told us that our ‘15 Minutes of Fame’ would include shaming, insults, threats, etc. And that we might not have even asked for it.”

October 05, 2021

I love wheelchair costumes

There's even a group that will build them for you.

Posted on October 05, 2021 at 04:03 PM in Craft Crap, Holiday Hell | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 14, 2017

Psychedelic eggs

So there's a thing.

Posted on April 14, 2017 at 07:15 AM in Craft Crap, Holiday Hell, Science Dorking Goodness | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 25, 2017

I approve

Lisa Frankenfoods

Posted on March 25, 2017 at 08:29 AM in Craft Crap, Geekitude | Permalink | Comments (0)

I approve

Lisa Frankenfoods

Posted on March 25, 2017 at 08:29 AM in Craft Crap, Geekitude | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 22, 2017

Hidden Peep shows

So while reading the ComPost chat (Washington Post)....

Q: I am still getting over the loss of the peeps, as long as we're airing Post-related grievances.

I will never get over it. Even with the Westminster Md. peeps show to look forward to. My one regret on retiring from NSA was that I would no longer be able to see the internal Peeps show, many of whose entries were brilliantly funny, even though you had to have the right classification to get the jokes.

A: Alexandra Petri

There was an INTERNAL peeps show at the NSA? Are you even allowed to tell us this? I thought the only kind of peeps show the NSA did was singular.

Q: Re: Loss of the Peeps

Did I ever mention I was a finalist in the American Bar Association Peeps in Law competition in 2012? And that the word "anus" was removed from my description (even though I pulled the language directly from the complaint filed in court)? I can't understand why I didn't win: http://www.abajournal.com/gallery/peeps2012/577

A: Alexandra Petri

What is the world COMING to? Maybe the institution itself was rotten, between this and Defenestration of Peeps, and needed to have its swamp drained before it could rise anew.

Are you even allowed to tell us this?

You'd be surprised at what we're allowed to tell you. Individual offices set up their own Peeps displays, and once you reach a certain level of access, it's usually no problem having a colleague buzz you through the office door to see their efforts. It's literally the only thing I miss about working there.

Q: What would a peep made today look like in 50 years?

A twinkie - probably the same, but a peep?

A: Alexandra Petri

Maybe our new tradition should be the creation and eventual opening of a Peep time capsule -- both to see how time treats the joke and to see how time treats the Peep.

Also, here's the Peeps in Law photos.

Posted on March 22, 2017 at 05:23 PM in Craft Crap, Holiday Hell | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not sure about this.

This is sort of the equivalent of a fish wheelchair. Sorta. Apparently the fish has a swim bladder problem that makes it sink to the bottom of the tank, so this dude came up with a way around that!

Except, um....all these pictures show the fish at the bottom of the tank? Is it working? Or just kinda barely working enough so he's not faceplanting into the rocks?

Posted on March 22, 2017 at 06:18 AM in Craft Crap, Geekitude, Science Dorking Goodness | Permalink | Comments (0)

Low Budget Beasts

A TRIBUTE TO ALL THE LOW-BUDGET BEAST COSTUMES FEATURED IN PRODUCTIONS OF "BEAUTY AND THE BEAST."

Posted on March 22, 2017 at 06:15 AM in Craft Crap, Geekitude | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 16, 2017

So we have this place in my town. It is certainly interesting to look at. You could probably make a bingo game of the weird stuff on the lawn. Chickens, cactus, tipi, giant bike, little free library, turtle....

“We have a possum, two bluebirds, a small flock of birds, six chickens, two cats, baby squirrels and adult squirrels, a variety of bugs and insects, fish and microbial communities.”

“No one knows what’s going on with the design,” de la Fava said. “It is obvious that the Turtle House is unmanageable. But in a house where there are just four people it’s less obvious that it is unmanageable, so people cling to the illusion that they can control every aspect of their area. It’s nice here because it is so in-your-face.”

For de la Fava, the house has been a practice in his submission to what he cannot control. To explain this, he recited a Serenity Prayer to me that he had memorized:

“God grant me the serenity of the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can,” de la Fava said. “Even though I don’t have control in the overall design and the house itself, I can still have fun, small, creative projects that are actually really rewarding. It’s a weird balance — I can’t have it exactly the way I want it, but I can have it pretty close, and I can make a big difference if specifically I am willing to make the difference.”

What makes the house communal is the design as well. Since there is no dictation over design, the design itself becomes a canvas for spontaneity."

Posted on March 16, 2017 at 08:43 PM in Craft Crap, Local Life, Weird, Wild Stuff | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's kind of a coloring book

The Bloggess's new book (Washington Post)

“You Are Here” is a hybrid of art, self-help and memoir. It also makes sly fun of all those things. This is the same Jenny Lawson, after all, behind the Bloggess, the same woman who used a stuffed roadkill raccoon named Rory as a way of talking about her struggles with depression, anxiety and ADD.

On one page of her new book, she asks readers to write down five outrageous things they’ve done, “at least one of which is a lie.” Elsewhere, she suggests that you “build your dreams around you. Then build a pillow fort around your dreams. Fill it with cats and books and wine slushies. Then build a fiery moat around your pillow fort, filled with acid and razor blades, because people are going to want that fort. And your dreams, maybe.”

The book, subtitled “An Owner’s Manual for Dangerous Minds,” comes with perforated pages, so you can hang up your creations on the fridge, above your desk or perhaps on that pillow fort."

Posted on March 16, 2017 at 08:40 PM in Craft Crap, NaNoWriMo/Writing Stuff, Quarterlife Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0)