Fac me cocleario vomere!

ow. my head

Isara — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:55:27 GMT

mmmmmm..... many, many thanks to you all who helped me banish my sadness of yesterday afternoon. Huh, perhaps "banish" is better stated as "obliterate". Damn, I *love* this town!

The softer, gentler side of Laibach

Isara — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 01:55:11 GMT

See? I always knew they were softies! Laibach's take of The Beatles "Across the Universe" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q5mlb3Bjzs *edited to add the photo. The photo has nothing to do with the video. They're both independently amusing

PSA - microwave popcorn may be hazardous to your health

Isara — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:43:17 GMT

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/food/329640_popcorn30.html "Pop Weaver, one of the largest producers of microwave popcorn, is removing a controversial chemical flavoring agent from its products. The chemical -- diacetyl -- adds buttery taste. Government worker safety investigators have linked exposure to the synthetic butter to the sometimes fatal destruction of the lungs of hundreds of workers in food production and flavoring factories. " Do read it.

cupcake!!

Isara — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:13:49 GMT

So I was in nasty pain all day today and didn't get the work done I wanted to. Instead, I was moaning the loss of my favorite assistant this week, and wanted to make her something extra special for her going-away party. Oh, and I wanted comfort food (although I wasn't hungry). Cupcakes are total comfort food! I used the recipe and shamelessly stole the photograph from here: http://yumsugar.com/494746 The photograph looks exactly like my cupcakes. They're messy from all of the drizzling ooze, but soooo decadent! Root Beer Float Cakes Cake Ingredients 1 cup root beer schnapps 1 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (like A&W or Dads) 2 tsp. vanilla extract 2 cups dark brown sugar 1 cup butter 2 eggs 3 cups all purpose flour 1 Tbs. baking powder 2 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. salt Root Beer Glaze 4 cups confectioners sugar 1/3 cup root beer 3 Tbs. root beer schnapps* 3 Tbs. vegetable oil *for a more kid friendly version, replace schnapps with more root beer You will also need some extra root beer schnapps (1 Tbs. per cupcake) Or for the kiddies use root beer (again 1 Tbs. per cupcake) You will also need some basic Vanilla buttercream ( there are many recipes online to try J) Directions 1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. 2. In a bowl, mix together root beer schnapps, root beer, and vanilla extract. Set aside. 3. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. 4. Add eggs, mix until smooth 5. Sift in flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. 6. Mix with hand mixer on low, while slowly pouring in root beer mixture. 7. Mix until smooth and lump free. 8. Pour into lined cupcake pan. (Use foil cupcake liners to avoid "leakage" later.) Fill nearly to the top, you may think its over-filled, but it puffs up perfectly this way. Don't be tempted to use more than 24 cupcake cups... trust me. Smiling 9. Bake for 15- 20 minutes, until golden brown and cake springs back when touched. 10. While cupcakes are baking, prepare your butter cream and root beer glaze. For glaze, put all ingredients into a bowl and mix with a whisk until smooth and lump free. 11. To assemble, start by letting cupcakes cool, still in the pan. 12. While still slightly warm, pour 1 Tbs. of root beer schnapps over each cupcake. Pour on slowly to allow schnapps ( or regular root beer for the kiddies) to soak in. 13. Once the schnapps has soaked in and let sit for a few minutes, pour a couple tablespoons of glaze over each cupcake. 14. When the glaze sets up a bit and isn't too runny, put a "scoop" of buttercream atop each. For an added touch, you can even place a root beer barrel candy on each one. Makes 2 dozen cupcakes

Terminology help!

Isara — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:18:42 GMT

brain is mush. I have a section in my outline called "Care and Feeding" which covers the areas dedicated to Planning, Selecting, Implementing, and Maintaining this type of program I'm writing about. Somehow, I just can't think of a more descriptive header for that section, but I don't think "Care and Feeding" is appropriate for an encyclopedia article. Anyone have any suggestions?

article - 1,164 words out of the required 5,000-7,000

Isara — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 04:58:50 GMT

I'm still only on page 1 of the 3-page outline, and I haven't even gotten to the "good stuff" yet. I'm waffling between being terrified I won't have enough material and that I have too much material! I'm trying to remind myself that it's not about the word count, but what it is that I want to say about my topic. How is it going to be useful to the community? Oh well. More words is better than not enough. I can condense my writing better than I can expand on it. I think. I wanted to be done yesterday, but I slacked off more than I should have. I'm giving myself until Wednesday to be finished with this draft. It's due to the editors on the 27th, but I want my life back and I want to be able to let some of my professional colleagues who are WAY more knowledgeable on the topic than I am fact check it. (Why aren't they writing it? I'm just the dunce who volunteered to do it) Soon... soon...

the crazy has hit!

Isara — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 07:52:44 GMT

why am I reading and responding to my work email at 12:45 am on a Sunday morning? I spent the day watching Buffy episodes, cutting out and assembling the 18th Century stays I need for my Guillotine picnic dress on the 14th of July, and buying heirloom tomatoes and assorted other plants for the garden. The picnic: http://gbacg.org/Current/GuillotinePicnic.htm the dress I'll likely make: http://tinyurl.com/3agtuz Tomorrow, I spend part of the morning mixing planting soil into the sand that is my yard, planting my new babies, then spending alllll day sewing boning channels into the stays. The fabric is beautiful. I used cotton coutil and this wonderful sky blue and silver cotton jacquard that my roommate gave me. I didn't really bother with fitting for this one. If it doesn't fit (it might be a bit loose, actually), I'll just fuss with it some and make it fit. But since it's an undergarment for a dress that isn't supposed to have an undergarment, I'm not too concerned. Just gotta smooth the lumps with this one. Pics to come this week, I hope!

rawwwr!

Isara — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:07:33 GMT

Tanker fire collapses part of 580 onramp

Isara — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:10:43 GMT

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/29/BAGVOPHQU46.DTL holy crap! Ariellah and Bruce, I think this is your stretch of road when you try to leave the city. what a mess.

Tainted gluten used in pet food may now be in the human food supply

Isara — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 20:53:20 GMT

Hey all: You might want to read this thread, particularly if you're concerned about your pets and if you eat prepared foods: http://dogemperor.livejournal.com/122478.html I'm generally not alarmist ("oh look, there's a bug in my soup. I'll just fish that out and carry on..."), but this looks to be a major food supply emergency which isn't getting much coverage in the mainstream media. The thread above aggregates information from a lot of different sources.

Cool museum or cultural heritage websites? Gimme!

Isara — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:48:36 GMT

I have authorization to submit webpages for the Internet Archive's 2 Billion Page Crawl initiative. If you have any favorite museum or cultural heritage websites, please reply here and I'll add them to my list of pages for them to copy. Thanks all!! PRESS RELEASE: In December 2006, Internet Archive was honored to receive a grant from the Mellon Foundation for our ongoing development of the Heritrix web crawler. Using this grant, we will be embarking on a 2 billion page web crawl beginning in July. This will be the largest web crawl we have ever attempted. We are currently seeking url submissions for this historic crawl from libraries and archives as well as other cultural and memory institutions. We especially want international web content from a large variety of countries, geographic regions and language bases. Please help us gather this content!

cheap hotels in downtown SF, or with easy, direct access to downtown?

Isara — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:41:04 GMT

Anyone have any recommendations for cheap, decent hotels around the Union Square area?

wow. that sucked

Isara — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:38:29 GMT

I tried to install some content management software (Joomla) on my emphatic.org website last night. Figured I'd set it up so that I could monkey around on it, learn the program, yadda yadda before migrating it to darkcouture.com. Yeah. well. I initially changed the permissions on my folders to password-protect, which screwed up the background and theme images I'm hosting for another website. Changed a lot of other folders, too. Then I installed the program. After an hour of trying to figure out how I was supposed to change some other folder permissions, I got that problem solved and Joomla was working fine. It was at this point where a friend told me that the images on the other site weren't working, so I tried to fix the problem. Thing is, Joomla is designed to take over all aspects of your website. So somehow I had locked myself out of being able to change the folder permissions and the host (images) folder wouldn't become open again. and then I deleted some file I thought was a temporary one for install and I couldn't get into Joomla either. I finally just asked my webhost (Netfronts - they're awesome) to restore me from last backup, which they did. Even then, the folder permissions were b0rked and they had to reset the root permissions, too. I'll have to do some research to figure out how I can avoid completely screwing up my website again when I install. Anyone know how to use Joomla?

First Musematic post - New Media Art and Culture Preservation

Isara — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:33:11 GMT

http://musematic.net/?p=130 My topic tonight is on digital art preservation and artist intent vs. user experience, invoking Star Wars as an example.

frustration and geekitude

Isara — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 03:54:56 GMT

Generally frustrated today for some reason. I'm super stressed - waiting on a shipment, have a bunch of pieces I need to finish, someone on eBay is seriously underpricing me so that might eat into my customer base until I can do more in-person sales (not to mention eBay keeps raising their fees, so my profit margin is very narrow anyway), people I've been trying to get in contact with seem to refuse to want to email me back, and there's just not enough time in the day to do all the things I need to do! I did get to spend some time at a symposium today at the Berkeley Art Museum. Got to listen to a lot of supergeeks talk about new media art and culture and how to preserve it for the future (the short answer: you can't preserve it, but the way to keep it alive is to distribute it and let it mutate. Good luck selling that to the administration who want to know why we aren't selling more of our images). The keynote speaker was Bruce Sterling, who is like some sort of insane crazy genius guy (best known as author of the Mirrorshades anthology of sci-fi books). Oh, Kevine, you'll get a kick out of this quote from Sterling: "The iPhone is like a remote control for reality." http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about_bampfa/avantgarde.html I need to write a musematic.org post about it now. I'll post a link to those of you who might be interested. Hmm, actually, how many of you are interested in museology, new media art, and technology? In other words, I'd like to target my blogging to topics people actually care about. I know a lot of the academic topics don't engender comments, but that doesn't mean people don't read posts about it.

and in other news

Isara — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:47:07 GMT

I will learn how to clean and fillet a fish today. I love mackerel, but it's nearly impossible to find already gutted and sliced mackerel. Now I'll just make my own. besides - it's cheap. yes, omgsosexy. I make stuff AND gut fish all in one day. f43r me.

beam

Isara — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:44:03 GMT

http://musematic.net/?p=126

irrational desire

Isara — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:26:21 GMT

I can't let go of my wanting a particular set of perfumes. In conjunction with the release of the movie, "Perfume," Thierry Mugler produced a box set of scents inspired by the book. So you have scents of baby, of Paris in 1738, the human scent of lust, virgins, and replicas of some of the most famous and legendary scents in the world. They're bound to be the most unique of their kind - heirloom perfumes, if you will. And yet, they're $700 for the set. I would gladly fork that over if I had it, but I don't. Scent is very evocative for me. Well, it is for most people, but few are very conscious of it. Many of my most sublime memories are linked with scent (and music, too). I have always defined myself as a sensualist, but in the past that referred more to touch and sight and sound. Today I indulge in taste and scent as ways to create sublime emotions. (oh, for those interested in what I'm rambling about, this is the set: http://www.perfume.thierrymugler.com/us/ )

emphatic.org

Isara — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:39:32 GMT

what to do with it? The website began as part of a class I was taking in undergrad. The class was "Identity and Technology" and taught by Lynn Hershman (media art and film geeks will know who this is: http://www.lynnhershman.com/ ). She asked us to develop an artwork using technology to explain our identity. Being more interested in technical skills and not caring for video work, I built a vanity website, emphatic.org (named after a band in high school called "emphatic distractions"). Well, the website has kicked around in mostly the same format since its inception, the only difference being the addition of a weight loss tracking area. No one really looks at it, but the domain carries my pictures and that's where my email address goes through. There is some stuff I'm rather proud of on there - some photographs of Paris, my writings (including BGP - bad goth poetry), and poor photographs of my artwork. But the majority of it is simply unimportant to the world at large. I want to use the host/domain as a Joomla testing ground, but I'm unsure of its direction in general. Should that be my personal blog and should I just blog there, instructing everyone who cares to set up an rss feed to read it? Should it be the dumping grounds for all of those ratty costume and art photographs and for my writings (when they happen)? Maybe I should axe the site altogether and concentrate entirely on darkcouture.com. Does anyone care about my writing and my artwork? Well, due to some metalhead dork hotlinking to the site (and then providing a text link when I asked him to pull the image), I'm pulling anything that may be sensitive, leaving the writing and the artwork for now. But once I start playing around with Joomla, the site will look like a total disaster, I'm sure.

Happy Holidays

Isara — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 21:13:33 GMT

May it be... weird.

one more set: the Athiest's Nightmare - the banana

Isara — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:16:33 GMT

Proof that God exists - just look at the banana! Kirk Cameron is! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A Er, yeah, well, maybenotsomuch. Such a beautiful rebuttal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsBJlea848c

yes, this pretty much sums up my Apple Mac experience to date

Isara — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:10:33 GMT

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-773770276749807883 *watches the mass defection from her friends-list by the Mac-obsessed* (and I have figured out how to safely watch internet video while at work - filing!)

Wishmaster - The Misheard Lyrics

Isara — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:13:05 GMT

this video is made of win: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg5_mlQOsUQ *wipes eyes* (by the way, the actual lyrics are here. Not that they're much better... http://www.lyrics007.com/Nightwish%20Lyrics/Wishmaster%20Lyrics.html )

Dicken's 12/23?

Isara — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 18:05:57 GMT

Given that I had such fun in my big black dress last weekend, I'm thinking of doing ti again this weekend, and taking the time to linger over the shows. Who else will be there? It'd be nice to connect with some more friends. (need to get a good photo of myself in my dress. Thinking that trying to enter it in the costume contest might be interesting)

tough decisions in my life

Isara — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 02:08:41 GMT

actually cook something to eat or drink more port? food... port? food... port? HMMMMM *brow furrowed* (yes. I'm turning into a lush)