Unordinary

no more posts here

2009-09-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'm moving over to my main site for journaling (and comics and portfolio stuff).
It has an RSS feed available, and the journal and new comics will appear on the home page. I'm still cleaning up the "look" of the site, but it's up and running.
www.unordinary.org

Psychic energies are currently channelled into schoolwork

2009-02-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

The psychic energies will likely make appearances in the future. They are currently engaged in book-learnin' and doodling on the trolley.
For example:

I prefer not to talk negatively of strangers (and this kid was probably 18 or younger and most people have gone through embarrassing phases in their youth) so don't take this as a slam against the kid. This was just a beautiful moment in the history of trolley eavesdropping. The dialog was prompted by the kid's conversation with a young lady who was a Christian and a psychology major. This type of conversation was the first 5-10 minutes of the trolley ride. The remaining 30-40 minutes were full of this guy reading his poetry aloud to the young lady. He was still going when I got off at my stop. SO awesome. I was upset about my lack of tape recorder, but if you've heard an angsty goth boy read his poetry, the selection was pretty normal. He was maybe more committed to the angst than some. There was no tinge of humor or self-deprecation. That kind of oblivious-to-society passionate social interaction is rare, so I salute him for that.

Do comics ease the cop-out induced suffering?

2009-02-17T21:51:00.000-08:00

Horoscopes:
(All signs are the same this week.)
You are needlessly worried about your future. Everything is going to be OK.

In other words, the horoscopes didn't get done this week. Oops. Here's a silly comic instead:

Half-awake epiphanies are fun.

(late) Horoscopes

2009-02-10T01:25:00.000-08:00

I might have been reading too much science fiction this week. It seems to have invaded a good number of my predictions.

Aries - The Ram
March 21 - April 20
Your best friend is actually a cyborg planted on Earth thousands of years ago as a cultural recording device. Their programming is automatically reset every 80 years or so and they age and grow like a human until they are reset again. They have the same experiences and emotions as the rest of the population and are unaware of their purpose, but they store their collected data on a tiny internal hard drive. They are usually reset after an apparently normal death and burial. In the dead of night after the funeral, a newborn baby crawls out of the fresh grave and starts over.

Taurus - The Bull
April 21 - May 21
You make eye contact with someone at a party and experience the mythical wonder of love at first sight. After a few blissful years together, the government reveals the results of it's eugenics program, of which you were an unwitting participant. You and your true love were both given ocular implants at birth that were programmed to release a combination of hormones and adrenaline upon visual contact with an appropriate counterpart from the program.

Gemini - The Twins
May 22 - June 21
Whenever you experience a large enough rush of adrenaline you will see an amazing kaleidescope of colors that don't exist anywhere in nature and can't be synthesized on this planet.

Cancer - The Crab
June 22 - July 22
An optometrist visit leads to the eye doctor managing to peer into your soul by viewing your pupils from an angle she hadn't tried before. She manages to duplicate the process with other patients and always sees the same maddening image of a nine-armed monkey beast screaming silently and clutching dollar bills, genitalia, and ham sandwiches in alternating fists.

Leo - The Lion
July 23 -August 21
A rumbling in your gut turns out to be the birth of a new universe brought on by your thinking about it's existence while reading your horoscope. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics turns out to be correct, although the infinite space in which to house the alternate universes was not readily available and the layering of universes that results gives you indigestion.
(Thanks to JJ Barney for editing help on this one. I remember concepts better than appropriate nouns.)

Virgo - The Virgin
August 22 - September 23
You become a magician, assuming you have no magic powers but are very adept at slight of hand. You were actually given 20 years of magic powers through a wish a relative made on your behalf after finding a genie in a bottle. Midway through a performance 20 years later, you lose your magic abilities while “pretending” to insert a 12 inch needle through your arm. You instantly learn not only are you not magical, but your hand-eye coordination is very poorly developed after years of relying on actual magic. The needle barely grazes your arm when you shriek and jump in shock, throwing the needle in the air. It instantly embeds itself in the skull of your assistant, the tiger you thought you had successfully trained, but who was only responding to the magic. The tiger's motor skills are affected and he loses control of his bowels. PETA storms the stage, (they have been after you for years for keeping the tiger in captivity) and screams animal cruelty. Unfortunately, the tiger has been too damaged to be returned to the wild. You are forced to care for a very affectionate and confused 600 pound tiger although neither of you is fit for stage performances any longer. The incontinence was also not temporary, but the two of you are best friends from that day forward.

Libra - The Scales
September 24 - October 23
The Demodex mite population in your face (don't look this up if you don't want to know) builds subcutaneous radio transmitters so they can give you romantic advice. They hear things from the mites in the faces of the people you get close to, and they want to help.

Scorpio - The Scorpion
October 24 - November 22
Constructing paper battlefield reenactments becomes your full-time occupation. Everyone thinks you've gone insane until the invasion of the miniature paper mache Martians.

Sagittarius - The Archer
November 23 - December 22
After years of plotting, octopuses suddenly uproot from their complex cities under the sea floor and invade aquariums worldwide to rescue their captured soldiers. You are patronizing an aquarium during the event and are brought to an underwater city to be studied in an awkwardly constructed life-size doll house as an act of ironic vengeance.

Capricorn - The Goat-Fish
December 23 - January 20
You step on a beetle while walking to work one day. The beetle never becomes a bird's dinner. The bird must look elsewhere for food and is killed on electrical wires. The bird's young starve in their nest. The series of events continues until 3,000 years in the future when, as a result of your careless beetle stomping, there is a new and peaceful interplanetary association of cooperative governments in which everyone speaks the language of their hometown and celebrates their cultural differences while sharing a universal language based on the wise greeting methods of the ancient Bonobo.

Aquarius - The Water Bearer
January 21 - February 19
You mutate overnight and a window into your conscious mind appears on your forehead. The rest of the population soon follows and the visual telepathy completely alters human communication. That period when you were the only one whose thoughts were routinely revealed is soon forgotten, but it was incredibly awkward for a while there.

Pisces - The Fish
February 20- March 20
You are actually a delusional hobo, sitting in a gutter, furiously and meticulously documenting your “real life” on a filthy stack of notebook paper. Eventually in your “real life” you become aware of a strange man who is haunting your dreams. You seek out his identity with such unrelenting obsession that you lose your job and end up on the streets. The man continues haunting you until you believe he has taken over your mind and you can do nothing but sit in a gutter, documenting his thoughts and hearing the incessant scratches of an invisible pen.

Wild Card- The Leap Year
February 29th
The power lines near the house you grew up in are found to emit a strange type of radiation that gradually gives those exposed the ability to extend their leg hair in a fractal manner. You and all the kids from your neighborhood can now instantaneously grow your leg hairs out into infinitely complex webs at will.

Sleepiness sounds like a valid exuse to the boss when one is self-employed.

2009-02-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

Horoscopes will be a day late this week due to sleepiness. I apologize profusely to those people depending on these for aiding them in important life choices.

A rant about my website name that would likely appeal to angsty teenagers

2009-02-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

Regarding the website name... I do not consider myself to be unordinary. The name is not a reference to my persona. When people hear it there are usually comments made to the effect that they believe the opposite, and it takes too long to explain it well. People, in my opinion, are impossible to categorize as ordinary. If there is no ordinary, there can be no unordinary. Either that, or everyone is unordinary, which does not fit the definition of the word. people tend to relate best to others with similar interests. They may congregate in groups and call those with dissimilar interests "weird" or "different," but they are being referred to in the same manner by some other group. Even within these cliques people have things about themselves they would rather not share with the group for fear it would be too different from the group norm to be accepted. There is a gutter punk somewhere ashamed of their undying love of Elton John music, for instance. People all have fetishes, tendencies, preferences or emotions that they think no one else would understand. These issues are common to many people but in different combinations. People can be similar, but our genetics and environments and many other factors contribute to make us all feel that at least some of the time we don't fit into the appropriate social mold. We are not mass produced homogeneous products or BORG.
The name Unordinary refers to handmade items that do not appear on store shelves by the identical thousands. Toothpicks, plastic sporks, hair gel, instant mashed potatoes, and light bulbs are ordinary. Paintings and handmade things are a series of (yeah, yeah, no ideas are absolutely "new" anymore, but...) unique items that are not duplicated exactly. This makes them unordinary when compared to something one would purchase at a Walmart.

The horoscopes are a bit late today

2009-02-02T00:56:00.000-08:00

But for someone somewhere on the internet it is still technically Sunday night.

Aries - The Ram
March 21 - April 20
Weird bubbling noises alert you to a drain near your house where once a day the forces of nature collide to create a perfect replica of Ulysses S. Grant out of bubbles. The bubbles pop in Morse code, and give you the coordinates to Grant's private stash of Julia Boggs Dent-Grant 's erotic telegraph messages.

Taurus - The Bull
April 21 - May 21
Graffiti artists everywhere adopt a cartoon character of your creation as their own and begin incorporating it into their illegal public artwork. You gain the immediate disdain of the upper class and thus immediate validity among their angsty teenagers. Fortunately, angry young children of privilege have access to credit cards.

Gemini - The Twins
May 22 - June 21
A lost puppy distracts you as you flee the scene of an armed bank robbery you just pulled off. You immediately decide to leave your life of crime and become a puppy. You have likely lost your sanity at this point, but at least people who think they are puppies are less likely to be questioned by the police concerning bank robbery suspects.

Cancer - The Crab
June 22 - July 22
In the midst of following up a really snide comment about the WWF's validity as a sport with the phrase, “May 'Macho Man' strike me down if I'm wrong,” you are, in fact, struck by lightning. You are also still standing after the fact, which makes you unsure of how to interpret the incident.

Leo - The Lion
July 23 -August 21
You meet Bigfoot, feel shocked that those cryptozoology folks had it right all along, and then gradually grow to accept that you are now one of them after you realize that all of your photos came out terribly.

Virgo - The Virgin
August 22 - September 23
When you were a kid, at some point you or someone you knew gave smarties candy to another kid while playing a clean version of the game “doctor.” The “pills” had an amazing placebo effect on the recipient, who to this day has never once been ill.

Libra - The Scales
September 24 - October 23
You can cure intolerable halitosis with a single open-mouth kiss. This kind of sucks for you, and it gets much worse when your friends tell strangers about your abilities in public.

Scorpio - The Scorpion
October 24 - November 22
On your deathbed you realize that you can draw with uncanny precision the interior layout of any building by only viewing the exterior. Many governments and covert agencies would have loved to get their hands on you if they had known about your skills, but you only ever used them for guiding people to public restrooms. This use of your skills was arguably the best.

Sagittarius - The Archer
November 23 - December 22
You learn that honeybees are the caretakers of the world's oldest secrets. They never held up well under interrogation, and intentionally changed the course of their evolution so that their initial instinct in response to a threat is to sting the threatening object, thus mortally wounding the bee. You spend years attempting to learn their secrets through friendly coercion.

Capricorn - The Goat-Fish
December 23 - January 20
You start a popular blog and become world famous. Your postings are believed by everyone as absolute truth and could be used to enact positive changes around the world. Instead the last update you make is to tell everyone that it is the coolest, manliest thing ever when men wear “skorts.” Particularly when men emblazon their skorts with their stats, as in baseball cards or personals ads, drawn on by hand in puff paint. The resulting fashion frenzy causes you to fall down laughing every time you leave your house.
(disclaimer: I have nothing against men in particular wearing skorts, I think they are pretty funny on everyone.)

Aquarius - The Water Bearer
January 21 - February 19
After most of the planet unceremoniously explodes, there is a water shortage threatening the remaining population. You soon discover that you have the ability to sense the presence of ground water. It gives you the feeling of Christmas morning mixed with falling in love and winning the lottery. You become a bit of a cult leader. You are followed constantly by eager youths waiting for you to break into spontaneous songs and start hugging people. Whenever you do, they do all the well-digging and the parties that result are awesome.

Pisces - The Fish
February 20- March 20
Doctors discover that your lifelong “bad habit” that everyone has tried to cure you of is the only thing keeping malignant tumors from destroying you. From that point on, everyone encourages your “irritating” quirks.

Wild Card- The Leap Year
February 29th
You create an additive that can be mixed with crop dusting chemicals. It is supposed to make vegetables grow larger. Instead it causes Jerusalem Crickets to grow 6 feet tall and start attending college where the bastards totally ruin the grading curve and impulsively disrupt class with the mating thumps of their giant abdomens.

More Horoscopes? Yes, I have become a magic psychic lady.

2009-01-25T18:28:00.000-08:00

Us magic psychic ladies have it pretty tough. I'm thinking weekly horoscopes? I am pretty bad at keeping on a schedule, but I'll try for the Sunday night area. Sunday night seems like an appropriate time for astrological enlightenment.
Read em:

Aries - The Ram
March 21 - April 20
Someone named “Buford” writes a marriage proposal to you in the sky. You have never met this “Buford” and spend the entire day feeling very paranoid while your friends, coworkers, and family members send you disturbingly knowing congratulations, and old pictures of you with a mysterious stranger with the phrase, “I knew it all along!” written on the back with the “i” dotted in a heart.

Taurus - The Bull
April 21 - May 21
After wandering into a park on a corporation's picnic day, you are mistaken for an employee and thrown into a relay race. You win the game for the side of the CEO and he immediately hires you as his second in command.

Gemini - The Twins
May 22 - June 21
The world's plant life suddenly develops unbelievably adorable voices. You are forced to start eating puppies rather than vegetables, but they are so much less cute by comparison that you don't mind.

Cancer - The Crab
June 22 - July 22
You dress up as a wheeler (see “Return To OZ”) for Halloween one year. After passing out at a party, you wake up the next morning unable to remove the costume. You can still perform normal bodily functions, but you frighten small children and have to roller skate on all fours wherever you go.

Leo - The Lion
July 23 -August 21
You have a dream in which you go to college and get a PHD in a subject that has always fascinated you. The dream seems to last for years but when you wake up only 10 minutes has passed and you remember everything you learned. The information turns out to be accurate and you have a fully written thesis prepared in your head, but you spend the next five years attempting to track down the lab partner you fell in love with in biology.

Virgo - The Virgin
August 22 - September 23
George Lucas was actually channeling an underused portion of your brain when he made “Star Wars” (episodes 4-6, anyway). You have had the power of the force all along!

Libra - The Scales
September 24 - October 23
Drunken hillbillies stalk you through the woods. You break the rules of every horror movie cliché that would normally result in instant dismemberment, but still manage to get the drop on the hillbillies using only the boy (or girl) scout training you vaguely remember from when you were 5.

Scorpio - The Scorpion
October 24 - November 22
After a suspenseful chase, the government finally tracks you down. You think it's about your illegally downloaded MP3s, but when they play a sequence of lights in front of you, you realize you are a top secret spy and are obscenely skilled in martial arts.

Sagittarius - The Archer
November 23 - December 22
A group of sentient electric eels burrow their way from the ocean to a small pool under your house. They yell at you for days, trying to get your attention, and you think you are going crazy until you pull up some floorboards and discover them. They prove useful in ways that can't be discussed here in case of government surveillance.

Capricorn - The Goat-Fish
December 23 - January 20
You wake up alone in the desert. After wandering for several days without food or water, your spirit guide appears to you and teaches you the ancient Native American arts of the rain dance and the little known “snow dance.” You never go thirsty again and along the way you single-handedly repair the damage caused by global warming.

Aquarius - The Water Bearer
January 21 - February 19
While you are fingerpainting, various household items you have arranged nearby are toppled into the paints during a mild earthquake. The resulting mixture, as you discover, can be painted onto people to instantly remove wrinkles, signs of aging, and cancer if placed over the affected area.

Pisces - The Fish
February 20- March 20
You discover a pattern in "Pi" that no one noticed before. Your next discovery is that if you demonstrate the pattern to someone else it randomly produces different types of Pie out of thin air. Everyone thinks you are a crappy magician who is way too into puns and refuses to listen further.

Wild Card- The Leap Year
February 29th
While walking down the street one day you have an epiphany that renders you paralyzed and dumb for several minutes. When you regain motor function and speech you realize your subconscious has stumbled onto an equation that allows you to instantly translate any language in your head. It doesn't make sense on paper, but it allows you to become a world traveler, getting by anywhere on your wits and charm alone.

Horoscopes

2009-01-19T16:50:00.000-08:00

I started making fortune tellers on the trolley. They are an amusing way to pass the time and you have a fun activity to play upon reaching your destination. I was going to put them online so they could be printed out, but decided that half the fun of the paper version is making it yourself. So instead, I made horoscopes. If you want to make a paper version, the instructions for such a device are on this website.

Aries - The Ram
March 21 - April 20
You develop a ray gun that turns murderous thoughts into delicious food with a five-year shelf life. Everyone lives happily ever after except for murderers, who get so fat that they can't leave their houses.

Taurus - The Bull
April 21 - May 21
Pear trees begin spontaneously producing partridges. You discover this phenomenon and everyone names a new national holiday to occur in your honor on your birthday. It never becomes over-commercialized and is known as “The Cool Christmas.”

Gemini - The Twins
May 22 - June 21
You beat a reincarnated Andrew Jackson to a bloody pulp. No one ever finds out, including you, because Andrew Jackson was reincarnated as a sentient, but mute, punching bag.

Cancer - The Crab
June 22 - July 22
You meet a giant, gelatinous bird creature with completely transparent skin who befriends you and allows you to live in a 500 square foot compartment under his belly. He is like a flying glass bottomed boat and a best friend rolled into one, and you travel all over the world together meeting interesting people and watching the bird creature swallow nuclear missiles and convert them to gold in his digestive tract. You help pass the gold out to small impoverished towns and non-profit hospitals.

Leo - The Lion
July 23 -August 21
When you grow up the world reverts back to the state it was in when you were in your mid-late teens. Somehow no one remembers anything about that era but you, and you look like a psychic genius in every conversation you have.

Virgo - The Virgin
August 22 - September 23
After being forced into scuba diving by a treacherous foe, you meet a mermaid (or merman, depending on your preference) who you move in with. S/he makes breathing under water possible by administering sexy make-outs every 3 minutes.

Libra - The Scales
September 24 - October 23
Scientists decide that you are a portal to the 27th dimension. They shoot video footage of the back of your throat and it becomes the all-time highest grossing movie ever. The trailer alone is a known sock-remover.

Scorpio - The Scorpion
October 24 - November 22
All the dogs of the world elect you as their leader. You get to roll around on piles of puppies every day for 3 hours in exchange for putting out a notice informing the public of the most delicious brands of dog food.

Sagittarius - The Archer
November 23 - December 22
Your random public appearance on a talk show is somehow broadcast on every channel everywhere at once. Due to your stirring speech, becoming a scientist or writing a really useful and/or thought provoking novel replace “Rock Star” and “undeservedly rich and famous” as the careers of choice among youngsters. The media and complacency's hold over society crumbles, and we enter a new age of utopia, transparent government, and gain a d.i.y. mentality in which creativity is valued over a mass produced product with a licensed character's face on it.

Capricorn - The Goat-Fish
December 23 - January 20
You discover the doors to hell while hiking through a Russian wasteland. Your entrance into the dominion of darkness closes the deal on a millennium-old wager between good and evil. All religion suddenly ceases to exist and what was formerly hell becomes your private holodeck.

Aquarius - The Water Bearer
January 21 - February 19
You go back in time and re-live the 1990's as a millionaire patron of the jello-wrestling arts.

Pisces - The Fish
February 20- March 20
Bears suddenly develop an intense fondness for you and you are able to convince your new-found friends to learn an awe-inspiring synchronized rollerskating routine which you perform with them at extravagant concert halls all across the country accompanied by a full orchestra. You take winter months off so they can hibernate.

Wild Card- The Leap Year
February 29th
You discover your favorite band has been stalking you, actually getting started in music so they could actualize the soundtrack to your life. When they are finally convinced that they are good enough, they contact you and ask if it would be okay if they used all their money from record sales to pay you to walk around town while they perform behind you on rolling carts.

true story time

2008-12-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

Today I went to a thrift store to look for books. I was leaning sideways reading the titles, when a large man with shaggy hair and dirt-caked clothes approached me.
"Do you have a dollar?" he asked.
"I'm sorry, I don't have any cash." I said.
He apparently didn't believe me, and continued mumbling about his need for a dollar and inching closer to me. I mumbled "sorry" again and inched in the opposite direction. He seemed to think he was making me uncomfortable and tried a different approach. He had been staring directly at me the entire time, and without turning his head to read the titles he randomly grabbed a book and held it in front of his chest.
"See, I really want to read this book." he said, "I, like, need to read this book. It's important to me. It's a hardback so I need a dollar."
I looked at the book and got the giggles while I shook my head 'no' again. He walked away before I could give him a bit of advice. I wanted to let him know that if he should try that again, he should choose a book ahead of time. When trying to look less creepy, do not tell someone that it is an important, necessary need of yours to read a hardback version of this.

Giant Swallowtail Caterpillar

2008-12-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

The bird dropping appearance of the giant swallowtail caterpillar is apparently a defense mechanism, so they are not eaten by birds. I have a theory that human babies appear "cute" so that people will take care of them. Their defense mechanism is cuteness. Imagine if human babies looked like bear droppings or something instead. Sure, they may not be eaten by bears, but would they still get fed? This guy is about as long as the distance from the tip of my thumb to the first knuckle.

post brain eggs

2008-05-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

The brain eggs have hatched and are off in the world! Well, mostly Junc's corner of the world. This is most of the art that went into the show, sitting on my kitchen floor:
The view from outside during the show:
A view from inside:
There wasn't much foot traffic, but the show will be up another few weeks and should get more during that time. Lots of friends came, and made the whole thing much more fun, and even tried to talk passersby into coming in to look. They were occasionally successful, and it was heartwarming and funny to watch. I am too shy to self promote like that.
Annieoakleaves and her significant other, who I remembered as both being super awesome from the Punk Rock Craft Fair, came out to see the show. They brought me a present of one of her mushroom girl dolls and it is the cutest thing ever. She has an etsy shop here:
http://www.etsy.com/annieoakleaves
I also met the curator Jasmine Worth (also an artist) in person, and she was as nice in person as in her emails. Her art is here:
http://www.jasmineworth.com/

Brain Eggs!

2008-04-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

Solo art show May 3rd, 6-10pm at Junc Boutique and Gallery! Hooray!

Adolescent Dinosaur Mounted With His Thoughts

2008-03-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

Another preview picture for the show in early May! A teenage dinosaur has been hunted down, mounted on a plaque, and now has nothing but time and his thoughts... and apparently his thoughts are of boobs. This is another three dimensional canvas, and I am really enjoying the pattern making that goes along with these. I am actually using (probably very simple, but still...) geometry in real life outside of a math class!

Experimental painting progress

2008-03-19T14:46:00.001-07:00

The experiment is still in progress, but I'm having fun with it and have already sewn together and gessoed another three dimensional canvas. I'm off to work on that right now, while this one takes a bit of time to dry out.

Painting experimentation

2008-03-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with making and painting on 3-d canvases. Lots of fun so far. I sew 3-d, stuffed elements out of additional canvas and sew them onto a stretched canvas, then paint on top of it all. I don't have any completed yet, but here's an in-progress shot of the first one:

Hopefully I'll have a bunch finished in time for the show in May!

Quilt for my cousin's daughter's birthday

2008-02-29T16:50:00.001-08:00

This is my first quilt, made for my cousin's daughter's birthday. It is for a doll, so it's not huge, but the patchwork took less time than I expected. It's about 16" by 22".

2008-02-28T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's new camera day! The improvement is even more noticeable than I imagined! This camera has a macro setting for things like this guy:
Who is only a couple inches tall. I made him and others like him back in November or December 07'. However, this is the first time I've been able to get a really satisfactory image of any of them.
the camera is a Canon, but it is also called an "elph" which I'm sure is an acronym for something, but might also be because it is so super tiny! Also, these images were taken indoors after 5pm, elements which my old camera could never have stood up to. So I am mightily excited about the many images the future may hold.