The Daily Adventures of Mercat

So Geoffrey Rush was in a film about Peter Sellers life? I maybe should have bought it, it was $2 at Second Time Around, but I didn't feel like watching a semi-depressing bioflick. Even if Geoffrey Rush is super amazing, and Peter Sellers is even cooler.

Anyway, the Iron Man 2 trailer is out, and awesome, despite how lame Whiplash looks, and I CAN NOT WAIT. More hot engineering action? Oh, you know it. If only they hadn't dumped Terrence Howard, there really was no reason for that.

Total moral quandary: on facebook, I cannot decide if my profile pic should be Ancient Mew or Blastoise. BOTH ARE AWESOME. BOTH ARE HOLO. Breaking news: I am a nerd. ngl it makes me want to pull out all my old cards. I probably will when I get home.

You know another reason I love Troop? Everyone there is freaking HUGE NERDS. I swear to god every time I meet up with Troop people we have at least one small discussion involving Pokemon. Idek why, it just ALWAYS HAPPENS.

So there's been that video going around of the octopus using a broken coconut as a tool, you know, disregarding the fact that octopi at aquariums break out of their tanks all the time to eat other creatures, or spit out their night-lights, or crack puzzles to get to snacks. I HATE CEPHALOPODS. D: Dear Discovery Channel, thank you for horrifying me with your future-of-evolution special about how octopi/squids/whatever will climb out of the seas and live like monkeys and become the next intelligent beings. FUCK. YOU. Not to mention their texture is terrible for eating.

So Adidas finally released their Star Wars collection, and... it looks horrible. I mean, good on you if you like skater shoes or REALLY LIKE DARTH VADER or even x-wings. And the stormtrooper ones looked promising before... But the Princess Leia ones? *gag* Really.

Sadly, the only ones I'd probably wear would be the Falcons. =/ And they're not even that interesting. Sad day. ([EDIT] I LIED, I found better pictures, the Falcons suck too and the coolest ones are the TIE fighters.)

Interesting article about technology and relationships, although, it is from Cracked so take it as you will. ngl I'm kind of excited for psych 101 next semester. (Somewhat unrelated, I know.)

Anyone have one of these lying around somewhere? I kind of want one. To match my flashlight. And because it's adorable. yesssssss

Idk why but I've been tab-hoarding for weeks. As a result, running roughly 220 tabs was causing firefox to crash constantly. So, here is several days worth of tab writeups, which might mean whatever I wrote sounds a few days old. That would be because it is, but it's probably not too important.

( LOTS of articles )

( a second set, many more articles )

...I read a lot.

I've been messing around looking for a new layout because the lack of width on the last one was killing me, and I also have such a headache right now that trying to read white text on a black background is killer.

I'm not totally satisfied with this layout (I will probably switch out the "shark week" header for my own header) but it works until I find something better.


Also, I need some help. I would like to start a separate blog that I'm planning to be a design-based blog, basically, redesigning life. Breaking stupid habits, making things simpler, younameit. However, I can't figure out which would be the best platform. I love Livejournal, but it's not taken very seriously, and I think "outsiders" tend not to comment on it partly because of that. Plus, I don't know how well lj posts show up in RSS readers and such? Anyway, Blogger is too simplistic for my tastes, and stuff like TypePad is not free. Wordpress gives 3GB of space for you to use and is probably the best platform if I weren't so loyal to livejournal.

Anyway, I just have been accumulating a lot of links and I'd like to have a place to put them that I guess is more tradtional and less personal, set up like "here's the interest photo, here's some text from the website, here's my discussion". And in terms of that, Livejournal tends to be more personal blogs and comms, I think... But if I choose Wordpress, I don't really have any idea of how to get readers. Not that I am trying to be a professional blogger or anything, I just don't really know how to go about this. D:


Also, so much for Earth Day. With all my depression about that article I read I have now deemed it Dystopia Day, especially in light of the fact that I have a new listen-to-it-nonstop Billy Joel song that is awesome, and (in particular) dystopian. (Which reminds me of We Will Rock You, and listening to that all the way to and from Spain, incidentally.)

Here, have some dystopia for your day:



Back with more later, I am sure.

Also, hey "little Hawaiiana Jones icon that matches perfectly"!

Holy crap I feel like it's been ages since I've posted. That may simply be the fact that I have 123 tabs open because I've been too lazy to post in the past few days. (I think the guy that's on Craig Ferguson right now was the guy who voiced the turtle in Swan Princess.) Soooo I need to do a tab dump. I think part of my problem is that I've been trying to keep up better with my gmail and my google reader, but it's a LOT to read... Plus I don't have much space to be saving stuff on my hard drive, so I'm trying to figure out how to rearrage everything so it all works.

I did figure out I can keep some stuff on my netbook (which actually has more memory than my lappy, go figure--I didn't realize that the lappy only had 80GB) and keep a text document of the stats on the info that I need instead of lugging all the files around on a flash drive. So that will open up some space...

I'm not sure what to do with everything else. The problem is that the netbook is good for surfing because carrying around this thing is a pain, but for actual work I like to use this one. And I'm running out of room. Maybe if I succumb to desk use I can just use the backup hard drive? I hate having to hook up external drives though. Bleh.

And I can't put my games on my netbook because they're on CDs and I don't know if I can get my hands on an external CD drive. And I don't want to put my music on the netbook (though it would be handy) because the speakers are pretty shitty. Unless I can find some small (tiny) speakers to lug around with it? And then I'd put the musc on there in an instant. And I would still need an external CD drive.

So what I'm working with is an 80GB tablet, a 80GB+60GB netbook, a 2GB flash drive, a 16GB flash drive, a crappy old iPod nano, and a 250GB external hard drive. I will get a system working here. (It would really help if I could get a resolution on my netbook that didn't involve scrolling but did involve smaller icons and shit. Fucking asus... Excited about playing around with Linux, eventually.)

SO. LINKSPAM OF A MASSIVE NATURE.

Panhandling cat; I feel kind of sad for it. I am just a bleeding heart for street kitties... And I'm amazed it puts up with sitting there all day. (And I really want to adopt KL Kitty aka Tinkerbell.)

So you know that fugly 70's building in North Korea that's a huge abandoned concrete monstrosity (that apparently has no steel structure which I find hard to believe and has warped)? Apparently they are paying an Egyptian company to fix it up--don't know if it's just externally--but yeah. In following up on this I've learned more about North Korea than I've ever known and it is a truly creepy place. Start with this BBC photoset, and then here is a huge phototour. So crazy... They really keep all the "bad" stuff hidden out of sight, and it looks like a creepy, empty, badly-concreteized, highly stylized city. Although I guess most of this is Pyongyang... Still. And someone somewhere posted a lightpollution shot of all of North Korea and its surrounding countries, and NK is like a fucking black hole. Damn. I feel like you could film some crazy shit there if you trusted the place enough... like good Zombie films or something. I think it would feel way too abandoned like that if you did live there, though.

French, Spanish, and German translations for bizarre travelers' phrases. I particularly like "There's a corpse on the bed, please change the sheets". I'm also wondering how many of these innuendos translate to bizarre stuff... Like the silicon ones, maybe? Like maybe the German one is referring to silicon the element, and it just makes no fucking sense. These are the kind of things about languages that I love.

So did you know New Zealand is not technically on the same continent as Australia? It's part of Zealandia. How fucking cool is that? And can we please have more than seven continents? That'd be bitchin'.

5 ways common sense lies to you every day. Some of these, folks, we call logical fallacies. hurr durr

Brain decline begins at age 27?! Fuck.

A model with fake legs, and how they give her "superpowers". She's awesome.

Ricky Gervais and Elmo? That's some funny shit right there. (Is Elmo technically a muppet?! That's how I tagged it but I'm second-guessing myself.)

VERIZON customers: be careful about this. They're apparently sending out some shady paperwork you have to go through the effor of declining so that they're not sending companies info about where you take your vacations or what stuff you're doing online or whatever.

You know, with all these massive amounts of links I'm getting daily now, maybe I should just start a more news-blog styled secondary blog where I can just link these all through one at a time. Jesus Christ to I have a pile here... Bleh. (I am hating to imagine what I will come home to after a summer of tour; it was bad enough last time, but I can't imagine now with all my lovely google subscriptions and shiny things.)

Um... Why don't we stop here for now? I have to check my email and then sleep.

I have a good pile of links, I've been trying to clean up my googlereader. Blech. The bad thing is that when I sit down and read through Gizmodo and Make... I get all psyched up about electronics. Bleeeeh.

This is pretty cool, and be sure to look at the photos. This guy was able to urge bees to build in nonstandard patterns... It's pretty wicked art/architecture/sciene. I don't know what to call it. It's just fascinating.

Did you know there's a Mars simulation station in the desert? They have people live there as if they were on Mars and then study them. Pretty effin' cool.

They are planning to reboot the Tomb Raider series. I actually had no problems with Jolie, but then again, I have never even played a Toomb Raider game. I just enjoy them as the modernizing-Indiana-Jones-popularity thematic things that they are. So... anything with a good set and maybe some good artifacts, I'm in.

So I don't have a particular link for this, but apparently in the past few months passports have started to been distributed with RFID tags included, for easier data reading. However, it's been shown that someone driving by up to thirty feet away with an RFID reader can steal your data; so make sure if you get a new passport (and probably, some ID's already have RFID tags) that you get an RFID-blocking wallet/passport case for it. They usually just have a layer of aluminum foil added, as that's enough to block it. So yeah, it'd be relatively easy to make your own, too; there's some good how-tos on Instructables.

So this is only a design concept, but it actually looks like a very good design to me.

Finally, looking for a good insult? At your fingertips...