"Capture and Move Microscopic Objects - by the Force of Light !"

How the fuck does this work?

Wait, is light even a "force"?

I really need to learn about physics and chemistry. I feel like I have a reasonable amateur grasp of biology--on the level of evolution, ecology, etc., rather than the level of organs cells, and smaller--but I was always pretty ignorant of chemistry and physics, mostly because things I can't see and that aren't alive were less interesting to me.

Also, dude tattoos eyeball lapis lazuli blue. If you're a pussy who has some sort of problem with needles in eyeballs, you might not want to look at the pictures.

A lot of interesting and perhaps relevant (for me) articles cited here.

Fingernails on a blackboard.

Snatiation and gargalesthesia are awesome fucking words. omg.

aswang

This is way fucked (in a good way):

Aswang
Manananggal

Man, these are awesome and totally scary.

I'm not sure if they just have better monsters, or if the novelty makes it seem better.

line breaks

I do not know what is up with me + lineation these days, and I should be working on my own thesis or reading someone else's rather than writing this post. Ah well. Factors that go into line breaks:

1) form (e.g. certain number of syllables or beats, end-rhyme)
2) breath/phrase/clause breaks (places one would naturally pause slightly or where there is a discrete clause. breaking across those can create greater momentum and sometimes a jarring sensation, which can be okay/desirable in some circumstances but generally not, I think)
3) making the first and last words of the line interesting and/or significant. We pay most attention to the words at the beginning and ends of lines, because of orthography, structure of English, left to right reading, etc.
4) similarly, placing more emphasis on a certain word than there might be otherwise (in unlineated writing or in a lineation that more closely followed breath or phrase breaks)
5) evoking different or multiple meanings (keeping in mind productive vs. nonproductive ambiguity, that is, ambiguity that actually enhances meaning or expands things in some useful or meaningful way, rather than just cramming in extra connotations/weirdness for the hell of it)
6) surprise or irony

So yeah. A few years ago I seemed to be more into the latter 3, especially doing the unproductive ambiguity thing. I was so all about trying to make poems and lines that made the reader feel like the back of their head was blown off (however ED phrased that exactly). Now I'm really not. That is one flashy trick out of a whole bag of them, and there are better ones. Now I feel like I'm focused more on the first two, or more than I was earlier at least. I don't want to be breaking lines just because it's "poetry" and there are line breaks. One poem recently I was like, fuck it, it will be a prose poem. I don't know, line breaks are awkward for me now.

Oh, also I forgot 7), how it looks on the page. This is an irritating one.

helium, color

"Most of the world's helium supply comes from underground fields in the United States."

Man, it must be hard to mine a gas, wtf. And why/how is it there?

spectral line

"Many atoms emit or absorb visible light. In order to obtain a fine line spectrum, the atoms must be in a gas phase."

"All atoms absorb in the Ultraviolet (UV) region because these photons are energetic enough to excite outer electrons."

"inelastic scattering of light"

photoelectric effect

Color

Why frequency gaps? Tetrachromats. Berlin and Kay

"In the 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay describe a pattern in naming "basic" colors (like "red" but not "red-orange" or "dark red" or "blood red", which are "shades" of red). All languages that have two "basic" color names distinguish dark/cool colors from bright/warm colors. The next colors to be distinguished are usually red and then blue or green. All languages with six "basic" colors include black, white, red, green, blue and yellow. The pattern holds up to a set of twelve: black, grey, white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and azure (distinct from blue in Russian and Italian but not English)."

qualia

"The distinction between warm and cool colors has been important since at least the late 18th century but is generally not remarked in modern color science or colorimetry. The contrast, as traced by etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary, seems related to the observed contrast in landscape light, between the "warm" colors associated with daylight or sunset and the "cool" colors associated with a gray or overcast day."

"Any color can be made to appear warm or cool by its context with other colors."

red-green color blindness

"Anomalous Trichromats are often able to readily spot camouflage clothing, netting, and paint that has been designed for individuals with color-normal vision."

Cerebral achromotopsia.

""Mr. I. could hardly bear the changed appearances of people ("like animated gray statues") any more than he could bear his own changed appearance in the mirror: he shunned social intercourse and found sexual intercourse impossible. He saw people's flesh, his wife's flesh, his own flesh, as an abhorrent gray; "flesh-colored" now appeared "rat-colored" to him. This was so even when he closed his eyes, for his preternaturally vivid ("eidetic") visual imagery was preserved but now without color, and forced on him images, forced him to "see" but see internally with the wrongness of his achromatopsia. He found foods disgusting in their grayish, dead appearance and had to close his eyes to eat. But this did not help very much, for the mental image of a tomato was as black as its appearance."

i have gone insane

I think I may have gone insane. Evidence:

i would totally wear this (maybe you know with some pants under it). i totally hate the whole SEXY EVERYTHING costume thing for women, where the most random things are sexualized (like uh, fucking PACMAN), but i mean, come on, look at this thing, this is fucking awesome.

I would totally wear this too minus the mouse ears.

dig the way they can't say the real names of shit (e.g. "polka-dot mouse") to avoid lawsuit presumably

OH MY GOD AND THE MISS MUFFET ONE, ahaha. okay i wouldn't actually wear that one, but i would be tempted too just because of the spider. there should me more clothes adorned w/ giant three-dimensional spiders.

OKAY I WOULD TOTALLY WEAR THIS TOO (just the dress and with like something opaque over my legs), have I snapped? I think I have snapped.

I have never, in my life, felt as badly about my writing as I do now.

Fuck you tropical thesis, I am going to shred you.

I'm so ridiculous. I should just channel AH forever and get it over with. I should drag feral cats from out under houses for a living. WTF.

I'd like this to pass, please. Jesus.

note to self: persona poems from fundie perspective.

i've been having fun looking at some old intentionally-horrible poems i wrote (evidently they were convincing as genuine efforts, rather than as something self-consciously mocking bad poetry) and writing some more. This character has kind of emerged (the writer of said poems) and I think I'm going to make her a myspace page when I figure out what kind of username she'd pick.

Whew.

Another inadvertent blood sacrifice to the Hopwoods.

Hopefully it will dry and look like coffee smears or something.

I feel proud of my manuscript, but now I'll be obsessively wondering whether I stuffed them in the binders wrong or something.

look what i found

Okay, so I'm looking over my work because I have to submit the first draft of my thesis to workshop, and submit stuff to a contest, very shortly (and on the same day). A couple weeks ago I just complied all my shit and put it in alphabetical order. Just now I went through my brain and computer to find poems which I hadn't included and there were 23, which I'd totally forgotten about.

This is probably because I rule.

Okay, fine, a lot of them are basically ore at the moment. I didn't say they were all great poems. But perhaps I am unusually productive after all. It doesn't feel that way. I think of all the time I spend NOT writing.

So much work to do. I was looking at a list of the poems I submitted to the contest last year and was like, no WONDER I didn't win, I can't believe I even made it to the judges. I must have drastically improved/changed as a poet. At least, I hope that's true. I suppose it's possible that I simply have a different perspective on my previous work, just because I'm more removed from it now, and that I am making all sorts of equally clueless blunders. That I am just as bad, but my blind spot has shifted around, so to speak.

So much revision needed. And so little free time. I just want to have to do nothing but write. Caffeine is my friend.

Oh, I think a lot about titles. What will make someone pick up a book? Issues:
--Will it make someone pick up the book?
--Is it lame and potentially eyeroll-inducing?
--Is it a reference to a strong poem, and/or possibly one people might consider emblematic of the whole work? (because people are going to try to make that connection--including they're actually reading your poetry in the first place, of course)
--Is it okay to have a title which tangentally relates to your poems, or even doesn't relate to it entirely? I feel like it's cheating. Because sometimes I have way more fun coming up with titles than anything else.

Jaroslaw Kukowski

Also, this guy rules and has freaky paintings. What is it about polish surrealists? I think the l in his first name is actually the kind with the cross thru it that is pronounced like w and that I don't know the code for.

specimens in formalin + deep deep holes in mars.

Oh my god.

Disturbing/fascinating/???/kind of beautiful black and white pictures of animals preserved in formalin.

I don't know WTF a lot of them are.

Also, apparently there are these really really deep holes in Mars, so deep that the sun doesn't illuminate them. I want to spelunk on mars. Actually I just want to spelunk generally, I have not done that in a while. Are there any good caves in michigan? I don't know wtf is up with the word "spelunk," but it's a pretty good word.

YAY. Mystery. We want to find out what is in places we can't see. We want to go there.

I kind of want some of these insane tights. Too bad you can't really see what they look like in full. Also the website is sort of borked, and sends you to the wrong place occasionally. It's like a maze!

I want the red snakey ones.

So many colors

I don't think I'm going to provide context for this. But look around on the website if you want some idea of what the fuck. (May not actually be any more comprehensible after doing so.)

See also the "support the troops" one.