Weekly Wiki: Wilhelm Scream
HA, I remember the article that I was going to feature here a couple weeks ago!
If you’ve ever watched a movie or TV, you’ve probably been privy to the Wilhelm scream, a stock sound effect first used in 1951 and has since been audible in over 225 movies and TV shows (often as an in-joke).
The scream was first heard in the 1950s movie Distant Drums and gained popularity after George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino began to slide it into almost every movie they made (yes, including Star Wars). The fact that the scream is publically available has caused it to propagate throughout online media created by amateur film/media makers.
Compilation!
Flume
Sucky, sucky, sucky day. Do not wish to speak of it.
So in other news, has anybody ever noticed how average Idaho is at pretty much everything (but potatoes and lentils)? Aside from being one of the most right-wing-insane states, in almost every other way in which states are ranked/measured, Idaho almost always lands very close to the middle. Obviously there are exceptions, though. Did you know that Idaho has the third highest percentage of resident population under the age of 18? And that the state is 5th in geothermal power generation?
And for something totally unrelated: I forgot how badass the soundtrack to Princess Mononoke was.
Zazz
DUDES, did anybody else ever watch these?
YouTube is single-handedly making me relive my childhood. Freaking awesome.
Internettin’
I’m not going to deny it: I’m in love with the internet. All of it. Every informative page of Wikipedia, every dark, seedy corner of 4chan, every increasingly strange playlist on YouTube, and yes—even the frighteningly powerful overlord of Google.
It totally rules my life, haha.
I also just discovered Tumblr. Trouble now.
Stuff.
Also, I just found this on YouTube. We had this on VHS way back in the age of the Cassettosaurus.
I remember this like I just watched it yesterday, man.
I’ve had amnesia for as long as I can remember
1. Where are you from and where do you live now?
From Moscow (Idaho), living in Tucson.
2. Favorite childhood story/book/film?
Dr. Seuss’s A Fly Went By. Freaking LOVED that book. I had it memorized and could
3. If you could change gender for a day what would you do?
I’d run around without my shirt on. I’d be awesome. I wouldn’t want to change back at the end of the day.
4. Do you feel you family is complete or would you like more/some children?
Kids are scary.
5. What do you do/Where do you work and do you enjoy it?
Right now I’m doing e-text (making PDF copies of textbooks readable by text-to-speech programs for students who need books in audio format). It’s…um…tedious.
6. Which three words do you think sum you up?
Obsessive, odd, knowledge-seeking (that counts as one word!).
7. If you were a fairy what magical powers would you possess?
I’d like to be able to fly (with wings or without). And move stuff without picking it up. Telekinesis. Do fairies get that?
8. If you were invisible, where would you go and what would you do? Why?
I’d stalk the crap out of a few people, not gonna lie. I wouldn’t do anything malicious, though, and I’d give them their space.
9. What song can’t you listen to without crying?
10. Which book changed your life – or at least made you think a lot?
Voltaire’s Candide. I think it was such an impactful book in part because it was the first book I read in a class that put it into context—historically, artistically, politically, and culturally. It just made it that much more interesting. Plus it’s Voltaire, man, seriously.
11. Why do you blog?
It keeps me sane, believe it or not.
12. What is your top ‘me-time’ tip?
Schedule it after you’ve accomplished all your other goals for the day. It’ll be that much more special.
13. What can’t you live without?
A way to get the ideas out of my head and out into the world (even if I keep most of them to myself).
14. Which of all your blog posts are you most proud of and why?
This one. I wrote it all in one go one night long ago and it makes me happy.
15. Have you ever met a famous person? Who and where?
Nope, never have.
16. When did you last have a full nights sleep?
Like, the 8 hours thing? It’s been awhile.
17. What would you think is harder: Going to work or staying at home with children?
Depends on the work. Depends on how obnoxious your kids are.
18. What are you doing for Easter?
Probably nothing special.
19. What is your favorite drink?
Apart from water? RED BULL!
20. Do you play any sports?
HA. I’d like to play baseball/softball though, that’d be fun.
21. What is your most embarrassing moment?
My life.
22. How clever are you?
Depends on my mood. And how much sugar I’ve had.
23. Name a new favorite TV show?
A new one? I haven’t really discovered any new TV shows that I consider favorites. I’ll just say Metalocalypse.
24. Any guilty pleasures?
Too many. One of them is Leibniz.
25. If you could have chosen your own name, what would it be?
I like my name.
26. Who do you most admire in life, and why?
I admire my mom. She’s put up with a lot of crap in her life and she’s still chugging along fantastically. Yay mom!
27. What is your most treasured possession?
My USB drive with all my stuff on it (drawings, writing, music, blogs, pictures, etc.).
28. What’s been your worst injury?
I don’t know if appendicitis counts as an injury…so I’ll say the time I fell off the slide and got a concussion. OR the time I sledded into a frozen clod of dirt and got a concussion.
29. What is your biggest fear in life?
Regretting my decisions, especially those I’ve made in the past couple of months (whether I wanted to or not).
30. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream? What does it remind you of?
Oreo. It reminds me of when I lived back in Moscow. Every Thursday night my mom, dad, and I would go out to dinner somewhere and then my mom and I would go to Baskin Robbins and eat ice cream while sitting in the car in the parking lot.
Oh, Canadians…
When I was a kid and still going over to my dad’s place on the weekends, we’d often watch his old VHS tapes of the Rocky & Bullwinkle show. One component of the show that (for whatever reason) was brought to the forefront of my memory today was the old Dudley Do-Right segments.
The humor of these must have just gone completely over my head as a kid, but as I’m typing this now I’ve got this one playing in the background and I’m laughing like crazy.
Here are two others:
“We’ve destroyed more bridges than a near-sighted dentist!” Hahahaha.
Pasta Junkie
Do you guys wonder if the course of one’s life kind of follows the same pattern as the course of human history? Like, do we each of us have our own Dark Ages? Our own Age of Enlightenment? A Post-Modern era? If so, do we pass through these stages in generally the same order that humanity did? My own life has some strong parallels in terms of “periods” and general sequence, but that just might be me and my overanalyzing.
Anyway.
OH, and here’s something to brighten your day:
This is DJ Earworm’s mashup of the top 25 Billboard hits of 2011 (I was going to post this at the beginning of the year, but nooooo). He’s been doing these since 2007, so if this kind of stuff appeals to you, check out the rest of his YouTube channel. He’s fantastic.
END!
SSSSerif
New header! I cannot be stopped.
Also: I had a dream last night about a guy named Sam Serif. He was a sheriff. Even in my unconscious brain, man. Even in my unconscious brain.
Also also: here’s some food porn. Because yay.
OH CRAP it’s another blog
Two joyous items:
1. Hulu now has ALL SIX SEASONS of Chicago Hope. Must acquire money to get Hulu Plus. It’s a total ripoff in general, but it’s worth it to see the rest of the CH seasons.
2. The Piano Guys (two of the best musicians on YouTube) + Coldplay’s Paradise (one of the best songs ever) = this fantasticness:
Also, I forgot how much I love running.
All Quiet on the Western Font
Sigh.
You know what’s a big deal to me? Fonts.
Has anyone reading this ever seen the old Disney Silly Symphony cartoon called Music Land?
If you don’t have 9 minutes to watch: the story’s about two warring lands in the world of music: the Isle of Jazz, populated by anthropomorphic jazz instruments such as saxophones, trumpets, and guitars, and the Land of Symphony, populated by anthropomorphic—you guessed it—symphonic instruments such as violins, violas, cellos, etc. The princess of Symphony, a young violin, falls in love with the prince of Jazz, a little saxophone. They’re caught canoodling in Symphony, the prince is thrown into jail, and the two lands go to war over the whole thing. The prince escapes and the two lovers row out into the Sea of Discord (haha) separating the two lands and almost drown, causing the parents (Queen of Symphony and King of Jazz) to row out to rescue them. In the end, the queen and king fall in love and the two lands reconcile, creating a Bridge of Harmony across the Sea of Discord (d’awwwww). Seriously, watch the cartoon if you’ve got time, it’s pretty awesome.
Wow, tangent.
Anyway, to bring that back around, that’s kind of the relationship I see when I think of fonts. There’s like a Serif Land and a Sans Serif Land, with Times New Roman and Arial the two respective leaders. They absolutely hate each other and the serif fonts stay well out of the way of the sans serifs. And there’s like this half-breed group of wild semi-serifs that roam outside the boundaries of either land and eat the fonts that stray out of the protection of their respective areas.*
I’ll say it again: fonts are a big deal to me.
Anyway. The main reason I keep redoing my heading for this blog is because I have yet to identify a font as my particular signature font. Times New Roman is certainly my favorite font (serifs > sans serifs, I don’t care what anyone else says), but it’s not MY font. At least not for this blog. I keep jumping around with a few fonts (right now I’m using Metro, which is pretty great but isn’t just right), but every time I check for more to download I either download like 90 different ones and thus consequently have to delete yet another program from Vaio (hard drive = 99.9% full or something like that) while still not getting the right font or I get distracted reading about typography on Wiki.
So yeah, I know it doesn’t matter to anyone else and it’s probably just more annoying than anything else, but just to explain why that little header above keeps changing like every month/week/hour: I am searching for the right font. I know someday it will come.
The end.
Oh, also this, which I’ve posted before but am posting again because it’s hilarious and relevant.
*Do you see what goes on in my head? DO YOU? This is why I can’t take myself seriously.
Oh my. Guns N’ Roses.
Question: why did it take me 23 years to check out Guns N’ Roses?
Answer: who cares, they’re AWESOME!
I give you full permission to berate the hell out of me for never paying attention to these guys before. I don’t know what’s wrong with me—I honestly never sought out one of their songs for a listen and while I’m sure I’ve heard at least 3 seconds of one of their songs at least once in my life, I’ve never questioned who’s played it.
Silly, silly Claudia.
Robust and Toasty
HEY WE HAVE AN APARTMENT NOW WOO.
That badass loft bedroom upstairs? All mine, baby.
I don’t understand these commercials
I thought the Charmin bears had gone by the wayside during my two-year stint without television, but apparently I thought wrong. And lo and behold, the baby bears have yet to have learned how to wipe without shredding the TP enough to leave little pieces on their behinds.
I don’t understand.
1. This has never happened to me in the whole history of wiping my own butt. Is my technique wrong or something? Is this really a common enough problem for the general population that Charmin would devote a decade-long ad campaign promoting their toilet paper as THE toilet paper with which people can wipe without fear of leaving their butt looking like a freshly crop-dusted field?*
2. Do these bears age? Are the baby bears the same baby bears that were starring in these commercials in like the Stone Age? Maybe learning to properly wipe is a skill learned with age for bears, like how to catch salmon and the ability to advocate the prevention of forest fires. Maybe the bears DO age, and the older bears in the commercials are just thrown into reminiscing about how difficult wiping was for them when they were cubs when they see their kids running around with a contrail of toilet paper residue behind them. That makes them run out and purchase some Charmin.
2 ½. You’d think by this point in the generational timeline, however, that they would’ve realized that starting the cubs out with paper that ISN’T Charmin is completely ineffective and would just stock the stuff in the bathrooms (woods?) automatically.
3. Unless you too are a naked anthropomorphic bear, I still don’t really see the issue with this. If you’ve got TP all up on your butt, it’s really your own issue, not the rest of the world’s. Odds are, your parents/significant other/random other people/ aren’t going to point out the debris on your bottom. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to be grounded from spaceflight due to having paper crumbs in your crack:
And hell, if you’ve gone through the rigorous training necessary for intergalactic space travel, if you’ve got pieces of TP on your butt before a mission, your alien coworkers better just let you have pieces of TP on your butt before a mission. The focus should be on the effects of time dilation on you and your fellow astronauts, not on whether or not your butt is pristine.
So there.
*I have no idea if anyone else knows of this technique, but around Moscow once a crop-duster has dusted a field they drop a string of TP on it to mark it as done.
Busy spazzing, BRB
In the meantime, a silly vid:
Most accurate tourism rundown of Vancouver I’ve ever heard. The foot comment rendered much guffawing.
TWSB: Santa Ana is Coming to Town
I don’t know how closely any of you dudes follow the news, especially weather-related news, but as of right now the Southwest US is being battered by what are known as the Santa Ana winds.
The Santa Ana winds, which arise in Southwest California in late fall or early winter, are the strongest they’ve been in nearly a decade according to CNN. Gusting at 60 MPH in some places, they’ve already knocked out the power to a large portion of people living in Southern California.
According to the Wiki article, the Santa Ana winds arise when the surface air in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert becomes cool and begins to fall to lower elevations. Sinking into the valleys and canyons of the lower desert, the air is often pushed through the land’s channels at near hurricane forces. In addition, its sinking in elevation causes it to heats up again (a process called adiabatic heating; as the air sinks the pressure around it increases, thus causing the air to heat as it is compressed). This, when combined with the fact that the air has already been dried by orographic lift before reaching the Great Basin, makes for extremely dry winds, often with relative humidity levels below 10%, gusting at extremely high forces. These winds push across Southern California and, as evident by the recent news, cause havoc.
Edit: video!
Woohoo, crazy weather!
Damn you, David E. Kelly
Chicago Hope + Boston Legal = no sleep and much laughter.
And I have just discovered Gabriel Iglesies. He’s cool.
and
So wrong, but his impressions make it really funny.
Also, thanks to my NaNo, I now know more about presidential hairstyles and hair in general than anyone should.
7th Grade Hilarity
I’ve transcribed this here before, but now that I’ve got the wonderful and incredibly high-tech method of taping my TV with my camera and uploading said recording to Compy and then onto YouTube, I can show you the actual video. Not that you care (and not that I expect you to), but I’m posting it anyway. Mostly so that I’ve put it somewhere.
Here is our 7th grade advanced reading group performing our interpretation of the fight between Paul and Jamis in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Brendan’s the tall blonde guy playing Paul, Kyle’s the guy playing Jamis, Mitchell’s the guy who jumps off the tower in the beginning, Kristen’s Jessica, and I’m the camera guy.
And here are the “bloopers,” which is basically us performing Brendan’s scripted interpretation of pretty much everything relating to Duncan Idaho. Brendan’s twisted, twisted script.
I miss that freaking sweater so much.
Blog 2,024: Strummin’
Okay, new favorite musician:
The more I read about this man, Steven Sharp Nelson, the more I really dig him.
“I believe the purpose of life is to be happy.”
“I believe that good music can be a source of joy, inspiration, and fulfillment.”
“I believe as Bobby McFerrin once said, listening to only one kind of music is like insisting on living in only one room of your home your entire life.”
He’s also got bios of all his cellos on his site.
Badass. Go subscribe to The Piano Guys’ YouTube page for more awesomeness.
Dear Creative Muse: Pick a Freaking Topic and Stick with It
November 3rd: “Anyway, the new [NaNoWriMo] topic is deeply personal and definitely won’t get an excerpt posted…. so this year’s just going to be mysteeeeeerious! At least until I change my topic again.”
Today: I changed my topic again!
I had this super weird dream about a barber who goes and works for the President of the US, the President falls in love with him, all this absurdist subtext and symbolism is going on, there are lots of references to the ocean, and nothing really makes sense until the story’s over…
If I were a normal person I’d be like “oh, that was an odd dream. Oh well.” But since I’m a NaNoWriMo person, I was like “NEW NOVEL IDEA!”
So there.
And here’s a fascinating video discussing aging and time.
Haha, I’ve read that article they flashed at 2:26.
And he’s totally right…Vancouver was an intense hell on earth and therefore it felt about 60 years long.
Blog 2,013: NaNoReWriMo
That’s National Novel ReWrite Month for me, haha. I’m a fickle bugger, so I’m scratching my current NaNo idea (surprise, surprise) and going with something new. At least I’m restarting near the beginning of the month this time, unlike last year where Googol was born on like the 15th had to be written rapidly (alongside class-work stuff and that soul bomb of a thesis).
Anyway, the new topic is deeply personal and definitely won’t get an excerpt posted. Maybe not even a synopsis. But it’s happening because all my other ideas are about 45% there in my head and the stuff I’m writing about in the new NaNo needs to get out of my head to make room for more important stuff (a.k.a. statistics stuff, methods to convince my dad to get me a car, how many M&Ms just came crashing out of the bag I just heard tip over in the kitchen…stuff like that). So this year’s just going to be mysteeeeeerious!
At least until I change my topic again.
On a completely unrelated note, I was surfing around YouTube this afternoon and came across this video of Steve Jobs introducing the iBook way back in 1999.
I’d never actually watched one of his keynotes, but holy freaking crap, that man could sell a product. It’s got a tiny little 3.2 GB hard drive and I still want one.
My dad actually had a tangerine one way back when. I played Bugdom incessantly on it, haha.
OH CRAP NANOWRIMO
Haha, totally just remembered that that’s happening in like five days.
Commence pulling last-minute plot out of ass!
In the meantime THREE THINGS!
1. Adventure Time is still the greatest show on Cartoon Network and Lumpy Space Princess is freaking awesome.
I still think the art/feel of this cartoon is very similar to that of Tom Deslongchamp.
2. I’ve posted this before, but I’m linking to it again ‘cause it rules and I just rediscovered it.
3. Haha, stats jokes.
30-Day Meme – Day 27: The last thing that made you cry.
Uncertainty. I don’t like things being “up in the air” like they currently are. I don’t know how long I’ll be in Moscow, I don’t know what’s going on with the rest of my educational career (‘cause it’s most certainly not over, screw that), and most of all, I don’t know what’s going on with my head. Hopefully things will start making some sense in the coming weeks. It also doesn’t help that I’ve literally only got a suitcase’s worth of stuff here at my dad’s and the rest of my things are making their way across the continent, current location unknown. If my stats books and notes get lost, someone’s gettin’ stabbed.
I Coulda Been a Container
I’ve been up since 4 AM Eastern Time yesterday (Saturday). It is now 1:30 AM Pacific Time on Sunday. London to Chicago to Las Vegas to Seattle to Pullman to Moscow. Six hours in Las Vegas.
Party in the USA.
In other news, the Chicago O’Hare Airport has some pretty badass lighting going down in Terminal 2. Evidence:
If I ever end up with tons and tons of money? This. On every ceiling in my house. 24/7.
30-Day Meme – Day 23: What your last dream you can remember was about.
I had this really weird H. G. Wells-esque dream about a scientist who is somehow able to go into the future like 10,000 years. He finds out that a disease had destroyed a whole generation’s worth of humans’ eyesight and, for some reason, all subsequent generations’ eyesight as well. Therefore, everyone he meets is “blind” (and their eyes are bound over by these weird webs of skin and eyelashes explained loosely by crazy awesome dream science) and they become fascinated with him when he describes to them this thing called “sight.”
Not unlike the “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” adage, the scientist soon realizes that these individuals (who are living in a land that has once again become rich in resources that are scarce in the time of the scientist) can be taken advantage of because they cannot see him. He begins to pilfer from them, lightly at first, and then begins to eventually shape and alter parts of their routines and culture in order to get them to procure for him all these valuable resources. Little does the scientist know, however, these people have developed this sort of “extra sense” that allows them to “see” what the scientist is doing to them. They wait and play along with him for awhile to get him comfortable in the environment, then a bunch of them eventually capture the scientist and he is subject to quite a graphic and disturbing bit of torture involving the people injecting all these weird chemicals into the scientist’s eyes. It was…odd.
That’s all.
Crappity Crap Craptastic Crapperton
Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I want death.
You get 30 Day Meme and ONLY 30 Day Meme before I pass out in a heap of neurosis.
30-Day Meme – Day 2: Your favorite movie.
I’m not a movie person. There are approximately seven movies in existence that I would willingly suggest watching if I were in the position of HAVING to suggest a movie for lack of better alternative ways of wasting time.
But one movie I could watch again and again and again (and have) is Apollo 13. Why?
1. Tom Hanks. He’s badass and, in my opinion, one of the better actors out there.
2. Kevin Bacon. See above, plus the fact that he also starred in Tremors as a random cowboy makes me laugh every time I see him as an astronaut in this movie.
3. I have a thing for movies about space. From the more “accurate” movies like this one to the all-out corny “AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!” movies like Armageddon, space movies have always been of interest to me.
4. The soundtrack. Particularly the track “The Launch.”
Listen and chill.
