Painting I Made

So, I made a goofy painting for my dad's birthday since he's one of those people who is really hard to shop for. It's based on this picture of us when we were playing with the photobooth camera on my macbook last summer. It's mostly made from stencils I cut, because I can never seem to get the lines that smooth when I paint them.

Also, the photobooth camera is still the only one I have, so that's all I have to take a picture of the painting with, but oh well.

Here it is:

Woohoo! This picture is sort of too dark to tell but I'm holding an umbrella.

-msmadelinejo

I Wish this was Real

The Retrocycling Robot is one idea presented by an animator for Challenge Your World 20/20, where video artists submit their ideas for inventions to help deal with environmental problems in the future. Some are real ideas, and others are funny little things like this robot.

Here's how another artist interpreted the challenge:

(I love the little sound effects that the people's feet make in this one!!

There's a bunch more at http://challengeyourworld.com/2020. They're all pretty cool & funny ideas with dope animations. I found these on Motionographer.com, which always has really cool animations, music videos, and stuff like that on it.

I Can't Believe this is Real

I know it's out of season, but this is like...fantastically disgusting. How is this actually serious and who would eat it???

This lady's fucking crazyyyy yo!!! The part where she scoops the pie filling into the center i feel like throwing up a little. I also found this Christmas cake she made with like 5 cans of frosting glooped all over it. Ahhhh!

She pretty much drowns everything she makes in frosting. I'm weirdly fascinated by how ugly/gross it all looks.

-msmadelinejo

Fairies Sail All the Way to Love...

Probably not what she's really saying, but it doesn't really matter you can make up whatever you want. It's made of samples/sound effects from Alice in Wonderland, and I'm pretty much addicted to it. And the video too.

-msmadelinejo

I've Been Wondering Why...

...there aren't any reaction videos yet of people watching Drake's music video for Best I Ever Had. I mean don't get me wrong, I like him, and that song is a good song. But this video has....basically nothing to do with the song, is pretty much the last thing you'd expect to see, and is pretty ridiculous.

I just gotta say I have not seen ANYONE watch this video yet and not have a pretty interesting reaction by the time it hits about 15 seconds. Shock/Delight/Disgust, whatever it is, its pretty funny when it happens. One of my friends just got heeella surprised and then laughed her ass off the whole rest of the video.

Like you're about to watch this video and u think it might be him and a girl, or something like that...and then the first thing you see basically...

Like can you imagine proposing the treatment for this? We have this song that's about this guy and a girl and its kinda sweet, and then we're gonna start the video with a bunch of girls in psuedo-stripper-bathing-suit-basketball-uniforms running towards the camera with their boobs all over the place, sound good? Yea, fantastic.

The Rap Up: "Breast I Ever Had would have been more appropriate."

-msmadelinejo

A Very Pretty Evening

I wish I had a better camera than the macbook webcam to capture what the view of downtown Seattle looks like right now, but this is the best I can do. Love the way the downtown skyline looks really ghostly in the background.

And I LOVE listening to the rain :)

-msmadelinejo

There's a New Baby in My House

And her name is Lyla. She's so dark it's kind of hard to take pictures of her unless you have a good camera (which I don't), because she basically just looks like a black puffball. She's a 6 month old Pomeranian and is about 5 pounds.

She's already adopted a collection of stuffed animals and squeaky miniature tennis balls that she keeps in her crate, and if you put them all out on the floor she collects them all up one by one and takes them back in with her. Welcome home cutie!

-msmadelinejo

The Way I See It

So basically I'm a little behind on the times in not checking out Raphael Saadiq's motown album until this June (it came out in almost a year ago), but its niice. I already like motown, and its awesome to hear some new music that is equally fresh but brings out some of the classic.

Can't actually link the music video but if you click it should take you to Youtube where you can watch it. It's a nice mixture of graphics and real footage that comes with a kind of James Bond feel. Dope concept & I love the look. There are so many details in this video that I am feelin every time I watch it.

Okay and I had to add that this song, "The Big Easy," doesn't have a music video on Youtube but you can listen to it here. A tribute to the 9th Ward & other Katrina victims.

-msmadelinejo

Sure Thing-St. Germain

So on something like a Tuesday night a few weeks ago I was at home working in my room at about 1 in the morning or so...and my mom was listening to Jazz After Hours on NPR. I started hearing this song coming from the living room that just sounded really enticing in a kind of dark jazzy/funky/electronic way. So I wandered out to listen to it and all the lights were off, my mom was off somewhere in the basement, and this is what was playing:

It's Sure Thing by St. Germain, a French composer/producer who released his 3rd album, Tourist,in 2000.

The song is composed using samples of vocal and guitar riffs by blues legend John Lee Hooker. These sounds are woven into the beat in a way that kind of feels like a soundscape to me. It was a pretty dope midnight discovery.

-msmadelinejo

If You Haven't Yet

Please check out cakewrecks.blogspot.com. It's about "when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong" and honestly, I don't think I've ever read a blog that I found as funny as this one. There are actually some cakes out there that are ridiiiculous, and the commentary is sooooper hilarious.

-msmadelinejo

Goodbye Young Shi

:(

It's been a while since this happened, but I didn't really know what to say about it until now...on July 23rd we had to take our 12-year-old dog, Shiloh, in to the vet and have him put down. He still looked like a puppy up to the very last day of his life, but Shiloh was actually getting pretty old and was having kidney failure and heart problems that weren't treatable anymore.

If you want to know what a legitimately old-aged puppy looks like, this is it (this first picture is from June):

My mom found this dog sitting in the turn lane on Rainier Ave. 12 years ago and after looking for his owner for about a month we decided to keep him. For most of his younger years he was a loud and attention-seeking but awesome little dog. As he got older he tended to sit and observe us with his big button-eyes while we hung out around the house. It's kind of funny that we always sort of thought of him as being a puppy when, for his years he's been older than all of us for quite a while. I think he was more ready to go than we were ready to let him. It was hard but I think we did the right thing for him.

Goodnight little bear <3

Being home alone...

...was only fun way back in the day when it finally meant I could sneak in the kitchen and steal some ice cream or have people over in high school. Now I'm realizing more and more that it's just....depressing. I kind of crave my alone time when I'm away at school, but I've gotten so used to being surrounded by people all the time that now being alone in my house is just lonely and weird.

I'm trying to edit a Wordpress site that I'm starting for my next semester at school, and I think it's gonna be a really cool idea/should really pop off...if I can ever figure out how the fuck to use some of this css stuff. It's pretty much a foreign language to me, but I figure, delete a few things here and there and rearrange some stuff and it'll turn out the way I want it to, right?

....Sort of?

Anyway, in conclusion there's a griiiip of fucking terrible web design out there. So after wading through a lot of really ugly Wordpress themes, I'm trying to turn this one I've found into something not-shitty. Hopefully something really dope. Hope it goes well!

-mj