lolcats

I Hate The World - I Love The Internet

When your sister dies too soon, everything is harder all the time.

I'll just start with that to explain the first part of the title of my blog post.

I've been crying for a while now, tonight. Part of it is just release from a stressful, cold, busy week here in Belfast. The work is not hard. The weather is not that bad (and I was prepared for it). My schedule is not outrageous compared to some shoots I've been on. But all together + a touch of homesickness + time difference + grief = it's all exponentially harder. It's unexpected and surprising, this burst of tears and sobs. Maybe it's just my day off and I'm letting it all go, after working most of the day, to prepare, to gird my loins, for the week to come. Who knows. Maybe I just needed a great sobbing cry and it would have happened no matter where I was, no matter what was going on.

Here's a funny thing. I wouldn't have shared this much detail directly with Jen and yet I would have shared some of this with her and she would have been supportive and said helpful things, even if they were sort of just platitudes. Hard to explain how sisters are. Every sister relationship is so different, even within one multi-marriage family. 

You know what is hardest about being on location without husband or friends nearby? You miss hugs. But somehow, within a week or so, you find one or two people on set, on the crew, who you can hug every day and it's not weird. It's like emergency rations of affection. The video playback woman, Grace, is one of my hug-buddies. So are Paul and Amie on stunts. Great people all. Thank the the gods for them. Gemma too, when she's here, but she's always on a different set, preparing when we are shooting. I'm grateful for my hug-buddies. I don't know how I'd make it without them. And it's not even that long of a shoot.

Then there is the internet. 

I started this job with some blog posts about our location scouts and had to take them down because they were a bit too much information for the wonderfully passionate group of fans surrounding this project. Because of that, I started to read a few of their blogs and am having a lot of fun with it. There is one blog that has almost daily updates and I love reading about what I may or may not have been doing during my work day. It's great. And from that blog, I have gotten many new twitter followers. I have made it clear they will be disappointed by my tweets and blog posts from now on (in regard to the project), but still they are there and they interact with me and you know what? It's awesome. Two of them have even sent me HILARIOUS safety graphics and I posted them this week. I feel like, even though I have a very small part on this project (and those of you who KNOW me know exactly how I feel about this small part), these new fans/followers have kind of become friends. Paul and his 3 year old daughter in particular have been so kind and funny and supportive. When I tweeted that I hated the world and everyone in it today, he sent a supportive and funny tweet back in response. When I said how much I appreciated his and his daughter's support and even more so because we'd never even met, he sent me a picture of his daughter giving me two thumbs up. It made me burst into happy sad tears again. What a crazy wonderful thing this "social media" is. 

Then there is Dor who is now on Twitter and who sends me emails with LOLcats in them. My other dear sister Dorian. Thank all the gods for her too.

And I'm listening to Green Day. Billie Joe and Tre and Dirnt are sort of helping. If only I had drumsticks right now, I would be in great shape. 

My clothes are laid out for heavy weather tomorrow. It's 8:30 and I have to be up at 5. I'll be going to bed soon. I'm exhausted. 


Internet Celebrity, LOLcats and Cheezburgers

A few weeks ago I joined Sarah at the WordPress Word Camp LA at LMU. I went more for the content than the tech stuff as I use mostly Typepad (though Metblogs is WordPress). The thing I was the most excited about was that Ben Huh was one of the speakers. 

Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger fame. Ben Huh my internet rock star!

MeandBenHuh

Word Camp had only a few hundred participants and each talk took place in a classroom on the LMU campus so it was quite intimate. Ben's talk did not disappoint! He had great things to say about simplicity and doing things on the cheap. Very very smart stuff. Some great quotes from his presentation: 

Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity.

and 

Complexity has an inverse effect on your business's ability to scale.

I was fully inspired to continue keeping it simple and fun on Safety Graphic Fun. 

He took questions and mine was the last one. I asked "Where did you get that awesome t-shirt?!" He was quite pleased that I asked and said you can find it on Threadless. (I might need to buy that for a few friends...) If you have no idea what the heck that shirt is all about, you clearly have a full time job and kids and a life. This shirt is a beautiful dovetailing of two internet memes. The first is one of my all time favorites: Keyboard Cat. And the second part of the shirt is original Three Wolves Shirt on Amazon with the famous review. Stroke of internet meme genius, that shirt!

After the talk, I met Eric, the original originator of I Can Has Cheezburger. He's from Hawaii originally so we talked about where we went to high school (Radford for him) and other Hawaii stuff. He lives in LA now, working on a new venture (didn't say what). I then shook Ben's hand and thanked him for his great talk and Sarah kindly took the above picture for me. I also gave them both my Safety Graphic Fun business cards so they could see how they have inspired me.

It was a great day with some other great talks and great ideas. Thanks to Sarah for asking me to go!


Lolcat for Jen

This is a lolcat that I would have INSTANTLY sent to Jen. It makes me laugh and laugh about remembering her laughing and laughing about when Catleen brought a dead baby rabbit to their door and Matthew was almost throwing up telling her about what Catleen had done. Okay, you had to be there, but it was really funny.

Funny-pictures-roomservice-cat-brings-you-breakfast

That was the best kind of Jen laugh, when the kids made her laugh so hard.

Ugh, I can't even keep writing about it now.  I'm at work and need to keep my composure.  So much for that...


I Just Blew Our Delivery Date

One of the supervisors here at my new job and I were talking about certain european resumes we have received as we are hiring. They tend to have pictures of themselves on the resume. We giggle a bit but whatever. Today, the supervisor pulled up a resume with a kinda funny picture on it and I said, "We should lolcat these resumes!" and he looked at me blankly. 

He had never heard of LOLcats. 

I made a snap decision that I might come to regret.  I had him pull up a lolcats website and he got it instantly and laughed and then we looked at each other and said, "There goes your productivity."

Oh well.  As long as we are all laughing while working overtime...

I-can-has-cheezburger2


I Needed a Bit of a Tickle

I had a sick day today, my cold is just wearing me out and so I rested and forced fluids (under serious threat from Sarah!) and watched too much L&O and generally tried to feel better. I also perused the internets a bit.

You know I love me some lolcats. They crack me up and I'm also loving how the meme evolves. On my personal google start page I have a quote of the day, horoscope, weather, a few headlines and a funny cat photos window. This came up today:
535390

Which killed me because one of the first lolcats that tickled me senseless was the non-edited version:
Invisible_bike_410


So I'm still sick, but feeling a little better.