Snowmonster.
I don’t like to waste a good snowfall. When we got that blizzard last night, I knew I’d spend today turning snow into icy hot Dino Drac content. And I did.
I’d preemptively Googled for “things to do with snow” (that was literally my search string), ultimately locating an eHow tutorial about changing snow’s colors. I know this is reading as it’s fiction, but I swear, I really am that interesting.
Fast forward to this morning. I was armed. Using a spray bottle that once held glass cleaner and another that once held spot remover, I marched into that tundra with full tanks of green and blue Snow Paint™.
(Snow Paint™ is just water mixed with food coloring. Tell no one.)
I had such high hopes for this Snowmonster, but things didn’t work out quite like I’d planned. There were fifty reasons for this, but here are the top two:
1. I’m a big baby in the cold. I tell people that I’m unnaturally susceptible to it, but that’s not true. I’m just a baby. Even something as glorious as a monster snowman isn’t enough to lure me down a path guaranteed to be rife with cold-hand-pain. Cold-hand-pain is the WORST.
2. This was attractive snow, but it didn’t pack well. The wet snow acted like dry sand, and it took spit, prayer and animal sacrifice to even get as far as that photo shows. My Snowmonster looks like a busted fire hydrant covered in a sick dog’s green piss, but it’s not because I didn’t try hard enough.
Even still, there are some plainly visible kernels of my grand ideas. Notice the icicle spikes? I wanted him to be covered with those. I also wanted the carrot arms to end in what I guess we could term “snow paws,” with fingers made from additional, smaller icicles.
There. That’s what I wanted to build. A five-foot doom warrior. A creature cursed to cause pain no matter how gently it tried to touch you. A tragic monster with a Chewbacca-style bandolier, for some reason.
EDIT: It’s been pointed out that he sorta looks like Spikor from MOTU. I guess he does. Now I can’t copyright without issue.
Oh, and the red background? That was drawn with a crayon called “Big Dip O’ Ruby.” I promised myself I’d mention that, but now I can’t remember why.
You know, now that I compare the result to the concept, I think I actually like the result better.
It’s more abstract. It leaves you with more to think about. It effortlessly straddles the line between fun and frightening. Above all else, it only took 37 seconds to build. That thing I drew with markers would’ve taken hours, and “hours” sounds like an open invitation for an entire legion of cold-hand-pain.
Yes, yes. I am happy with my Snowmonster. He’s multicolored, and his arms are carrots. He’s Norman Rockwell meets Tim Burton.
The issue with Snowmonsters is that they can’t live forever. The sun shines, the weather warms. Finally, the Snowmonsters perish. Unless…
It’s the idiot’s version of cryogenic freezing. Snowmonster’s head will forever be safe in my freezer. Even under the scorching scrutiny of June, I’ll be able to visit him, talk to him, and maybe ignore him when I just want ice cream.
Conclusion: I watched Darkman this afternoon. It’s still pretty good!
I cannot understate how much I’m hoping you go for something that’s only like Disqus rather than Disqus itself. That thing has never wanted to play nice with me. I dunno about other people’s experiences with it ( know Rev uses it with her blog, which is why I only comment on the FB side of things there) but around a fifth of the time I’ve tried to use it to comment on anything, it won’t even let me log in and just hangs indefinitely, cache-clearing or not, so I kinda gave up on it. No clue what’s up with that, but I hate the fucker with a fiery passion.
Yuck. Well, I wouldn’t roll that out unless I was certain I wouldn’t have those problems. There are various versions around and from what I can tell, people who upgraded to whatever the latest one is had a lot of issues.
But the real hope is some sort of combination solution, meaning you could still comment the way you are now, if preferred. Basically I want a system that does not exist and cannot exist, and so will probably end up doing nothing aside from changing the “posted by” crosses into tiny shrimp.
PS, I’d even considered swapping out to a FB-driven system, but that’s a special case of it being both the best and worst solution simultaneously. (Not going to do that.)
I’m all for crustacean comments.
I do dig the cross, though; maybe you could keep that for your own posts. Kinda like how you used to have the ghosts in your posts facing the opposite direction.
I don’t know much about it, but one alternative to Disqus I’ve heard a few people mention before is Intense Debate. Mind you, no site that I visit actually uses it, so I have no clue how reliable it is or what sort of options there are, but it might be worth looking into.
@ Juge…
I picked up the station back in 2008 or so, and after reading your link I am positive it was “V24″. When I first tuned in it was playing music which my wife said translated to roughly “pleased to meet you/happy to meet you etc.” (specifically mentioned in your link) After the music a female voice recited random numbers then she signed off saying “good luck talk to you later”. The phrasing here was apparently very colloquial northern. And yeah, my wife said all accents (music and numbers)were distinctly North Korean. That opening song is even a DPRK folk tune. My wife says the accents are unmistakable, like comparing northern and southern American accents.
Who knows what all that means; counterintelligence aimed at the North, or perhaps the music may be a joke to South Korean agents?
p.s
click my name for deep North Korean cuts.
For what it’s worth, Disqus has always worked well for me, and I appreciate that it’s often used across several sites, tying them together in interesting ways.
Not to say that it has to happen here, but I’ve never faced any issues with it specifically. It would be really cool to have more control over what is able to be posted here (i.e. embedded videos, images, etc.).
No problems with Disqus here. In any case, I trust that you’ll make the right decision, Matt. And I agree about threaded comments. They pretty much suck. You have click a thingy to expand everything and conversations get unwieldy and blah no thank you.
Another Tom:
Wow, that manages to add even more intrigue to it all.
I’m currently just playing around with a Degen 1103 hooked up to a very long random-wire, so it’s battery-power only for me until I can find what I did with the weird-ass Chinese AC adapter, but once I finally repair and re-hang my dipole and get my old ICOM IC-735 up and running again I’m going to have to remember to leave it on and monitor some of the frequencies V24 has been known to use, as I’d love to catch a recording of it. Being in California, I tend to miss out on a lot of the numbers stations, with the Cuban ones pretty much the only thing that I’m guaranteed thing to hear on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, Voice of Korea is getting really fun now that the nuclear testing is going on. Of course some news agencies are going to end up wearing their biases pretty openly—whether it’s Fox News, Democracy Now, or Radio Habana—but Voice of Korea is pretty much the last of the old-school “ridiculous propaganda that doesn’t even try for subtlety” stations that you can hear in the U.S., so you get to hear newscasters bust out with great lines like “Facts show that the United States and the South Korean traitor Lee Myung-bak and his gang are nuclear war maniacs who do not hesitate at anything to do harm to the DPRK!”, and that we are “crazy with war-fever and vertigo of invasion of the north!” and that we’re likely planning on randomly nuking North Korea without any provocation from them, because that apparently wouldn’t be a total clusterfuck for all parties involved.
In an era where almost everyone else has access to multiple media sources from the internet and TV and propaganda has to be a little bit more subtle to be effective, hearing official broadcasts like that is almost quaint, in a totalitarian sort of way. Between this sorta stuff, crazy end-of-the-world-is-coming preachers, and all the weird sounds, I’m gonna be sad when SW finally goes the way of the dinosaur.
he looks like how i imagine the manatees that congregate around the power plant would if they mutated and took to land…and invaded a seven eleven, only to spill slurpee goop upon each other….yeah, i live in florida….if i ever get a chance to encounter snow i’ll probably end up making a snowMANatee no matter what…. – if i do i’ll tell it to holla at yo’ snow monster, so they can breed and create something one would hope to find at the bottom of a happy meal box