5, 6, 7: Labels, Drive-ins, Lampposts

I think this is going to be a pattern.
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5:

I have really ridiculous blog labels. I was looking at the "labels" tab on the side of my screen, which shows me all the labels I've used in case I want to label my current blog post with one of those labels, and the first few are

#, $100, $300, %, *poke*, 1,  100, 1000, 11:30, 13, 1st, 2

Then it goes on with a bunch of random numbers till if gets to actual words. Anyway, I don't know why I'd label anything with 11:30 or 100 or 1000, but I know exactly which post the $100 and $300 labels go to. I made a post about getting my tablet a long time ago, and the one I was going to get was $100 while the one I ended up getting was $300. It's kind of weird labeling a post with something like that. I guess I thought, you know, I think maybe one day, I’m going to want to look up my Wacom tablet post, so I’m just going to google “$100” instead of “Wacom tablet. Or maybe I thought I was going to buy a lot of $100 things in the future and blog about them. Lol. It's just weird. I guess I thought labels were like search tags, which they kind of are maybe, but there is an actual search bar that looks up all the words of posts, not just their labels but I was probably thinking I'd label everything a bunch of labels just in case. Yesterday I labeled my post with “3” and “words” but akjehdfd

Today: 758 words
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6:

At drive-ins, every drive-in, every living building at night that chatters busily despite being alone, the warm glow of fumes floats heavily, every huff and puff of yesterday freeing itself into the cool air. The trees feel it first, that dim vibration of everything secret that the world buttons up in its coat pockets, next to the jigsaw puzzles and bricks of mysterious cheese. It hugs every trunk, and seeps into the asphalt, into the dirt, into the shells of the tiny glittering bugs that sleep snug between the roots. And the stars, as small and sad and distant as they are, feel it too, and swing into stuttered motion, clicking their way to the sea, where they drop and fizzle lovely craters in the sand.

- from the writing meeting I went to, to the prompt "summer"

Today: 0 words
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7:

 Allow me to gather my thoughts. This is kind of turning into an every-three-days thing rather than a daily thing. I’m leaving for a week long trip soon! So that week is going to be almost completely sparse of updates. Which is funny, because it means I will have a lot of words to make up, along with the words that I already need to make up! 

I just had some chicken pot pie. It was delicious, as chicken pot pie always is until the need to have chicken pot pie dies out. Let me recall my surroundings. I am in a room, lit by a ceiling fan. Faint desert air blows in through the bejeweled curtains, as I sip from my coconut tea. 

One night, while in the car with a friend, on the way back from a drive-in movie theater, I was watching the tall lampposts(?) outside pass by on the highway, and I was thinking of how the lights from those tall sticks were kind of like stars, except they are held up by poles and follow the highway, so we pass each star really quickly. So wouldn’t it be cool if the lampposts down here were actually the stars of the society in the sky, and their lampposts were the stars in ours? In that case, we’d be living in an inverted world, sort of, and if their lampposts lined their streets, then their streets are really weird and jumbly or scattered. But I guess the stars in their sky are always aligned since their stars are our lampposts and those follow our highways and small roads. Their constellations would be really obvious. Maybe they have a problem where there are so many stars in line with one another that it’s difficult to section them off into constellations. Also, in their world, their sky would be smaller than their ground/land/whatever, which is weird. Maybe they have more underground things than we do as a result, and it would be funny if they kept digging through our sky until finally they popped out through the other side and fell out into someone else’s. 

Today: 626 words

2, 3, 4: AHHHH, :(, Beep

I know I haven't posted for the past 3 days! Ahh! Ok here we go, succession of posts, both short and medium and nonexistent! 
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2: 

Everything burns. I went to the beach with some of my friends. We made a sandcastle with strange jut-outs and a cat head and another head, and tried to boogie board but didn’t really since the waves were somewhat low. 

Clothes: burn 
Fabric: burns 
Shower: burns (apparently there is no cold water in my shower) 
Lotion, 10 seconds later: burns 
Another kind of lotion: burns 
Typing: burns

Just kidding about the last one! But
Sitting with my back touching anything: burns

Today: 153 words
(comment from the future 7/5: what a fun and sad day)
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3:

Today: 0 words
(comment from the future 7/5: .___________.)
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4:

My printer is going kzzk… kzzk… kzzk… kzzk kzzk kzzk kzzkhzkhzkhzkhzkhz 

So I’ve been reading a lot of webcomics lately, and but I only recently noticed all the different sound effects that the artists come up with for things. It’s not just ZAP! or POW! or CREAK.. click beep POOF! slurp, swish, bzzt, slam, whack, kaboom, crash, THWACK, etc. (Actually, it’s funny to note the sound effects that are verbs, like slam, crash, stomp, and slurp. Maybe one day sound effects will evolve into really ridiculous verb sounds, like WALK, drink, CLOSE DOOR!, open, UNPEEL!) Anyway, instead they’re a little more unusual. Like 

Krrrnch - breaking a metal floor 
Zrrrrrt – laser beam through tent 
Woooom - explosion
Shooooop – opening a chest
Crrrr – wagon piece dragging 
Fweeeee – light fleeting away 
Fwshhhhhhh – power zapping out 
Zzzzhooooom – laser beam 
Ffssssss – electricity doing its thing 
Krsh! – power zap, electric 
Shhf –leather boot sliding into saddle, gun into pocket 
Fzz, crik, crak – campfire 

I'll tell you about the webcomics another time. So I was thinking of how you would come up with sound effects for just things you do/things that happen every day. I guess the steps would be something like this: 

1. Listen 
2. Imitate by voice 
3. Try to spell it out 
4. Figure out the pattern (long and extended like shhhhhhhhhhhhhhk, short blips like beep beep beepbeepbeep, dramatic like SLAM!, soft and lowercase, etc.) 
5. Figure out what it looks like (slinky and oozing around in waves, etc.) 

So... I did some stuff and listened to the sounds that happened (appeared, resulted?) and tried to translate them as accurately as possible. Here they are: 

drinking water – glgflkgdlgfglg
fireworks (happy 4th of July, belated!) – poooosh! Buh buh bububububububu crkkk… pook 
flicking light switch up – blun
ceiling fan - whuwuuwWWWwhwhwhwhwhWwwWWWWWWww 
laptop having trouble breathing- vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn vrrn vrn vrrn vrrrrrrRRRrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN 
crinkling receipt slowly – blllk mllk blLLK… Kr k MLk blKrr.. 
peeling a post-it - fffzzzzzzzzzzzzzsssssuh 

Wait. Is it peeling or unpeeling? I am peeling an apple. I am unpeeling an apple. Unpeeling a banana. Is there a difference? Ok. Peeling is to remove the skin. So unpeeling would be like putting the skin back on, except it’s not. Also it doesn’t seem to show up in dictionaries as a verb. What a mystery. 

It’s really difficult, when you’re listening to a sound, to figure out whether it is an “n” sound or a “d” sound or something else. I was poking my laptop with my nail just now and couldn’t decide whether it was more like a “d d d d d d d d” or “dn dn dn dn” sound. The only reason the “n” is being tacked on to the “d” is because the tapping sound is slightly muted, probably largely by my finger and then by everything else, so there needs to be something that stops the d sound from being too duh duh duh when you read it. 

Anyway that was fun. You should try it. It was surprisingly difficult. I guess there’s a difference between the sound effects used in comics and how you would actually spell out a sound effect if you wanted it to be as accurate as possible. I’m pretty sure if someone drew a character scrunching up some paper, they wouldn’t write “blllk mllk blLLK” next to it. They’d probably just go with “crinkle crinkle”. 

Aah this is so complicated, typing and continuing the same blog post on different days. Let me tell you how I am organizing my NaNoWriMo writing right now. I’ve got MS Word open, and I just type type for the day. At the end of the day, I write the word count for the day, type a looooooooong line of dashes under that and write the date, in bold, at the end of the dash train. I highlight the dash train a hideous cyan because it’s either that or another terribly blinding color, or yellow, which is boring (only highlighter yellow though. Normal yellow is awesome! And only highlighter yellow on the computer. Real-life highlighter yellow is so practical it’s ok if it’s a bit boring. At least I can see the words underneath). Then I type type for the next day and repeat. 

 Ooh I want to try something. 

“At my end of my day, I write my word count for my day and I type my looooooooong line of dashes and I write my date, in my bold, at my end of my dash train.” 

 I always feel bad about using “I” too much in sentences. Are you ever worried people will try to psychoanalyze you? Anyway, I thought I'd see what it would look like if I replaced all articles with “my”. It’d be funny to have a day where everyone does that when they speak. It might become a habit though. o_o 

So that’s how I’m organizing everything, I can’t keep blog posts in one piece on MS Word. They must be separated by dashes. It’s just weird, especially when I decide, the next day, that I want to type something BEFORE the stuff I typed yesterday for my blog post. Actually, I’m not supposed to really run into this problem since the goal was to post every day, and the assumption was that I would only write blog posts on the day I post them. Gah confusing. Alright see you tomorrow!

Today: 1133 words
(actually I'm kind of warming up to that horrible highlighter cyan. It may look cute here, by the way, but it doesn't so much on MS Word)

1: Camp NaNoWriMo & BrieAd

I’m taking on a challenge this month! Camp NaNoWriMo starts today (I guess it’s yesterday now). If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically National Novel Writing Month but in April and July (usually it’s held in November). The goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, and those words are supposedly part of a novel. Laurapoet is participating in it, and I thought it would be fun to do too! Although I’m just going to ignore the novel part and go for 50,000 words of whatever I feel like writing just to write. I’ll be posting daily (er, almost), so every post will count as part of my 50,000. Split up and rounded up a bunch, that would be about 1700 words a day! Since I won’t really write a 1700 word blog post every day, I’ll just blog and then write whatever else I feel like writing for the rest of my 1700 words. I’ve got a lot of freedom with this, which is awesome! Exciting stuff! Ahh!

Anyway it turns out that I wrote a whole bunch for a blog post but there’s just too much stuff I’d need to collect to finish it today SO I’ll just be scooting that to another post. And tomorrow... there won’t be a post. Which is a terrible way to start this, but I’ll be away from the computer all day! I’ll still be writing with pen and paper so I’ll type that up later when I’m near a computer and count that as part of the word count for that day.

So now that that’s announced and ‘official’ and everything, today I went to one of laurapoet’s writing meetings, where we wrote and talked and ate patriotic brownies! And vanilla ice cream! It was fun! So I think I’ll share what I wrote sometime later. It just feels weird to sandwich it in the middle of a post because then I have to introduce it or something. Boop. This is terrible. I keep introducing things like the-stuff-I-was-GOING-to-post and the-writing-thing-I-did-at-the-writing-meeting-that-I-will-post!-but-later and so all this is really is just an announcement. So I’m just going to find a really interesting link or adorable picture as a brief addition...

I just googled “sad bread” and this one is really cute so here you go

by Jonathan Burrello, click

So now it’s no longer July 1st, but I stopped and got the word count for all I’d written before 12:01am so I’ll just post that number at the end of this post. I’ll be doing that for every post this month, although the word count at the end stands for the number of words written that day, not for that blog post. That’s all!

Also just for personal reference and semi-notice, since I just remembered, I REALLY NEED TO TALK ABOUT WEBCOMICS AND IFICTION AND CERTAIN ANIME AND BOOKS maybe. I’ll ramble about those in some other posts. This IS A TERRIBLE PROCRASTINATING POST I’M SORRY AHH

Tooday(yesterday): 1257 words