Some times in ones life there comes a shining moment of truth; your first love, the first day of school, the grasp of understanding mortality, things that change you for the rest of your life. cheese has always been a favorite of mine with the most notable MVP in recent years being Brie, what i thought was the unbeatable cheese if you will. i was wrong. to fully open this story of cultured passion I’ll need to go back about four months ago while i was strolling through Costco. perusing over the assorted exotic cheese isle looking for a good brie i stumbled upon something most interesting. it looked like brie if not a very fancy brand, expensive too ($9.89 a pound). the words brie were no where to be found. allured by its looks and luxurious name i bought this “Le Delice De Bourgogne” and brought it home with me. exited to try it with my rosemary and olive oil triscuits i opened the pop top and unwrapped the plastic covering hording the sensual aromas within. stuned by the smell it was if i had lost control of my hand, it slowly and methodically shaved a small strip of this gooy yet mild firm white wonder with weatherd rine and spread it. as it met the roof of my mouth and i begain to chew it was like ripples of joy cascading through my jaws and down my throat. this was no cheese. THE CHEESE GODS THEMSELVES HAD OPENED HEAVEN AND LET FALL THE SWEET FERMENTED BREASTMILK OF ANGELS INTO MY LAP! this was the best cheese i had ever had. with many things good things go fast, but not so with said cheese it was so decidant and filling and elisivly large it seemed to last for more then a week, something unheard of. this monday i found her again. heres a small snipit from the website about said cheese

“This decadent triple-cream cheese is incredibly rich, full-flavored with a smooth, melt-in-the-mouth texture. The rind is yellowish-white with a soft, chalky-like dust and a remarkable aroma.” sourse

i recomend anyone interested in loving life to buy this cheese and try it. so few times do we as humans have the chance to give our friends a path or shure fire words of advice that can change there life when it comes to the consumption of good cheese please i beg of you, look around and try to obtain some if you dont have a costco membership. the next party type shindig i will try and remember to bring some so the love can truly be shared.

Costco has many things going for it as a refuge from zombies. a lot of floor space, full concreate walls and heavy steel garage door enclosures, loads of caned and dry foodstuff that would last, loads of tools and other items that could be put together mcguyver style to function for any situation. costco does not have guns (at least maybe besides a revolver in the floor managers desk) and costco has lots of perishable goods. frezers and frezers full of food that could go bad rather fast if power wasn’t kept up. if you notice the next time your in a costco in the verry back of a costco theres usually in isle blocked off by a fencing of some sort that will have verry large palet sized blue blocks in stacks all along there masive shelving. you’ll also notice that each block has power cords coming from it to the next. this is costco’s battery backup system. a load of chemical batteries that can sustain all of its electrical needs in the event of a normal power outage. i dont know off hand what there run time is but you have to come to the realization that theres well over a million plus dollars in just frozen foods. something many people might overlook is the footage on the roof of costco. im sure there are acsess hatches in a place of that size and if it can handle the weight of the ventalation system i bet it could handle a garden or ten. you’ll have the poting soil and seeds there as well. if you go the rout of fueling a generator to keep the place lit (and refrigerated) many costcos have gas stations but there usually at the other end of the parking lot witch could spell disaster in trying to make expeditions out to get fuel. the biggest and most pressing issue unfortunatlly with staying at costco is not zombies but humans infected or not. people will figure out how to breach its defenses unless again properlly gaurded by weapons. costcos are always in city limits witch would put you at a disadvantage. i would guess a group of 10 maybe 20 could live well in a costco but no more. if  you were really serious about taking one i would suggest arming said 10 to 20 people and being prepaired to strom the costco by force with guns at the onset of full blown infection. scare tactics and infact much killing inside the costco would scare many out and then you could dispose of the bodies after you’d locked up. it might sound brutal but if there are women in your party you might have just saved the world if you end up being one of the few groups to survive, becasue well… someone has to repopulate the earth.

i like glitch art, at least some of it. in my limited experience with the stuff, i’ve seen some patterns and made some hasty conclusions, as is my way. allow me to introduce you to what i’ve come up with thus far:

there are a few different kinds of glitch art, based around a pair of binary choices: digital or analog (assuming it is all or at least primarily eletronic), and intentional or non-intentional. i’ll try and come up with amusing examples of all four possibilites.

digital, intentional
though intention can be hard to dermine, in some cases it is quite obvious. there’s quite a bit of stuff out there like this, with different styles and arrived at by different means, but the basics boil down to three methods: direct manipulation via photoshop, hexadecimal manipulation of image files, and digital feedback.

the photoshop method is the most powerful, but is limited by the artist’s imagination. i prefer stuff that is clearly intentional but could be on accident, walking that fine line. hex manipulation of, say, jpeg files is a popular thing, but you tend to get the same sort of rainbow smear, and most of the original image is intact (booooring, usually).

since everything you do here is deliberate, this isn’t a “you get what you get” philosophy. people are actually trying to make a point with this style. detachment, coldness, a machine-POV maybe. notes from where order and structure breaks down and loses context. it’s like the technological ghetto, in a sense; the graffiti art in a world of data.

digital, non-intentional
this is when your camera gets messed up, or your computer corrupts a file. sometimes it’s cool, often it’s just annoying. iphone cameras seem to do a particular sort of tile-shift glitch once in a while, and if you search flickr for iphone glitch shots you’ll see the pattern.

the quality of the outcome here depends heavily on recontextualizing the base imagery, and it can add an eerie atmosphere to otherwise mundane snapshots. movies take advantage of this effect sometimes, for a sort of “lost in the machine” moment.

analog, intentional
this is probably where it all started: video feedback, magnetic distortion, that sort of thing. the classic in this category is to aim your video camera at the monitor, getting that infinitely recursive thing going. i’m guessing that things got more sophisticated later on, with folks screwing with analog video signals using various pieces of equipment. i’m pretty sure there are a few people out there who have made a successful career out of this art, ’cause i’ve met many who wish they could have.

i’m gonna go ahread and declare this to be the old-school, and insist that the truly avant-garde have moved on. it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a whole industry of people who produce this stuff live for electronica concerts.

analog, non-intentional
this one seems to be mostly video camera-related, as when someone’s VCR fucks up its tracking, or your images on magnetic tape get wrecked in one way or another.

i suppose cracked LCD screens could also fall under this category, though i haven’t found too many people calling such a thing “art”. soon to happen, though, no doubt.

that’s about all i got on the taxonomy of the thing. if i find anything else on the subject worthy of sharing, i’ll let you know.

I’ve started collecting examples of design that could be used as inspiration for future projects. This is a an example of someone remaking the movie poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey with a very slick colorful look. 

I especially like the field of star in the background!

I love that its well designed…

i don’t know a whole lot about glitch art, but i’ve collected a fair amount of it recently from various parts of the interwebs. it seems to me there are a few different ways of arriving at a glitched image, some intentional and some not, some hardware and some software, etc. mostly though, i am interested in the sort of bizzare emotional effect you get from these things.

i’ve decided to populate my posts here with glitch art instead of, say, a topical image. especially when it comes to short stories, which i will share here in the near future; sort of like how the new yorker puts an odd image at the front of their featured fiction section, right? that sort of thing.

we’ll see how this goes.

I came across this today on in the New York Times… Thought I wold share it.

my approach to getting around is as follows:

1. i would rather drive like an asshole than drive like a moron;
2. as a pedestrian, one should never have to stop moving;
3. in any situation, assume everyone else on the road is blind.

of course, point #1 has some stipulations and further definitions, point #2 isn’t always possible, and there are beautiful, placid moments where #3 is wholly untrue and unnecessary. in general, though, that’s roughly how i do my thing.

it isn’t always successful, i should mention.

if you have your own moving-through-space manifesto, i am listening.

Up until recently I have chosen to completely ignore the existence of Internet Explorer, but now that has to change… or at least I have to be aware of it. But it’s such a headache!!

but oh well, and here’s why…

Yesterday IE made it’s way to a second place rank for total number of page hits with Firefox sitting pretty at number one! GO FIREFOX!!! you just keep on doing what you’re doing!!