Sorry folks, no science tonight. Today’s video took a lot longer to make than I thought it would (four hours and counting) and so I am rather pressed for time, and as a consequence I don’t have time to read all the science articles that I have bookmarked and then choose the Top Six.

So it’s stream of consciousness tonight, folks. It might not be the most professional or coherent form of writing, but it’s fast.

I do have a few things to share. Like this hella fun bit of video.

The song’s adorable, the singer is SUPER adorable, and the kitten is, of course, adorableness itself.

And I am pretty sure that having a kitten bomb your vid like that is not anything someone could plan, which makes it all the more delightful.

It’s slightly possible that the kitten did it in rehearsal, I suppose, and our cute songstress hoped it would happen again because of course, nerds + cats = YouTube hit galore.

But odds are, it was just a happy accident that we all get to enjoy. The kitten obviously needed someone to play with and was not about to make that optional.

Ah, kittens. Such adorable fuzzy lil cracked out ninja commandos.

Other than being pressed for time (how hard do you have to press someone to make the time come out, anyway?), today’s been decent. Got a GST cheque yesterday for $95. Saweet. That’s the kind of thing that is bound to lighten your mood, especially if like me you live on a little under $700/month.

What can I say, poverty sucks. My therapist keeps bugging me to apply for full disability, which would mean another $200/month plus the ability to buy a yearly all zones bus pass.

Both of those could mean a lot to me. I more or less just scrape by on what I get now, so any increase of income would have a huge impact on my life.

And the bus pass might be just the thing for opening the door to exploring the world more and desensitizing me from my agoraphobia. I picture myself heading out one day with the plan to stay away from home for a certain amount of time. I could do anything I like, just not at home.

And over time, I would increase the duration of my outdoor adventures until, eventually, I get a hotel room and stay overnight all my myself.

That sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t it?

So that’s all the reasons why I should get right on getting that done. Go to the welfare office, pick up the form, fill out my part, take the rest to my therapist who has already said he will fill out the doctor portion for me, submit the form, wait for the inevitable rejection (they reject almost everybody, figuring if you want it bad enough, you will appeal), go through the appeal process, and then maybe, just maybe, improve my life a whole bunch.

Yup. I have some very logical reasons for why I should do all that.

Doesn’t mean I will, though. That’s life with depression for you. There is still a lot of bad wiring in me that makes it hard to translate desire into action.

And so it goes.

Here’s a brilliant bit of comedy from The Onion which is sure to get them in a lot of trouble.

Genius. And very dangerous. A lot of people are just going to react to the content of the video, a truly horrible interpretation of the Wizard of Oz, and not get the joke because the joke is in the context.

To me, it is clearly a satire of pop culture analysis itself, and is making fun of the sort of overblown language and mushy minded thinking that often goes into that kind of thing by using the tools of pop cultural analysis to reach a truly awful conclusion that almost nobody could accept.

Thus, they expose the flaws inherent in that kind of thinking and challenge people to pay attention to the content of what they are hearing and not just accept or reject it based on how it sounds.

Admittedly, though, I can see that not everybody is going to see it that way.

But I do, and I love it!

Finally, here’s the vid that took me so damned long to make today.

The main reason it took so long was that the first hour of production was spent sorting out technical problems. Mother. Fucking. Technical problems.

God damn it, why can’t thinks just work?

First, as is its habit, my webcam decided to just stop working. Black screen. Computer says all the connections are good and the device is working fine but I might as well have shoved it up a miner’s asshole for all the picture I am getting.

So then I had to reboot, which ate up a bunch of time. Then, for whatever reason, the program I usually use for the primary recording of my vids, Cyberlink Power Director, shit the bed and crashed and was not inclined to come back.

Very well. I had been meaning to try out the program that came with the cam anyhow. So I booted that up, plonked in a few useful defaults, checked out the hilarious “special effects” the cam can do (not useful, but amusing), and used it to record the raw version of today’s vid.

I then import that into Ulead Video Studio, the program I use to do all the cutting and trimming and adornment for my vids, and everything seems to be going OK, but then I realize that the video is out of sync with the audio and hence useless.

Fine. It’ll be just me talking with a picture of a penny on the screen. But then, it seems like Ulead (or my computer) can’t handle whatever format the previous program used and as a result, the video only plays back in fits and starts, which is hell on the nerves, especially when you are trying to edit.

So I just output the whole thing back out in a more friendly format, re-import it, and work on THAT instead. And then… I could finally get back to working on the fucking thing.

Argh. Stress. Oh well, we must suffer for our art, and I proud of myself for staying bloody-mindedly determined throughout the whole ordeal.

God dammit, this video was going to get MADE!

And it did! Yay me.

Talk to you later folks!