hachi8 and a needle sword

hachi8

pond

in college i had a saltwater aquarium. my fish ate goldfish. every week or two i'd hit the local petco or fish store for some delicious goldfish. one day a few of the goldfish looked too good to eat (for my fish not me), so i tossed 2 of them into a goldfish bowl that sat on the ikea tv stand.

months passed, and these goldfish didn't die, of course i fed them and routinely changed their water. almost one year later i brought these goldfish, along with 2-3 petco coy fish, held in a separate tank, down to mom and dad's house. dad had put a pond in our atrium, and i was moving from my apartment. fish needed a home and parents had potential.

fastforward to present day (7-8years) and those $0.25 feeder goldfish are prospering in a renovated pond that is 4-5 times larger than their original, and have many more friends.

10 years of blog

lately i've been reminded (a few times) that blogger was turning 10.

i wasn't there on day one, or even year one. but i started blogging long ago. i started with livejournal, and after a few months migrated to blogger. i'm not sure if the live journal blog was deleted or simply forgotten but i can't remember the username/address for the life of me.

personally, i don't consider myself a blogger. i blog but i am not a blogger. perhaps i hold the title of "blogger" on a pedestal. in my mind for one to achieve the status of 'blogger' they must earn their keep. constant fresh content, and a quality of content that keeps readers navigating back to the site again and again. i also know that i'm capable of more than is reflected on this blog thus it makes me feel as if i don't deserve the prestigious title of 'blogger'.

between the live journal and this "/hunger" blog i've definitely done some blogged elsewhere.

'lawn chairs in the garage' was a blog that gene and i shared. it didn't last too long but was fun going back and forth. i've always wanted a blog with two authors going back and forth, unfortunately that takes way more effort than one person writing.

for a few months i kept a daily blog based on dictionary.com's word of the day. each entry was 1-2 sentences that normally rhymed. the goal was to use the word correctly by it's definition.

at one point i was paid to blog for livedigitally. the site used to have multiple contributors, focusing on tech news, doing product reviews, and 'articles' about the digital life we lead. since then it's turned into jeremy's rather verbose blog. i'd post 3-9 posts/day with a product review each week or so.

of course i've done the password protected & anonymous 'my hear is broken' blog. which also didn't last long, though that's a good thing.

i've got a doodle blog that is pretty inactive (though my doodling isn't). i'll revive it once i get a scanner because photos of doodles just don't cut it. i'd like to have an extensive collection of doodles and art created by me, but the time and effort thing get me every time. see why i don't refer to myself as a blogger?

i would almost consider yelp to be somewhat of a blog as well. to date i have 435 yelp reviews. puting things in perspective, this blog has 698 posts and is about 8 years old. i've been a part of yelp since jan 07 making that only 2 1/2 years.

i don't really blog for others, i blog just to blog. the creative process is therapeutic. i find that my daily life sees benefit from the time and energy i put into blogging. from the concept or idea creation, to the composition, blogging means constantly creating ideas and converting them into words and pictures that hopefully communicate my original idea. i also notice that when i'm avidly blogging, writing work emails takes far less time and energy.

plus, i love reading comments about my posts or talking to people about a post that i've written.

happy birthday blogger! i can't wait for our 10th anniversary together.

u like dags?

I swear that I work much harder than everyone thinks I do...

food vs. meth

after watching a documentary from national geographic about the drug 'meth', i've been thinking about food.

quick rewind: dopamine makes people feel good, released by the brain to reward the body for doing 'good' things, like eating food and having sex. now, meth fools the brain into releasing dopamine by the truck load. it's easy to see how people can get addicted at the first hit. fast forward.

then michael commented on my blog "dude, are we having dueling food blogs?"

this got the old dopamine creating gears a-turnin'. of my last 10 blog entires, 6 are centered around food!!

food provides much satisfaction. we eat food not for the fuel it provides but for the satisfaction it brings. this is bad. i quickly realized that i'm a watered down meth addict, and my meth is food.

meth addicts lose their teeth and scratch off their skin. food addicts get plump and pudgy in all the wrong places. meth addicts will do anything for a hit, food addicts will drop $75.00 on a decent piece of meat accompanied by some vegetables and a glass of fermented grape juice.

the documentary referred to meth as an epidemic, statistics like "80% of crime in some po-dunk oregon city was meth related". obesity has often been coined as an epidemic.

we sure love our dopamine releases don't we?

headphones

lunch from home

working at home has perks, like a much better lunch than the cafeteria can offer.

hachi

we were going to name our zine 'hachi'. i was playing around with how that'd look.

'Naive' by the Kooks

pattern #5

Purple Smoothie

contents of the purple smoothie, about to be blended. each week it's a different recipe. someday i'll get it down to exactly what i want, or perhaps continually rotating is better?

edit: this is what it looks like when it's all smooth-ified.

sponge bob and patrick