Maru's Mun Journal

+ Urquhart's PB is on yet another thing being a medieval character.

- He wears a bloody big face fungus in that one, so I get no new icons whatsoever out of it.

Here, have an advertising inspired icon. This is actually a campaign here in Germany (just with the words in German) for Whiskas cat food. Don't know if they sell that internationally.

It's quite a sophisticated campaign, mixing media quite well*, with online and offline elements, and user content that really works where you can upload videos of your own cat being special and funny. It works well with the cat-loving demographic, of course.

* This part where I babble about advertising is brought to you by overdoses of 'Mad Men' and long-time association with my friend japanologist, who runs his own agency.

But anyway, every workday when I go home by train, I pass several large billboards aimed at the commuters on the line,  bright purple, with just that slogan in white and no other picture of anything, and I lean back in my seat, relax a little, smile, and think, 'Yes, I love my cats, and am on my way home to them right now, and will spend my evening cuddling them on my divan while incidentally poking things on my computer (from their point of view), and that is entirely a Good Thing.

Just now somebody in crackchat talked about having had a shitty day (literally, poor lady!) and now going to lie on her bed with her dog and write.

I mean, we don't need those animals on a utilitarian everyday basis any more. Not all dogs have jobs any more, and cats probably never really had -- carolinw once pointed me to an article that claimed that basically, cats domesticated people and conned them into giving them an easy life in exchange for killing vermin, which they do anyway, so the cats win coming and going.

But we need them. Living in cities, far from nature, makes us need them more than ever before. Our tame animals keep us rooted to our own animal nature, you might say.

There's these people who claim that the Neolithic Revolution was a bad move, inexorable alienating people from nature and introducing things like work, exploitation, and privilege, and that the best time for humanity was in mesolithic times when we had already invented a few clever things and roamed the open country with our dogs**, never working too hard, and living very well with it. There are many different proponents of that theory, from the author of 'Ishmael' to the experimental archaeology bloke at the little museum one town over from where our family holidays at the Baltic Sea happen.

** At that time, with no granaries, safe houses, and stable life routines, cats did not find us interesting enough yet to domesticate us. They only did that when we first provided these things in Ancient Egypt.

In any case, whatever these people say, there is no going back. We are city dwellers, and I don't want to live without tea, public transport, or the internet, thank you very much. And my cats seem to be quite happy with what I provide them with. Especially the bright purple tins of cat food that contain more sauce than any other wet cat food. Sauce, as such, is a product of civilisation. I doubt those mesolithic golden-agers made sauces much. But my cats adore it.

And keep me grounded in nature. At least a little bit.

That is all.-

I know I meant to make you new 'Everybody' icons today, but life seriously conspired to distract me from my purposes. First, there was Project Rant -- getting stuck in that was entirely my own fault, of course.

Then, a friend who is doing a project for the company I work for pinged me with work related things. Apparently, he had just had a brilliant idea and managed to push it through with my bosses in one fell swoop. I think that is excellent. However, I am not Don Draper who is still working even when he's in bed with a woman who is not his wife. I was meaning to do entirely non-work-related things with that time. Like making icons for somebody...

So instead, I talked about work by IM and read proposals and looked at Powerpoint presentations and asked pertinent questions to show I had paid attention.

And now I have to get ready to go to an anniversary party of the Nazgul's kendo club. From which I will be back, hopefully un-cloudbursted-on, before eleven at night my time. Hopefully.

Sorry for the general fail at doing what I really meant to today.-

Comment with 'Icons!' and I'll pick five of your icons to explain.

Mine, from athousanderrors :

Nebra Sky Disc	Rotten Reality	Blacherniotissa	Needless Writing	Purple Pride

Nebra Sky Disc:
The Nebra Sky Disc is a bronze age Celtic astrolabe/portable henge kind of thing found near Nebra in former East Germany, and considered an archaeological sensation. I saw an exhibition of it in Mannheim a few years ago. I use the icon for serious historical or spiritual posts or comments.

Reality is a rotten place to be:
That's from a fearfully hippie-esque movie from the the Sixties called 'Psych-Out' in which the (then) young Dean Stockwell played this, erm, hippie who was continually stoned and spouted this deep stuff when stoned, which was sort of continually. It was meant to be serious when it was made, but came over rather funny in 2007, when the Nazgul and I watched it. He says that line in just that scene while taking some terribly strong hallucinogenic with the main heroine. We almost keeled over laughing, and I decided it had to be an icon, and it had to say the text in hippie-esque pink writing. I use it for posts and comments about the general SNAFU-ness and ridiculousness of the world as such.

Blacherniotissa:
It's an icon icon I own. Having an icon of an icon is a kind of meta that appealed to me.

Needless Writing:
Anita Blake icon! Bloody LKH interrupts plot for three pages of description of how Jean-Claude has redone his sitting room, in loving detail, while the really urgent and suspenseful plot just wibbles away in the back of the reader's mind, waiting until the waffling excursion is over. Too much sex in a book is bad as it is; interrupting both plot and (omnipresent potential of) sex for pages and pages of white-and-gold interior design is idiotic.

Purple Pride:
That is the actual name of that breed of tulip! And it's one of my first pictures with my digital camera when it was new. I bought the flowers especially so there could be pictures, and from those pictures, an icon. It was all about asar_suti , of course, who at that time had taken over the garden in Milliways. Suti is all but gone, but the purple thing stuck with me.-

I was complaining about the last quarter of 'Narcissus in Chains', to burning_bryght, when I was suddenly struck by this momentous insight...

**grins evilly**

Heh! Dear _inbetween_ made me this manip for Christmas which shows me with, erm, the Captain. As in cpt_tantony from the discworld_rpg.

So, GIP.

Something is wrong with the new version of Deepest Sender. It has a function to automatically do LJ user and LJ cut tags, but these bugger themselves up very easily while now longer being accessible manually. I must experiment a bit, because I have now of course lost the old version...

Can I at least link to the discworld_rpg, as I normally do?

It eats the damn code. I will have to complain to the programmers at once. Losing Deepest Sender is a bore - and there is no way I could do a rollback, either.

( Perhaps at least the cut works )

So - does this post all right now, or will it screw up again? And what about strikeouts?

ETA: Hmmm - seems to be a bit better. Still I need to pile links and LJ tags at times, and that seems to utterly confuse the poor thing. What if I want to mention both cpt_tantony and margolotta in one sentence, and then point somebody to lituus.org, which is the website of nazgul_nr_5 That will, I fear, produce utter chaos. And it does. Unless I fix manually. Over and over.