I livestream from time to time, usually to show off my Karaoke evenings, but not always. Last night, during a non-Karaoke livestream session, something rather remarkable happened.
That was such an amazing coincidence tonight! It isn't just someone I knew through computing or something where knowing you wouldn't be that bizarre, but this is someone from high school from long before either of us had anything to do with computers. That's boggling. She and I became friends right before her graduation and became old-school snail mail pen pals for a while and lost touch. What a neat thing to happen!
See you in 2010!
Well, it's Christmas at last, and from the sound of you all on Twitter your cards are sent, and your presents wrapped. It's been great hearing all your cries of delight recently, as your poor postmen and women have struggled with packages through the snowy weather!
Hope those of you who have time off over the festive season get everything you wish for, and those who are working have more fun than you might be expecting. We've published the dates we're working over the holidays, so if you find yourself in the office, you might well have company here in the UK, or over with the MOO Crew in the US.
We've had a great few weeks spotting unique gifts and ideas created with MOO, here's a few of our favourites:
A tetrabox advent calendar, by Bcome
Also by Bcome, this lovely looking memory game, complete with a great pattern on the back:
This super-cute Mosaic Frame, created by thisiswoly. Filled with 20 Minicards, it features the beautiful baby Sarah.
These wonderful looking alphabet game cards, by taraghb, which look like they were as fun to make as they will be to use!
And last but not least, look at this! another entry into our MiniCard Gift Box competition! Created by emusing-emma, it's really bought an extra flutter of Christmas cheer into MOO Towers. We love his little sledge!
Fancy joining in the fun? Closing date for entries to our competition is midnight PST 28th December 2009. Why not grab some festive paper, and see what you can do! More competition details can be found right here.
And now all that remains for me to say is a Very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from everyone at MOO!
It's grey and overcast here in San Francisco with the kind of sky that threatens snow, if not here then at least in the mountains which bodes well for my week in Tahoe hurtling down a mountain with an ironing board strapped to my foot and yet ... even still it manages to feel oppressive and gloomy.
As such it's either wildly inappropriate or wildly appropriate to have the next song as (probably) my last in a tenuous hip-hop continuity jag since it does nothing but remind me of a long, lazy summer just after I'd been kicked out of University and was wondering if they were going to let me back in. In my mind the song is drench in cornflower blue and a deep, bright yellow. Almost exactly the opposite of today in fact.
Well, the last order dates for the holidays have passed, and Santa's final sacks of festive MOOs are filling up fast. We're still taking new orders though, and we'll be shipping them out as fast as we can - so don't hesitate to order thank you cards for all your lovely pressies!
Just so you know, here's our warehouse and customer service closure dates over the holiday season.
Thursday 24th December - LIMITED HOURS: we'll be shipping orders in the morning, but going home in the afternoon to wrap presents.
Friday 25th December - CLOSED : we'll be at home feasting on mince pies and turkey.
Monday 28th December - UK CLOSED: we'll be buying new trousers to fit our expanded waistlines!! (please note this is a UK Holiday only).
Tuesday 29th December - OPEN: business as usual.
Wednesday 30th December - OPEN: business as usual.
Thursday 31st December - OPEN: business as usual.
Friday 1st January - CLOSED : we'll be trying out our New Year resolutions and nursing hangovers.
Monday 4th January - OPEN: that's it, holidays over, back to work!
It's also important to note that our StickerBook turnaround in the UK is severely delayed over the holidays. Any orders placed after the 20th December will not be dispatched until the week of the 4th January.
That's all for now - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the MOO Warehouse Crew!
Since last week I was wittering on about Pharcyde and how they paved the way for 'alternative' hip hop bands and how the success of the Wu Tang Clan and RZA's spinoff project Gravediggaz tinged their second album in a darker, more mellow way.
Which gives me a couple of thematic outs - I could go with either Wu Tang Clan or Gravediggaz but, since I don't really have time to delve into the entire mythos of The 'Clan and the only video of my favourite Gravediggaz track on You Tube is a static video with a the Album art I'm going to skew slightly left field and go with an old Holiday standard
Featuring Kelis on vocals for the chorus and samples from Slick Rick's "Children's Story" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (yes, that was the drum loop that you were trying to work out where you'd heard it from) the video is based around the blaxploitation film "Dolemite", the trailer of which contains the classic line
"I'm the one who killed Monday, whooped Tuesday, put Wednesday in the holiday, called up Thursday to tell Friday not to bury Saturday on Sunday"
When "Bizarre Ride II the Phardcyde" came out in '92 it was during the height of the East Coast vs West Coast Gangsta rap era so the lusher jazz stylings were a palate cleansing sorbet in the middle of a rich meal of guns, bitches and bling.
Along with artists like Oakland's own Del Tha Funkee Homosapien it paved the way for other "alternative" rap groups like Jurassic 5.
The second album "Labcabincalifornia" was generally a more mellow and sombre affair with themes of dealing with fame, drugs and failed relationships. Released 3 years after "Bizarre Ride ..." the interim period had seen the rise of the darker tinged Wu Tang Clan and RZA's spin off project, the horrorcore Gravediggaz.
The first single off "Labcabin..." was the chopped, ethereal "Drop" which looped a sample of Ad Rock from the Beastie Boy's "The New Style" and gives the Spike Jonze directed reverse-filmed video (featuring a cameo from the Beastie Boys) a oddly surrealistic quality.
Inspired by this feature at Pictory ...
The first place I ever really got culture shock was Australia.
The odd thing was that I, even at that age, I'd travelled a fair amount before - going all over Europe, Morocco, Cuba, swathes of South East Asia. Not only that but it wasn't the first time I'd I'd been there either - I'd worked and travelled there for several months a few years before.
However I'd just spent 2 months in Palo Alto working probably 80 hour weeks and then flown into London on Monday and then left bound for Oz with my then girlfriend on the Wednesday at 5am.
About 3 days later I was still nauseous with jet lag and still utterly exhausted. We went into Brisbane and kept bumping into people she knew and suddenly, standing in the town center I felt a weird almost vertigo-like sensation and it dawned on me that I was experiencing acute and pronounced culture shock.
Looking back I think it's because everything was nearly the same as the UK but just very slightly different - like a weird, real life application of The Uncanny Valley. In the William GIbson novel "Pattern Recognition" the protagonist continuously refers to this phenomenon as 'The Mirror World'
"The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."
For a while I kind of had a slight feeling of how people with Capgras Syndrome - the bizarre condition in which a sufferer holds a delusional belief that a friend, spouse, parent or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor - might feel. That uneasy feeling of certainty that, even though everything looks normal, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
It passed and, since then, I've had only the faintest echoes of that sensation. Occasionally I miss it - it wasn't entirely unpleasant and, without it, I fret that I'm somehow taking it all for granted.
So I keep travelling to prove myself wrong.
