Media and Culture

43 days.

That’s how long I’ve been getting treatment for my ADHD. In case this is the first blog entry of mine you’re reading, I’ll recap: At the ripe old age of 32 I finally figured out that I have ADHD. The shrink put me on a low dose of Adderall, and the rest is history. Ok, so it’s only like a month and a couple days worth of history, but you know what I mean.

I got a surprising amount of feedback on the whole ADHD thing, including a few people asking me if it affected my ability to come up with novel ideas. There seems to be a lot of creative types out there who are holding off on getting treatment because they don’t want to turn into a mentally blunted zombie. I get that; I had those fears too. Continuing on the same blundering path would be kind of shitty though, so I read up on all the available meds, edified myself, and took the plunge.

---

The Good: Adderall is Kind of Awesome

All advice is autobiographical. There are no exceptions to this statement. Keep that in mind when you hear my take on this whole ADHD thing. Everyone has different genetic and epigenetic variations and combinations that affect the levels of neurotransmitters in their brains. Never trust someone who tells you they have ‘the answer’ to anything; they are, without fail, going to be full of shit. Maybe not entirely full of shit, but anyone who can put aside rational doubts and uncertainties is not to be trusted. I could write a whole book on this topic, but that’s a tangent for another time.

What I’m getting at is that this treatment is working for me, but it may not work for everyone. Some of the ‘new and shiny’ aspect has worn off, and my brain has acclimated to a little bit to the stimulants, but they’re still remarkably effective at clearing out the sludge and cobwebs and getting my neurons back in line.

I have a funny habit that my shrink observed, where I’ll stop in the middle of a conversation when I’ve been trying to explain some complex topic and ask ‘does that make sense?’ I no longer need to do that. I never even realized it, but I will lose track of my own topic of discussion if I go on for more than a few minutes. I can also code things now. Since I work in IT, this is incredibly useful. I’m actually not sure how I coded anything prior to this, but seeing the volume of comments I put in my code before I can hazard a guess. It’s like having a damaged short term memory, where you’ve only got so much space to work with. Ever see the movie Memento? It feels a little like that, only without the gaping plot holes or Joe Pantoliano.

Post-it notes are my friends. I need less of them now, but the number of reminders and notes and personal instructions I have to record have been cut in half. This stuff has cut down my stress levels tremendously. There’s a natural sort of uncertainty and anxiety with ADHD, where you can’t tell if you’ve forgotten about something or lost track of something, and you’re always worried you’re going to fuck something up. Keeping on any sort of task is exhausting, and even the thought of certain tasks is panic inducing. Dumb stuff, like scheduling appointments, planning trips, cleaning the house, walking the dogs, etc. These are things that are no longer new and shiny, so your brain knows it’s not going to get the dopamine fix it desperately needs. Somewhere in the back of your mind the spine-crawling anxiety of being trapped doing something un-stimulating for fifteen minutes feels like hell on earth. Some of the animal rescue work my wife and I do requires us to call people and interview them for fostering or adoption; doing that filled me with a level of dread I can’t properly express. It was so damn easy to forget key questions that you need to ask people, and I did it all the time. The constant threat of failure for even simple, mundane tasks like that is awful.

There are a lot of things that I do, and I think a lot of ADHD people do, that make them come across as complete assholes. Obstinate, stubborn, argumentative, difficult, inattentive, etc. It ain’t deliberate. Things that used to make me insane are now tolerable. Sort of… normal. I don’t mind making those calls, or planning stuff that takes more than a few minutes.

ADD/ADHD is kind of a dumb name for this disorder, if I may interject some more random only vaguely related opinions. Something more serious sounding like “Dopamine Deficiency Syndrome” would be better. ADD has such cultural baggage as being a non-condition or an excuse, but this shit will seriously fuck up your life if you’re not aware of it. Ok, tangent over. Well, this tangent. There’ll be more.

But the answer to the big question that people asked me is that this stuff doesn’t mess with your creativity. I still have no problem coming up with ideas. Dextroamphetamines are kind of weird; they’re not like long term meds like anti-depressants; they don’t really cause any major brain rewiring, there are no withdrawal symptoms if you go off of them. The human body is so good at processing them that the problem is actually keeping enough of them in your system to be effective.

I’ve gone a few days or a weekend here and there without the Adderall, and I went back to my normal disoriented self. In theory I think if someone did find that their creativity was impacted by these types of meds, you could just pick a day or two and go off of them and let your scattered brain go berserk. Record your ideas, and then go back on the stuff so you can focus and work on them. I don’t need to do that, personally, but it’s a viable option.

It’s not all unicorns farting rainbows and shitting daisies though.

---

The Bad: Welcome to the Exciting World of Drug Interactions!

Many years ago I was diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression. I was put on a very low dose of an SSRI: Zoloft. Tiny dose; only 5mg. That’s a barely therapeutically effective dose.

Recently I bumped up to 10mg, after I really came to the conclusion that my brain was just not working right. This was a few months before the ADHD revelation. No side effects; I felt a little less miserable about failing at all of my life projects and being in a constant state of mild confusion, so that was good.

About a week into taking the Adderall I started getting side effects. These were not fun. Tolerable, but not fun. I was hot all the time, and I was sweaty. My heart would race from time to time, and it felt like it was beating harder than normal. I started flinching at things that startled me way more than I really should. My fight or flight reflex was in complete overdrive, to the point that playing video games would get me so amped up that I’d start to get tremors and muscle spasms.

But then the tremors stayed… and the random muscle twitches were pretty constant. An average person could probably accept a certain degree of trembling hands, but for an artist? That’s really shitty. It got to the point where it did impact my ability to draw, and I was starting to get worried that the side effects would force me off of the stuff.

But I’m a little OCD, so I’d been reading up on all sorts of interesting things about brain biochemistry, the history of pharmaceuticals, neurotransmitters, etc. I’m a nerd, so I get into that kind of stuff. Part of it is probably that it’s novel, so it makes my brain light up and triggers the whole dopamine release thing.

So in my research, I stumbled upon something really interesting: Adderall is really not supposed to be mixed with SSRI’s. SSRI’s are Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors. I know how they work, but to put it simple, it keeps the serotonin hanging around longer in your brain to do its job better. Adderall does a similar thing with Dopamine, in addition to making your body produce more.

But Adderall also makes your body make more serotonin too, and that’s the problem.

Serotonin Toxicity: The Fun Never Starts

Too much serotonin is bad. In fact, it causes those exact symptoms I outlined above, among other things. Adderall side effects overlap with a lot of those symptoms, so it’s very easy to overlook. But a few of the symptoms, like the weird muscle spasms and tremors, are nearly unique indicators of Serotonin Syndrome. The severity varies, as with anything, and I believe I had a mild case of it. Severe cases can just outright kill you though, so this is shit to take seriously.

Interestingly, it only took a minor dose of each of these meds to trigger those symptoms. It’s like a combination of menopause hot flashes and roid rage. I mean, I don’t know what either of those things are like, but you know what I mean.

So the obvious solution was to stop the Zoloft, so that my Serotonin levels, which are rather clearly at or near a normal level, could calm down a bit. So I did, and the next day they were gone.

Oh but if only it were that easy…

---

The Ugly: Brain Zaps.

I’ve never written about this before, but I know these fuckers all too well.

A few years into taking Zoloft I went cold turkey for a bit, to see how it was affecting me, and see if I still needed it. A few days later my head started to explode.

I didn’t register what it was at first, but soon I put two and two together.

When you go cold turkey off of an SSRI, your brain goes a little ape shit. SSRI’s do make long term changes to your brain, unlike plain old stimulants. The human brain is very malleable and adaptive, and it responds and adjusts itself to whatever chemicals are in your body. Food, drugs, etc. The brain undergoes clear changes when you get an SSRI in your system, and it takes some time for your brain to finish the rewiring. Most of these types of things are of a risk for young kids, but there’s some evidence that even an adult brain will have some permanent or at least very long lasting brain changes from it.

So, of course, if you go off of the stuff it takes a while for your brain to un-wire itself.

That’s where the zaps come in. It sounds like a dumb name, but that’s the best term for it. It’s got a whole formal name of SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome. Brain Zaps sounds more interesting though.

It feels like you’ve hit your funny bone; a really bad hit, the kind you feel in your toes and belly button or even under your tongue. Only it starts in your brain. For me it seems to be related to the balance system, as it’s tied in to vision. Turn your head too fast? ZAP! Look left or right with your eyes too quickly? ZAP! Stand up too fast? ZAP!!

Sometimes they just hit you out of the blue for no clear reason too. And boy do they feel shitty. Some of the big ones can hit so hard that your hearing cuts out for a second and your vision closes in a bit, like if you get up too fast after playing a marathon game of Tetris or an average Warcraft raid and go all light headed. It clearly sends some kind of insane signal through all of your nerves, because the really strong ones will make your tongue, belly button, toes, and the head of your wiener go all pins and needles. Pretty much anyplace in your body with a shit load of nerves gets blasted with unfiltered nerve signals.

Yeah, that’s right; I said the head of my wiener. It’s over-sharing day today, didn’t you know?

It takes almost a month for SSRI’s to take effect on most people. And it takes the same amount of time, or longer, to wean yourself off of them. I can only hypothesize that the drugs themselves don’t directly curb depression, but it’s more to do with the neurological changes they induce. I don’t know though, I’m just some random game geek on the internet, so don’t take any of my rambling speculations seriously. My symptoms and side effects are about as accurate as I can report them though.

---

And After the Ugly: the holding pattern of moderate annoyance:

So that’s where I’m at now. I’m walking an annoyingly fine line between brain zaps and hand tremors, while trying to get a better handle on how long the Adderall lasts in my system.

Take the Zoloft too infrequently or cut the doses back too far, and my brain starts trying to give itself electroshock therapy to punish my poor decision making. Take it too close to the Adderall and I start doing involuntary jazz hands.

I’ll get over it, of course, but it’s going to take some time. Hopefully not too much longer than a month, but we’ll see.

The real crazy thing is that the doses I’m on are pretty small. There are people on ten to twenty times as much Zoloft as I was on. There are people taking five times as much Adderall as me. There are people on both of those drugs, at the same time, along with other shit to control other symptoms or side effects.

I’m scientifically literate, financially stable, and reasonably intelligent and well informed on matters of medical importance. And in spite of that, I can just barely navigate all of this madness to get myself correctly diagnosed after twenty five years of symptoms starting when I was a kid. I can’t even wrap my head around how hard it must be for people with less means and less information to navigate these types of issues.

I don’t mean to end this by going all bleeding-heart-liberal-commie-socialist whatever on you guys, but this is heavy shit. What I’m dealing with is insignificant compared to what others have to deal with, and my issues have half fucked up my entire adult life.

That’s one of the pernicious things about names and labels. I wrote earlier that I thought ADD and ADHD had too much cultural bias attached to them, and I’m dead serious. Screwy levels of one or two chemicals in my brain, cause by one or more dysfunctional and all too common variants of a gene, have caused me to get fired from jobs, nearly fail out of school, screw up one opportunity after another, and lead to depression, self destructive behaviors, and an impressive collection of idiotic decisions over the years.

And I got really lucky. Even with my late diagnosis, I’m doing pretty well, and avoided all of the worst ADHD pitfalls.

I ain’t saying none of this is my fault. It’s all my fault, and I’m ok with that. I don’t like it, but it’s my bullshit and baggage to own. But bloody hell, our system isn’t well suited to help people with mental issues, is it?

A lot of people seem to have the opinion that mental issues like depression or ADD or mood disorders or what have you are moral failings, a character flaw if you will. Just a result of laziness, indifference, weak will, or whatever dismissive term you want to write on a label and slap on someone’s forehead. I’ve met a lot of people like that. They exist; there are a lot of lazy assholes out there, both physically and intellectually. But not everyone with trouble getting by is like that. I doubt that even a majority of people with issues like that are malingering exploiters.

I’ve gone my entire life, except for the last couple of months, assuming that my problems with work and life in general were because of something that was wrong with me. I bought in to the idea that I had motivation issues, or perhaps my screwed up childhood damaged me and made it harder to get shit done. That’s the kind of thing a person should be able to get over. Strong people are able to overcome crap like that, persevere, and be successful. So for my entire adult life I’ve thought I was a lazy shithead. I’m smart, I can figure stuff out, and yet I can’t finish a damn thing and sometimes just holding down a job has been an unbelievable struggle. I’ve never once blamed an outside source for my shortcomings. I’ve always turned it inwards. Try harder, think harder, concentrate, don’t be so scattered, stop wasting time, don’t fixate on useless stuff, don’t be such a failure.

That’s some rough shit. It’s no wonder my previous shrink thought I was depressed; I fucking WAS depressed, but for legitimate reasons. Treating the symptoms wasn’t going to help; the root cause needed to be identified and treated.

But that blame, that accusation that you’re just another lazy fuck who’s blaming their laziness on ADD or depression or bipolar disorder or whatever… that can be some seriously debilitating shit. Even if most of it is coming from you, yourself, it eats at you.

And like I said, I’m one of the lucky ones.

My disorder is simple, if hard to pin down and complicated by other issues at first. It responds well to treatment, and now I can focus my energy on getting my shit together.

…

But I still think about people with worse problems and less resources. How the hell would anyone expect them to excel in the face of that kind of adversity? Even in countries with medical systems that are less hindered by infantile ideologies than ours it’s tough.

…

---

I’ve got no solutions for this. I could think up plenty of stuff, sure, but I doubt any of it would be useful. I don’t know enough about it to come up with a plan that would be worth taking seriously. But I will say this:

Everyone has their demons. Never dismiss someone out of hand, because you never can tell what’s going on in their head.

Hell, even they may not know.

Lots of random shit today. For starters, the sketch above sucks, but it's the first chance I've had to really sit down and just doodle stuff. No real idea what it is, just some kind of beaked golem thing. Whatever. Finding free time is a real bitch, although step one is cutting out video games, quite frankly (ironic given my last post). Video games eat time and shit fun. If you want to get other stuff done in life, you really gotta cut back. I'm always amused by geeky gamers who trash professional sports or non-sports like golf for being a huge waste of time, while they'll burn six hours straight in a friggin World of Warcraft raid. I'm not a sports guy; I'm a gamer at heart, but I gotta call a spade a spade here. If you play copious amounts of video games, you probably should shut the fuck up about other people's hobbies being a 'waste of time'.

---

In other news, this: An asshole opines on how to screw people over and foster terrible professional relationships. This article generated a hell of a lot of furor all over the internet, particularly on DeviantArt where I'm pretty active. It's an incredible article, and a spectacular example of the kind of douchebag to avoid if you do freelance art. His basic premise is that you can save money on a game design project by hiring young, inexperienced artists and lying to them and manipulating them into giving you as much as possible for your money. he even includes social engineering techniques right from the Dilbert pointy-haired boss school of project management. While technically correct, that yes, you can often get some quick savings by being a sleaze, he's completely off base on long term success. Nothing he said in there is unique; it's all the same sort of techniques employed by used car salesmen and scam artist everywhere, going as far back as the concept of money and contractors.

I've got more thoughts and information on this topic, but it'll have to wait till I get home and can access my links. Ok, sort of changed my mind about taking the time to dig up more information and opinions on this. I think the guy's article speaks for itself, really.

---

And last but not least, all the World Trade Center Mosque craziness. In case you live under a rock, a group wants to put up an Islamic Cultural Center two or three blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York City, and a lot of people are freaked out over this. This center will be the equivalent of a YMCA, from the description, and the guy who's behind it has actually worked with the George W. Bush administration and Obama's administration on international programs to foster tolerance and cooperation between the U.S. and Arab nations. He's not a terrorist or any of that B.S., he's a liberal/moderate Muslim, just like most Muslims.

The issue is really simple: people who are opposed to this are shitheads. For starters, this is private property. The site in question is a run down old retail building. There are absolutely no laws that will prevent this from happening. Nothing. Debates about whether they have the 'right' to build there are idiotic. Secondly, the first amendment. You know, that whole freedom of religion thing. The part that a lot of conservatives seem to want to selectively apply when it suits their voting base. And third, the first amendment, because that's pretty fucking important here and deserves a second mention. Someone give this to Newt Gingrich, he could use a refresher:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A lot of people, indeed, a majority of the country, seem to think that this is a bad idea and that they shouldn't be allowed to build there. The perception seems to be that this is an insult to the victims of 9/11, and they equate it to putting up a giant Nazi Swastika next to the Holocaust Museum. That's actually a pretty interesting mentality. There really are a lot of people who think that this is a religious war, and that we're at war with the entire Muslim world. I guess it goes to our tribal tendencies, and of humanity's tendency to separate into us vs. them camps. Hell, polls are indicating that twenty percent of the country think Obama is a Muslim, so who the fuck knows what these imbeciles are really thinking. This is the same as thinking all Catholics are child molesting pedophiles, or that all Atheists are immoral monsters, or that all Teapartiers are racists, or that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, or that all Black people are crooks and welfare exploiters. Pick a stereotype, almost any one can apply.

You just can't paint people with such broad brush strokes. The actions of a small subset of assholes in any group can't be applied to the entire group. It just doesn't work that way. But we all do it. Again, it's that idiotic tribal mentality our species just can't get past. The latest tack I've seen is a lot of commentors asserting that Islam isn't a real religion, it's a political system designed to control and oppress people, and thus it isn't protected by the first amendment. Ironic, given how people who espouse this attitude often want to force the rest of the country to bow to their religious beliefs and prejudices.

The angry backlash is just another indicator of a portion of our country's xenophobia and hatred, although it's a good way to spot people who really don't give a fuck about the constitution or the law.

---

Anyway, that's all for today. Fear not though, I've got more irrelevant opinions on the way!

***This is what paying attention to commercials can do to you***

I don't wind up watching many commercials. I have a DVR that my cable company was nice enough to give me, so I can generally avoid them.

But, every once in a while I do actually watch a show when it's airing, and then I have to sit through the commercials. Normally I just tune them out, as we all do, but the other day I sat and really paid attention to them for some idiotic reason.

Commercials are fucking horrible. It's not just the shitty products they're trying to push off on gullible little consumers, it's how they're presented. I mean, the products are terrible, no doubt, but the fake, trite way in which the announcers try to sway your opinion in a 30 second spot is chilling in the same way that a kind and polite serial killer/rapist is. It's just bloody well wrong on all levels.

I know that there's almost an art to this whole process, of getting people to buy shit through advertising, but it's an evil art, sort of like calling upon the powers of the great cthulhu to spread madness throughout the lands. I know people are gullible, and our brains are wired to make us stupid and susceptible to certain types of arguments, but knowing that wouldn't you want to, you know, not be an evil douchebag and leave people alone? It seems to me that the entire purpose of commercials is to infect your brain with inane jingles and catch phrases, like some horrid auditory plague, so that when you see their products that vile little saccharine blight of information that's wormed its way into your deep memory comes rushing back to the forefront unbidden.

Like McDonalds: "I'm Lovin' It" preceded by a brainless little "bada-bababaaaaa". That pops into my mind when I see McDonalds shit uncontrollably. I can't help it. And I don't even see all that many commercials, the shit just sticks there, like a shotgun of putrid memes that waste the activity of precious braincells.

There are plenty more. Like GEICO, the mother of all overzealous ad campaigners. I figure those fucks could discount every policy holder of theirs fifty bucks a month for the staggering amount of fucking advertising they buy. I mean, how many companies do you know that have like, five different simultaneous ad campaigns going on? I mean, really, how good can their fucking service be if they spend half of their budget on shitty caveman and lizard ads.

And speaking of which, one of these days I hope the caveman snaps, grills up the gecko over an open fire and sucks the marrow out of his bones. Then he can track down some of those idiots with the piles of Viagra and Ciais who are always inexplicably hanging out on the beach in separate bathtubs, murder them, and steal their boner meds. Then he can swallow two entire bottles of the erection stuff, and then track down that bitch Flo from the Progressive insurance commercials and bash her over the head with a club and go completely retro back to his roots and drag her off to a cave where he'll have his way with her using his new ten foot erection. And maybe he can curb stomp the Walmart smiley face, shatter the blue K-mart enema bulb looking thing, and brain a couple of walmart greeters on the way there, and perhaps stab Ronald McDonald and the Burger King through the heart with a wooden spear. AT THE SAME TIME. Then it can end with him falling in battle as the Capital One vikings come to steal Flo from him so THEY can rape the shit out of her, but then caveman and his giant cock fight them off but succumbs to wounds inflicted by the viking interlopers, and everyone winds up dead, raped, eaten, or broken.

Man, wouldn't that be awesome?

...

Holy shit I'm getting worked up just thinking about all of the gray matter I've wasted storing this useless god damn information. I think you get my point, I'm going to go sit in a corner quietly for a while.

Lots of random bullshit to talk about this week. I'll start with the computer stuff: CS5 has been released, and I've been toying around with it quite a bit. I'm almost certainly going to get the entire design package, which will set me back a pretty penny, but I think it'll be a good investment.

However, it's not all rainbows and kittens and happy sunshine stuff. There are some issues, and things I'm not pleased with, but the overall result is positive.

Photoshop CS5 is the big dog out of the deisgn package I'll be using most of all, followed by Indesign and Flash, and hopefully Dreamweaver to make site updates smoother and less stressful. Pretty much everything on this site was built using Drupal and edited the hard way with notepad and tearful prayers to the pantheon of web computer gods known as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE5, IE6, IE7, and IE8 that they'll all take a liking to my work and see fit to display it properly. 99.99% of the time one of these fickle asshole deities decides he's on the rag and scorns my pathetic mortal attempts to please all of them at once, and I curl up in the fetal position and wish for a quick death.

So, anyway, I'm hoping the fact that Dreamweaver integrates with common CMS's (like Drupal) will help.

Anyway, back on Photoshop CS5: It's good. It's got really slick features, severalof which I'll probably never use. Content aware fill is some sort of fickle black magic that looks to be awesome for photographers, but rarely useful for us digital painter types.

Puppet Warp is cool and I'm fairly certain that there will be good uses for it, I'm just not quite certain what yet... at least as far as my work goes.

The Blender Brush is my new Photoshop crush, as it were. I like it, although I recognize that it's got some peculiar behaviors and limitations. Even so, after playing around with it quite a bit (and using it on the girl in the pic above) I think it might be perfect for my personal workflow style. It behaves oddly with multiple layers, but I think as long as you're aware of it it'll be good. The old school blur and smudge tools were about as useless as tits on a bull, as the saying goes, so this is a good improvement. People coming from a Painter 11 or Paint Tool SAI background will probably dislike it (and my internet research seems to bear that out), but for those of us who got started in Photoshop it's a good addition to add to the arsenal.

The last bit is the Bristle Brushes. This is where my disappointment mainly lies. The Bristle Brushes map each brush bristle as a 3D object that dynamically moves and shifts based on pressure, tilt, rotation, and interaction with adjacent bristles. It's the best 'real' bristle simulator available; light-years ahead of other similar products from Painter. However, they're obscene CPU hogs. They lag terribly, even on a current higher end system like my desktop (Phenom 2 black Quad core). The only solution so far is to make the bristles short and stubby and work close so that you don't overtax the CPU and GPU on the redraw. I actually made the girl's hair above using one of the new bristle brushes. I like them, but I feel that they can't possibly be that processor intensive. I'm hoping Adobe will patch them or do something to tame these hungry bastards, because they're quite fun to use.

---

Ok, enough tech talk stuff. My next topic is my garage: It's full of shit. Not literal shit, but donations for a charity tag sale that's going to be held on my front lawn. See, I work with local animal rescue groups, and our biggest fund raiser is tag sales that we run a couple times a year. Lots of people donate stuff left over from their own tag sales or that's just laying around in their garage and get a nice tax write off.

The problem is that some people have an over inflated sense of how much their cast off junk is worth. This is tough, because you don't really want to alienate people making a charitable donation of any type.

But, god damn, some of this stuff is incredible. I mean, really, I can't sell a dirty crushed plastic child's Easter egg basket. Also, no one wants your old skis. I don't care that you paid hundreds of dollars for them so you could tear up the slopes back in the day; they damn things do not sell. Also, keep your old printers. I've got boxes of printers that I'm going to wind up dumping off at an electronics recycling center. Seriously now.

I also don't need a broken golf putter, dismembered GI Joes, or a lone baby shoe with no match. Also, no one really wants a hundred pounds of worn out Spongebob Squarepants memorabilia or Teddy Ruxpin tapes.

And if you do feel compelled to drop this stuff off, please do a rough inventory ahead of time, rather than opening every box at our place and photographing and cataloging it while we wait around for your distracting sense of nostalgia to wear off.

Also, no, you can't have my riding mower or snow blower when tag sale time comes. They ain't for sale, which is why they're hidden inside the garage behind a closed door.

---

Anyway, I notice that I tend to do these entries with three topics merged together. I have no idea why, I just sort of like combining three ridiculous and generally unrelated topics together. So there, take that.

My buddy Dave mentioned this bit of wicked coolness, and it needs to be shared, so here it is:

http://gizmodo.com/5231112/best-video-ive-seen-today-will-make-you-smile

Seriously, that is just too cool for words.

Advertising firms should hire at least one pervert per ad team. I'm convinced of it.

Why am I convinced of it? Because of True North Snacks. I'll give them a free plug, since their commercials have been making me giggle like a nervous schoolgirl for weeks now. No, no, guys, this one's on me. No monetary compensation needed: the lulz are enough.

So I saw Cloverfield this weekend, and I loved it. It's fucking great. I have just one caveat:

If you get motion sick, this may not be the movie for you. The whole thing is filmed first-person perspective as if it was through a hand-held cam-corder type thing. It's like Blair witch, only more so.

That being said, I'll now engage in some spoilers and such.

*SPOILER ALERT*

This is an unfiltered scan of a pen-sketch I did in a couple of meeting yesterday. My brains were turning to gelatin, and threatening to ooze out of my ears, so I had to start drawing like a mad man to prevent catastrophic nervous system failure.

So it turns out that Dumbledore is gay! Now, at this point in time, there is an epic list of things I could say. I could start breaking out the gay jokes, or wax poetic on societal tolerance and such. But really, many other people will say more eloquent and informed things than I could ever manage.

So a while back I was discussing a former over the counter* prescription diet pill that went over the counter: Alli. At about the same time that this diet pill was released, Wendy's put out the mother of all grease bombs, the Baconator. Coincidence?