It used to be Brad Pitt but it kinda changed to Bradley Cooper after the beard thing

So I've been talking to this guy recently and we've been having the most interesting conversations about everything we have to share. It's been great. One of the many things I've learned with this guy has stuck out recently. So there's this cactus that I already knew made a delicious fruit. It's basically a pink (or white), mild kiwi, with a kind of sticky sap that makes your mouth feel like it's been dosed with sugar syrup. It's delicious. I was there asking this guy about its harvest and he interrupted me to let me know that the fruit is actually a flower. I was kinda taken aback because this was an interruption and we usually let each other speak, but this was absolutely necessary at the time. See, he explained that its original flower form mostly changes because of bats. A bat will stop by this cactus and pollinate it, basically. It feeds the cactus for what seems like no reason at all. At least initially. After the bat shows its love the cactus repays the bat by creating a fruit out of its flower, for the bat's consumption. Then humans caught on and fucked the cycle to harvest the delicious fruit, but that's not what's important right now. This was, and continues to be, fascinating to me. It's amazing because it's an act both unselfish and rewarding to both parties. It's not a leech-like system, like I've seen and noticed many other relationships to be.

No photo-manipulation necessary

Well, anyway, I don't know which I was. I know that one of us was one of those in our story. One of us was the cactus, and the other the bat. This isn't really a romantic thing, and it's not supposed to be. I couldn't imagine a bat making love to a cactus, I'd really rather keep that image far away from my very active imagination. The point is they were incredibly different and still good for each other. The much more fitting part of that point is that neither the bat nor the cactus ever need each other. The cactus, without the bat (or a human's) help will still be a cactus, and the bat without the cactus can still eat other fruits, nuts, and bugs. It's just that while they work together, there is a very beautiful mutual gain. Other animals find this really difficult, sometimes especially humans; but you and I pulled it off, even if just for a little while a long time ago.

High five.

The Pain of a Do-Over

It's not really a secret that I like to dabble with photo manipulation and digital art. I love making something come to life on the computer screen, or to give it a new life. This proves particularly handy when it comes to branding what's mine. I designed the D4AM logo (which I'm going to remake soon) and I've recently been designing the mascot/logo for my new local project-blog. The mascot was Capuchino, the White-Headed Capuchin Monkey.

And this is him

Research, brainstorming, and general idea pull through, took me about a week. I knew I wanted the face of the monkey, something cute that would instantly catch your eye when you see the sticker on the hipster-hangout bathroom stall. I wanted to give him earphones because of the musical influence running the project, and because drawing a Capuchin's ears proves to be a bitch. I wanted them red to stand out, make them noticeable. I wanted him to smile, which wasn't the easiest task because my model monkey was the serious type. The execution took about 24 hours. I'm not saying I took a day to make him, I mean I literally spent 24 hours before I was comfortable with the result. Capuchino. My baby.

I like to do the fun things first, so Capuchino was made before any other part of the project. Before material, before layouts, and before officially selecting a color scheme. I figured pink red and yellow would be nice enough. I was wrong. I later settled for sunset gradients. A nice pastel salmon would transition into a bright  dehydrated-piss-yellow. When I put it up against the title in that perfect font, I knew I found the look. Give it that well-done old-school look. Add some flair here, play with some greens there, funkify the layout, realize your mascot doesn't look like the rest of the site, tweak the font sizes for— the mascot doesn't look like the rest of the site. I fucked up.

For a few hours I tried to make it work. I tried to incorporate the new color scheme into Capuchino. I tried to make certain areas gradient, I tried making him more simple. Eventually I realized that I was ruining my baby for the sake of the rest of the site. There was no fixing him, he was made to perfection when I finished him. It was when I realized that I couldn't even use my base drawings anymore, that the logo wouldn't even be a monkey, that my mood became bitter sweet. The project will be better. The next idea won't rely on colors at all. It's classy, and it's pleasing to the eye. I'm just not looking forward to the do-over, to the hours of work I'm going to be putting into something that most people won't even fully understand as anything more than a brand of some sort. All this, and my general audience might never even see the first ideas.

Sucks. But now we're on to better things.

The "Good" Hip Hop Artist

I was organizing my D4AM contacts list onto this nice understandable format, when I found some emails I could have sworn I'd deleted by some random unnamed lyricist who I may or may not have written about here. At the end of that there post, he went on a 3 comment tangent, supposedly not realizing that comments were moderated, and made a complete fool of himself in the process.

I sent him an apology email. It's lengthy, so I won't be posting it. My main points were "Your lyrics are good, your rhyming style is white" and ""This is a pretty self centered album, bro."

I also ended the email with:

Now on to a different note, you left three comments on the page. I monitor the comments myself, and I allowed them. In the comments you make your points, but you repeat a lot. I know it's hard to control oneself when upset, but it doesn't paint you in a positive light. If you want me to delete some, or if you want to re-write your point so that future readers can see that, that's fine with me. I'll even link to it at the bottom of the post. Otherwise, if you're truly unhappy with the post, I can delete it for you. Not many people would do this, but again I wasn't trying to insult you and I feel you're insulted. I'll take the post down if it means you'll be happier.

Source

I was about as nice about it as a puppy happily awaiting bacon. But I didn't receive no fucking bacon. I received chocolate covered razor blades. I was not a happy puppy.

To say that it sounds like I studied a thesaurus and then to compare me to Vanilla Ice, it is contradictory. You have a cheesy white one hit wonder and then you have me, an intricate lyricist. Then to go on to say that I'm pretty much saying nothing? C'mon! There are plenty of Hip-Hop references that more than likely went over your head. I study, breathe and live Hip-Hop. I have a nice little following and there is blatant story telling during the LP, Maybe some of it will resignate years from now (lol), I don't know. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but you contradicted yourself a tad bit. Asher Roth is decent but Eminem is corny and if those are your only two WHITE Hip-Hop references besides Vanilla Ice and Beastie Boys, That's sad. There are a ton of other underground white rappers with undeniable skill. 
If you could please delete the last two comments from me on your page I would appreciate it. I understand you are not a Hip-Hop blog and that is fine but it is offensive at certain parts of your write up.

Resignate isn't a word, you illiterate chunk of wanna-be white trash. Your syntax feels like the surviving remains of Shakespeare's unwanted abortion. Using two well known white rappers for reference is not near as sad as thinking that those are the only ones I know of. At least you say please. And no, definitely not a hip hop blog. Before I got to respond, he sent another email. I'm just gonna highlight some of the best stuff here.

Also when you say a lot of the lyrics are me speaking of myself, that is false. I am speaking in first person but through another alias. If you listen to it, it tells the story of a homeless man who is misunderstood. I metaphorically call myself a shark or a cryptic type creature because I feel that Homeless people, like sharks get a bad reputation and are misunderstood. For instance, most of them are docile but because of a few attacks both on the shark end and the homeless end, the media and what is unknown about these people and creatures are misunderstood. That was a huge reason for the album. Most of the album besides a few things are spoken through a different persona.

The word 'homeless' shouldn't be capitalized. I might capitalize genres, but only because I'd rather not italicize them. The lack of basic syntax has just lead [Unnamed Rapper] here to tell me that the media is as misunderstood as the homeless and sharks, with a terrible segue into it. I'm not even touching comma use. And could you be more of a dick? His anger secretes so much negative fluid; I'm afraid he might still be angrily humping your thoughts in my direction.

The comment he didn't ask me to delete mentioned that in order to properly understand the album, you had to download it and read the booklet it came with. The basis to this being that the booklet would explain everything he failed to in his rhymes. What a great concept; a lyric based album that can't properly explain itself.

Finally [Unnamed Rapper], if you ever read this and take offense, hit me up. Let's rap this out. I don't have a studio, I don't have beats, and I am definitely not a rapper. I insist, however, I can rap circles around you. Bring it.

Passion

I hate writing the word fuck. I could say it all day every day, in every paragraph and even multiple times per sentence if I had to, but writing it just feels so wrong and dirty. Fuck is just such a raw word, it's carried almost entirely by the emotion put behind it. It's the word that comes out when you're not even thinking of words anymore. When you stub your toe you yell "fuck," when you absolutely despise someone you don't wish them a very slow Chinese water torture, you tell them to go fuck themselves, and when you listen to that perfect song for the first time in 15 years, it's only most likely you'll let out a long sigh of melancholic "fuuuck."

Sometimes there's no word to substitute it. Which is why yesterday, as I finished writing my first ever screenplay, I mentioned to nobody but myself how much I fucking love writing. I'm not even that great. I'm not that bad, but I could be better. I won't be winning an award. I left imperfections because they felt organic. All I can think of after this point is how much I fucking love writing. Not passionately love, it's so much more. Not even blindly, madly, deeply, as cliche and near perfect as it would be. Fucking love is the only way it feels right to say it. Maybe because the wound it's left me is still so fresh. Maybe it's because I just saw a peak of my imaginative side without restrictions. No longer thinking I need visual aid, or to satisfy someone, or to impress anybody. I felt a whole world come to life through my fingertips for the first time, and it was like a lifetime's work of writing about all the passion artists put into music in one tiny little digital report. I won't stop doing that, I can't. I've already felt what a lifetime's work of it feels like. Even if it remains a hobby for the rest of my life, stopping would be a dagger to my fucking heart. But I feel the ceaseless need to write more. To write for me, and for others who see things like I do. Maybe not always screenplays, but fuck, I am definitely doing that again.

Maybe I'll try one of these book writing challenges. Maybe I'll poke around and find an artist to write a webcomic with me. I have to try as many mediums as possible to see which one feels like the most lifetimes of amazing work, so I can live my life a million times over through passion.

I won a box of diabetes

November 27, 2014, I received Mel's package in the mail which contained a bag of Christmas chocolates, a box of Zingers, and a box of Twinkies. The chocolates would have been the death of me if I were that allergic to nuts. Instead, the melted peanut butter pooplets were devoured. This was the start, I won a box of diabetes.

Actual photograph of a "Christmas tree shaped Reese's Cup"

Scared of the potential addiction the Hostess boxes would bring, I waited. It wasn't until December 10th that I started writing this terribly boring journal entry style blog post about my carefully eating the Zingers one by one, because surely those were meant to give the most diabetes at once. The truth is I didn't like the Zingers, and they seemed pretty much like glorified Twinkies. They have what looks and feels like shredded coconut all around them, but it doesn't really taste like coconut. They have "raspberry icing" that tastes like whipped sugar with a tinge of menstrual blood for color, and then you chew it and it's like eating a sponge with whipped cream in the middle. Sorry, Mel. I wasn't impressed.

Dead set on eating the whole box on my own, a bit over a month passed by. I never even opened the Twinkies box, I figured it was just a longer Zinger with less sugar coating. What was there to miss? I slowly ate the sugar coated tampon—Zingers, and I did eventually learn to like them, but it wasn't amazing. I felt nothing but confusion.

And then I got high.

I'm not one to smoke very often. I do, but it's not a thing. So in an unforeseen event, a friend came over and we exercised our recreational rights before my realizing I had half a box of Zingers left and all the appetite in the world.

The raspberry taste was so clear, the "coconut" shreds were the perfect textural addition to the spongy goodness. I was happy. But only about as happy as I am when I wake up after a party without a hangover. It's pleasant, but soon forgotten. It was with blind faith that I trusted the food gods as I opened the Twinkies up and unwrapped one golden chemically induced sponge cake.

Proof of existence

Let me just say, there is a science— there is a mother fucking science to eating a Twinkie. One end contains more cream filling than the other, and just by looking at the bottom you can tell which end that is. That end goes first into the mouth, and unless you want to waste the taste of glory oozing down your throat, upon entering that first section into your vocal cavity you must shove the rest of it inside. The cream will dampen the rest of the cake, and the experience can be completed. If you do not look like a blowfish, you are doing something wrong. I would recommend trying again, practice makes perfect.

After learning how to perfectly blow a Twinkie, I realized at the pace I was going I really would give myself the diabetes I've worked so hard not to fall under. I stopped learning the science of Twinkies with two Twinks left to spare. I ate one the following day, and it was good, but it wasn't glory. I still have one left, it's been months.

I think I'll go eat it right now.

How to make your Blogger/GoDaddy link work without "www."

To better understand the emotion behind this post, I recommend hearing Chariots of Fire by Vangelis in the background.

I've spent over a year trying to study and understand how to properly edit zone files on GoDaddy. Mainly because you couldn't reach my site (www.d4am.net) by typing in "d4am.net", but also because I like learning. At least I thought I did for 3 months, until I realized nothing worked. The months that followed showed nothing but the pain and agony of basic code ripping my insides apart as I gave up, tried over, and repeated everything all over again. Always hopeful that one day, maybe, Google would answer my question.

I've found the answer.

All this time I thought, gee, if other people can get it to work, I can too. I can just, make a switch here (and ruin my site for a few precious hours) or make an adjustment there (and clench onto my heart as I try to put everything back exactly how it was.) The trick seemed to be not to use GoDaddy at all.

If you could feel my eye twitching, the sigh of relief, and the release of what seems to be soothing endorphins, you might just understand what finding insomnia over a web address might be. You might decide that yes, some geniuses with the time and the patience really did study all this A Host and CNAME donkey-dung, but me, I prefer the easy way.

This is how you do it.

Go to your blog's settings. You should land directly on your basic settings, and from there you should see your modified blog address. Click edit. Toggle the redirect button.

Here's a visual representation.

Well, I feel stupid. At least I did it. I pulled through, I dedicated, and I probably didn't even have to go through all those sacrifices all these months just to do it.

Great.

Clubbed

I'm tired of hearing people say there's not as much good as evil in the world. It angers me when people say there's so much bad, and I find it ironic that a huge chunk of the people who dare say this are good people who help society.

It may take a little delving into, it might be hidden from you, but if it weren't for social mediums like Facebook or the news, most of you wouldn't know about all the evils going on in the world either. And I'm not saying these mediums are bad, I'm just saying we have to look beyond them. We have to open our eyes and see that for every evil deed, there's someone out there performing an act of kindness.

I was on the street a few weeks ago, working in matters irrelevant to the post, but as I was I met this man. He was about 60, and he was out on the traffic asking for any spare change. I was around him, so we got to talking, and I got to finding out about him.

This man had a deep, strong accent that made it difficult to hear things like his name, but I did eventually grow used to it and in a matter of hours I was hearing his stories.

I don't know about elsewhere in the world. But over here, if you're out on the street asking for money you're usually a junkie, and people treat you as such. Some people will feel sorry for you, and they'll hand you some spare change, but that's that. These junkies don't spend their money on food unless it's absolutely necessary. A loaf of bread maybe. So imagine my surprise when this man rolled out $5 from his cup and went to the nearest fast food for a bite.

I then started to realize several things, his eyes looked healthy, as did his skin, he didn't stink... I've met my fair share of junkies before.. this guy wasn't fitting the criteria. And wouldn't you know I later on saw him counting his earnings. Wads of 5's and 10's put into a separate pile.

I took it upon me to start one last conversation before I left. We talked for a few minutes, he mentioned he would beat me up if I worked at a fast food from here to 10 years, and lead me to believe he was psychic when he told me the girl I'd only just met that day would be my next love.

He was full of it, that never happened.

Eventually I got the courage to ask him what his vice was, and he said he had none. I asked him why he was on the street, and he told me he lived in a house. I asked him why he was asking for money on the street, and he told me he was funding an operation for his clubbed feet.

Now it would've been nice to mention that earlier, but the truth is at first I found it irrelevant. I've spoken to many a wandering drug addict with the wonky feet before, and so I put it behind me and looked on for other hints and clues.

It turns out it's hard getting a job as a cripple. And it turns out that even if you do, the odds of you getting the money for certain operations are difficult. Especially if you don't have medical insurance. Who knew, right? So the man set himself out on the street on a rich, busy avenue, and started telling his stories to any stranger who would listen.

The man had been gifted everything from food, to blankets, to a trip on a cruise once he'd recovered from the operation (courtesy of the cruise ship owner). Knowing all this, I finally just asked how much he still needed.

The man told me he had already paid for the operation, and he'd be taking it January 9th of 2013. He was about $5,000 short, just for therapy and other little do-dads he'd need done. I asked him if, being that it was nearly mid December, he would be able to come up with the money. He just smiled, nodded, and said it was definitely doable.

I didn't have it in me to ask for a picture of his feet. I'm a bad blogger.

What inspired me later on was following him around, listening him speak to the strangers in the cars. You'd see the occasional butt nugget either mouthing him off or just pretending he didn't exist, but the people with empathy were more. The people who would spare anything from a quarter to a twenty dollar bill were more than the arrogant.

What does that say about society? How did this average Joe have it in him to see that people could be good, and yet the average do-gooder are stuck worrying over the evils that surround us? I'll always find it upsetting how it's easier for people to focus on the bad than the good, but as long as those of us who try get any attention, I guess we're not so bad off.

I just wanted to share that. Anyway, life is good. Enjoy it.