Two web design, one grammar

[channonyarrow]

None of these are new. However, they evidently bear motherfucking repeating.

If you design a website or middleware site, stop making the font be a different iteration of the same fucking colour as the background. I have seen one too fucking many light-grey-on-dark-grey/lavender-on-violet/light-blue-on-dark-grey sites today. Actual contrast is okay.

Additionally! If you are using a middleware site and you are posting to a comm, quit fucking breaking the font overrides I have set. I have set my overrides to generate a page I can fucking read, and you know what? I don't think it's particularly cute when you break my overrides so that your tiny, tiny text can come through in your comm post. Either you've set your screen resolution far too low or you've got the self-esteem of a bug. Knock it the fuck off.

If you wish to use an idiom that contains a homonym in it, you might want to check the idiom. It is "deep-seated", not "deep seeded". It is "spitting image", not "spit and image". This, in particular, pisses me off. I cannot take someone's deep seeded fear seriously, I really can't.

*****

Today, I am going to wash my car. It's been over a year.

This is why I buy gray cars.

I also need to clean it out so that I can a) find my Fall Out Boy tickets and b) put graeae into it. It's getting to the point where there's not even room for me.

I may even vacuum it.

ETA: Apparently, I will be taking a hammer to the fuse box. I have no power in part of my kitchen, and I know why this is. It still pisses me the fuck off - and I really wonder what was being done in the apartment below me to make the fuses blow, but since I have more fuse switches in the off position than I have verified should, in fact, be in the off position, I have no urge at all to just randomly flip switches.

So apparently I get to chase down Every. Single. Fucking. Circuit. in this place before I call the landlady and tell her what's going on. Yay!

Comments

[gasslight.livejournal.com]

Huh. Lost my response. Probably because I am likely to press buttons.

So yeah. Idion/homonym stuff makes me crazy as well. However, I have a friend whose ex makes up idioms to stand in for the ones he hasn't heard correctly despite their making sense (or not, as the case may be). My favorite is "Six of one, half does the other two."

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

...wow, I would so be bashing him in the head with a shovel. That just drives me bananas.

[gasslight.livejournal.com]

Eh. He's her ex...I hardly ever see him any more...but when I think of some more of his malapropisms, I'll just be sure to let you know...

[florahart]

...actually, spit and image is the older usage.

http://www.bartleby.com/68/73/5673.html

(also, OED and others)

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Hm. I did not know that. I feel that it's a bit like having an ewt in prose, though.

[koemiko.livejournal.com]

Soooouuu...

If you had to recommend a few Fall Out Boy songs and a few Cobra Starship songs, what would you recommend?

1 of 2 - I talk a lot

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I can give you two answers to that.

First answer! Fall Out Boy!
If I were blindly reccing songs, I would pick these:
- This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race
- Thnks Fr Th Mmrs
- Sophomore Slump Or Comeback Of The Year
- I Don't Care (not the remix!)
- I've Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth
- I've Got All This Ringing In My Ears And None On My Fingers

However, I am not super familiar with their entire catalog, and much as I like From Under The Cork Tree and Infinity On High (one of those songs is from their upcoming album, Folie A Deux) I don't really see a difference, generally, between their songs. Most of them sound very much the same; it just happens to be a way that I find awesome. Probably the two real standouts on that list are I Don't Care (from Folie) and Thnks Fr Th Mmrs (Infinity) which is more ballad-y than the others I recced. I'm not saying that I don't like them, I just have JUST dled their earlier albums and on the ones I do know, their songs sound very much the same. I picked Bad Idea over Snitches And Talkers Get Stitches And Walkers because I like Bad Idea's title more, for example.

Second answer! Cobra Starship! (Also known as "pack a lunch, we'll be here for a while.")
Cobra Starship, on the other hand... *evil grin* They only have two albums, I know them both very well, and I kind of want to just rec both. However, I'll restrain myself.
- Snakes On A Plane (Bring It)
- Guilty Pleasure
- The City Is At War
- Prostitution Is The World's Oldest Profession (And I, Dear Madame, Am A Professional)
- I Kissed A Boy
- The Kids Are All Fucked Up
- One Day, Robots Will Cry

Videos: (all on YouTube)
- The Church Of Hot Addiction
- Send My Love To The Dancefloor, I'll See You In Hell (Hey Mr DJ)
- Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)

And, for the advanced Cobra Starship scholar:
- Pleasure Ryland
- Being From Jersey Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

I'm leaving out songs I really, really love there (as I say, I want to rec both albums) like Send My Love To The Dancefloor, I'll See You In Hell (Hey Mr DJ), and Damn You Look Good And I'm Drunk (Scandalous) but I just totally want to rec all their songs. There isn't one off Viva La Cobra! that I don't love.

2 of 3 - REALLY A LOT.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

The advanced section is for people who think, for some reason (I don't know why, I put Prostitution on the list) that Gabe is somehow an evil bastard. I will agree that it is fucking HILARIOUS that he has a song called It's Warmer In The Basement, about locking someone in your basement so that you can have them to yourself, and that he's said that he locked William Beckett (they're very close) in the basement - but then again, this is the guy who doesn't take himself seriously, and I think that some of that sweetness comes across in Pleasure Ryland. And the whole story of Cobra is that Gabe was wasted on peyote in the desert in New Mexico and had a vision of a giant cobra that told him to start a band to teach hipsters to stop taking themselves so seriously and emo kids to quit being pussies, and that mankind was fucked but it was Gabe's job to be sure that we went out with a bang. This is, obviously, complete lunacy, but it's considered very true in some parts of CS fandom: I had a conversation a few months back where I randomly commented to someone in someone else's journal (I knew this person not at all) about how I thought that Gabe was totally cockblocking Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes, who's dating Katy Perry, by covering all the songs she covers, but in one case that would require an actual time machine, since he covered it before anyone knew who she was and this complete stranger and I agreed that if anyone on earth would have a time machine, it would be Gabe. I mean, we LOVE him for his complete crazy. And we also know that he is not, in fact, crazy.

Oh god, I'm getting crazy - I really want to link you to rawknroll's primer on Gabe Saporta, for example. But I'll leave it with saying that in his previous band, Midtown, the music was, basically, a love letter to the Jersey scene - I mean, there are two songs there that are exactly that - and Being From Jersey is his breakup with the Jersey scene: he's not in love with the FBR/Decaydance thing, which is a lot less serious - less hardcore, and I don't mean musically - than Jersey, which is the scene he grew up in, but he's leaving Jersey for FBR/Decaydance because they'll let him do this other thing that he thinks is really important, but joining FBR/Decaydance IS dumbing himself down to appeal to the audience for that label, it's completely different from the Jersey scene. I mean, MCR is kind of fringe-Jersey-hardcore scene, and you really get that on their early live stuff and even on Bullets, but compared to Midtown, they were kind of cupcakes. So I include those because I hate the fanon version of Gabe (obviously you're not running off to enter fanon, but I'm just saying, this is my policy: head off this vision of this lovely, lovely, genuinely caring, very smart man as completely evil) which is that he's, basically, completely evil and kind of dumb and transparent, and he's so not. He's...yeah, he's not even a tiny genius, man, he's just a genius, he's amazing, and I love him unironically with all my heart. I've been waiting for him and his band to come along and make music all my life, and I felt so fucking privileged to go to the Jersey show last week.

Say it this way: Gabe doesn't consider his fans to be fans, he considers them members of his gang, and so we have a gang sign for this (throwing up the fangs) that I always do wrong exactly like William Beckett, because, like William, I am left-handed. If you're further into the gang, I believe you get a handshake, and then you get a hug or something like that, but the basic model is throwing up the fangs (and apparently people throw up the fangs in weird places all the time...like one of the actors on Gossip Girl.)

3 of 3 - I HOPE.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I mention videos for CS because...really, nothing is fucking funnier than the story contained in Hot Addiction/Dancefloor, and it covers the creation of Cobra Starship (note that not one word of it is true, though). And in case you don't know, the guy in the rabbit suit in Dancefloor (you'll see) is Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy - the FBR/Decaydance bands are very close, it's kind of creepy. Also, though Hot Addiction isn't their best example of this, both Gabe and Alex (bassist) at least speak Spanish (because they are Hispanic; Gabe also speaks Hebrew fluently) so the bit at the beginning, with the two guys playing guitar as he walks into the club? Yeah, that's Alex and Ryland playing another song of theirs, in Spanish (and I can't remember which song it is.) I may actually adore Ryland more than anyone else in bandom, or at least FBR-dom, but it's hard to get past Gabe being so fucking awesome. Still, though, Ryland is adorable in person and AWESOME in concert, and I just really have completely lost it about this band, haven't I?

And the video for Snakes On A Plane is actually not Cobra Starship: it's the Cobra Starship super group, but basically, William heard about Snakes On A Plane the movie from someone else and was talking to Gabe about it because The Academy Is... (William's band) has a song called Black Mamba, and William thought it would be perfect, etc, so this led, basically, to FBR taking over the entire album (I have it, I don't think there's many people on it who aren't FBR/Decaydance bands) and the Cobra Starship supergroup obviously did this song. But the people in it are Gabe Saporta (mostly singing), Maja Ivarsson of The Sounds (female), William Beckett (guy singing in the lounge area) and Travis McCoy (Gym Class Heroes) who does the rap. And it's an awesome video as well as a primer to about a third of FBR's artists.

Trust me, I WANT to keep going, but I'll stop here. I can upload all the songs if you want (not the videos, though). Some of the songs are kind of rare for various reasons so I can post them if that makes it easier. And if anything I've said needs explanation, let me know.