Ace In The Whole

So the other day my homie was telling me about how he noticed this big ass bug while he was out hiking with Wifey. He’s a California native so he knows a bit about the wildlife here. He tells me it was this thing called a Tarantula Hawk. I was like, “the hell is that man?” He begins to explain that it’s a wasp that kills Tarantulas.

After doing some good ole youtube research I came to understand this bug is a mutha funkin G. I mean as hard as they come. The mother of all Geez. Like if this bug were a dude, he would have balls that hang down to his shins. This bug is the most Gangster bug I have seen to date and here is why:

The Tarantula Hawk is among the largest of wasps reaching two inches (50mm) long with a blue-black body and bright rust-colored wings. The wings are bright to let you know, “don’t funk with me.” Their stinger is among the most painful in the world. According to Schmidt’s Pain Index, it is second only to that of a bullet ant.

A Tarantula is a big ass spider and depending on the species, the body length of tarantulas range from 2.5–10 cm (1–4 inches), with 8–30 cm (3 to 12 inch) leg spans (their size when including their legs). The largest species of tarantulas can weigh over 9.1 grams (0.3 ounces).

Now the gangster part:

The FEMALE Tarantula Wasp walks INTO the nest of a Tarantula and drags his/her ass out, beats him down and further drops the “owned” stamp on it by laying freakin larvae on it. The egg hatches and then feed on the guts of the Tarantula. The male tarantula hawk does not hunt; instead, it feeds off the flowers of milkweeds, western soapberry trees, or mesquite trees. The male tarantula hawk has a behavior called “hill-topping”, where he sits atop tall plants and watches for females that are ready to reproduce.

What? The male just has sex while the female is the real Gangster up in here waaaaaattt? You know you want to see it in action. Peep the vids people this is craziness: (and don’t get at mad at me when you start looking up bug fights on youtube)

Check out these gangster pics: (click the pic)

The only thing around that consumes these babies is a RoadRunner! Which officially makes The RoadRunner a SuperGalactic Gangster.

Main Source Wiki:

Being injured has forced me back to the drawing boards as I realize most of my income earning eggs are in one basket. That basket is dance. I recently wanted to completely re-design and code my joshventura.com site and now has been the perfect opportunity.

When I first started revamping the site, I had to drive some negative thoughts out of my head such as: “What’s the point of making a website about me dancing if I can’t dance,” or “Damn what if I can’t use my arm for breakin again?,” what’s the point of doing the site when i have a #$%&ing separated shoulder” I decided to alter the perspective on these thoughts and instead I said to myself, “OK, I’ll redo this site as a means of motivation!! This time I’ll have the site ONLY focus on my dance and entertainment experience and not my new media skills.” It will motivate me to be the person I portray on the site therefore motivating me to GET BETTER. Well it made sense at the time!? In other words, I will have this site where it’s showing me doing all these fancy dance moves so it will motivate me to stop bitching and HEAL. Ain’t like I haven’t been injured before.

So the new site is up and running at joshventura.com. On the services page, I have a javascript image gallery that I found here. I was having some spacing issues with the css and then I noticed it wasn’t cross-browser compatible. Issues were present with older firefox versions and possibly ie6. My homie Victor (my personal pocket web genius who’s destiny is to be the first asian male on the cover of men’s health) reworked the javascript a bit and now it’s working great across all browsers. Feel free to grab the script from my site if you run into the same issues with the orginal gallery.

I stuck with the always popular slimbox for photo viewing on my media page. I also implemented videobox for the first time for overlaying vids of me “in action.” I used one stylesheet for both scripts. The one thing I would like to figure out is how to use the new HQ youtube extension with videobox. When I add the &fmt=6 or &fmt=18 to the youtube url it does not pull in the HQ version of the video. I am guessing this is a javascript fix for the video id, which of course I don’t know yet so if anyone has a fix for this holla holla holla holla. I am also considering implementing an all in one version of a media overlay script such as Lightview and or LightWindow which looks really diverse and powerful. What I needs to jew is learn some javascript!!!

The old site is here if you wanna peep it for comparisons. I felt the old site was way too busy, all over the place, cluttered is a better word. Like I was trying to hard. And I was. I was really really trying to learn some new coding techniques at the time and play with all kinds of Photoshop brushes but of course simple can be way more effective and efficient. What do you think of the new site?