My metroblogging has begun
Thanks to Annika for leading me to discover Metroblogging, I have now begun blogging for the Austin Metroblog. Here’s hoping I can keep the pace.
Thanks to Annika for leading me to discover Metroblogging, I have now begun blogging for the Austin Metroblog. Here’s hoping I can keep the pace.
Due to the fact that the number of unauthenticated commenters on my blog is far outweighed by the number of spam comments that attempt to get posted (and luckily trapped for moderation so I can delete them), I have now turned off comments for unauthenticated users. What this means is that you can not comment on any entries unless you create an account and sign in to leave a comment. I promise it’s painless and all your privacy is totally respected, protected and all that. Most people who comment here are already signed up anyway, so most of you won’t be affected. So to those who have not signed up for authentication with Typekey (you can sign up directly form the comments page), be it out of laziness, or paranoia of some worldwide internet conspiracy to steal your private data for Big Brother, I apologize. I am tired of moderating spam comments, and they are far more numerous than the comments I receive.
EDIT
I may allow unregistered commenters to comment again. I can’t decide. I really love not dealing with spam, but looking back through my old comments I started thinking it might suck to exclude those people.
For a long time I’ve felt in a creative rut. Basically, since I started this job over a year ago, I’ve done just slightly above nothing in my creative pursuits. Stopped going on auditions, hell, don’t even have any headshots, haven’t done anything musically, not much updating here, etc. One of the reasons I quit playing World of Warcraft was that I felt I could use that time more productively (even though we never had time to play that much anyway).
Lately I feel like I’ve made at least some progress in this field. I wrote another short film for this year’s Kinetoscopic Wonderment Festival, but unfortunately found out that they had moved the deadline up by several months from the past two years, and thus found it was impossible to enter this year. My reign of winning has come to an end there. I still plan to make my short film for posterity and possible entry next year though. I’ve also been making at least some progress in paying more guitar at home and honing my craft. Not as much as I’d like, but some. The new tranquil green cave in our condo is a warm and creative place.
I also acquired a few new pieces of software for my home studio which I’ve been loving and learning to use. It has inspired me to do something I’ve thought about for a long time. I’m doing my own version of “Tomorrow Never Knows” off of the Beatles’ album “Revolver”. The interesting thing about it is that I’m recreating all the parts (except Drums, vocals, and tambourine) with my super bitchin Variax Digital modeling guitar, and Pod XT Digital modeling amp/effects unit. I find this song not only a brilliant composition, but a brilliant feat of production. The entire song drones on one chord, with various strange little tape loops being faded in and out throughout the song. I’ve read stories about how when the album was recorded, due to technology limitations at the time (they only had 4 track machines), Gearge Martin had various interns standing all over Abbey Road studios, some in closets, holding tape loops on spinning on pencils as he faded them in and out, practically “playing” these loops as instruments. I’ve had a blast recreating these strange sounds on guitar. It’s coming along greatly.
On another front, inspired by Annika, I have become a Metroblogger for Austin. At first I was scared to sign up as they want people who can post more than 3 times a week. That seemed like a lot of pressure, but what what better way to get me writing creatively more often than an actual obligation? Supposedly I’m in the process of being added to the system over there and then the panic can begin.
Of course lately I’ve really been wanting to play WoW again…
Thanks to someone’s blog (or perhaps I should be cursing them), I saw something that had me wide eyed and slack jawed in its horror. Proof that Disney is a soul devouring machine of pure condensed powdered evil. I found myself appalled, and yet I couldn’t stop listening. As each consecutive clip played, I wished I could burn my own ears with a red hot poker until they were solid masses of flesh which could not be further violated. Instead I bolstered myself, summoning my strength of inner will to shake off the effects of this travesty and instead face this dark material; look this beast in the face to gain what knowledge and understanding I could without being cowed. I faced it and came out stronger, more knowledgeable of this insipid horror like some Lovecraftian hero who must be able to face monsters and demons and look them in the face to know their world and learn how to defeat them. Mark Mothersbaugh, why have you forsaken us?
There’s a subject line I never thought I’d type. For a long time there wasn’t much on TV that we watched. Usually just a handful of programs. This last season has been one of our busiest. Many of the shows we started watching to see if they would be any good, ended up canceled (Nightstalker, Threshold) while we still have many more that we are watching. I would say that a very large chunk of shows that we now watch were discovered in hindsight. We let everyone else suffer through the crap and wait to see what seems to consistently rise to the top. Eventually there are always certain shows that we can’t seem to escape. Everywhere we turn, we hear or read constant praise. When this happens and we finally decide that we must check out this show that everyone’s raving about, we will usually download or Netflix all the previous episodes, get caught up and then start recording new episodes as they air. This is how 24, Lost, House, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica and possibly a few other shows came to be in our regular watching schedule (if you want to get technical, I think we actually caught up with BSG when they re-ran all of season 1 before season 2 began).
Our latest addition is Arrested Development. As with most of the other shows, I had been subtly inundated like Chinese water torture with references to how great this show was. I was always reading about how, despite its greatness, it was on the verge of cancellation because television can’t possibly let something good and original survive. Only the most cookie-cutter, bland, lowest denominator pablum was fit for our airwaves! When I heard it was canceled, I decided to finally give in and check it out because now I knew there was a finite quantity, and therefore I wouldn’t be investing myself into another indefinite television relationship (the small irony of that being now that I’m watching it, there are rumors that some other networks may pick it up).
I gotta say, I think it’s worthy of every nugget of praise that has ever been lodged into my brain. Very original and hilarious.
A few other grains of sand which have settled in my oyster hoping to irritate their way to making pearls are Scrubs and Deadwood.
With Deadwood, we don’t get HBO, so we have no choice but to download or wait for DVDs. Catching up and watching live isn’t really an option. We’ll see if Scrubs is persistent enough to break my resolve. Usually, once I’m aware of a program’s presence in my psyche, it’s only a matter of time before I give it a go. We shall see.
Many of you have probably heard of “collectible card games”, the most popular one being “Magic: The Gathering.” After Magic became such a huge hit, everyone on the face of the planet was mandated to put out their own CCG, 99% of which quickly faded into obscurity. Well I’ve just stumbled upon something even cooler. A “Constructible Strategy Game” and even better yet, it’s all about pirates! I present to you “Pirates”. Each pack contains everything you need to play: cards that you punch pieces out of to construct your 3-D pirate ships, a punch out island, treasure tokens, crew member tokens, and instructions. It’s a simple little game that looks like it could be a lot of fun. It’s similar to the “CCG’s in that there’s a whole list of ships and crew members which you try and “collect” ranging in rarity. Their website has a lot of great information including a flash animated set of instructions and game examples. We just bought a couple of packs and will probably end up with one or two packs from each expansion. Check it out!
Because I haven’t updated in quite some time, and really don’t have much to say, instead I’ll jump into the latest thing going around my friends’ blogs!
Interesting that even though I told it I am male, I am the world’s tallest woman. This also means that Chainsaw and I must be the same height, and Donald duck has a LOT of middle names.