Blather
On Being Bigger Than Kiss
I like Teenage Bottlerocket, and they just wowed me with their newest music video, which is animated by the guy who did a favorite animated short of mine awhile back. Anyway, here it is for you to enjoy!
Teenage Bottlerocket “Bigger Than Kiss”
Teenage Bottlerocket | MySpace Music Videos
On Tim Burton’s Alice
I love the Alice in Wonderland story. In fact, I read the book a few times in high school, watched the old movie, played the hell out of American McGee’s Alice and often thought about how I’d take a stab at the story if I ever got the chance…you know, should I ever pursue a career in writing. Well, thanks to Tim Burton, I won’t have that chance for awhile. He’s gone ahead and adapted my favorite kid’s story into what looks to be a quirky flick about the Mad Hatter and an all out chess war straight from Narnia.
Wait, wut?
There’s a lot to this trailer that intrigues me in terms of direction and style. Everything in the real world is a drab caricature of Pride and Prejudice, and has enough gray tones to make you instinctively yawn. Wonderland itself looks dark and demented and all kinds of crazy. So far, so good, but what about the story that’s hinted at? A war? Alice in armor? Chess pieces clashing together like this was Middle Earth? Granted, this is only a trailer and I shouldn’t be so quick to judge, but I’m already on amber alert here. I’d really like to enjoy this film when it comes out (count me there on opening night), and I hope Burton’s silly love affair with Mr. Depp doesn’t detract from the world that I know and love. But with a trailer like this, it’s hard to be all out enthusiastic.
At least they HAVE a Cheshire Cat. Yeah, that’s right, SyFy’s Alice!
On New Years Resolutions
Last year I wrote up a post about my new years resolutions. Out of the 20 I posted, I ended up completing only one. So this year I decided to re-think the resolution thing and come up with more attainable goals so I feel less pathetic when the 2011 rolls around. Although, I have a feeling that history will repeat itself like it usually does and I’ll be writing a post similar to this one next year. Yay for New Years Resolutions, eh?
Anyway, here’s the list in all it’s listy glory.
- Finish a final draft of Year of the Con, my nerdy road-trip comedy.
- Acquire an Agent and a Manager to help sell my script and future ones I write.
- Complete writing of two web series I want to produce.
- Get at least one of the web series produced.
- Write a third screenplay.
- Get Photoshop CS2 and Flash 8 back on my compruter. Srsly, the newer ones blow.
- Write every day.
- Find either a better-paying job or a second job.
- Start up my old webcomic.
- Go to more shows.
- Go to a rave.
- Go to at least 2 nerdy conventions. Dress up for both of them.
- Go to comic con.
- Write a sci fi novel.
- Complete Script-Frenzy this year and do NaNoWriMo again!
- Write a spec script for a sitcom, hour-long drama, procedural, and whatever you call the ooey gooey goodness that’s on HBO and SHOWTIME these days.
- More dates. Some blind dates perhaps.
- Do one of those speed dating things and have at least as awkward a time as Steve Carrell did in The 40 Year Old Virgin.
- Drink more cranberry juice. So delicious.
- Get a suit. I’ve got the pants. Just need to get the rest.
- Co-write a film script with someone.
- Hang out more with friends and be less of an anti-social bitch. God, srsly.
- Do two things I would never otherwise do.
- Get my toon to level 80. God, srsly. I’m such a terrible nerd.
- Visit at least 2 Friendfeed people. ROAD TRIP!
- Take Killer (my cat) to the groomer. Be able to afford that.
Here’s to the new year!
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Remake It
The HORROR! THEY'RE REMAKING WHAT?!
I’ve got a rather novel idea that I’d like to share with the world, something which I think everyone can agree with on some basic level. Something, which when I say it you’ll say “amen” under your breath. Ready for it?
We don’t *need* remakes.
I was looking at some stills for the upcoming movie remake The Karate Kid and suddenly this revelation hit me in all it’s clarity and wisdom. Why was this remake needed? What wasn’t told with the original story that needed to be re-told? What other kind of spin could anyone actually put on this to make it suitable for a new generation? Last I checked, the original source material still holds up and isn’t that painfully dated. And it’s not the casting that bothers me about this remake, it’s that the best option was to just re-do everything and call it a Karate Kid movie.
What if instead of remaking everything under the sun people decided to just take the basic story structures from these older movies and make something new entirely? A young, troubled boy finds an outlet for his untoward behavior in karate, thanks to a sage neighbor. Why does it have to be called The Karate Kid, and furthermore, what’s so important with it being a remake? Is it just to bring in the nostalgic moviegoers? Is it because remaking already established properties is fiscally safe?
How about this? Let the basic story stand on it’s own feet and trust that audiences that like that type of story will come in and see it. Since there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s not like you’re going to get sued for having a similar story type to the Karate Kid. If that were the case, I highly doubt a lot of “original” properties wouldn’t exist today.
Just something to think about. If it ain’t broke..
On NaNoWriMo
Dudes (and Dudettes), I totally frickin’ did it!
I wrote a 50,000 word novel. That’s about 93 pages using your standard Times New Roman font and the basic margins set up by Microsoft Word when you open a blank document. Seven more pages and I could use one-fifth of a ream of paper to print out my novel. Reading my words would take a few trips if you took the public transportation here. So, now what? What happens now that I’ve done the unthinkable (or at least have done what I thought to be unthinkable..or doable)?
I dunno.
I think I’m going to take the next month or so and let the project simmer so I can get a feel if I want to actually do more with it or if it’s going to remain merely a means of cheap therapy. There’s not really that much of a plot to speak of, since it’s based loosely on me and my life after graduation. And every few thousand words I throw in something fictional to spice things up and make it readable on some level. But for the most part there’s a lot of incoherent ramblings about the craft of writing, which perhaps works well with the crazier parts of the story as one would have to be a bit nutty to fictionalize themselves.
The process of writing out this monstrosity was kind of interesting as I forced myself to write at least 2,000 words on average every day. On days I took off, I made up for it by doubling and in some cases tripling the word count. By the fourth week, I started to feel the strain of the deadline and let myself get a little looser in what I allowed on the page. But what I didn’t expect was that all this writing would spark my creative juices in such a dramatic way. I started going back to my other projects and re-examining them, planning on what I would do when I finished my novel. On one particular day, I even planned out another novel that I want to write. I imagine that there will be a NaJaWriMo or something in my future.
This fire to continue writing hasn’t stopped since I passed the 50k word limit. In fact, I wrote two short scripts on Sunday and outlined another project. And as you can tell, tonight I decided to blog a bit.
If I could impart some advice from what I’ve learned doing this whole project it would be that you just need to write. Don’t get hung up on whether it’s good or not. Tell your story and save the validity of it for draft two. Be as raw as you can be and you’ll find that the words come quite naturally.
But fuck poetry, because that’s just stupid. 
Putting the Rant Pants On
ORDER! ORDER! HE made the internets stupid!
It’s been too long since I’ve updated this blog, internets, but I don’t really plan on apologizing for that today. Instead, I’m going to don the rant pants and do some serious bitching. Here’s the short version: Facebook is stupid, twitter isn’t worth squat, and Hulu is about to get one less user. Whew. Now onto the long version.
Facebook is still hard to use. They’ve added a new feature where you can have a live feed roll down the page in “real time,” except it’s not real time. As a fairly adept internet user, I’ve usually got a minimum of four tabs open, one for each service and then random site hopping. If you are on another tab, the facebook timeline doesn’t update. You have to actually go back and make sure the site is the focus before it will do anything. You can tell that the idea of the “live feed” came from the Friendfeed guys, but it looks and feels like the Facebook guys are the ones who implemented it. Granted, the Friendfeed guys ARE the Facebook guys now so I’ll rephrase: Good idea, shitty implementation.
They’ve also removed cities from networks. So I guess the only networks I *can* have are schools or jobs? I question the usefulness of networks now, especially now that friend lists are becoming a big deal. Also, what good are networks in a twitter-ized environment anyway?
I heard somewhere that Twitter was worth billions. I kind of wish *I* had thought of a service with poor uptime and a shitty API so I could be worth billions too. Oh yeah, they’re coming out with lists, a feature that every other service has had for some time now. Hell, even twitter clients have list-like features.
You’ll remember a blog post I made awhile back bitching about users who couldn’t be bothered to pay the small fees from Pandora. Yeah, those people are still tight asses, but there’s some news that might make this “pay for online content” debate a little bit more complicated. Hulu is expected to charge for their content by 2010. I think this is a fairly retarded decision, considering the fact that the service isn’t out of it’s infancy yet (my opinion). Also, for a service like hulu to start charging, it needs to change the way it’s delivering it’s content. First of all, to me, pay for online content means zero advertising. It also means the service (like the article says) needs to extend beyond the website and extend *reliably*. Also, this eight day delay between episode air date and hulu release would have to stop. In fact, I would say that Hulu should just release the episode as soon as it airs.
Now, there was mention that there could be a tiered pricing scheme, which would make this into a less-sucky idea. But I’m going to put it out there that there won’t be much to the free tier. Sorry, but at this point, I see no reason to move to Hulu from Cable, or to even pay for both. Cable sucks, but at least it’s reliable and it won’t buffer if your connection isn’t as stellar.
Ugh.
Let the Busy Times Roll
Hey all, I’ve been fairly busy the past week or so with extra work, which is why I haven’t updated this thing or ranted about some inane topic that you probably don’t care about. So, I thought I would just give some twitter-like blurbs about various things throughout the past week.
- Patrick Swayze died. Add this to the list of reasons why ‘09 sucks.
- Kanye West decided that he wasn’t douchey enough and humiliated Taylor Swift during her award speech. But hey, that’s what the voice of a douchey generation does.
- I made it to level 30 in WoW. I hope I can get caught up to the newest expansion so I won’t feel so left behind when Cataclysm changes everything.
- Social networks continued to be social.
- The diet coke of Facebook was released. It reminded me of what I liked about the older iterations, namely the simplicity.
- I didn’t see any movies in the theater.
- I started watching This American Life, the tv show.
- I thought about working on my comic, but got distracted with the internet instead.
And there you have it. I’ve been busy.
On Fraud and Credit Cards
Via The Consumerist:
Enter Merchantfraud, a group of well-intentioned but foolish outlaws who advocate having customers ask them for stickers identifying the companies as violators, then sticking them on offenders’ storefronts.
I agree with the author of this article to an extent. Calling business establishments robbers and thieves is a bit over the top, but at the same time I am a little bit miffed that stores can get away with this. I remember coming across this problem in a bar a few years back. I had just ordered a drink and was about to pay with my card when the bartender told me that I would have to spend at least $20 before she could ring it up. Since I had already consumed about half of the drink already, there really wasn’t any way I could go out and seek out an ATM somewhere, of which there wasn’t one to be found (I know because I looked later that night and it was blocks away). So, naturally I drank $20 worth of booze and got way more blitzed than I planed. This would have been a different story if this were the Hopleaf, but I digress.
Point being, it kind of blows to find that stores can get away with this, especially if it’s “prohibited” by the credit card companies themselves. But I don’t think I care enough to go around defacing store-fronts with stickers.
On Thom Yorke
I heard a bit ago that Thom Yorke of Radiohead has given up on creating complete albums, citing “death to the band” as a major reason for the decision. He went on to complain that the creative process is just too painful for a full-length album and that they are better served by just making singles from now on. As someone who struggles to be creative day in and day out and who is diligent despite the void, all I have to say to that is, “SOMEBODY CALL THE GOD DAMN WAAAAHMBULANCE!”
Every OTHER band can make albums without too much trouble, so what’s the big deal here? Furthermore, what about everyone else in the creative field who has to continually produce content for the public? What if THEY reduced their workload just because they didn’t want to “hurt themselves?” Would their audience stand for that? Probably not.
I’m calling shenanigans on this. Thom York is just a lazy bastard. I don’t care if his music is good or not. I can’t respect someone who whines about their lavish career, which nets them millions in a year, when others in the same field work even harder and get hardly the same recognition.
Fucking shit or get off the pot, dude.
On DRM and Controlling Your Shit
From Techgeist:
You know what happens to authorized machines? They get reformatted and break over time. Yet the people who sell is software and digital media expect that when we need to reinstall Windows on our only computer so that we can get work done and meet deadlines, we’re thinking “oh, of course I have to go through EVERY PROGRAM I HAVE INSTALLED AND DEAUTHORIZE IT.” Screw that.
I feel bad for anybody who bought music back in the itunes DRM days, because there’s not really much you can do with the music unless you unauthorize / reauthorize or go through the pain of breaking the DRM through other means. But to stop buying from the itunes store because you disagree with policies that they disclosed early on and have since fixed (for the most part) seems a little rash.
I’m not really trying to defend Apple or their store here, but I would like to point out that keeping up to date with these companies’ policies is critical as a consumer and if you don’t agree with what they do, don’t patronize them. Case in point, I didn’t agree with the whole DRM thing, so I patronized Amazon. I don’t agree with Apple’s way of handling apps, so I bought an Android phone.
Not really going anywhere with this rather than just airing some initial thoughts from reading this article.
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