I'm Gonna Write You A Blog You Can't Refuse

I just watched an animated movie trailer for a Japanese film based on the Professor Layton video game series. I didn't understand a word of it, because I don't speak Japanese and there weren't any subtitles, but that didn't stop me from just soaking in the exotic-sounding chatter, adorable giant eyes, and charming storybook animation. About the only thing that made me cringe was the over-enthusiastic narrator, who would forcefully shriek something insane-sounding in Japanese every few seconds, accompanied by a large title ending in at least one exclamation mark. Our voice-over artists are much, much better. But otherwise, it was a lovely trailer that reminded me again how in love I am with Japanese culture.

Just thought I'd make that a public proclamation. Nobody do a Zelda movie, or I will rip out your soul and feed it through a log chipper, because I'm making it first.

Three Times It Blogs

I always have the strangest of dilemmas (and corresponding blog posts) at 3 AM.

I'm currently dividing costumes based on whether or not they could be potentially useful to have in Los Angeles. Of course, Hollywood is the land of prop houses, sound stages, and wardrobe departments, but having an instant-access (and *FREE*) source of outfits at all times is clearly a strong convenience on many a front.

Due to the massive volume of clothing I've collected over the years, however, the boxes are quickly over-flowing. And here I stand at the brink of disaster: that fatal decision of taking something out and leaving it behind for the sake of space, only to find in two months that I "really, really should have brought that, because now I need it."

Most immediately, while checking over the piles I'd made, I had the bizarre and sudden concern that I have not packed a single dress to bring to LA. This is upsetting in that not only is a good dress a life saver for any movie low on estrogen, but also that I'm moving to the other side of the country and considering which dresses, and how many, I should have with me.

I can nearly justify leaving the dresses behind in that Los Angeles is positively full of women (often attractive ones) (often actresses) (often out of work) and that getting a real, live one -- or at least her dress, for a couple hours -- should not be a challenge at all. But I suppose having a dress on hand has become almost a security blanket to me now. Just knowing I have one tucked away somewhere means that should the unthinkable happen -- can't find a girl, can't meet the deadline, can't come up with an intelligent sight gag -- there's always a last-ditch fallback, and all it takes is to go pull it out and zip it up. Voila, boy in a dress. Instant laughs ensue (albeit cheap ones).

I haven't made up my mind still, and I don't think I will tonight. Picking out capes has already sapped most of my decision-making powers.

Your Mother Was A Blogger And Your Father Smelt Of Elderberries!

Over the course of the past two days, I've collectively pilfered 13 working television sets from the Park School's loading bay and dumpster area. I'm not positive why this mass genocide of CRT screens is occurring, but am making a guess that the college is putting some money into upgrades and cleaning out old offices and classrooms.

Driving home, I hoped desperately that I would not be pulled over by police, who would find my car loaded with television sets clearly not mine.

I also saw Transformers 2 the other night (Beard Srinivasan came all the way from Florida to watch it) and found myself awake for its entirety -- a new feat for the Autobots. Good and exciting, but reeking of cheesy absurdities and characters who should have expired within the first act and not returned. Ironically, Shia LeBeouf was the least obnoxious person in the film. That's probably a first for him.

Regardless, the Optimus fight in the woods was perhaps the first time that I've been invigorated watching giant robots fighting. I'm not sure why they've never satisfied my wild action-sequence bloodlust before, but that scene finally "worked" and won me over to robot mano a robot mano. A terrific moment indeed.

But how about all that smutty stuff? Did I miss it, or was the first film majorly less-sexed than this one? I was watching with Casey and Eric and Beard and I still blushed at moments -- a little heavy for a family film? Don't get me wrong, both Megan Fox and Isabel Lucas are gorgeous... but maybe working them and their underwear into a romantic comedy would be a better suit than into a film about giant fighting robots. Seems to me that Transformers, as a brand, is above that.

You Are One Sad, Strange Little Blog

I caught some sort of spark today and have been doing some feverish opening-sequence work on my past Thesis film -- probably a side-effect of watching another clever Fiction short from classmates and feeling envious that nothing I've shot has turned out festival-worthy. So while returning to my Thesis to further repair it, I was reminded of this list I compiled once on a group project.

For obvious reasons, I scribbled them on paper and stuffed them away instead of voicing them to the team. But they're pretty good, so maybe if I get some nerve, I'll bust one of these out next time I find an appropriate situation.

1) Your work makes me want to commit ritualistic suicide to spare my family the shame in knowing that I had the power to stop you and didn't.

2) Choosing something for you to work on is like selecting which way to be mauled by a rhinoceros.

3) I keep considering sacrificing you to the gods to appease their wrath. Ghana could have water right now, if only I had burned you alive already.

4) Are the planets aligned, or do you just suck this badly all the time?

Wow, I'm a really nasty person when my grades (and pride, and creative investment) are on the line. "Does not play well with other children." But in truth, it was probably a really good (and really vital) lesson to learn about dealing with people who aren't going to agree with the plan and inevitably get their way. Probably half of the movie business is about playing give-and-take with not just studios, but talent and critics and audiences. Being able to wrap up a movie with a professional attitude, regardless of how it stacked up to your expectations, means a quicker and smoother transition into the next opportunity to make a masterpiece.

I'm not sure I'm quite there yet, but I'm a heck of a lot closer than I was four years ago.

Blog What You Can And Give Nothing Back!

Looks like I've been letting this collect some dust as of late, although my recent computer troubles have been partly to blame. No massive projects to whine about at the moment, anyway.

Today marks the one-month-away point for moving to Los Angeles, and I'm feeling a bit spooked by it. I guess I've been writing off the transition as being "sometime later this summer." It was always many weeks away -- too many to actually take the time and count -- so I lost track of how close I was to leaving until hitting a major mile-marker like this. I'm not exactly thrilled how my decision to come back to New York has played out, either; employment has been sparse, money's been tight, and with only one significant project put on the shelf, I've started questioning whether remaining in Los Angeles immediately after graduation would have been more beneficial.

Is this bad? That I'm already complaining about life and I haven't even gotten out to Hollywood?

I'm still searching short-term jobs, but with less than a month to work, it's basically an impossibility. Tomorrow I'm interviewing for an activism job about global warming. They can accommodate my timeline and I can accommodate their obnoxious hours and a long drive (in my state of desperation, at least). I'm not crazy about the situation, but I'm uneasy about my financial state and my parents are in an absolute tizzy.

As I drove through the extreme construction tearing apart my town earlier today, I got this severe feeling of economic depression and a post-apocalyptic civilization living off bartering stones and livestock. Hopefully that's my wild imagination and not a premonition.

Are You Blogging Closely?

I'm afraid my computer's come a bit under wear recently, enough that the mouse button has gone haywire. Since on the fritz, it's been clicking rather strangely at things I'm not trying to open or edit, which makes working on films particularly challenging, as well as navigating the web. I'm still addressing the problem, but I'm likely out of warranty, which means costly repairs and miserable phone calls. I'll keep you all informed, since you're undoubtedly on the edges of your seats on this issue.

Without a stable computer to edit on, I've been actually attending to some real life chores. My room looks a little disastrous right now... but it's actually a heck of a lot cleaner, and I've organized a lot of unneeded and unwanted items to be sold off in a garage sale. Maybe I can make a few bucks to help fund my trip to LA?

I'm pretty nervous still about LA. Not so much living as working, because I don't know what to expect when I get there, but I know exactly what I want to come of it. That's not a great combination at all. I'm hoping to get right into a studio film the moment I get out there -- tap on some of my internship supervisors, finagle my way onto a lot, hook into a really dedicated team, and get sucked into every major project they work on. That's Phase One.

Phase Two has me writing something incredible, which I then take back to the people in Phase One, and they help me sell it (with the stipulation that we also get to make it). And that leads into Phase Three: Big Bucks and living rich and famous.

But probably the real plan goes more along lines like this:

Phase One: Cry to internship supervisors; they let me use their copier. Send applications to studios everywhere, get no responses back. Ultimately throw cover letters and resumes out to the population of management companies, score a few painful interviews, and maybe turn up an aggravating desk job to pay the bills.

Phase Two: Either get fired within a year, or promoted to a better desk and more money. Get no closer to making a movie, but get old enough that I will veritably never get the chance to.

Phase Three: Own a nice house, but remain a nobody in an office while the rest of the world finds stardom. Pay off loans and die.

I really hate that plan. It's solid, but only if you're living to live, and not living to make movies. And I'm not a weekends guy. I'm a Monday-through-Friday guy.

I guess if I find myself stuck in this track, I could make wild decisions and switch it all up at some point (go back to school, move elsewhere, try out the game industry), but then, I've also heard that the only people who don't succeed in Hollywood are the ones who don't stick it out long enough...

Only time will tell where I fall on this speculative grid, I guess. But if there's another thing I've always been guilty of, it's not having particularly good patience...

A Blog On One Is A Blog On All Of Us

Any other man on earth would be visiting FML for this, but given my sophisticated and classy demeanor, I'll offer this polite alternative: FAOM, or "Fart all over me..."

My beloved MacBook Pro has always been a source of secret pride.  Ever since getting it, I've snidely pointed out to my Windows-loving friends that "My Mac never gets viruses," "My Mac never crashes," and "My Mac never needs repairs."

Yeah, well, tonight, my three-year extended warranty is two nights past expiration, and my friggin Mac needs a repair.  Screw you and your fat, saggy, jingly pockets, Apple.

The mouse button (remember, Macs only have one!) has gone all rogue and hyper sensitive, and thinks that any shift of weight over it implies that I'm desperately trying to click something.  And so anytime my finger rests over it lightly, it begins madly double- and triple-clicking all over, opening and minimizing and renaming everything it can find until I jerk my hand away.  At first, it was only misbehaving occasionally, lightly, with tricks like highlighting lines of text.  But once I started trying to edit, it began interfering much more deliberately, by changing my timeline and and goofing around with precision clip-placement.  And when I went out on the net looking for troubleshooting information to solve it, it only got worse from there.

At this point, I've stolen the USB mouse from my desktop PC and am now using it (on my bed) for my frustrating little Macbook.  Now that I've been told that my warranty's fresh out and the Applecare plan ran out on Sunday, I'm feeling pretty much screwed about how to solve this problem.  And goodness knows that a guy trying to move to LA with no money and no solid career (and college loans to pay, and a single working parent with four children, two still furthering their educations) hasn't got the funds to play Apple's stupid game and dabble around with insane repair fees for a wacked-out mouse button.

Only now do I realize how many batteries have died, how many programs haven't run, how many pages won't load, how many files won't open, how many keys have fallen off, and how much patience this Macbook has secretly been costing all these years.

Read Some Blogs, Pam; You Look Tired

Today I did some cleaning downstairs (and that's about all I did, judging by my unmarked To-Do list).  As many of you know, my family is notoriously obsessed with keeping old treasures from years past and "filing them away" in places that will preserve such relics for centuries unnoticed.

Being a parttime computer junkie, I decided to dig through our computer drawers and see what I could find in them.

I can't recite everything that each contained, but rest assured that once I was finished, the drawers were quite empty and the garbage was quite full.

Observe some of the amusements I found (and promptly discarded):

-A printed list of every email address my family has ever received mail from or written to (or simply exchanged on paper with someone)

-The user guide to our previous computer, and two printers previous

-Unopened install discs for Windows 98 gift card-making software.

-Three packs of various photo papers

-The Walmart price tag from our first computer

-Instructions on how to set up Dial-Up

-Print copies of various Explorer windows, with penciled-in folders and some items crossed out

-An external Zip Drive (with a zip disk inside still)

-Limited Warranty fine print for 512 MB RAM we bought and installed two years ago

-A Frontier "We Installed Your Internet While You Were Out" door handle card

-"Barbie Salsa" audio CD (contains one (1) song)  (which I admit, I listened to)  (and copied into my iTunes library)

-50 floppy disk labels (and about 5 Zip Disk labels)

-This After-Thanksgiving-Day-Sale clipping:

(The Super Nintendo went out of production in 1997.  Just for anyone crunching the numbers on this stuff.)

So what's my point with all this stuff?  No point.  Just Sharing Time, or maybe Show and Tell.  And a firm resolution that you will never pick this stuff out of my cabinets and computer desks (except maybe that Barbie Salsa CD, since it offers mildly redeeming value)

I Hate Blogs, Doc! I Hate 'Em!

In honor of our nation's greatest personal holiday, I thought it was a good day to throw out a blog about patriotism and honor, instead of my usual self-indulgent mush.

Throughout the year, I make a lot of comments about The United States of America.  Unfortunately, most of the comments are generally criticism.  I think a lot of us tend to do that.  We complain about our weather, our economy, our society, our obesity, our pollution, our government, our military, our laws, our media -- EVERYTHING!  No matter what it is, chances are, we have something bad to say about it.

But what about all the good things?  Like most elements in our world, we tend to spend a lot more time pointing out flaws than voicing support for strengths.  A heckofalot more time.

So on this day -- 24 hours of the year -- I'd like to throw all that in the garbage and say, "America is an incredible place to live, and I'm extremely proud of my country."  Because the truth is, it doesn't always make us happy, and we may see things we want from other nations.  But this is our home, and it's a darn fine home at that.  I feel small and pitiful thinking about all the bold men who fought and died for this country's freedom hundreds of years ago, while I scorn it and belittle it almost every day from my Lazy Boy.

So here's to You, America.  You put up with a ton of crap from your very residents, and take public abuses in front of the world audience each and every day.  Nobody ever properly thanks you, so today, I'd like to.  No matter what we say about you, don't ever change.

America, you freaking rock.