Photography is Phun!
I've posted my first Lomo photographs online. Though not here, since I still haven't come up with a clever interface. Or any interface. Or a clue as to why I've started using terms like "interface" in the first place.
I'm not really a geek. Really. I'm not.
Curbing Enthusiams
A friend of mine loves Vice City, but he's concerned he may need to stop playing, as he's no longer certain he can resist the overwhelming urges to run over pedestrians for points on his way to work. I don't play Vice City, but I'm reading James Ellroy and having unsavory fantasies of shotgunning pimps and running heroin in East Asia, so I don't feel as if I'm in a position to throw stones.
Just thought I'd share that.
Ch-ch-changes...
Yes, it's a new header. Yes, I'm making changes to my site. And I'm scratching my head to the bone while I try to figure out how Brookelyn did up such an elegant interface to display her photographs. And I'm gazing lovingly at my new Powerbook. And I'm having some nice wine. And I'm trying to figure out why my Airport keeps punking out on me. And I'm thinking about just chucking everything for the evening and going back to my book. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a Thursday in the wild rollercoaster of thrills and chills that we call My Life.
Climbing
A friend took me up to the über-posh Reebok Sports Club this evening to use their indoor climbing wall. As someone who's not a huge fan of heights, I was a little hesitant to attempt scaling a fifty-foot wall that looked like a giant child had been throwing multi-colored flecks of Play-doh at it. But hell, I'd gone all the way uptown, so I strapped in and jumped on.
It was hard. It was great. I made it to the top. When I got back to the floor, I had a hard time standing, and I wasn't sure if it was the sustained exertion that was making my legs tremble, or the fear that I'd been suppressing. Most likely, it was both.
I did it again. This time, I only made it two-thirds of the way up. The wall smote me. The wall kicked my ass. I took it like a man and went for a run on the treadmill, then hit the showers for some serious manly pampering.
I've learned it's good to do things that scare you. I've also learned that if you're going to do things that scare you, it's good to have a sauna, a steam room, AND a jacuzzi to relax in afterwards.
TrackBack, Cont.
Ben Hammersley, the clever fellow behind LazyWeb has thankfully done up a nice TrackBack-in-a-Nutshell guide for those (like myself) who are having a bit of a time keeping all this stuff straight. I, meanwhile, am trying to figure out how to get rid of that stupid green border around the header on my Archives pages.
The more I learn here, the more I learn I have to learn...
TrackBack!
After working my way through Movable Type's extremely helpful user manual last night, I think I've got TrackBack up and running. And I've enabled one-click posting from my browser's toolbar (though I had to turn off the Pop-up blocker to do it).
I love Movable Type.
Because "Brooklyn" is Passé
Apparently, I now live in Bococa. Lucky me.
Kikko-what?
Michael Malice has found what I can only guess is a Flash commercial for Kikkoman soy sauce. I'm not sure where the suicidal cat fits in, but it's probably explained in the subtitles.
I've completely lost all ability to distinguish between the serious JapanaFlash that's unintentionally bizarre and the stuff that just imitates it for laughs, but this strikes me as the former. Unless there is no serious JapanaFlash. Unless the Japanese are truly out to mind-fuck us all.
In other news, having finally watched the astoundingly incoherent XXX, I've conclusively determined that Asia Argento is nothing more than a parallel-universe Winona Ryder who flubbed her audition for HEATHERS, coked out, and ended up in the Italian porn industry.
Insomnia
I haven't been able to sleep for the last two hours.
On the other hand, I HAVE finished setting up my .Mac account and discovered an entertaining home video of two hyperactive children. Apparently, they can't sleep either.
I have also just realized that all I had for dinner was a potato pancake and two bottles of Doppel Hirsch Allgäuer Doppelbock.
I'm hungry.
ReAnimator
When I was a wee lad (okay, I was about fourteen), I had that classic toy, the Etch-A-Sketch Animator, an electric version of the Etch-A-Sketch that allowed the user to do basic animations by drawing them on the screen, one pixel at a time. Required lots of patience, yes, but your hard work paid off in spades when you got to watch your little movie of Joe Army Guy blowing the head off of the Evil Dragon Monster, or whatever you had in your twisted early-teen mind at the time, and I'm sure there's more than one techie toiling away at Pixar with one of these puppies in their basement. Personally, I loved my Animator.
Until it began to go insane.
It started, late one night, when I woke to a repeating series of soft electric tones. There, on the floor of my bedroom, was the Animator. Quietly beeping to itself. I got up, turned it off, went to bed.
Came home from school the next day, and it was at it again. This time, it was drawing something, random pixels on its screen flashing on and off to form mysterious images. I showed it to a friend, and together we determined that the thing was either possessed, or it was sending a signal to its comrades to bring on some impending domination of the Earth. Eventually, I just turned it off.
To be woken, once again, by the beeping. Now it was going the whole nine yards: noise, random pictures, the screen flashing on and off, doom clearly rapidly approaching. I yanked the batteries, threw it in my closet, and dove back under the covers to manfully hide from my fate.
I left well enough alone for the next couple days, and by the time I worked up the courage to dig the device out again, it had disappeared. I tore my closet apart, but found nothing. The Etch-A-Sketch Animator had vanished without a trace.
Until today, when I checked my email and found the following:
>> From: "Etch A. Sketch"
>> Date: Tue Jan 14, 2003 10:48:44 AM US/Eastern
>> To: etk@theforeignembassy.com
>> Subject: Pain
>> I am coming for you.
God help me.
Not that I'm obsessed or anything...
...but to get an idea of the appeal that a little analog camera had for me in this digital world, check out this cool Flash presentation of Lomo photographs and interviews with the photographers.
Wandering
I recently added my blog to Wander-Lust, just to see what would happen and to get a little more diverse traffic to the site. And thanks to a cool MT script courtesy of kadyellebee, I can apparently automatically add updates to that site. If I have it installed correctly, that is...this'll be the test.
Soon as I get some free time, I'm gonna add a link to some info about me (since who doesn't want to know more about me!), and try to work out some kind of navigation scheme for photos as well. For now, I'm just going to have some dinner.
Say Hello to My Little Lomo
I got it. I'd been staring at lomography.com for the last couple days, and I finally bit the bullet today and took the subway in to the city to hit B&H, that fantastic sprawling photog paradise in midtown. One Visa card and three Hasidic Jews later, I was out on the streets with a heavy little package wrapped in brown paper.
I love the thing. Simple design, solid metal construction, feels sturdy and substantial in your hand. Not to rag on my Elph, but there's definitely something satisfying about an actual film camera, about that mechanical click and tremble you get with the shutter closes. It feels real. It feels pure.
Of course, we'll have to see how my pictures turn out...
Going on Safari
Being the Apple guy I am, I started messing around with Safari, Apple's recently-unveiled, still-in-beta web browser. I only recently discovered the glory of Chimera, and having gone through the hassle of reorganizing and transferring my bookmarks from Internet Explorer to that browser, I wasn't looking forward to starting all over again. But I'm a Mac geek, so I had to give it a try.
The verdict? Well, it is a beta, and while it's a good start, Safari still needs a lot of work. The best news is that it's FAST, even faster than Chimera's Navigator, which was faster than IE. But, in keeping with Apple's tendency to rip off other people's innovations and make them their own through zippy marketing (do a side-by-side comparison of Apple's Sherlock with its superior inspiration, Watson, for an excellent example, and then go buy the latter), the "complete rethinking" of bookmarks in Safari is merely an enhancement of Chimera's excellent bookmark organization, in which you can slot bookmarks in subfolders when you make them. And since Safari isn't letting me import my old bookmarks more than one at a time (I've got over a hundred of the suckers), and is naming them incorrectly when I DO import them, I'm not really to dig in and get comfortable with it. The fact that you can't print more than one page doesn't really bother me, as I don't have a printer, they seem to have fixed the problem with Javascript that was preventing me from accessing me my Hotmail account, and it has a nice pop-up blocker like Navigator, but Safari lacks Navigator's handy ability to save logins and passwords for every site you visit, and I'm not crazy about the straight-outta-iTunes interface: the Apple development team seems to be od'ing on chrome.
So, I wouldn't kick Safari out of bed for eating crackers, as my dad likes to say, but I'll stick with Navigator until they get it out of beta. And who cares about the buggy browser? The 12-inch Powerbooks should be getting to Tekserve in a couple weeks, at which point I'll be doing a serious happy dance.
Good Morning
When your clock radio randomly wakes you with John Williams' "Raiders March" from his score for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, you just know it's going to be a good day...
Out of my Head
Get ready for ten minutes of thought-babble...
I don't write all that much here, you may have noticed. Lots of short bits, with a rare introspective thought or observation thrown in. Why? I was wondering about that, and...I dunno. Lots of it has to do with my belief that if I'm writing, then I should be WRITING. Writing screenplays. Getting the hundreds of thoughts and ideas and characters I've got in my head down on paper. Doing something worthwhile, something I can eventually be making a living off of.
Like most of my beliefs, this was adjusts regularly, and I'll find myself needing to write something, ANYTHING, just for the sake of writing. "Half-Hour Fiction"(which, yes, I plan to do more of), for one example. Posts like this, for another. Writing is like exercising: it's good to do it, for no matter how long, as regularly as you can, just to keep those muscles fit and loose.
I was walking in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, that is) on Sunday with my fiancée (still feels weird calling her that), and I said in passing that I was surprised that we aren't hipper than we are. Hipsters, to be more precise. I mean, two intelligent, highly artistic types living together in Brooklyn, I feel sometimes like we should be wearing flea market clothes and going to poetry slams and covering our walls with paint. But then I come back to my senses. I like my walls with obscure movie posters and old maps. I like my jeans and sweaters. My lady (that sounds better, I think), looks good just as it is. We don't need dredlocks and art supplies. We're fine just as we are.
And there's my ten minutes.
My New Computer
I'll take the small one. The Powerbook, that is...
New Year
It's 2003. Last year just up and disappeared on me, vanished, as they say, like a fart in the wind. It's not that nothing happened; I moved out of Manhattan and in with my girlfriend, for one, and then went and made her my fiancée, for another. I quit one job and found another. I made money off of screenwriting for the first time ever...not much, for the five-plus years I've been pounding away at it, but enough to be something. I started a website, got bored with it, made it a blog instead. I read some great books, heard some excellent music, caught a couple good flicks. I learned a lot. That's something.
As I said, it's not that nothing happened...it's that it happened so damn fast.
Anyway, new year, new things coming. Some I can try to predict, some I can just hope for, most I can't even begin to guess. All I can do is do the best that I can: write hard, work hard, be kind, be Good. Take whatever comes, make the most of it, make it last. Live for all it's worth. Sounds good to me.
Happy New Year.