I’m a freakin’ movie star!
Not really, but I am making some movies with the help of Xtranormal. What I'm doing is going back through my archives, back to when I posted more often and was still funny, and putting the text to movies. I've done two so far, but I might make this a regular thing. Of course, those of you who know me know that nothing apart from not posting for ages at a time is regular.
Here are my first two movies:
I’m REALLY looking forward to this.
Really, really.
I loved (but fell way behind on) the comic series this is based on. I hope I don't forget to add this to the Tivo.
More poking around in the past
I'm old. That's what happens when you get old. You poke around in the past, seeing what's in the crannies. Like a smoker digging in a couch, looking for a buck to buy a pack of smokes. Smokes are still a buck, aren't they? Well they were in my day, by gum! Kids today, with their new fangled $12 packs of smokes, and their whoozeewhatsit 'peapods'... Get off my lawn!
The latest poking about took me to my old forum. I had big plans for the forum way back in 2004. My site had some regular followers who were also bloggers and creative types, so I started the forum so we could play a game together. A storytelling game called... wait for it... "The Storytelling Game!"
That's me being creative.
The point of the game is that someone would post a list of words, as many as they wanted, but usually 8-10, and then everyone who wanted to play would have three days or so to write a story that incorporated all of the words on the list. Then after the time elapsed, everyone could vote on their two favorites whether they wrote a story or not. Points would be totaled and the winner of that round would pick the words for the next round.
It was a lot of fun. It lasted through 22 rounds, but toward the end participation was sparse. Near the beginning I became sidetracked by my new romance, in addition to the other daily things that ate my time like a cannibal loose in a nursery. If my time in that scenario were represented by plump, tasty babies and there weren't any cops on hand to save some of my baby time.
What drove me down that long abandoned road of creativity is a rekindled desire to write the zombie story that is buried somewhere within me. I also remembered a short series of stories that I began in the game, and considered digging them up and seeing if there was anything worthwhile to them. Anything I could use. I looked all over my computer to see if I had them stashed somewhere, but I couldn't find them, so I decided to go back to the source, if it still existed.
It does, but it hasn't been touched by anyone since 2005. I could almost see dust and hear an echo when clicking around. Made me kind of sad.
I found the story. When I say "a short series" it turns out it's shorter than I remembered. The first part came up in round 3 and the second in round 4, and then like many things it was abandoned.
If you are interested in reading both parts, it's after the jump, unmodified in all its glory. Well, maybe not "glory" exactly. I still like it though...
Is 42 too early for a mid-life crisis?
(I started this post a few days before my dad went in to the hospital. It was intended to be a humorous look at my life and getting older. Now I don't really know what it is, other than here it is.)
Depending on how long I have left to live, it might be too late to hit the actual middle.
What would I like for my mid-life crisis?
My hairline restored? Nah. A couple years ago I shaved my head bald for charity, and I think I actually look better bald than the way I look with my goofy-ass hair grown out. When I was twelve-ish my mom took me to a barber school for a haircut. The woman cutting my hair spent some time running her fingers this way and that in an attempt to figure out how to begin with the disaster that was me. She told me that I had seven different cowlicks going on. My hair was all kinds of fucked up and it's been annoying for my entire life. Now as my hair line has receded, I think I'm down to four. Fuck hair. The less I have the better.
An expensive car? Nope. I don't really give a flip about cars. Never have. If it doesn't break down and gets me where I need to go then I'm happy. Of course, it's easy to take that attitude when you don't have the money to get one. Which I don't. But even if I did, I couldn't see myself in a douche-mobile.
A motorcycle? Now that's a possibility. My first mode of motor-powered transportation when I was a teenager was a motorcycle. I didn't even get a license to drive a car until I was in the Air Force, and I wrecked my first car within a month of getting it. I never had a major accident on a motorcycle and I looooove riding them... but, damn. Back then the only person I had to be concerned with was myself. Now I just don't know if I can let go of the safety of a car and take on the risk of riding a motorcycle again. Especially around here with the huge amount of idiot drivers we have and the horrible condition of most of the roads. Maybe I should wait on that until my end-of-life crisis.
Video games? From the time of my first Atari 2600 back in the day, I've never really stopped playing video games, so it would be hard to turn them into a mid-life crisis. I suppose I could try collecting arcade cabinets. Hah! The only problem without that, apart from the cost, is that there aren't that many arcade games that I remember fondly from my youth that I would also like taking up space in my house. I have a crapload of games, but all grouped together they would take up the same amount of space as a couple of cabinets. I like variety too much to settle on a couple of stand-up cabinets.
Drastic career change? Hmm. Quite often I find myself wondering if I made a mistake by allowing myself to fall into graphic design. After the Air Force, I did a lot of shit jobs. One of them was through a temp agency assembling baseplates for a company called Applied Magnetics. It's the place I was heading to when I rolled my VW bug way back when. The work itself was monotonous and slow, so I started thinking of ways to increase the efficiency of the job. The in-house engineers were interested in my ideas and worked with me to turn them into reality. These baseplates were the core components for an emerging technology: optical disc drives. From what I can tell, the contracts were military, however one order came through an account called "Skywalker," so it's possible that they went someplace in the George Lucas empire.
With my improvements to the process, what used to take 15-25 minutes when I started the job only took 10-12 seconds by the time I was done, and we cut down the number of magnets that broke by at least 80%. The lead engineer asked me if I would be interested in working in their department (I'm getting the feeling that I've already told this story before – another sign of getting old). By that time I had been accepted into The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design with my sights set on becoming an illustrator, so I politely declined. Based on what happened while trying to achieve my goals of becoming an illustrator (which I know I've talked about before), that was probably a mistake.
I've always enjoyed trying to increase efficiency, get things done faster and faster. No idea why, but I like it and I'm pretty good at it. However walking away from a paying job in this economy in the hopes that I can find something more inline with my heart's desire just isn't a doable thing, especially with other people depending on me and my income. Much like riding a motorcycle again, no matter how much I might want to I just can't see doing it at this time.
Take up with a woman half my age? Don't be stupid. I love Heather.
I guess it'll sort itself out when the time comes.
An influx of subscribers has me puzzled.
So I shut off the ability for just "anyone" to be able to register for membership. I noticed a lot of the email addresses that were used for registration ended in .ru, and I would be shocked if I was that popular in Russia. I have no idea what shenanigans a person can get up to be being a subscriber to a blog, but I'm having none of it.
If you really wanted to be subscribed to my blog, and I just dropped you like a Russian spammer, I apologize. Leave a comment and I'll set it up.
Today I'm annoyed at WordPress. For my day job I had been developing a WordPress site for a client, but we didn't have access to the final hosting spot so it was set up at a testing location. The client finally wanted it moved to his real server, and I tried. Lord I tried. I thought it would be as simple as just moving the files with an ftp program to the new location. Oh no. Not so. Not at all so. It also doesn't help that the final host is very security conscious and the account I was given to log in with doesn't have permission to add a database.
Shit's all fucked up now.
Apparently not knowing jack about PHP, MySQL, and that other programmy hoodoo has finally caught up with me. "Dammit Jim! I'm a graphic designer, not a web jockey!"
*sigh*
Hopefully our service provider will be able to restore the database that I tore to shreds, burned the pieces of and then pissed on, so at least the site will be functional once again at the test location. Otherwise...
On the bright side, I'm learning from my mistakes at an awesome rate. By the time this is all done I might actually know what I'm doing.
Inspired
"If only I'd thought of that first."
There are so many things I wish I'd thought of first. I mean things that I actually could have thought of first. Not things like "computers" or "fire". Lesser, yet still fun things.
Not just things that would have made me rich, either. Things that look like they would be a blast to do. If they helped pay the bills then gravy.
Like Bill Zeman's project "Tiny Art Director" that he's been working on with his daughter since she was 2-1/2 years old. He now has a book out, I bought it and it's awesome. I could have done that, if I'd thought of it.
Or what "The Crap Archivist" is doing. There's some very funny stuff there, and I'm always looking for an outlet for my pent-up funny. Many occasions I've found some really amazingly crappy things that just beg to be dragged back out into the public eye and mocked. I've even done a bit of that in the past on this site; just nothing so focused and consistent as what he's doing. That kind of dedication takes work and I've already got a job. Still, I wish I'd thought of it. I wish I was doing it. Or something like it.
Perhaps after my trip to Tennessee, I'll be a little more focused on how I want to spend the rest of my life. I have a pretty good idea right now of how I don't want to spend it.
It’s just not right.
Being this tired of everything on a Friday... There's no way that two days will be enough to recover from the strain of the past few weeks/months. It wasn't enough last weekend, or the weekend before. No reason to expect this weekend to be different.
But that's just negative thinking, right? I need to stop doing that. Somehow. It's not easy to break a lifelong habit, but it's reaching the point where I must in order to continue to function at any level above a potato. Assuming I'm currently functioning above the level of a potato. Some days I have to wonder...
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Perhaps this weekend I'll find some time to lose myself in finally creating some new designs for SplitReason.
This past Wednesday, while waiting for Heather to complete her tour, I started doodling for the first time in months and it felt pretty good. I do so much work on the computer, I forget how relaxing it can be to draw with a pen in my hand. Now I just need to escalate from doodles to something of worth.
If I come up with anything, I'll be sure to post it here.
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I really need to buckle down and power through my studies into CSS. Right now when I open the book I can get through about half a page before my eyes start swimming. I'm only halfway though the first book. In hindsight I probably should have started with "Learn CSS in 10 Minutes". Maybe I should shift gears, work through that and then return the the book I'm currently on.
Ugh. My brain is old and rusty.
I'm still learning but not as fast as I would like.
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I have every intention of shaving my head this weekend as well. My hair is annoying me, and it's high time I did something about it. I miss the feeling of the wind on my scalp as I amble hither and yon. Weeee! Woosh! Amble!
The last time I shaved my head my hair was about half as long as it is right now and it nearly killed the clippers.
I have to make a contingency plan in case they crap out this time. I can see it now. I'll have half my head stripped to the skin, and the other half will be varying levels of random butchery.
What to do, what to do...
I suppose I'll have to dye what's left red and pretend that it was my plan all along. If I widen my eyes as far as I can, tilt my head to one side, don't blink and have a slight smile at all times, I think I might just pull it off.
If I put my clothes on backwards it might even get me a vacation. A cozy, padded, sedated vacation. Mmmmmm...
Found…
... 120 broken links within my archives. That's going to take awhile to sort out. Especially the image links. Glarg. I wonder if it's worth the trouble of trying to fix... Tell you what, if you find a broken link and it bothers you, let me know and I'll try to fix it. If I can't fix it I'll probably toss my hands in the air and say "Oops!" Otherwise at this point I'm going to treat it as out-of-sight, out-of-mind until I have more free time and absolutely nothing better to do.
Phone test…
Just checking to see if I can post from my phone.
A quick question about my RSS feed. As someone who gets feeds, do you prefer to have an entire post, or just an excerpt?
Now to see if photos work:
Home, home on the web.
Settling in. Trying out themes. Marveling at the number of random-ass categories I have and how crazy long my archive is. It would be far more impressive if most of those months didn't consist of less than five posts and most of the writing wasn't crap.
New year(ish) new beginning.
Gotta sort out the "Blogroll" too. So much to learn, so much to do. All kinds of fun!