What a Bunch of Turkey!

Ah, I love shooting! Specifically, I love how creative you have to be when you have no budget when you’re shooting.

Also, I have problems typing “would,” “could,” and “should.”

Read all about it at the LFTI blog!

I and some friends were at a convention, a mix of Comic-Con and Dragon-Con except it seemed to truly be a convention for independent “content creators.” Robb and Tanya were there, I think, and we were trying to peddle the sitcom to people at the booths. It was, of course, difficult getting anyone to take notice. I visited a booth Robb had already visited, where there was a line of non-TV-related people signing autographs for a large line of people, and I butted in line to a non-busy person to try to give them one of our demo DVDs. (The butting in line came from the movies Friday night, when I cut the line so I could get two water cups.) The person I talked with was nice, but we both realized Robb had already given them a demo DVD, so I was really just making a fool of myself.

There was, as always in these dreams, a huge world surrounding the task of shopping the sitcom. To describe it would take many paragraphs, and that’s not considering how much information I’ve forgotten since waking up this morning.

The end of the dream was, however, the most telling bit of the entire exercise.

In the center of the convention space, which was low-ceilinged like at Dragon-Con, I found racks of toothbrushes. As I always do when I come upon toothbrushes in real life, I searched for the extra soft variety. In the dream, I was expecting failure, as always happens in real life. But no! Lo and behold, the entire bottom of the rack was filled with extra soft toothbrushes!

I was so excited, and I knew I had to buy a bunch to take home, like I did in my parent’s town last Christmas, when I did find some extra softs and took home 5. My dream excitement was tempered when I saw on the toothbrushes that these were special “Limited Edition” extra softs. How annoying. And yet, how lucky I saw them before they were discontinued.

As with anything in my dreams these days, a leisurely pace was not allowed. There was pressure as I shopped for the toothbrushes. I was delaying my friends (I think it was my boss Richard by this time) by stopping for this personal errand. I had a few toothbrushes in hand, but then I started looking at them. They were all different, but not “normal.” In continuing to scour the selection on the racks, I saw that there were nearly infinite varieties of Limited Edition extra soft toothbrushes. Small heads, large heads, narrow heads, fat heads, many bristles, very few bristles, short handles, long handles… but I could not find the kind I wanted.

This part of the dream may sound stupid, but it’s not. In fact, it’s about as correct a reflection of the waking world as you can expect from a dream.

My friends were pressuring me to leave, but I could not find what I wanted. I knew I had to buy something, though, because there was no guarantee I would ever find extra-soft-bristled toothbrushes ever again. Yet the selection and design of the toothbrushes was so over-intellectualized that none of the brushes seemed to be useful.

As far as I can recollect, I ended up grabbing a few random brushes. A couple had tiny heads and long handles, and two had square heads with only four clumps of bristles, once in each corner, like a Lego. I had extra-soft toothbrushes, but at what cost?

I had a good chuckle and head-shake when I woke up from this dream. But I have to ask why? Why, why, why oh why do I have to dream about my real life? Where, after all, is the fun in that?

This is a very nicely shot mini-documentary which brings up a good point: Where does all that music go in the end? What if it’s lost to future generations? A majority of music is crap and probably not worth the vinyl or plastic or wax or metal it’s delivered on. But do we only save the popular stuff? How many gems or masterpieces have been lost to time because they were never very popular?

This little movie brought up another question I’ve had for a long time now: What happens when civilization collapses and we lose all our technology? How do we re-discover who we were? A record is a perfect storage medium for sound. With a minimum of knowledge, you can look carefully at an album and figure out how it works. The same is true for film. You can just look at film and see what’s going on. But a CD or DVD? A digital file? Magnetic disk drives? Once the technology is lost, once the algorithms and codecs are lost, how does anyone reconstruct those treasures? My guess is they don’t.

In the event of a major crisis, a dark age following this technological one, our digital world will be lost forever. Analog at least has some chance of survival and rediscovery.

The movie is a measured study in careful, level shots, but just here, and only here, as the scream of a train whistle gradually approaches, the camera slowly tilts into a Dutch angle, and stays there through the next four shots. Then, on the fourth, as Laura’s urge dies, the camera just as slowly re-rights itself, and her life goes on.

I re-discovered this thanks to Post Secret. Someone’s secret was simply a still of the movie, and someone then replied with the YouTube link.

It’s movies and moments like these that fill me with love for cinema.

But not really.

Zach Beane has charted the grosses, rankings, and longevity of the weekly top 25 movies since 2006, plus some top 10 charts for 1988 and 1998. I prefer the normal vs. the log scale charts. These charts are much more elegant end legible than the (still cool) chart at The New York Times.

I found this via H&FJ. Read their take here.

With what?

With the sitcom, for one. We are shooting our next “episode” this weekend, and we’ve been working very, very hard. I put episode in quotes because it’s not really an episode, it’s a series of shorts introducing our new character. But this is sort of secret, so don’t let anyone know. We’re keeping this new character and shorts series a surprise for our fans. If any of them make it here, then, by golly, they deserve to know this secret! Yeah, not many people read the LFTI blog, but by golly, they should. It is chock full of interesting info about our show, and it’s typically quite the funny read. This is not tooting my own horn, but… Well, yes, it is. It is tooting my own horn. But I am tooting it in tandem with the horns of Robb and Tanya, who also post regularly. They deserve the toots just as well as I, maybe even more so.

So, the sitcom. Yes. It is a beautiful, wonderful time suck. I feel my life is gaining meaning again by working on it. I sat on the floor two nights ago, for instance, cutting and shaping foam rubber to create a cowboy hat. It has to look like the Arby’s hat, you see. Why? That is one secret I shall not divulge here. That secret I will make you wait to discover in good time.

I feel so creative with the sitcom, so rewarded and so proud. These are results that both grow from and grow into obsession.

My second obsession, at least for the past few weeks, has been the iPhone. I have loved my iPhone somehow even before I owned it. I waited in line for hours to get one on June 29th last year. I have used it and, despite its few shortcomings, loved it for over a year now.

Then the 2.0 upgrade was announced, along with the new 3G version of the iPhone. It would be a month-long wait between the announcement at the having. Well, that day of having was last Friday, July 11. Since that day, my happy iPhone has been a completely new device. It’s like the tiny but sunny window you’ve been looking out of for a year was been suddenly replaced with a wall-sized picture window. Really. Just like that. But my old phone did not have three important new features: 3G, GPS, and 16GB of storage. Upgrading was not a necessity, it would be a luxury. I checked up on three stores over the weekend, all with huge lines that scared me away. I went back and forth in my head, knowing that my original iPhone was excellent, fine, perfectly great.

Today, on the way back to the office from a work show at Disneyland, I called the Glendale Apple Store. They had 16GB black iPhone 3Gs in stock, and the line was short. I made a detour, waited maybe 45 minutes in line, then after ten in the store, I had a new iPhone.

There was one thing, one incredibly geeky, ridiculous, silly thing that pushed me over the edge to get a phone now instead of waiting for the next version. I want to keep the original iPhone. I want to be able to pull it out years from now and show it off or even just touch it because it will be a device long-remembered for changing a small tidbit of the world. I much prefer the original iPhone feel and look to the new one. It has a much nicer heft, and the aluminum is so wonderful to hold. I would use it until I ran it into the ground. But that was just it! I did not want it to end up like my Newton, shattered and useless. I wanted a relatively cosmetically excellent specimen to enjoy for much longer. The only way to do that was to sacrifice my everyday enjoyment of it.

I am writing this now because the new phone is loading the backup from my old phone. I will love using the new phone, I will love it’s faster wireless speed and its GPS and its extra space. But it will not be an original iPhone.

I have yet another obsession, which is more long-lived, and that is dealing with rude people. Selfish people, people who do not have any consideration for others, and whose world extends beyond them only so much as it does to support and coddle them.

It was a great posting by a guy named Lance Arthur that, combining this topic of selfishness with an iPhone 3G line, that started me writing this post in the first place. Please go read it now.

I sympathize with this fellow for a few reasons, one being that he waited in a long, long line to upgrade his phone, like I did, and another being that he had a run-in with a schmuck that turned out for him as it would have for me (namely, with an illogical confrontation ending in lingering anger). It also seems he;s gay, which adds a sprig of parsley to the dish.

I have posted before about run-ins with inconsiderate neighbors, and the continuing saga of a majority number of drivers believing themselves to be the only ones on the road has got me flummoxed at record-high levels. New examples arrive in greater numbers, every day, of people who are so turned inward that I can’t imagine why we’re not all standing about, horrified at having to stare at their glistening innards. My own recent attempts to exact justice on these types only leave me flustered and angry, like Lance. Even the possibility of encountering idiocy and potential intervention create a dull but palpable stress. The very real potential of being kept awake at night by a dolthead next door who thinks talking loudly on their cell phone at three in the morning is acceptable social etiquette is enough to keep me from falling asleep in the first place.

Did I mention that drivers are even more insanely self-absorbed now than they were when I first moved out here? There’s the lady yesterday who, talking illegally on her phone and half-blocking a lane of traffic at a parking garage exit, gave me a look of “fuck you!” when I dared to honk and crowd her back into the garage. There’s the guy who darted from behind me into the lane on my right, which was ending in 100 feet, then shouted mean names at me through my window when I refused to slow down so that he could merge in front of me. Plus numerous other, similar examples. Somehow, these people become indignant when they are at all inconvenienced by having to work with others in their society.

You see how I obsess. Sure, no surprise there to anyone who frequents the Forum. But you see how the past couple weeks have been a double-whammy of obsession for me. I feel fairly overwhelmed with all this, yet I know, really, since my obsessions have kept me from getting sleep (see: right now), it’s less me being overwhelmed than being exhausted. I could use my obsession with the iPhone App Store to find a productivity app to keep me task-oriented and hyper-scheduled, allowing me to get more sleep… but oh so much more fun to download the daylight app that shows day, night, dusk, and dawn times and use that for our shoot this weekend…

Fake websites promoting movies are nothing new, I think the BnL site is pretty damn clever.

Reminds me of what I used to do, back in the day. (Plus other fun, non-review-like formats!)

I saw it on the 101 south on the way into work this morning. Eddie Murphy’s head just appeared from an on ramp, merging gently into traffic. It’s (obviously) a promotional… thing for Meet Dave.

Thoughts that went through my head: “Who sculpted this thing?” “Is it as top-heavy as I think it is?” “Who exactly pops out of that door in his ear? Certainly not Eddie Murphy himself!” “Does Eddie know this exists? If so, has he seen it?” “Who gets to keep it when the movie promotion is done?” “How many of these are out there?” “What if I rear-ended Eddie?” “If Eddie’s head fell onto my car, would the insurance company consider my car totaled?”

That new iTunes Coldplay ad is pretty damn great in just about every way. I think that should be their actual video. It’s beautiful and striking and an amazingly accomplished piece of animation.

* * * * * *

When Tanya and Robb brought me on board as producer for LFTI, they probably did not realize they were gaining a lunatic. Not just any lunatic, of course, but a font, typography, and typesetting lunatic.

I’ve always been fascinated by text. I spent lots of time as a small child trying to draw perfect block letters. I’d take the plastic, all-caps letters (yellow Futura medium) from both our copies of The Alphabet Game and tape them onto construction paper to make signs. I cut out matching letters and numbers from the newspaper to make my own Iran Hostage Crisis count-up sign. I hand-lettered every single one of my campaign posters for Vice President in 8th grade and President in 11th. One of the best things about the Mac when it came out was, for me, that its handling of text was much better than Print Shop on the IIe.

My love for type has never diminished. It served me well post-college, when I worked as a book designer at Birkhäuser Boston, right through to the present day, when I get to contribute to the “online conversation” regarding the fonts candidates use for their campaign materials.

Unfortunately for Robb and Tanya, it currently serves me well on Life from the Inside.
I am of the opinion that text, fonts, typography, and typesetting, while flying under the radar of the general public’s awareness, are some of the single most important elements in adding a sheen of professionalism and style to any project. Most of the quality we strive for in LFTI is applied to the usual concerns: camerawork, writing, editing, music… Very few people might notice if a font is improperly stretched, or if a wayward apostrophe has made its way into an pluralized acronym, or if the hyphens in a block of text are disconcerting to the eye though they may be properly placed.

Robb does 99% of the graphic work for the show, including all the titles, credits, graphic elements, DVD menus (yes, DVD MENUS!), blahdee blahdee blah. And I have to say that 99% of everything he does, text-wise, is fantastically great. Unfortunately, now that I have wedged myself into the picture, I’m here to catch the remaining 1%. If I see some kerning I don’t like, I’ll say so. If the leading between two lines is too tight, I’ll point it out. If there’s a space between a word and an asterisk, I’ll call for its death. If four fonts are being used where two will suffice, I shall champion the cause.

Sometimes, where text is involved, there’s a trade-off between correctness and aesthetics. To me, correctness should win out most of the time, because there is usually an aesthetically pleasing way to correctly render an awkward block of text.

If I’m going to prattle on about this topic, I really should give an example.

Robb had designed a bit of text on an upcoming DVD menu (yes, UPCOMING DVD MENU!) to fit nicely into a rectangular space. The work “jukebox” (yes, JUKEBOX!) had to be split, so he designed it as “JUKE” on the fist line and “-BOX” on the second. Now, the text fit beautifully, four characters on both top and bottom, but I could not stand the hyphen being tied to the second half of the word. That is simply not done. It gave me a case of the frownies every time I saw it. Since I am now tweaking and redesigning that particular DVD menu, I changed the layout to “JUKE-” and “BOX.” It made the text top-heavy, but it was correct. However, knowing that I was changing a very particular design choice that Robb had made, I thought I could compromise. I was willing to—GASP!—have the word split, but not hyphenated! “JUKE” and “BOX” would fit more nicely into that rectangle without a hyphen. Perhaps to some, this would have been the worst choice out of the three, splitting a single word into two sans hyphen. To me, I’d rather have the hyphen gone than have it on the bottom. And jukebox was probably two words at one time, anyway. It’s not like we were splitting “grottos” into “GROT” and “TOS.” Blech!

I have not finished the menu redesign, but I think we agreed to keep the hyphen on the top, probably because I whined enough about it.

So what does all this pain-in-the-assery get us? From my point of view, it gets us closer to looking great. When no detail goes unnoticed, when we can concentrate on the small things that most people simply don’t understand or don’t even notice, we can give everyone a better show. Then, if people do know and do pay attention, they will hopefully appreciate the care that was taken to make LFTI a top-notch piece of time-wasting entertainment!

Sort of like something else I know.

See the Reese’s ads here. It’s a dumb-ass Flash interface; currently, the ads play automagically. If they don’t play automagically when you visit, click the TV Commercials box. If you’re reading this in 2009 or 2010 or 2416, the site may have changed, and I’m sorry you won’t be able to see them.

It turns out there had been a sequel planned, which comes as no surprise; anyone who was a fan of the radio show, the TV series, and the books knew there was much more to the story.

Well, it turns out this guy named Andy Baio has gotten his hands on a backup of the shared network drive from Infocom, the company that produced the Hitchhiker’s game. (Infocom was more known for the Zork games, none of which I ever played. Well, to completion, anyways.) Andy has posted some emails about, memos regarding, and even a playable version of the unfinished sequel!

I am still making my way through the post’s comments, which are almost as fascinating as the story itself. (UPDATE: Keep reading them… the Bywater spat is fascinating!) But I’m taking a break to post this so my bucketload of readers can go enjoy the posting right this very second. Go! Read! Geek out!

Via Daring Fireball

If the first trailer was bad, the second trailer is even worse. I simply don’t think I will bother to drag myself out to see this one. Ech! CREEPY!