Saturday, April 28, 2007

Scatterday.

I slept today. I slept a lot. I think I needed it.

It's good to be busy, but sometimes, even the anticipation of how busy I am, and am going to be, lends itself to an anxiousness that in and of itself is tiring.

So, what the fuck, slept in today. Have chairman commitment manana. Scene partner A will be working, I might see if Elwood is gonna be around; he and I can work on some stuff.

Meanwhile, the good and decent routine I had a year ago, I want... hell, I need to plug that back in, piece by piece. Get back to having a clean house for the sake of having a clean house, cooking food in my own kitchen, taking care of all of those things. My daily readings and meditation.

One thing at a time. Plug that shit back in.

Last night I told a guest off. He was a complete dick. Telling him off cheered me up for the entire rest of the night. I could have handled it better, but fuck that guy. He has to live with the fact that he's a big, fat slob and an asshole. I get to live life. I win.

This is scattered, I know, but I really don't care right now, I'm just sorting. And it feels kind of good. We'll bring it up short of an actual "To Do" list published on the web for all to see, right now. (No promises for later.)

I'm gonna leave you with a quote I got from Artist Coop!'s blog "Positive Ape Index:" I guess Coop had a stressful day yesterday. (Edit: Thursday, I guess, actually.)

"So why do I feel compelled to share all this? Well. I AM a blogger, after all. Vomiting up horribly intimate moments for the amusement of idle cubicle jockeys is what the internets are all about, right?"

Heh. Right on.

I do highly recommend his blog, which reminds me, I need to post a blog roll on this bitch. I need a new camera, too, get some photos up in here. Oh, and apparently, someone is working on an animated "H.R. Pufnstuf." Awesome.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Ninja Noir Pirate

Just got back from hanging out in the Comic Book Shop with The Mighty Archer. Well, that and some errands. Though she is a Ninja and I am a Pirate, we are working toward a common cause. A Film Noir via Comic Book cause. I'll have to watch her, though, she is ninja. Sneaky bitches, those Ninja.

I got in and out of the place without buying anything at all. That may be a first.

This might be a place holder. I haven't decided.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

To Post, Perchance to Dream...

Placeholder, kids. Just got back from My Thursday thang and about to go hit class. Well, about to shower so I'm not hated in class. I think I may just have some stuff to postify later tonight.

No, really.
----------------------

Ugh. I just spent an hour on hold, literally. About an hour and ten minutes, really, at One O'Clock in the fucking morning. Well, after Two, when I finally hung up.

When I got home from class both my cable and my internet were out.

I called the Cable company, and here's the real bitch, they never even answered. After an hour the cable came back on and I rebooted the modem and here I am back on the interwebs.

Fucking pisses me off.

I'm tired and pissed. See you tomorrow. (One would hope.)

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Technical Difficulties.

Ugh, every thing Tech on the interwebs is pissing me off, but I think it might be getting better.

First the obvious: I wanted to post that video of Mike Daisey and how he handled the assholes who fucked up his work, but it just would not work until now, and yes, I figured out why. It's too tedious to detail right now, frankly.

What pisses me off is that I had just been thinking that, y'know, all this speculation about eventually moving this blog to my own site, hey, why go through all that, Blogger's working out pretty cool, they store all the stuff, I don't have to mess with it, and what the hell, it's good enough for Post Secret right?

Fuckers.

My next bitch is Imgred.com. I shouldn't be pissed at this guy, 'cause he's trying to do a cool thing but it was kind of unclear and now I need to swap a bunch of things out.

The idea behind imgred (Image redirection) is to make it really easy to avoid Hotlinking. Hotlinking (which I am guilty of innumerable times) is when you see a cool picture on the internet, and you link it somewhere else, say a Blog or a forum, and you do so directly from the place you found it. The problem with this is the site that the picture was originally on gets dinged for bandwidth from both sites now, and sometimes that costs the person who originally put the thing on the web money. Not cool. What's considered polite is to save the picture, host it on your own site or at a picture hosting site, and link it from there. This is a pain in the ass, and frankly "Politeness" isn't in terrible abundance here on the interwebs.

So this guy, this imgred guy, he creates a code. You simply put "http://imgred.com/" before the url of the picture, link it normally, like you're Hotlinking it, the code hosts it at the imgred site, and after that, that''s the new url for the picture. He even set it up so it'd automatically create a thumbnail.

Cool, I thought, no more hotlinks or fucking around with Imageshack.

Nope, turns out, "This site was meant as a demonstration, not as a self-sufficient service. If someone on Website A wants to show an image from Website B, the image should be locally cached on Website A. It is up to the Website A programmer to develop such functionality."

So, it's a code I could use if I had a site to host stuff at, and the brain power to implement the code. That is, I could come up with my own, private, "imgred.com" for my pics I wanna "Borrow" off of the net. Well, that's cool, I guess, and while I'm sure I could figure all that out, I'm probably gonna go try and figure out "Flickr" again instead.

Mike Daisey Audience Protest, Walkout and Attack

Holy Shit, this was a pain in the ass.

YouTube and Blogger won't play nice.

I've been trying to post that fucking video for three days now. Pissing me off.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Hmmmm....

This is an unusual place holder.

I had posted a YouTube thing, I thought. With text and commentary. Maybe it just hasn't shown up yet. When I hit publish, it did say that it would show up later. The Kermit the Frog "Hurt" thing worked. I dunno.

I'mo wait, rather than double post. Read yesterday's entry, it kicks ass anyway. If my video shows up, I'll delete this post or something, if not, I'll put something here. Maybe I'll put something here anyway, and you'll get a double entry for once. We'll see, but for now I hafta jet.

Laterz.
-RRR

Sunday, April 22, 2007

We're getting the Band back together.

So, today, my scene partner and I for The Blues Brothers put on our costumes and went walking around outside.

It was a very interesting day.

First of all, the casting is spot on. Everywhere we went people smiled. There were all kinds of hilarious exchanges with folks, I don't think I could even remember all of them. People literally pulled over in their cars to say, "Hi." It was more than a little surreal.

At one point we went into Virgin Records, where we pointed out to the Emo "My Chemical Death Cab" kid behind the counter that they only have eight foot of Blues Music for sale, and "What, a mile?" of this, "Rock/Pop Pop-rock stuff," which wouldn't exist without that eight foot of Blues. "How is eight foot supposed to support a mile? It's wobbley, that's what it is." The kid could not stop laughing while we talked to him. With us, at us, I give a fuck. It was hilarious.

Then we went down to Hollywood and Highland, in front of the Chinese Theater. People in various Character Costumes gather here every day of the week and try to make money off of the Tourists who snap pictures and take video and whatever. There are Street Performers, as well. These folks are not hired, they just show up. Everything from Hellraiser's Pinhead to Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and pretty much everything in between.

We figured, what the fuck, we'd take Jake and Elwood down there and see what happened.

I was kind of expecting some slight hostility from these guys having some new guys show up, but this was not the case. "One of Us, One of Us, We Accept you, One of Us." We were strolling around, just getting our bearings a little bit, when this Homeless Guy came up to us. "Lemme show you something, lemme show you something," and the fucker whips out a harmonica and starts playing. And here's the thing; the fucker was good. I shit you not, he could play the harp. Turns out he had two, an A and a C.

So, what could we do? He played and Elwood and I fuckin' danced. Danced our asses off. Badly.

People took pictures and Video, I told 'em to give the Homeless guy, Enrice, the money. Enrice actually looks, talks and acts like Tony Montana. Anyway, we hung out with him and his friend for a while and actually bought him a bottle. Well, we needed an empty Night Train bottle for the scene anyway, and I'd have hated to waste the booze. So, what the fuck?

Crazy fuckin' day.

Elwood wants to go back, maybe get a boom box, put a little thing together. Why the fuck not, I say.

Why the fuck not?

Crime rates

It is said, apparently, in Crime Watch studies and Police Data Reports, that if a broken window is left unrepaired in a neighborhood for an extended period of time, the crime rate goes up. It would seem, if no one cares enough to fix a broken window, the general attitude of people in and around the area figure no one really cares what goes on, and slowly people just stop giving a shit, and the kind of folks who do things they don't want others to see start to do that sort of shit there. In the neighborhood with the broken window.

I missed two Blog posts this week. Well, almost. We'll say two. Sunday was a conscious decision. I took that day off, I wasn't going to count that. Thursday I flat forgot/didn't get it done. Right now it's Sunday Morning, 2:22 AM, and I just got off of work. This could, and should be considered Saturday's entry, but I didn't even get a place holder up.

We're gonna score that at two missed.

Two posts, that's a busted window. One, what the hell, shit can happen. Two in a week, I gotta take care of that shit. Same shit has happened in my house. I start saying, "Fuck it," about one little thing, next it's uninhabitable for anyone but me and the cat again.

The place holder thing, it's good for me, I think. I'm not sure how it comes off on your end, for the reader, (If anyone is even reading the damn thing. Hi Mom! Sup, Brad?) but it tends to make me feel obligated to finish up with something, which keeps me thinking during my work day (night) what I might post. So, even if it seems cheesy, you may have to put up with it. Comments are, of course, appreciated.

Part of the point of doing it at all is that it seems, for me, writing begets writing. If I write in this damn thing, I tend to write other stuff, and I really need to be writing stuff.

Just now, as I left work, I was telling a friend of mine about back when I used to work at the Flower shop, when I was "The Punk Rock Florist." Just briefly, couple a minutes, telling him some of the circumstances around me getting the job, and the irony of me working there at all. "You gotta write a book," he says. It was nice, with the thought of this Personal Monologue/One Man Show thing on my mind, to be able to say, "I'm working on it," and mean it. I don't know that my working in a Flower shop is fodder for a whole Monologue segment.

But it might be Stand Up material.