There's a new link in my list over yonder, a site my brother pointed me to. It's cartoons based on spam headlines. Self-published original content via RSS is the way of the future, according to my HCI final paper. That means it's true.

I'm done. My last final was yesterday and it probably went well. I felt like I knew what I was talking about. There was one question that asked if video games were character driven or plot driven. I said character driven because the player experiences the game through the avatar and any emotional impact comes from the character, but in retrospect I could say that games are plot driven because the story and the environment define the character's actions and are shaped to reach a specific end and there isn't anything that the player can do to change the conclusion. Yup. This is like undergrad in that I keep thinking "you're letting me major in this?"

Here are some highlights from the semester:

• Arriving for the first day of grad orientation and finding out that I get a kickass graphics computer with a monitor as big as all outdoors.
• Finding out that my friend and former high school speech duo partner is enrolled in grad school here as well.
• Being pounced upon by Michelle while waiting in the buffet line and learning that I would be seeing her in every class, thus beginning the Meyers-Briggs mayhem of my existence here.
• Living next to Gerry, which means that I always have someone to read comics with, watch movies with, and hold my spare key so that I can get back into my apartment when I'm locked out in a t-shirt and pajama pants a half hour before I have to be ready to go to the Wynton Marsalis concert. Not my proudest moment.
• HCI class, where I had the distinct pleasure of being among a disparate group of geniuses for a few hours each week, often followed by a post-class trip to Scotty's.
• The narrative theory class where we did an ideological criticism of GTA: Vice City, and I got to play as the whole class watched. As I meandered around the game, I asked how antisocial I should be, and Michelle called across the room for me to "punch a hooker!" Grad level class. The matriarchal amazon woman in the class who is a good deal older than I was horrified that it was possible to do such things in a game. The look of horror on her face when she asked me if I enjoyed the game was priceless.
• The Halo 2 party.
  

For now I need a rest. I can't think of anything more to say, and I have a stack of good books from my friends to read.

Quoth the Cookie Monster:

Now what starts with the letter C?
Cookie starts with C
Let's think of other things
That starts with C
Oh, who cares about the other things?

C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C

C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C

(spoken)
Hey you know what?
A round cookie with one bite out of it
Looks like a C
A round donut with one bite out of it
Also looks like a C
But it is not as good as a cookie
Oh and the moon sometimes looks like a C
But you can't eat that, so

C is for cookie, that's good enough for me, yeah!
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C, yeah!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C, oh boy!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C!

(Cookie Monster eats the cookie)
Umm-umm-umm-umm-umm

Yeah, that's right. I passed narrative theory. I get credit for that ordeal. My GPA will take a hit, but I should be alright. It doesn't matter much to me, though. An animator needs a good GPA like a fish needs a bicycle.

It was still better than art history.

Whenever I mention how much work I have to do, someone invariably tells me "only one more week" with the best of intentions. In truth, I'm all too aware that I only have a week or less to accomplish everything.

The creativity class Dust-O project is coming along well, I think. I've been match-moving for the past few nights and I have yet to figure out how to make the lips move how I want. I have a MEL scripting book that may offer some insight.

I'm genuinely worried about passing narrative theory. I talked to the professor and she gave me some good advice for the final, and I have a couple of friends who have offered to help. The bright side is that it's not art history or graphic design. I really hated those classes.

Digital storytelling class is OK, I suppose. I'm not sure how I'll do there. Not great, but not terrible.

Human computer interaction is my favorite class, though the final paper is huge and I have yet to actually type anything. I have plenty of research, though. My topic is Bittorrent as a content delivery system, and I plan to include information about RSS, as the two work together effectively.

Aside from all of that, things are going well. I like the people I get to work and study with, and without them I don't know if I'd still be here. Coming to grad school was, in some ways, a bad idea. If I am as intelligent as some people say, it doesn't show here. This is still my only way out of a lifetime of servile retail work and hopefully my ticket out of Indiana. This state eats youth to fuel a dead economy. Everywhere I've worked, I've seen several people who could be better used in other fields. Great writers, philosophers, and historians reduced to hocking Dan Brown novels and other airport terminal best sellers. Then I hear about people my age and younger in other states doing great rewarding work and living better than I can even fathom. I have to get out. Currently I'm thinking Boston. I don't know what's there for me in my field, but I know it has to be better than where I am now.

I went to my first BSU basketball game last night. I don't see it becoming my favorite thing in the world, but it was enjoyalbe. We won, which was exciting enough. The reason I mention this event at all is because of something that I found funny. (Is there ever any other reason I mention sports, really?) It is customary for the crowd to stand and clap during the fight song; this much I remember from high school. I didn't feel like standing after the day I had lugging camera equipment around the library, so I remained in my red plastic seat. The hunchbacked octagenarian woman in front of me, however, fought her way to the closest thing to a standing position she could manage to cheer for the team. I felt kind of ashamed to be so slothful, but I still didn't get up. I'm a grad student, for heaven's sake.

The semester will be over soon, and I'm already considering a project for next semester. I want to make something interactive, though I'm not clear on what. Is something interactive just because it has a clickable menu? I define true interactivity with immersion and a sense of agency. A video game is interactive, while a VCR menu is merely an interface. I'll have ample time to develop this by experimenting with interactive interfaces in an extensive joint study I plan to do in conjunction with my brother, a classics major at Kenyon.

The following is an actual conversation I had this morning. The screen names have been changed to avoid IM spam.

(11:14:26) firesetterninja: I miss my dichotomy studies.

(11:15:07) firesetterninja: there's still a big huge comm geek inside me just waiting for the opportunity break out at a moment

(11:15:47) elvee: At what point did "dichotomy" become a real word? Seriously, this was not a term invented by hunter-gatherer society.

(11:16:29) firesetterninja: how about when we moved beyond the hunter gatherer society? :-) Burke argues that the use of the negative was the point when this all changed.

(11:16:39) firesetterninja: because the negative does not exist in nature.

(11:16:52) firesetterninja: it was at that point that we began to think in the abstract

(11:17:37) elvee: There was a point in human history when the brain evolved to think in abstract concepts.

(11:17:44) firesetterninja: I dont know if that was the answer you wanted.

(11:18:01) firesetterninja: exactly. the closest we can pinpoint is to the understanding of the "not"

(11:18:16) firesetterninja: which stood as the basis for dichotomy and metaphor

(11:18:27) elvee: That makes sense, actually.

(11:18:30) firesetterninja: and where would we be in abstraction without that?

(11:18:52) firesetterninja: yes! I RULE! I just explained burke to an animator. :-)

(11:19:06) elvee: I'd say that we wouldn't have abstraction, but that would be a negative, so I fear my brain is tied in knots.

(11:19:14) elvee: Good job. You get a cookie.

(11:19:14) firesetterninja: now, this all ties in with perspective by incongruity....but that's a whole other lecture. :-)

The work here seems to have let up a bit. I'm ready for this semester to be over so that I can get on with something educational and worthwhile. Narrative theory makes my intestines bleed, but everything else is going along well enough. I think Human Computer Interaction is my favorite class, even though I don't talk much and I stumble through the material I present as if I've never had any sort of public speaking experience. Creativity as a class is a little grating lately; the last few guest speakers have been very boring. The work outside of creativity class is fun, though. I'm working on making lip-synch animations for puppets made out of dusters called "dust-os". Digital storytelling class is good enough, but kind of pointless. I got to talk about video games while we were on the subject the other day, then it was back to things I really don't care that much about. I'm not opposed to the material, but I really can't make myself care about usage studies of a handful of NPR station websites. My job is getting a little more hectic now. I'm finally moved in to a new office with working internet and a festive purple wall. The library video I shot a few weeks ago looks like crap, so I'll be reshooting after break. The problem was that I did the whole thing myself after I told people that I know how to shoot video. Suddenly I'm in charge of shooting and editing a video tour of the library all alone. Robert Rodriguez did less on El Mariachi. This time I get to have lights set up and my boss will direct, so I don't have to do everything myself.

I saw Squeaky today, eating in the atrium and talking louder than anyone really has to outside of the base of Niagara falls. I don't know why I'm so fascinated with this little misanthrope. Maybe it's his oddly shaped bald spot surrounded by preposterously curly hair, maybe it's that he reminds me of a duck/rodent love child, maybe it's because he wanted to start a heated argument in the only swanky bar in town. I just don't know.

Outside of school, things are good, or so I'm told- I wouldn't know. For whatever reason, everyone I hang out with left for the weekend. Not left as in Indy or Cleveland, left as in boarded an airplane and crossed several state lines. Tomorrow night I'm going to see a concert at the Heorat. Good bye, lungs, liver, and brain cells; I wanna rock.

So, what can I say about the election that hasn't been said already? I'm no fan of most pundits from any side, and I'm really not all that well-versed in politics domestic or foreign. As appalled as I am at the result, I do see how it happened.

A topic that doesn't come up quite as often as it should is the growing divide in America between the mid-to-upper-class and the lower class. The middle class from the past forty years has split noticeably in the past decade, mostly since 1999/2000 and the start of the recession. Manufacturing and skilled labor jobs have been moving out of our borders for years, irregardless of who sits in the oval office or policy, be it Reaganomics or NAFTA. Most of these jobs were based in small towns, where the atmosphere is conducive to small business with low overhead and return. With diminished local economy, small towns have fallen apart. The people are still there, though, because for many it's all they know. Moving to somewhere more viable isn't an option for the older generation that live on the same street they were born on.

The social stigma of being poor in a small town is perhaps a larger factor. The popular vernacular refers to them as derisively as "white trash," and as affectionately as "redneck." I'm no better, I admit. The average person in a small town dresses sensibly and purely for utility on a normal day, never like anything from Vogue. Urban popular culture shifts with the wind and the internet. Small towns, as a rule, do not. Tradition and simplicity are valued by a fiercely proud manufacturing class. With the loss of manufacturing and small businesses, a large degree of pride and purpose were lost as well. Agriculture has been in similar shape. Young people are urged to escape from small towns to pursue opportunity, assuming they can afford it. Often the only employment to be found is at large national chain retailers. Workers dress in cute little uniforms and adhere to dehumanizing policies under perma-day lights. This is a far cry from the locally owned furniture factory where the foreman knew each employee by name.

With these facets of small town culture fading away, it seems that the people in these areas have fallen back on the one thing that cannot be exported away: the church. Poverty and religion have always gone hand-in-hand because of the solidarity found in both. Evangelical Christianity has swelled to enormous levels all over the country, and I believe that this is the reason. The community within this establishment is some of the last vestige of humanity to be found in some of these small communities.

This is exactly where the right wing found traction. Historically the aristocracy has avoided contact with what they view as peasantry, often with disastrous results. The French Revolution comes to mind. The American ruling class has been different since the revolution, though. They know where their labor comes from, and where their soldiers come from. The American Revolution was, as my old history professor put it: "a rich man's war, a poor man's fight." The Republican Party plays this angle well historically, dressing up as common folk when they have to.

Many in the fifty-one percent of voters claimed to have voted based on "values." These things have nothing to do with how to run a country, nothing to do with the economy or health care or education; nothing to do with the prosperity of a nation. Have small town communities really become so disconnected from the rest of the world? If so, then this is a problem. This means that the majority of America is disconnected like this. They voted for what they see as the survival of their way of life, never mind what else was riding on the ballot.

I don't know how to fix this, but something must be done. A large portion of the population has become economically obsolete, but it is still important to recognize them as human and therefore possessing potential. Apparently, just paying them lip service is enough to become president.

If there is a witness to my little life,
To my tiny throes and struggles,
He sees a fool;
And it is not fine for gods to menace fools.

-Stephen Crane

Have you ever heard the phrase "busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest?" That would be me. Here's a recap of things that are worth mentioning.

Halloween was fun. I dressed as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, complete with codpiece. I've never been punched in the balls so many times in one night. The party host hit me, strangers hit me, Gerry hit me, I hit me, it was not the sort of thing I envisioned a year ago when I decided to come here. It was multicultural too- kids from Japan were lined up to cheapshot me in the fellas at Gerry's friend's house. Gad, what a weird night. The coolest costumes: Flint from GI Joe, and a girl with a post-it note on her that said "Hello, my name is Dave Coulier."

My election reaction blog post is kind of long, so I'll post it later.

I'm tentatively looking for a creative project advisor now. I've been carefully evaluating people, and I'm quite sure of one comittee member. The rest will come in time. I'll be pretty low-maintainance, so I just need somebody who is cool with new media and knows production pretty well. More on this as it develops.

I haven't seen Squeaky lately, which is for the best. I have learned that other people have seen possums outside my window on different occasaions, which is forboding.

Here's something my family will enjoy. By family, I mean my brother, but others might get a chuckle. Hamlet's soliloquy for socks: link

As I'm typing this, there's a geeky guy at the computer on the other side of the table helping a cute girl with photoshop. I'm quietly cheering for him.

I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving already. You know the semester is bad when I look forward to a break. This is because I'm in the vaccuum of unapplied theory hell. If it weren't for the dust-o's project, I'd be climbing the belltower with my hat backwards as we speak.

I'm still formulating my opinion about the election, but here's a nice article I found that helps put things into perspective. link

As of this post:

CNN projects: Bush in the lead.

Fox news projects: Open season on A-rabs 'n civil rights queers!

I project: "cancel my subscription to the resurrection; send my credentials to the house of detention"

I care about this election quite a bit more than I've cared in past years. I worry about the future of the country, because I see pictures of my boss's daughters every day at work, with their goofy little kid grins, and I think about the country that they'll grow up in. I'm kind of okay with America falling apart, as I take an optimistic view of it. The Brittish empire fell pretty hard and fast, and England eventually found it's footing again. Every country goes through an asshole phase (Germany, Italy, England, Germany again, N Korea, Russia, N Korea again?), ultimately falling from whatever superpower status they had. But they recover eventually. I've been screwed over by world events well out of my control in the past few years, and yet I think I'll be okay because I at least got a running start during the last economic and cultural boom. I'm probably over reacting, but I needed to vent that, hence the purpose of a blog.

I've tried twice to post in the past week, and both times the system screwed up. If this makes it, it'll be nothing short of a miracle. Not that it matters, though. North Korea could nuke us and the EM pulse would probably wipe out this blog. Don't blame me- I voted for Kodos.

I've got a paper due tomorrow for narrative theory, and I really don't like that class. It's not as bad as art history, but I really don't think I'm getting anything out of it but dent in my gpa. (I think I actually have to care about my gpa now, in order to stay in the program.) There's one old lady who talks in a bizarre meter and says "m-hm" repeatedly. It's like listening to that old Crash Test Dummies song in fast forward. I am encouraged by this, though. The third bullet point especially.

I've got some good stories from this past weekend that I'll try to post when I have time.

I'm up to my arse in work, but I still feel the need to post. It's a kind of validation, I guess. I have no actual news. All I have is frustration that there are possibly only two copies of the Cambridge companion to Goethe in the state, both in Fort Wayne. Go Red Sox.

Today's news will carry some measure of schadenfreude for my brother. The rest of you probably haven't known me as well or as long. I'm getting reading glasses. (I'll pause now, for Michael's friends to retrieve the defibrillator from the closet and start his heart again.) My vision is good, better than what the Air Force requires of jet pilots. However, I haven't been reading very well lately. This has probably been the case for quite a while, as the only materials I have been able to read at length are things that don't require prolonged focus on small print. Comic books, e-mail, and some magazines are easier because I can refocus my eyes periodically. In summary, only sub-grad level, or sub-Michelle. Making up new terms for things is fun.

I took a little side trip to the new instrument store on Jefferson. They have a nice selection of guitars and amps, as well as a lovely young woman who showed me a guitar and amp that I'm thinking about purchasing at some point. Well, sort of. The amp isn't that much, and it really sounds nice, but $230 is something I'm going to need this summer in Italy. The guitar is way out of my price range; Victory-class Star Destroyer expensive. It sounds fabulous, though, even in the hands of a hack like me. Maybe I'll focus my energies on concocting a scheme to tie this nice stuff in to my studies and get a grant for it. Yes, that's the ticket.

This is my first Fall break ever. USF didn't believe in such luxuries, but we did get a "reading day". I don't mind the break, considering how the semester has gone. It's been nothing but reading thus far, aside from my GA job. Sometimes the reading is important for class, but most of the time it's never discussed. Theory is all well and good, but I need some way to apply it or it goes in one ear and out the other like a TV commercial. What really sold me on the program was the tour I got last spring from my advisor. I liked his attitude, and I liked the building: a two-story toy box for super-powered AV equipment courtesy of a massive chunk of change from Lilly. The digital storytelling program is full of great people from several backgrounds, and I feel fortunate to have met them. With so much positive, I feel bad complaining that I'm bored and lost. I've been told that grad school is supposed to be a sort of do-it-yourself education. This would be great, if I had enough time to take any sort of initiative outside of my classes. Things look better in the long-term, as my course load will lighten and probably include something more technical. Ah well, end rant. The rest will do me good.

Last night I went to see Sarah Vowell read at Butler University. She was great, and I wrote down a few lines that made me laugh. They make more sense if you've read her books. For those of you who read nothing but Greek and Douglas Adams, or read only as much as you absolutely have to, here is what you need to know: the author loves history and pop culture, and often relates the two.

"I learned that John Kerry is descended from John Winthrop, which I found thrilling."

Speaking about the guilt that comes from being raised to be a nice girl, the "guilt that becomes narcissistic", she thinks about Pol Pot: "Whatever I've done, are there piles of skulls lying around? Most of the time, no."

"Assassinations are my Kevin Bacon" -referring to her ability to relate anything to a presidential assassination.

Comparing working at NPR to working at Pixar:"It's like a scratchy brown sweater vs a Cosby sweater."

It was an enjoyable evening. I got a signed copy of her first book, "Radio On", and even she was incredulous when I told her my name was Loyal. I had to spell it.

Today is my birthday. It's been a good day of web design work thus far. Well, that and blogging. I alternate back and forth. Tonight I'm going out to dinner with my friend Michelle, and later I'm going out with a huge gaggle of fools. A confederacy of fools? A murder of fools? Whatever. It'll be fun. I'll report the details that are appropriate for the internet tomorrow.

Check out these articles from McSweeney's. They made me laugh.
# # #

Here is the news I wanted to post yesterday, but couldn't because I was busy. I got to take a tour of Paws Inc, the place where Garfield is drawn. As much as I tried to maintain my composure, I was giddy over getting to see the place. I used to read Garfield books and collect as much Garfield memorabilia as I could when I was younger, so getting to see all of this was really great. Doc was the tour guide. I'd seen him before a few years ago at the Castle Gallery show where I met Jim Davis (I sang what I could remember of the Abu-Dhabi song and he laughed). What really impressed me about the whole facility is that it's the family business. It's global and very successful, but it's run mostly by relatives.

I just read this- Sarah Vowell will be at Butler U tomorrow night at 7:30. She's one of my favorite authors, and she also did voice acting for Pixar's "The Incredibles." I'm pretty sure I can make that- I get off work at 5:30, but I might be able to knock off a little earlier. This geeks me out on a cerebral level.

It's Tuesday, I'm hungry, and I really don't have time to blog now. But, I do have a couple of links I feel a strong need to post.

The visual thesaurus is probably something somebody is trying to sell, but the demo on the site is fun to mess around with. Little by little, hypertext is taking over, and I for one welcome our benevolent technological overlords. Please don't crush me.

A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram, is now online. The whole thing. The immense mass of it is capable of forming and supporting a life-sustaining atmosphere, given time. That's just how big it is.

More actual news tomorrow if I live through today.

Any big news I might have to post here has already been covered by my fellow bloggers. Gerry covered the season's end for the Cubs, and my brother posted this glorious news. Beyond shameless plugs for other blogs I love, there's really only one piece of blogworthy news left.

The other night, long after the sun had gone down, I was walking to my car to drive to Walmart. I was parked behind my building, near the windows of my single-bedroom subterranean. As I fumbled with my keys, I noticed motion in the shadows of the building behind a few plants. Neighborhood cats often walk past my window, so I assumed the slinking shadow to be feline. I called to the cat in the voice I reserve for animals smaller than a breadbox, but I could tell something was amiss. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and in the ambient orange glow of a street light half a block away, I saw the true beastly form of the creature under my window. A possum. Those of you who read this with any regularity may recall that I had a run-in with a possum last winter. I made a powerful enemy that cold day, not just in an ill-tempered rodent, but in a primal force of nature. The genetic memory of the north American possum is forever ingrained with the knowledge of "tall one, hurler of ice." We recognized each other, there in the night behind my apartment. He knows where I live, and we both know that there won't be any snow on the ground for at least a month or more, thus putting me at a marked disadvantage. This isn't over.

Gad, what a night. I fell asleep at 9:00 last night while reading a particularly boring chapter in my HCI book, only to wake an hour later in the stupor that commonly follows an impromptu nap on the couch. Backing up a bit, I am now the proud owner of my family's old family room couch and kitchen table with three chairs. My apartment is a feng-shui fever dream. Later on, I couldn't sleep for the life of me. I had tea with dinner, forgetting how much caffeine is in that stuff. I even tried reading from my HCI book, as that had worked before, but the next chapter was really interesting, so that got my brain working again. BUT! At about 4:30 in the morning, I dozed off a little bit and came up with an idea for my creative project animation. I stumbled over to my computer desk and typed out everything I could think of into a haphazard treatment of sorts, because I would have forgotten otherwise. It'll be a ton of work for one person, but it's something that I can do myself. I can't really relay the specifics yet, as I'm still figuring them out, but I plan to show it to my old Communications professor at USF, as I know she'll get it and give me good advice. It'll make sense soon, I hope.

Today has been a little different. I used to go on minimal sleep in undergrad because I had the solidarity of my sleep-deprived friends. I also had gen-ed classes to sleep in, so that helped too. No such luck now. I did see something cool, however. At lunchtime I walked over the student center and there were a bunch of promotional booths set up outside. They were all technology themed, but the coolest ones were a jeep outfitted with at least five different Nintendo Gamecubes and a tent full of guitars and effects emulators. The Nintendo jeep had buttons with pictures of classic characters in their original pixel glory. I picked out Mario and Bowser, grinning like a 24 year old third grader. I went to the guitar demo tent and I got to mess around with a $400 fx box and a $4,000 Gibson guitar. It needed tuning, but the tone quality was glorious. The guy in charge recommended an Epiphone, because it's a lot cheaper and the sound is comparable. It was great, though.

"And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities..."
-excerpt from Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago."

Gerry has informed me that the Cubs are currently ahead in the baseball wildcard race, which is cause for excitement. It reminded me of the Carl Sandburg poem quoted above, in which the poet also refers to Chicago as the "ciy of the big shoulders." That's where that moniker came from, if you ever wondered.

In my last post, I expressed some disdain for Flash. I still don't like it very much, but yesterday I used it to solve a problem on the forthcoming BSU teachers college website. (The current site, by the way, is not my doing. Whoever designed that monstrosity probably jumped off a bridge a la Javert in "Les Miserables".) The new site will feature randomly selected Flash graphics; a new one each time someone hits refresh. I didn't make the animations, but I did make the loader file in Flash to make them load randomly. Score one for cracker.

Six months ago I was standing at a cash register watching yuppies graze stacks of bargain books. This was when I first wondered "what do you call an animator who doesn't animate?" I figured that I would solve this problem soon enough, as I was planning on enrollng at BSU in the Fall.

I've been here for a month, and I'm starting to wonder the same thing again. The closest thing I get to animation is a little flash project I'm troubleshooting at work. It's mildly amusing, but Flash is very dull and clunky compared to Maya. I'm told that there are computers on campus with Maya on them, just waiting for someone who knows how to use it. I'm typing from one of those machines now, actually, but it doesn't have Maya like I was told.

Yarr! September(edit- September 19th) be "national talk like a pirate day!" I wish it wasn't on a Sunday, because I'd like to celebrate this particular day in narrative theory class. Arrr.

Here's a link to a stereoscopic image site with a novel twist- the images flicker back and forth to give the 3d effect. I need to experiment with this in Maya. http://ofwonder.com/blink.html (for some reason, blogger isn't displaying the toolbar to make the link in the text)

Also, the new trailer for Pixar's the Incredibles is online on the apple site.

Three great CD releases are sneaking in under the radar in the next month or so. I already mentioned the new Tom Waits album, but two more also have me excited. The Black Keys just released their third album, which I promptly bought to celebrate my first check. Oh, the neighbors are going to love me for the next month and a half as I learn to play the new songs. Third is Billy Corgan's solo album, slated for a late October release. I'm not really holding my breath, as he is notorious for taking several months in the studio, but whenever it gets released I'll be frantically scurrying down to Best Buy to get my grubby mits on it.

Work is getting better and better. It turns out that the nice young woman who I met at the Heorat last week works in the office down the hall a couple days a week. She loves music, and the two CDs on her desk right now are my copy of the Breeders' Title TK, and Johnny Cash's American IV: the Man Comes Around. Great taste, I must say. Elsewhere around the office, I found out that my paycheck is delivered to me. This is after I walked all over creation yesterday trying to find it. Convenience. Today, I met the head of BSU marketing. He's a good guy, and that means something from me, as I typically hold marketing majors in similar esteem as middle school gym teachers. I first met him when I accidentally walked in on a meeting with him and my boss and my boss's boss. I wanted to buy a coke out of the refrigerator behind his chair, so his first impression of me was a tall guy with an iPod loping through the door and wedging in behind his chair to acquire a canned beverage. I was introduced by name and then as a student in the Digital Storytelling program. His affirmative answer, like so many others, said that he didn't know what that meant either. Later on, as I was saving my work and preparing to leave, he came in with my boss to tell us about his great idea for the video tour. Something new and innovative- computer animated tourguides! The user would have a choice of three fun characters to watch, and... Something about a greenscreen... Something else... I was thinking "wow, I'm blogging this." He asked me if I thought this sounded good, and I told him that a little animated character was going to come across like the MS Word paperclip. It would disconnect people from the message. I didn't mention that it would mean about ten grand in equipment upgrades and more to hire a staff to create these to have online by March at the earliest. Later, my boss (a saint, I should mention) told me that she was happy that I stood up and told him the truth.

I got to thinking, though. What would an animated tour look like? Imagine Gollum at BSU. "Ahh! Tricksy bursarses, steals your monies! No, they's's good to us, the school cares for us. No! All our monies go to losing football team! We hates them! Hates them! Curses!" It would go on like that, and enrollment at IU would jump through the roof. I find it weird that being an animator has meant that I spend much of my time in such discussions telling people how much harder animation is, and how live action is simpler.

Tomorrow night I'm going to see Wynton Marsallis for ten bucks. I'm going with Gerry and a few other friends, and a few total strangers. Discount tickets to good events is another great thing about BSU. USF would be lucky to get Tito Jackson and John Oates.

Tom Waits has a new album coming on October 5th. story

Today, September 13th, my blog is one year old. I remember starting it after hearing about a purportedly free service that would let me type stuff and post it on the internet. Bored as I was, I decided to check it out. The purpose, for me at least, was personal growth. I didn't really have a goal in mind, I was unemployed and bored, and it was free.

After one year, things have changed for the better for me. I entered the workforce as a retail drone, helped various people move, tried my best to avoid purchasing music from RIAA-affiliated artists, waxed pseudo-poetic about movies and television, went to Texas, watched the Cubs on TV, bought a belt, applied to grad school, got accepted to grad school, exited the retail workforce, and moved several furlongs south of home to start grad school. I started this last year because I was bored, and now I almost forgot that I wanted to make a post at the one-year mark because school has me so preoccupied.

The funny thing about all of this is my audience (hi Mom). Once, I new for a fact that I had three readers. I'm not even sure who reads this now, but it is more than three. We had a discussion in HCI class about blogs, and some people couldn't fathom why anyone would want to read somebody else's blog. I'm mystified myself, but I read at least half a dozen that I can think of off the top of my head.

As for the title of the blog, Misplaced Commas, I plan to keep that. My punctuation has improved somewhat, but I can't think of a better title. "Siamese Dream", "Never Mind the Bollocks", and "Swordfishtrombones" are all taken.

I planned on making a list of my favorite blog posts, but I think I'll just post a few. There's a big archive up on the right, and clicking randomly will take you to different points in the past year. It's interactive hypertextuality fun for the whole family.

There was this one...
The time I went to Texas and then wouldn't stop talking about it...
There was that possum...
And then there was the two part moving weekend post. Part One and Part Two

Don't bother reading them if you have something better to do. They're some of my longest writings ever.

The big cultural question of this generation will be, for better or for worse, "where were you on September 11th?" Much like the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, this otherwise innocuous early autumn day has become an immediately recognized day of infamy and sadness, so much so that the corresponding year of 2001 is left to the shared assumption of the populace. To be more specific, then, where were you on September 11th, 2004?



In 2002, there was a solemn memorial held across the nation. The dust in New York City had settled or blown out to the ocean, the Pentagon had been repaired, and the burned scar in a field in Pennsylvania was beginning to grow wild grass in patches of dirt not too saturated with jet fuel. Similarly, the nation as a whole seemed to exhale a bit. One year later and at least two hours back on the Damoclean doomsday clock, America was still on the map. My own choruses of Barry Allen's "Eve of Destruction" had turned out to be premature, thank goodness.



In 2003 we lost our sense of humor. Coping mechanisms that had been the chic of the past two years became sources of shame and embarrassment. Overeating due to stress became the "plague of obesity" on the nightly news, reinforced with pictures of overstuffed children and anonymously photographed giant adult midsections, cropped in and blown up in hi-definition for the world to see and scorn. Stress in general became any number of "anxiety disorders" or even "adult ADD." However you feel, there's a pill so you won't. Rational discussion also fell out of favor, as often happens to groups of people under pressure. News programs degraded into gladiatorial shouting matches for the favor of the public and the patronage of advertisers. The extremes on both ends screamed world war III at anyone who would listen. Whether America falls to ruin tomorrow or miraculously enters an era of peace and prosperity, the pop-pundits will emerge from this period each with their own personal fortune to retire in luxury.



In the weeks approaching September of 2004, I began to wonder how this year should be marked. More quiet reflection with video montages on TV? Eat a lot and yell at someone who disagrees with me? Spending another day reliving the bloodiest day in American history and recounting two of the most trying years since the last big war era is not how I wish to spend the rest of my finite and chillingly precarious life. But to try to forget and pass the day like any other would be callous, and would require avoiding other people, lest someone self-consciously mention the date in conversation. After some thought on the matter, I decided on a third option.



In 2004, I smiled. With conviction. I woke up in the house I spent most of my life growing up in and came downstairs to my parents. Mom made cookies for me to take back to my apartment, Dad sat and drank his coffee from the same sacred ìDadî mug he's used since I was little, the dogs ran around barking at squirrels, and I was happy to be visiting home. I bypassed the front page for the sports section where I found that the Cubs won the second of a double-header, and I was happy to cheer for my team. I called my brother to ask where the spare set of car keys went, and, upon hearing that he was out on a Saturday morning with no foreseeable time to return, I was happy that he is happy and prosperous. I was happy to hear that my high school marching band started their season today with two contests in one day. In general, I was happy.



Upon arrival back at BSU, I spent much of the remainder of the day with my good friend Gerry. We laughed, celebrated another victory for the Cubs, and wandered around the mall with no real shopping agenda aside from a gift for his co-worker. In the later evening, I went to the Heorat to meet my fellow graduate students and see a band fronted by another of our classmates. We drank, sang along to raucous blues rock, and the whole bar smiled in the cloying atmosphere of dim lighting and thick smoke.



Allen Ginsberg posited the volatile question: "America, why are your libraries full of tears?" Ours is a tumultuous history, inexorably intertwined in the history of the world. The calculated actions of madmen who export fear and rigid obedience to the rest of the world are regular footnotes in the record of the centuries of civilization, but they have never defined or altered the course of history completely. This may be because the most fundamental defense against them is to smile, laugh, and remember why life is worthwhile in the first place- friends, family, and a belief in a better tomorrow.

I rented Taxi Driver last night, at long last. I'd tried in vain for years to get it at the Fort Wayne library and I think they lost the DVD at some point. It was a good movie, kind of like Catcher in the Rye with a lot more guns and drugs. What really impressed me was the editing. It's obvious that Martin Scorsese trusted his actors enough to leave the camera running during long exchanges between characters instead of editing every sentence back and forth between shots. The famous "you talkin to me?" monologue is one of these shots.

Back to class today. I'm current on all of the reading so far, so it shouldn't be a big deal. I feel a little like Harold Hill (or perhaps Lile Lanley). "Yes, digital storytelling, that's the ticket! Media convergence, narrative, paradigm, blah-biddy-blah-internet." I'll feel a lot better when I'm able to get back to actual video and animation work.

"If we were talking face to face, ... you would have heard me say just now to someone climbing the stairs outside my window 'Your pants are falling off, you retard.' And I guess saying that isn't very PC, but neither is walking around without really committing to wearing pants."

-My brother Michael

Today I was working on encoding videos for the teacher's college website at work. I've told everybody who asks that "yes, I know all about digital video editing." It appears some people take this statement at face value, because today I got to use Final Cut Pro, which I haven't really dabbled in since USF, to color correct these videos. It kept crashing, and this happens enough that the video guy here has this note below his monitor: EXPECT A CRASH. Yup. After a while, I started looking for other options. I ended up signing away my masculinity and self-respect by using iMovie, the generic Apple box video editor to fix the contrast and export video suitable for the web. It worked surprisingly well, albeit clumsy for multiple video file exporting. So, I got an important lesson about techno-hubris, and Apple got a fat stack of OS X crash reports to ignore.

Gerry and I ware going to the Football game tonight. We get in free, and the school gets to use the new lights for the first time. More importantly, we'll see our newly acquired friends in the band. That counts for something. Gerry also promises that we'll leave if they get blown out early, which is likely.

There used to be some concern, at least in my mind, that the things I write here are boring and repetitious, and void of any real content. That may even have been true while I was working retail during the past year. In light of the past hour and a half, though, I now feel much better about the things I used to write. I just spent a good size chunk of time reading a twelve page .pdf of a scanned chapter about narrative. The author had maybe three interesting points that could have been summed up in four pages. I wouldn't be all that upset, as twelve pages isn't normally very long, but I know that this probably won't be important in class Monday. The last reading assignment was a 30 page small print history of narrative, and I decided that I was going to read the hell out of it. I highlighted, wrote in the margins, and even made notes to myself about what I was going to ask in class and even made conjecture about what we might discuss as a whole. I'm a serious student now, right? No longer the aloof academic screw-up with a singular focus on animation that I was in undergrad, right? I read that damn thing for three and a half hours, fighting fatigue and my almost non-existent attention span, trying to make sense of the schizophrenic academic language that these damn things are always written in. My brother knows what I'm talking about; we've had this discussion about academic writing being needlessly complex and murky.

The discussion in class was focused around a powerpoint presentation of images pilfered from the internet. A dozen or so slides with jpegs on a black background as a (dubious) supplement to a lecture about symbols in history. We covered maybe half of what I had read for class. It was marginally interesting, but nobody else in the room really knew how to add to a possible discussion. I said something and one of my classmates, a card-carrying Superextrovert if ever there was one, said something, and that was it. These are smart people, too. Maybe things will get better, I don't know.

As I've been writing this, the squeaky-voiced guy I mentioned before sat down about thirty feet from me. I have my earphones in, and his little muppet voice still cuts through the live recording of the Smashing Pumpkins song "I am One"; roughly eight minutes of distorted guitar crunch and screaming vocals. This is no match for his super-sonic warblings, though. For some reason, I keep seeing him around this big campus, a place where it's possible to never see a good deal of the student population. Of course I see him, but for the life of me I can't seem to run into the cute Bulgarian artist with whom I discussed Christo and pop art for the better part of two hours the other night at the Hoarat. Insert irritated sigh here.

This whole grad school thing is a pretty strange endeavor. I think I'm getting the feel for it, but that could be because I took an allergy pill that put me in a stupor. From my antihistimine haze, this all looks pretty well possible to accomplish, but that could be because I'm incapable of panicking until the medication wears off. I set my work hours for this semester today. I had to distribute them around my already haptic schedule, but it should work okay. I do four hours a day, give or take, and most days I do two blocks of two hour shifts between classes. My office (yeah, office)that I share with my boss is right across the street from the comm building with all of my classes and a place to eat. It's all quite convenient. I'll often have only scant minutes to make it from work to class, but I scheduled plenty of time to eat lunch and dinner on most days.

The library here has a great collection of Kurosawa's movies here, so I checked out The Hidden Fortress, the movie that inspired Star Wars. I might even have time to watch it one of these nights when I'm not too tired.

I'm sitting in the BSU library right now with a clear view of a large gray cement pillar behind my monitor. Behind that the view is better, though, with many shelves of books and periodicals.

I moved the remainder of my stuff into my apartment last night, and to mark the occasion, Gerry and I went to the village to celebrate. We had a beer at the Bird, formerly a Buffalo Wild Wings franchise, followed by a stop at the Martini Bar across the street. It's a swanky little establishment, with cool lighting and reasonably clean couches. He had a fruity concoction, but I opted to wait for some time when I didn't have the overpowering flavor of Guiness in my mouth. We talked about all the usual stuff that we've talked about for years, and then chatted with the bartender for awhile. She was cool, but then some guy started trying to get into an argument with Gerry about how BSU's journalism program isn't as well respected as Notre Dame. I don't know what his problem was, but he had thick glasses, a hearing aid, and a high squeaky voice. Those disadvantages coupled with a bad attitude made arguing with him rather pointless and dull, so we left.

The graduate development conference this morning was actually worthwhile in a big way. It turns out that my old high school friend Jessica is a grad student here too. We caught up with each other during breaks and over lunch. I also met a couple of people from my same area of digital storytelling. Media geeks aplenty. I talked to one of my co-workers, and she said that my work computer is awesome. I get a GB of RAM.

After the conference I went and took a walk through the art museum here. The collection is pretty nice, with a couple of Ansel Adams prints and a Degas statue, among a few other names I recognized.

I got my student ID picture taken. If you can imagine me as Andy Kaufman, that's what it looks like. Kind of crazed, but fortunately not at all like the passport photos of the 9/11 highjackers. That counts for a lot, I think.

My stuff is still mostly scattered and in boxes and I need to go to the store to buy food. I haven't any orange juice, and I fear I may succumb to the scurvy.

Last night was honored to attend the wedding of my former roommate Todd and my friend Christa. Wedding reception, to be precise, at the botanical conservatory. The wedding was a smaller family and cameraman only affair before the meal. I arrived a little late after cleaning up from moving my stuff to my apartment earlier, and dinner had already started. I was pretty sure this was the right place. All wedding parties look the same until you recognize someone you know. In this case, Andrew, my friend and conscience during college spotted me and called to me from where he was sitting. I hadn't seen him in a long time. His hair was always long in college, then he cut it short a while back, and now it's getting longer again. This may sound rather pedestrian, but it's significant to me. We were the two long-haired art students, you see.

The wedding reception was outdoors in a tent on a beautiful evening. It was idyllic, really, not a cloud in the sky. It's what you get when two artists get married. There were little girls who I assumed to be her cousins wearing wreathes of orange leaves who were darting around laughing as little kids are prone to do. A band was playing acoustic music, sometimes featuring a seven-year-old fiddle player who was really good.

I went to drop off my wedding present on the designated table and then to congratulate Todd and Christa. They were both much cleaner than I had seen them in years. Todd was clean shaven with a neatly trimmed goatee, and Christa didn't have any paint on her hands. Other people at their table looked more familiar, though. Marlon had his Canon XL-1s with a big shoulder-rig and eight-inch digital display. James was alternately using Todd's 16mm Bolex camera and Super-8 camera. He handed me the Super-8 for when the bride and groom danced together and with their parents. All was right with the world, then. Just like in college, Todd was directing, and James, Marlon, and I were shooting footage. I can't wait to see the final edited product. Rachel, James's wife and professional photographer, was shooting still images with a professional digital camera that made me quietly drool with deadly-sin level envy.

James pulled me aside and told me that Todd was going to play a song that he wrote for Christa as a surprise, and I needed to film that too. Armed with the Super-8 I filmed Todd playing his guitar and her reaction to the song. It was one he wrote back when we lived in an apartment. I remember him staying up all night writing and playing, and a couple of days later the apartment office gave us a notice that we'd been too loud because of the guitar sound all night. I slept through it, so it wasn't that loud at all, but the lady next door didn't like it.

We all sat around talking and catching up on everything we'd done at and since USF. I got to talk to Christa's Mom briefly, too. I always had oddly spontaneous conversations with her, like the time she called Todd and I's dorm room looking for Christa. She was out with Todd, so we ended up having a nice conversation about art history and things to see in Italy. I also saw Todd's lifelong friend Russell, to whom I am forever indebted because he got me a Smashing Pumpkins ticket back when they were at Purdue.

It was an enjoyable wedding reception. I like those two together, and I can only say that about a certain number of people. I know some couples who I don't think will last more than ten years, but I'm confidant that Todd and Christa have a long, crazy life ahead of them.

I have a cell phone now. It's a big step for me, as I generally don't approve of the devices. I think they're needless gimmicks, toys of affluence, arrogant, and rude. I despise classical music ringtones especially, and most other cellphone noises in general. I don't like the feeling that I'm always available with this, either. So why, then, can I not put the thing down? I'm enamored with it. I've fiddled endlessly with the little features, trying various display color schemes and wallpapers. Currently I have a little cartoon bomb icon in the back, though I'm strongly considering changing to the black pumpkin icon. There doesn't seem to be a cool skull icon, but if there were, I'd use that. I check obsessively for missed calls and voicemail messages, though this has yet to be an issue, as only three people have my number. I don't know what I would say if someone would call me, though. I'm not really a talkative person. The phone is a little smaller than my iPod, but I have yet to decide of that is significant. I suppose it won't be that bad to have, but if I ever leave it on during class or in a movie theater and it rings I'll have to commit seppuku.

I got my first look at my apartment today. In a way, I signed the lease sight-unseen, but I had already seen what it would be like when I took a tour with Gerry and his kin. The walls were freshly painted white and the electricity was on and powering the refrigerator. My brother filled my ice cube tray, so at least it's doing something somewhat constructive. Also, for some reason www.apartmentsguide.com/ gave me a $50 discount on my first month's rent. I've never been to this site, but if they're footing the bill for part of my rent, I'll give them a plug here. It probably means that one of their admins reserves the right to crash on my floor for a couple days, though.

Last Saturday at 5:56 PM I shelved my last book at the library. Feeling a strange sort of giddiness surge through me as I stood up, I wheeled my big wooden cart back to the employee elevator on the fourth floor and proceeded to the basement where I removed my ID tag and walked out for the last time. No more books in bulk for me, just one book at a time now. An oil tanker full of rolaids and preparation h couldn't match the level of relief I felt as I made the two block trek back to my car, past the bank buildings, through the alley with the Cthulhu graffiti, and across the freshly paved road to the library lot. Even the mundanity of the local radio stations couldn't quash my good spirits.

I stopped at Books Comics and Things and picked up Ultimate Nightmare #1 and the new Batman 12-cent Adventure. Ultimate Nightmare seems interesting, and it's written by Warren Ellis, so I expect good things, even though most of the pages are ads. The Batman 12-cent stories are always cheap springboards into longer story arcs, which serve as a great preview of things to come. This particular issue wasn't particularly interesting or well-written, but for 12 cents, it was a decent read.

Last night, as I was practicing my guitar, I accomplished something significant (for me). I was practicing the song Jennifer Ever by the Smashing Pumpkins, which uses the F chord often. Normally, I can't hit this chord at all, but last night I did.

So, thus begins a week of preparation for moving to BSU. I'm going to do as much laundry as I can while I'm here so that I don't have to worry about that later, and so I don't smell funny as I introduce myself to new aquaintainces. I have a decent hodgepodge collection of amenities and brickabrack from my previous college experience, except for a dish drainer for the sink. It seems an odd item to be lacking, but I never had one when I lived in an apartment my senior year, so I didn't know that I needed one until someone told me.

I've been really boring for the past week. Just dull. The next few weeks will be much busier as I pack and move to BSU, so I've allowed myself some downtime. Yeah, that's the ticket.

I've been reading The Smashing Pumpkins: Tales of a Scorched Earth by Amy Hanson. I ordered it at Barnes and Noble and it came in a month ahead of the scheduled release date, much to my surprise and delight. It's a little bit challenging to read, though. I'm pretty sure the author did all of the editing herself, judging by the unusual amount of cliches and egregious similes. The book is really well researched, though. I mean really well researched. The author gathered information from sources so obscure that even the most devoted fansite wouldn't have on file. Even personal interviews with producers who remember the band from back in 1988. It was at least twenty-five pages before the first Metro concert was ever mentioned.

I went to the eye doctor this morning. My eyes are fine, even though I got them dilated. When I left I needed sunglasses for anything brighter than indoor lighting, and my peripheral vision was so wide I could almost see my ears. I looked pretty cracked-out.

This is my last week at the library. I'm not especially sorry to leave this job, even though I like some of the people I work with. I am going to miss the cheese bagels from the food cart in the entryway, though. Those are amazingly good.

I got the call about the web content job at BSU today. I got the job, and apparently I get more money for it than I originally thought. In addition to this, I think I get a newly renovated office space to work in. I also know I like my boss, whom I've spoken with a couple of times. She's nice and competent, and I don't imagine she'll ever tell me that I need to work harder to sell reader's advantage cards.

This hasn't been the case for a long time, but I've been so busy this past week that I haven't blogged. I've been doing things.

Last Monday I was in Muncie for an interview about a web content producer grad position. I think it was a good interview, and I'll hear if I got it or not in the next few days. After that, Gerry and I went and drove to downtown Muncie to find dinner. If I ever need photo-reference for the city at the end of the world, I'll know where to go. I thought certain parts of Toledo were depressing, but this might top that. We did eat at a good restaurant, though. I had a grilled sandwich that I anticipate eating again sometime in the next few months. And there were boats hanging from the ceiling, in the eventual case that Muncie is wiped from the landscape in a flood.

Tuesday through Thursday, work, yadda-yadda.

Friday night after I left the library I went to Cebolla (pronounced seh-boy-ya) for dinner with several of my college friends. It's the second best Mexican food in town, which is still quite good. I ate cheese enchiladas and caught up with two of my old forensics comrades, and life was good. I came home and later my brother and I watched Duck Tales at three in the morning, and it was every bit as cool as I could've hoped.

Saturday evening was my last day at Barnes and Noble, which is both good and bad. I'm happy to be closer to leaving for grad school, but I'm going to miss my co-workers. I went to Henry's with three of these guys after work and they gave me a proper send-off. We talked about books, mostly. These are some freaky-smart guys with literature, which is why I like them, because it gives me something to aspire to and they recommend really good books. We toasted to my success in continued education, and then to The Da Vinci Code and mediocrity.

Today my brother and I went to dinner at Taco Cabana- the highlight of this outing is in his blog. After this, we went to check out the new Mitchell's bookstore that opened where Million Story Books used to be. It is only the second day of business for them, but I wasn't all that impressed. The books were scattered and disheveled, even though we were two of maybe four customers in the store, and the staff were just standing around. Also, it isn't the most efficient use of space. The science section is right in the front, and for some reason they sell luggage. And the fiction wasn't even alphabetized right, and biographies were mixed in all crazy-like. In short, I don't know what they hope to accomplish with this store, but organization really ought to be a priority. I kept feeling that it's just not Million Story, which made the place feel sad, like a dead bird. That sounds dramatic, but it really was a somber feeling in there.

I'm going to turn in my resignation at the library this week. It's not at bad job, but I don't think I'll miss it as much. I'm not all that attached to it.

I had quite a night last night. As per the mission statement of this blog, every time I do something interesting my small but distinguished audience gets to hear about it.

When I got home from work last night, my brother informed me that the Three Rivers Festival's most essential Junk Food Alley would not last for the duration of the festival, but only half. We had planned on going on Tuesday, but all we would've found then is an empty space and a few bloated carnie corpses (they always leave a few). Our goal was to find something fried and delicious, and this year did not disappoint. First, though, we took a walk through the carnival.

This was the first bright shiny novelty to catch my eye. Most carnival rides are titled "serpent", or "racer", and are painted to reinforce these names. The theme here was film. Apparently, sitting in a teacup and spinning around is just like being in the movies. I think "ciak!" is Italian for either "action" or "motion sickness".

I liked this shot with the lights and the sunset and the helicopter. There was a similar scene in Apocalypse Now, so of course I had to pay homage. There are always helicopter rides every year, but the ride is really expensive. I think Gerry went on it one year, and I didn't want to so I sat on a bench and got to know Wes. Good times.

I hoped I would get a cool tracer effect here, but no such luck. I include this image anyway because Michael dubbed it the dumbest ride there because it holds you upside down for a long time. I agree, that is pretty lame. "Metal fatigue" spelled upside down still means the thing. After I took this picture, some peasant did a slurred impression of someone asking me for fifty cents. Ahh, carnivals.

At this point, we made our meandering way to the food. Last year, we ate Milky Way candy bars dipped in funnel cake batter and fried and covered in powdered sugar on a stick. If your religion doesn't include some mention of this, you're being seriously gypped. After solemn consideration and perusal of the various fried-dough-capable neon trailers, we decided on...

Fried Oreos.

Served hot and delicious, these were our fried indulgence of the evening. Even as they lay cooling on my lap, I could smell how sweet they were.

Inside view. Michael commented that for the price we paid, they could've at least used double-stuff. They're still good, though.

One of Michael's cookies actually fused together in the frying process. This is dangerous science, here; not to be trifled with. When we were standing in line pondering what we were going to eat, we heard somebody call the various fried cookies and candy bars "heart-attack on a stick." As we were eating, Michael responded to this: "I've had a heart attack, and it kind of sucked. These are awesome." We made our way back to the car as it began to rain slightly, our stomachs full of fried dough and lard cookies. It's bliss, I tell you what.

After we got home, I remembered that one of my co-workers at the Library was having a party. I've known her since middle school, and she said that there would be live DJs there, so I figured I ought to give it a go. After all, the premise was lucrative in of itself- an outdoor party at night in the middle of nowhere with live techno music. I'm no socialite, but I am a sucker for novelty.

I exited the interstate by the General Motors plant and drove east into the uncertain lightless void that is rural Allen county. My invitation said to take the second exit and turn left, putting me in increasingly unfamiliar territory. Still, I pressed on through the directions and pulled into an unassuming farm driveway. There were cars parked on the grass, indicating I had found the place. Still no sign of a party, though. No lights or music, just a quiet farm at ten o'clock at night. There was a grass path with tire tracks on it and a sign advising against driving on the muddy grass. I took this as an indication that the rest of the trip would be on foot.

The walk back was dark and quiet, with a field to my left and eventually trees to my right. The clouds overhead obscured the moon and stars, so the only light I had to navigate by was the ambient light from the GM plant two miles away. I could feel that the soft ground under my boots was grass and occasionally mud, so I took this as a good sign. Tire tracks lead to people, or so my theory went. After about ten minutes or so I came upon a pond dimly illuminated by the industrial light bounce off the clouds. On the far side I could see a bonfire and a lantern, and movement that looked like people. The way around the pond was shrouded in trees. To quote my wise Grandpa, it was "darker than a sack of assholes."

I reached the bonfire circle of partially visible strangers and scanned for a familiar face. My co-worker Levon was the first person I could recognize, so I sat down in a chair beside him and we talked about stuff and idle chitchat. I knew a few people, including the host. This was all well and good, but the real fun started with the music.

Two DJs were standing at a table under a tent. Their equipment was laid out in front of them like something at NASA. Like funky NASA, to be specific. Each had some sort of drum machine with blinking light buttons to indicate which beats and parts were playing. Each was linked to a larger control box in the center with sliders and lights that shifted the sound in different ways. I stood watching as they worked, listening to the thumping music and studying how each guy changed the music every now and then. Though the beats and sounds were pre-programmed, the whole thing came off as one continuous jam session. The free form aspects of it came from the DJ's improvisation and ad-lib. I kind of felt like Mr. Rogers, visiting an unfamiliar place and learning all about it. Like the aforementioned sage, I felt hopelessly square among the cool people around me, but I watched enthusiastically and nodded my head to the beat.

People would periodically get up and dance when the DJs were doing something interesting. Not the lame-ass R&B club dancing that keeps me away from dance clubs, but cool crazy dancing. This is often accompanied by people waving various colored lights around with varying degrees of success. One guy had two glowsticks tied together, but every time he'd swing them around one of them would fly off and he'd have to go chase it. That was kind of funny, but the really cool thing was the girl who was swinging two wires with clusters of LEDs on the ends. Each strand twirls opposite the other, and in the dark with the music it looks really intricate. The lights illuminated her as they swung past quickly with red, blue, and yellow light. I can't help but think that Degas would have absolutely loved this dancing with weird light. Her next feat was holding the lights close to her hands, standing in front of people and moving the lights in front of and around the person's head in a dizzying display. She turned to me and asked if I'd like to try. I gave an affirmative and she introduced herself. Then, lights in hands, she rapidly waved them around in a random pattern, sometimes in opposite ways so my eyes couldn't follow both. It was quite something. I watched the DJs for a little while more, but I had to leave early because I had to work for eight hours the next day.

Like an Orc peon with four trees left within reasonable walking distance of his Orc encampment, I'm getting close to being done with my work at Barnes and Noble. It's funny, because different people have all said "so, I hear you're leaving us" in the same casual way. This leads to me telling them that I'm going back to school at Ball State. Inevitably, I then have to explain what Digital Storytelling is. It feels pretty darn good to be working behind a counter and think about how I could break out in a dance like Christopher Walken in that Fatboy Slim video. Coincidentally, I found this list of things that people ask in bookstores. I've heard most of them, often more than once. I recommend perusing the other lists on the site, too.

Well, wonder of wonders, the computer is fine. The guy at A-plus was able to install a new drive and even recover all the data from the old one. Looks like I can keep all of my digital ephemera.

Now that I have a fully armed and operational machine again, I want to try something a little different with this blog. Since blogger hosts images, I plan on doing more photo blogging. It's something to do as I kill time until/ prepare for mid-August. The only subject I can think of is the Three Rivers Festival's annual Junk Food Alley. That ought to be worth taking pictures of. That, and there are a few places around the city that I want pictures of. There's a really great side-street alley that I walk through to get to the library that I've always liked. Todd and I filmed part of Courier there.

Here's a site that made me laugh. FU-H2. This is good therapy after working at Jefferson Pointe for so long.

I got a call about the computer today. It turns out that my big 120GB drive is kaput. That means I lose a ton of cool stuff. 20+ MST3k movies, seven or eight Smashing Pumpkins concerts of varying quality, and most of the 2D computer art I’ve done in the past few years. Fortunately, I’ve been saving my 3D files on another drive. There’s still a chance that some of the data can be recovered, but things don’t look good.

In better news, I’ve turned in my 2-weeks notice at Barnes and Noble. I like the store and the staff, don’t get me wrong. I’ll probably still go there for books I wish to purchase that I can’t find at Hyde Brothers. I also have an interview (or something similar) next Monday at BSU to find out about being a content producer for the BSU website. So not only is this a substantial financial windfall, but I might get to do something that will count as real work experience.

It’s been quite a week. I worked quite a bit over the weekend at both jobs, so I was already worn out when I got home on Sunday night, when I could feel myself coming down with a cold. My two days off, Monday and Tuesday, I get sick. Then, to add insult to injury, the computer crapped out on me, so I had to drive across town to get it repaired. They’re backed up right now, so it will be Monday before they call with an estimate. Call me Okonkwo, because my things are falling apart.

I’m blogging from my Mom’s laptop now, which is kind of odd. I’ve used it before for blogging, but now I’m faced with a week or more of being a “Mac Person.” I wonder when the mindset sets in? When does one become a full-on Mac enthusiast? If I find myself trying to sell anybody on the many features the Mac has, and the many great games that will eventually see Mac release, I’m going to jump into the St. Mary’s.

Well, one feature does warrant mentioning. When I plug in my iPod, the Mac reads it as an external drive. It even charges the battery through the firewire port. Kind of cool, right? Well, no. For some reason, iTunes is incapable of playing songs in the intended album order. It even goes so far as to rearrange the songs on the iPod. I used iTunes for MS to rip the songs, too, so I know that the track order is all correct. Maybe when Steve Jobs gets done hula dancing in a skirt of money in front of Michael Eisner’s house he could get somebody on this problem. That would be great.

I feel I would be remiss if I didn't pass this link along to the few people who check this site. How to disable autorun. It's a pretty significant security measure, and if you scroll to the bottom, you can download a little applet that will do it for you. Disabling autorun will also defeat the current spyware and anti-copy crap that comes on some new CDs.

As of this writing, I’m reclining on a hotel bed at IUPUI blogging in Word in the hope that I might encounter a wi-fi hotspot at some point tomorrow.

Today I visited BSU to get my schedule straightened out. I’ve been paranoid about missing deadlines, but apparently I’m okay in that regard. It’s kind of nice that I can get into any class in my course of study with no problem. I also paid a brief visit to Gerry, who was in the middle of something of immense importance when I wandered in. Things are looking good for this Fall, very good indeed.

I had dinner at Maggiano’s Italian restaurant. The interior design is really nice, I dare say nicer than the eating establishments featured in the Godfather movies and on the Sopranos. The cheese ravioli was amazing, as was the tiramisu.

-------------------------------------

Back home now. I meant to write more last night, but I was pretty tired. As a matter of fact, I'm still tired, so if my prose has the rhythm of a squirrel eating a coconut, there's a reason. I got maybe four hours of sleep due to the three glasses of tea I had with dinner. It turns out that when a restaurant bothers to actually brew tea from scratch (instead of mixing tea-flavored koolaid with tap water) it retains a hefty measure of caffeine. I never learn. All of this was supposed to be blogged and posted from somewhere with Internet access, but that wasn't an option.

I managed to pick up a few useful items for the coming fall. The reason I mention this is that I feel like making a bulleted list.

• iTrip: The iTrip is an FM transmitter for the iPod. It sits atop the iPod and a little red light glows to assure you that it is properly draining the battery power of the iPod like a little plastic lamprey. Once I got it working, though, it actually did broadcast to the radio. The added value of this is that Orrin Hatch hates this sort of gadget with a venom he usually reserves for mixed-race marriages.

• Bathrobe and two pairs of pajama pants: It ought to be glaringly obvious what this is. The bathrobe is a thick black material similar to Emperor Palpatine's robes. Perfect for contemplating stuff, or watching movies. The pajama pants are a lighter material with plaid checks. I doubt the proud clans of old Scotland meant for their fabric heritage to adorn my Ent-like legs.

• 32MB USB drive key chain: My computer won't be on the university network next year, so I need some way of moving data to other machines. For big things, like large .tif sequences, I have my 10GB iPod. For anything smaller, like papers and medium-res images, 32MB is plenty. And it has a little clip on it, the international symbol of usefulness.

In a scant two months, I'll be up to my eyeballs (6' above sea level) in cool tech and like-minded people at BSU. I'm very excited about starting school and a new job. I haven't really felt like this in a long while, this anticipation of something good and meaningful. There isn't a whole lot of that to be found in this town.

One bonus to this is that I get a new mascot. You see, for four years I grit my teeth under the yoke of being a "Cougar." Other Catholic universities get cool mascots, like the "Fighting Irish", or the "Saints." They get thematic monikers, we get an endangered species of cat that preys on weak livestock and gets caught in traps set by dairy farmers. I did my best to avoid any merchandise with the mascot logo on it, as it looked like something a high school would put on a gym floor to hide water damage. I bought a Franciscan cross in Asisi so that I would have an appropriate symbol of my alma mater and not an athletic logo. Besides, the actual school seal has two hands with stigmata. That would look pretty hard-core on a football uniform, don't you think? Imagine this on a field:

Visitor: "We're the Bulldogs! See this logo? We're the Bulldogs! What's that on your logo?"

USF: "We're USF- our logo has the divine blood of the saints flowing from hands crossed over an old Roman execution device that became the religious icon that our school is founded on."

Visitor: "You guys are messed up. We're gonna get killed."

No, alas, "Cougars" won out. But how is a Cardinal any better? Well, to it's credit, it is the state bird. It isn't particularly frightening, unless directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but it's loads better than some of the alternatives.

I haven't focused on this blog too much recently, as I've been kind of boring. I haven't been lazy, but working at the library and housecleaning aren't all that exciting. I'm planning a trip to BSU in the sorta-near future and a much longer stay this fall that ought to make for more blogfodder. In the interim I'll probably just make little posts with links shamelessly stolen from Fark, Slashdot, and Boingboing.

Speaking of which, here's a link to a story that made me mad. I've been boycotting RIAA releases for over a year now, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. I still happily buy music from non-RIAA labels and artists, such as Epitaph. You'll also notice the RIAA radar link in the right-hand column of this site.

Check out this page if you've got some time to kill and you like great photography. Commute NYC.

Here's an update from yesterday's post about the home renovation project. I got the wall anchors out and found that they were made of cardboard. I guess this is the way things were done in the 1970's, before people had been properly warned about Abba. Anyway, I caulked the holes in the wall and my brother and I hung up the shower curtain. Take a look at it to fully appreciate the novelty.

I'm currently in the middle of a project, but I wanted to post this. My brother and I took out the shower doors in our bathroom because they leak beyond repair. The doors are gone, but before I hang up the shower curtain, I need to put caulk in the holes in the wall where the screws were. The thing is, there's some sort of mystery substance in the holes that kept the screws in place. Not regular plastic wall anchors, but something from the "other" category. But the point of this post is that when I was searching for guidance with google, I found this guy. I think he's my id.

Everything's Coming Up Milhouse!

I'm geeked out over this trailer in a big way. I'm not sure how it fits into the Final Fantasy VII story proper, but in this case, I really don't care. This movie completes the trifecta for coolness- Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Star Wars Episode III, and Serenity. If my head explodes next summer you'll know why.

This past weekend I got the very good news that I have been offered an assistantship job at Ball State. I'm not clear on all of the details yet, those are coming in the mail, but I'm positive I'm going to take them up on the offer.

Yarr! Look over tharr! It be a leviathan! If you have time to kill and a desire to learn about Cedar Point, check it out. I wonder what it is about driving through Ohio that makes he and I want to blog about it in great length?

It's been a good day today. I got enough sleep last night, indicating that I may be acclimated to my new schedule. I had been waking up after three hours of sleep no matter how tired I was, and I usually can’t get back to sleep. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done this way, though.

I went to the Mill this morning before work to get a little something to eat. As I stood in line with a smattering of pastel-clad hand wringing southwest matrons, I decided on a large butterscotch chip chocolate chip scone. (They’re real, and they’re spectacular.) The credit card machine broke when I was about to pay, so I got a free piece of bread for waiting. I was still on time for work, so the point of the story is the scone.

Shelving books was everything you might expect, but there was one point of mild excitement. I was shelving a car repair manual when I noticed someone making strange noises on the other side of the shelf. I ignored it, as I often do to pretty much everybody save for co-workers. Then I heard a hissing sound, followed by a quick inhalation, followed by a low grunt and a hand grabbing the shelf. I could smell some kind of gas, too. It was one of the indigenous bums huffing gas, like, four feet away from me. He walks around the corner and looks at me for a second, as I squat down where I was shelving. I don’t look up, as I’m not quite sure what to do here. “D’hew-hur-eer” the now visible noise says. I look up at him, doing my high school drama class best to look like I hadn’t known he was there. He was a stunted little rodent of a man, with old clothes and a blue bandanna, the type of garb that the destitute welcome wagon gives out. “What?” I honestly had no idea what he said, his eyes focused on anything but me. “Do you work here?” he successfully vocalized. I nodded and said yeah, and went back to what I was doing, and he did the same. After a bit of thought, I decided to tell security. This seemed like the kind of thing they ought to know, that the business and technology section was being used as a crack house annex. I snuck away to the desk and told the guard at the front desk what goofball was up to. He said he would send a guard back to check it out. You’d think that this is where things would get cool, right? You’d expect a Cops-style bust where the grey shirted hardass would chase the bum across the whole building before tackling him and hosing him down with pepper spray. I wanted something cool to happen, but he just went and looked at the guy, who went and sat at a table to read. Well, as well as he could, all hopped up on goofenthal. What kind of security guards are these? The guards in Metal Gear Solid investigate if they see anybody, for crying out loud. And don’t let the blue bandanna fool you, this guy wasn’t Snake. His voice was all slurred from his last two brain cells rubbing together, so I kind of wanted to offer him a dollar of he’d say “Hey- the sheriff is a ni___r!” like the crazy old prospector from Blazing Saddles. That would’ve been sweet.

¡Libros para Libre!

Fair warning about tonight's post: It's about work, a subject I usually avoid because it bores even me.

I've completed my first week at the library, where I push carts and shelve books in near silent solitude, which I enjoy. The repetition makes the time pass quickly, and all the squatting and standing is giving me a great workout. It’s like cardio for nerds, where instead of an aerobics instructor chirping instructions at me, I have the Dewey decimal system, so I move to where the book goes according to the number like some kind of alpha numeric DDR game. The library is quiet, too. Not ninja-quiet, per se, more like Calvin Coolidge-quiet. No annoying music, and what few slack-jawed yokels find do their way into the building mostly behave themselves. My new co-workers are all very nice, too. A group of people who choose to eschew sunlight for books are my kind of people indeed.

For now, I probably won’t leave Barnes and Noble. I work with some really great people, some of whom I may even call friends. I get tired of the BS sometimes, like trying to sell the membership cards and working on a cash register for seven hours with no place to sit. Every time I think I might call it quits, though, I have a great conversation about Tom Waits with another bookseller, or I get to listen to Dave the history buff manager discuss American history, or I get to go out after work with a group of people, and the job is worthwhile again. It’s only a few hours a week, but that’s enough.

Two days this week I worked both jobs, which amounts to close to an eleven-hour day, including lunch break. That’s a long day, but I make a pretty good amount of money on those days. This sort of thing is when I just have to keep telling myself “if I can’t do this, I can’t do grad school.” That’s been my mantra since I first started at the bookstore.

Here's something everybody can enjoy: The Robot. My brother got this in a sudden IM, and I got a good laugh out of it.

I found something funny last night when I did a Google image search for "fighting cardinal."

I've been telling Gerry that I would make a fighting cardinal for a while now. Here, at least, is a cardinal picking a fight. I don't have any particular enmity or allegiance for either team, and I somehow doubt that any BSU athletes would ever give me the time of day. The white-trash aesthetic of a pick-up truck decal seemed fitting to Muncie.

Obviously, I Haven't blogged much lately. I haven't blogged because I haven't really had much to say. In the past week I've worked, played Knights of the Old Republic, and read books and magazines. I did get to see Gerry, and we watched all kinds of geek TV and sporadic bits of the Cubs losing on Saturday. It's been a rough season for the Cubs so far, having an injured list comparable to Valley Forge.

So, in the absence of things worth driving to, I've been thinking about the public figures and closer friends I admire, trying to figure out what I should be doing in my life and if I went wrong somewhere. Without getting too self-absorbed, I do feel that at some point in high school or college I was mislead. Not by any person or institution, per se, but by the dot-com-era ideal that I was assured wealth and success directly out of college because I was majoring in something computer related. My unconscious and unerring belief in digital entertainment as the land of milk and honey was my driving reason to get through college. I scoffed at anyone who questioned the validity of computer art, eagerly pointing out that innovation was the key to revitalizing the increasingly irrelevant art field, much like photography had done a century before. In hindsight, though, I've come to realize that the computer art program at USF was a little recruitment sham that the school started when it was facing bankruptcy that, through the nurturing dedication of a communication professor and an animation pro, evolved into a legitimate study program. I ended up with what I think might be a great education, but as the job market evaporated, I never got a real chance to test this.

Thus, my present dilemma. In examining different people whom I admire, I've noticed that there are curious blank spots in each of their biographies. Without using Google, tell me what Matt Groening was doing when he was twenty-four years old. What about Jack Kerouac? Neil Gaiman? Douglas Adams? Tom Waits? What about prestigious people I don't like so much, like John Ashcroft, or most of the cast of Friends? At some point I got old enough that I stopped hearing "when I was your age" stories. This could be because there comes a point in every life when you just sit in the ocean on your little dingy of dreams waiting for something, anything, to happen. Case in point:

Before the Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan spent his early to mid twenties as a chunky, depressed, writers-blocked wanna-be rocker. He spent a little while in Florida with a little Cure knockoff metal band called the Marked. Nothing much came of this back in the era of decadent wuss-rock, and he ended up back in Chicago where things finally started to work out for him.

Conan O'Brien graduated from Harvard with all kinds of high honors and accolades, moved to the west coast, and promptly got a job in a leather jacket store. His first few TV attempts weren't even noticeable, and even when he eventually scored a job as a writer on Saturday Night Live he was still largely invisible.

Try this: think of five people over the age of forty, famous or familiar. Can you determine with certainty what they were doing in their mid-twenties? Was it at all glorious or rewarding beyond the satisfaction of hard work?

So, here I am, full of promise in the quarter-century quagmire. This is my main motivation to go to grad school, to get out of this town and out of this funk. BSU seems far more oriented in the practical application of my knowledge, which is exactly what I want. Perhaps in two years time I'll be able to say with certainty that I really did do something constructive with my young professional life.

Here's a novelty. As you see below, Blogger now supports image hosting. I think it gets re-compressed, though. I saved the image in the same resolution as it is currently displayed, and it looks fine on my end. On the page, though, much clarity is lost. It is a free service, though, so I won't complain too loudly.

What happens to a pre-fab poser model when you export it as a .rib file and render it as-is in BMRT? The same thing as everything else. 

I had a job interview this morning at 10:30 (aww, poor me) for the shelving position at the Library. Fortunately, I keep an emergency wake-up-in-the-morning survival guide in a cold war era armored floor safe for just such an occasion. I got ready, ate what might pass for breakfast, and set upon the morning's first daunting task: my necktie. Several of my attempts ended up looking nothing like the traditional men's accessory, but rather something I had become entangled in while sleeping. Eventually I got it tied, but I was running a little late, so of course I hit every red light on the way to the library. The interview went pretty well, I thought. I think my strongest advantage over my anonymous competition is that I can already shelve books with the aplomb and agility of an art major trapped in retail purgatory. This job is another step towards doing what I want, as it will provide me with money for this fall. I did get the job, by the way, the HR person called me about three hours later. Score one for cracker.

New comic books tomorrow. Astonishing X-men #1 written by Joss Whedon (genuflect, all ye geeks) and Punisher #6. Marvel comics has no respect for numbering or continuity anymore. I haven't purchased an X-men comic in ten years or more, back when the characters had actual costumes and Wolverine was intelligent and disciplined and did not have a goatee. The current continuity has him as a metrosexual shadow of his former self.

I need new geek media. Last week's Smallville and Angel finales left my inner fanboy confused and curled up in a fetal position. Smallville's season closer was a big-budget rush job mess with a reasonably satisfying montage at the end. They could have done the whole story more effectively spread out over two episodes had they planned ahead and cut out some of their mid-season filler. The Angel finale was good, albeit bleak. We learn that our hero doesn't get to become human again after all, as he consciously signs away his destiny for the good of humanity. The abrupt end is open, but it implies that the main characters all die fighting a huge army of demons. This is particularly harsh for me, since I really liked this show. It goes to show how great TV can be from time to time. It also demonstrates why Smallville will never be as good a show- the outcome is set in stone, and come hell or high water, Clark will become Superman. I'm also still mad about Wonderfalls, but I feel my soapbox starting to creak.