S-S-S-Saturday Ni-iiiiiiiight
Thursday, July 29, 2010, 09:01 PM
I FINALLY got paid for the CCCW shit from the Lumiere. The surprising thing is that they want me to come do some stuff for them this weekend at their next show. With the turn-out they are going to get at this event, I'm sure they're going to have me edit together this one as well. Well..I guess I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I think they're making out very well for themselves with this venture and the meager amount I'm charging them for my services is probably nothing compared to what each video brings them in return for the next show. I think they not only realize that, but value it as an on-going resource. Still, I'm not comfortable resting on that notion alone and want to continue to grow my relationship with them into a mutual business venture that can help not only them, but myself as well.
I just finished shooting two new episodes of Drinkin' Beer as well as some mini Talkin' Beer episodes. I really want to keep going with the series, but I'm kind of in a rut with Talkin' Beer as that series is something that I can't really force myself to do. The hardest part is going to be editing it all together into a cohesive package that I'm satisfied with. I'm referring only to the Talkin' Beer stuff, not the Drinkin' Beer segments. Those are significantly easier to make and will probably end up dominating most of my time in that regard. It's just what I do to pass the time I guess. I'm really thinking about opening Talkin' Beer up into a wider forum by trying to conduct over the phone interviews with beer drinkers and possibly brewers as well. It really all comes down to content that I feel is worthy of going up. I've shot a lot of stuff that hasn't made the cut so I'm very weary of doing more of the same. I need to breathe new life into this series, I'm just not sure what will do it for me.
Anyhoo, I'm going to take advantage of this weekend by taking the 7D to the event and getting some behind the scenes stuff of the fighters between matches. I think I can incorporate that into future videos, which will help make them a hotter item for fans. I'm all about helping to grow the CCCW brand if they aren't just flaking out. I think I'll learn a lot more after this weekend. I think I'm going to have Sariah pick me up a six pack of IPA.
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( 3.2 / 11 )Live below the line
Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 09:23 AM
Live below the line is a charity in Australia designed to "raise awareness" of the growing poverty situation in their country and throughout the world by challenging the well-to-do youth to go 5 days on nothing but $2 a day. A lot of people see this as their chance to do something altruistic while both opening their own eyes to the struggles of those who live below the poverty line and making themselves feel like better people for it. It's this pretentious premise that drew me to this charity like a moth to a bug zapper. I feel the overwhelming urge to do my part.....in tearing this shit house down!
First and foremost, it can be argued that charity in all forms has no lasting impact on poverty. It's like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Poverty exists because of people who are too reliant on assistance from others. I know that sounds cold, but government assistance programs are to blame for this situation. There are a lot more "poverty stricken" people in this world than there are homeless. That's because if your only choices were to get a job and support yourself or live on the streets, most people would go to work.
To anyone who's been alive long enough to have seen their fair share of charity schemes, it's pretty obvious what is going on. That is why the organizers have decided (like most charities do) not to focus their efforts on educated adults, but rather target the youth market on social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube. I learned of it through a few videos made by vapid Aussie girls between the ages of 19-22. They talked about how great this campaign is and how much it's going to do to raise education and awareness of poverty. The irony is subtle.
And what is it all for, you might ask? That is the best part. According to the website livebelowtheline.com, one hundred percent of the proceeds of this charity go toward education, and I don't mean they take the money they make and donate to their local public school system. They plan to travel from school to school, raising awareness about poverty. They also plan to re-open a school in Cambodia to help the poor suffering children of Kampong Chang...by giving them an education.....?????? What in the fuck is a poor kid in Cambodia going to do with a fucking education?
Again, I don't mean to sound cold, but you have to address the economic situation of the country as a whole before going all altruistic on their ass. Perhaps that money would be better spent opening a call center and teaching the children foreign language so they have an actual way to make money. That goes a lot farther than hope ever could. While most people are suckers for hope, poor people's priorities are pretty basic; they want money. I know I just said that giving the poor a hand-out doesn't help eradicate poverty at all, but neither does educating the poor.
In the US, their are so many economic assistance programs designed to help the poor receive an education that it's nearly sickening. The part that is even more disgusting is that the only reason those same economic assistance toward furthering education programs exist is because not many poverty-stricken youths/adults are looking for an education. It's a sad state of affairs, but that's the US for you; we put money where it's not needed.
If anything, I would say this organization has raised awareness of the growing problem we have as a society in which kids spend so much money daily that they couldn't possibly fathom going a day without spending money. Do you know how shallow you have to be to consider not spending over $2 a day equal to walking in a poor persons shoes? I guess it's not so much shallow as it is naive and ignorant. These kids will eventually discover for themselves that life isn't as simple as commercial platitudes.
I see things like this and I wonder why there are no charities for the hard-working middle class? Why are there so many economic relief systems set up for the poor which are paid for by the middle class, but none available for the middle class themselves? Being middle class means you are in the majority in this world. You work every day to earn money which you use to support yourself and your family if you have one. You don't ask for help, but you welcome a helping hand if one is provided. You have a positive outlook on life and cling to the belief that one day things will be better for you and the ones you love...all you have to do is keep pushing forward and one day you'll finally get to where you want to be. It's that never-ending well spring of hope that both the lower and upper class have relied on for centuries and there doesn't seem to be any sign of it ending any time soon.
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( 3.4 / 10 )The Sandy Ravage
Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 09:57 PM
I don't know why, but I watch live streams from people who play MW2. I own the game, have xbox live and am perfectly capable of playing the game myself, but I just hate playing it anymore. I've held out hope for the past year that Payne would get back online and start playing again, but I know now that it's not going to happen. He played xbox when he lived in St. Louis/Phoenix because he didn't have anything else to do. Well, it started out that way, then it became our principal method of communication for a while.
I've learned that I take the game way too serious when I'm playing it by myself, so I stopped playing it. However, I still like the game. It's a catch 22. That's kind of why I watch Sandy Ravage's streams. I get to watch someone competent play MW2, plus he plays kick-ass music while playing and doesn't talk over the whole thing like everyone else. It's just a way for me to indulge in something that I love without the frustration of trying to do it myself.
That sounds really stupid.
Well, it's better than watching Nostalgia Critic or AVGN loops over and over and over.
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( 3.5 / 11 )Cups and cakes
Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 11:33 AM
I hate listening to people who can't sing try to sing. So, it's amazing to me how my job has now become just that. These god damned local talent competitions that we tape are unbearable. These people have no talent. I really wish each talent competition had their own equivalent of a Simon Cowell to really tell these people how bad they suck so they never attempted this crap again.
My stomach is killing me. I've only been at work for 3 hours, but I'm probably going to take off pretty soon if this doesn't stop. I'm happy to hear that the cake was a success. I knew going into it that it was going to turn out to be one of my better cakes. While I'm not exactly thrilled with the end result (I personally think the icing was too tart), I do feel the substitution of cream cheese for shortening was a good decision. It would be nice to make something that tastes as good, but still has the consistency of regular icing. I really don't want to sacrifice appearance for taste in the future.
We finally got the pan/tilt head in. It's going to take a little time to get this thing rigged up properly and then it's going to take a little time to get used to the controls. It's a noisy son of a bitch, I'll say that much. Might not be practical in some shooting scenarios based on that alone. I thought the base was made to fit right into a Manfrotto head, but I guess it's not. I don't know how I'm going to solve that problem, but it should be interesting to say the least. Okay, It's been almost 5 hours now and my stomach just feels worse. I don't get it. I'm going to get up and go to the gas station. Maybe that will make it feel better.
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( 3.3 / 6 )Hemorrhoids and me
Friday, July 23, 2010, 12:09 PM
I hate having hemorrhoids. I've been using a combo of medicated pads and Preparation H, but it really isn't helping anymore. It's like my hemorrhoids have developed an immunity to hemorrhoid relief treatments. I've been contemplating going to a doctor to see what other options I have, but I'm constantly haunted by the thousand dollars I still owe to CPI for my last round of doctor visits. It's not serious enough to require medical treatment, however the blood in my semen might be....that's a whole other issue though.
It's the day after my 15 year wedding anniversary to Sariah and we're going to spend the day together. We don't have a lot of money, but we'll probably end up going to Jerseyville to eat at a restaurant we like and possibly do some other stuff. It's hard to say at this point. I kind of blew up on her earlier this week and since then she's kind of had a change in attitude, but there for a while she was really distant and acting very depressed all the time. I had finally had enough and let her know how I felt. Like I said, she's been different lately, but she usually is shortly after a big fight, so it's hard to say if this trend will continue or not. It's amazing to me that after 15 years of marriage I still hold on to hope that Sariah will one day be happy.
I've emailed the CCCW guys and have called them a couple of times only to get their voice mail. I finished the video and am anxious to get the money they owe me. Between two guys, neither one seems to have the time to keep in touch with me and believe me, they don't hear from me very often. For the time being, I'm really focused on the CCCW stuff, but the goal is to branch out and start doing my own stuff soon. I have a few ideas, but don't really know how to get started. I suppose I'm going to have to stumble through it and hope I don't screw things up too bad.
Okay, Goliath is driving me nuts. I've got to go now.
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( 3.1 / 10 )To catch a predator
Friday, July 23, 2010, 01:20 AM
Ugh! I've been watching this damn show all night on justin.tv and I'm damn burnt out by hearing these pathetic jackasses lie through their teeth over and over. Some of it's funny, but most of it's just tragic and sad. It hasn't been on the air in a long time because of the controversy over it. While no one should ever solicit sex from a minor, I can't help but think that the methods employed by Perverted Justice are a bit coercive. Still, the show did a lot more good than bad and all the negative press really is inconsequential when pitted against the fact that their investigations have served a greater public good.....and it's just gooooooood watchin'!!![ 2 comments ] ( 8 views ) | permalink |
( 3 / 13 )Kick out the jams, motherfucker!
Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 09:22 PM
It's times like these when I think about my life. I think of the choices I've made and whether or not they were the right ones or not. The one problem I face with this analysis is that I search for outside opinion to justify my own, which is a stupid thing to do when all my friends want from me is to be around them as much as possible. I find that to be somewhat ironic as they kicked me out of their world, but that's a whole other issue.
Here's a scene for you:
I kill myself tonight.
Sariah gets off work and calls me to come pick her up. She doesn't get through to me, so she leaves a message and waits. After about 3 seconds after leaving the message she calls back, once again to get no reply. She then leaves a more hostile message. She decides to wait exactly one minute before once again calling me again, only to reach voice mail. At this point she is beyond pissed and most likely hangs up before the beep to call Jill to come get her. Jill comes to pick her up and take her to the bank where she makes the nights drop. All the while, she's bitching about how sick of me she is and how sick of my shit she is. However, before she comes back to the house, she has Jill take her through McDonald's so she can get an ice coffee.
She enters our home reluctantly pissed (since she has gotten her ice coffee, after all) to the dogs going nuts at the gate. she sets her purse down and opens up the gate as usual while the dogs continue to go shit house. She yells at them to shut up while she goes into the kitchen (which she does every time she comes home for some reason) before she notices that I'm not there. She calls out to me and hears not reply. She then goes back into entry way and shouts upstairs, but still there is no reply. She finally goes upstairs and sees that there is no one there. At her most pissed off, she storms outside and into the back yard to see if the car is still in the driveway. It is.
An odd feeling washes over her, but not enough to cause alarm as she knows I am a drunken degenerate ready to throw away all sense of responsibility at the drop of a hat to party with my friends, so she goes back in the house, fills the dogs bowls with water and food, then sits at the dining room table and works on a bracelet. The dogs constantly freaking out and running back and forth between the dining room and the living room begins to bother her as she finally gets up to take them out. She searches around for their harnesses and eventually gets even more pissed about the fact that she can't remember where she put them.
Eventually she finds the harnesses and tries to put them on the dogs, to which they are receptive, because if you've had dogs and kept them in-doors long enough, you'll know that they will take going outside over anything else when presented to them. So, Sariah takes the dogs outside for a walk and then returns to her bracelets. At this point she calls my phone again only to hear it ringing in the living room. She's confused by this as she knows I always take my phone wherever I go, but at the same time she knows I just got a new phone and it's too bulky to take with me a lot of places. She simply resolves this to me skimping out on her and leaving my phone so she has no way of getting in touch with me.
As the clock reaches midnight, Sariah assumes that I must be in Beardstown. She starts calling all of my friends who she has the number of. She soon finds that they have not seen me at all and becomes concerned for possibly the fist time of the night. For the first time of the night, she venture upstairs to look for me. She thinks that possibly I am just passed out and didn't hear her, so she decides again to call out for me. She ventures from room to room, not finding me in any of the beds between our two bedrooms. She pays no mind to the dogs, which are constantly barking and jumping at my mothers old bedroom door. She finally makes her way to the door and opens it. She sees the boxes containing the last remnants of her mother's existence before seeing me lying in the bed.
She begins shouting at me to wake up, but as she clears the door, she sees for the first time that I am not asleep, but in trouble. She rushes to the bed only to observe a lifeless corpse with all the blood drained from it hours previous. She reacts in the manner any sane person would and immediately calls the police, then proceeds to call my mother and her family entire. Shortly after the ambulance shows up, the police appear and question her about the events of the night, as any fucking jack-ass Jacksonville cop would. This causes her a great deal of grief to which her previously alerted family members swoop in to comfort her from.
This is as far as I can go with the story because it's truly farther than I can possibly know while dead. I assume my friends would throw a shitty benefit in my name and that would be it. My life would be nothing more than a footnote in the lives of the few people I've met in my life. I guess at this point I should invoke the name of Randy Hoar to illustrate my point. How many people outside of those who truly knew him in his life still think about him to this day? Probably not that many, right? Well it's really difficult to say if all you do is sit around in your comfort zone and never venture out to seek these truths.
So, what is the truth?
I don't really know.
The one thing I know is that Sariah just called me to come pick her up and I answered the phone. So here I go.
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( 3.3 / 15 )The big time
Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 10:38 AM
I'm halfway through editing the Lumiere fight and this weekend is the next CCCW fight in Springfield. From a money standpoint, this is turning out to be a pretty good resource for me. I'm definitely considering putting together a plan to take their video production to the next level. I want to put together a package that includes all the things I think would add to the quality of their overall product, yet won't cost them an arm and a leg in the process. It might not even be possible, but until I get some information down on paper, there's no real way of knowing for sure.
I guess Tom may have some doors opening for him. He and his friends have been doing a show called "Fun Guys" and it's pretty good. Well through his connections his ragtag little show might end up turning into a reality show with a national cable network. He's meeting with a producer this weekend and discussing a few things regarding the upcoming redneck fishing tournament, in which the "fun guys" are entered. He's got a lot planned and hopefully this stuff pans out for him.
Today is also a landmark day as it is the day I was finally able to purchase a motorized pan and tilt head for the company. It's been a long time coming so I'm happy as a clam to finally be able to get one. It will make the overall production aspect of future events much easier to manage, especially smooth pans while dollying. God how I have wanted that for a while now! Another cool aspect is that we can finally get our jib back into the mix.
I often think about how I take all of this stuff for granted. It's so easy to buy stuff for the company because it's like I have been given access to a bottomless bank account. I sometimes wonder how different it would be if it were my money going to pay for all of this stuff. Granted if I had the money to spend, I would spend it. Still, there are a lot of things that I have purchased that really didn't need to be purchased. Lessons learned in life, I suppose. I'm actually quite glad I've had the opportunity to learn these things here and now. I've had enough of wasting my own money on trivial equipment purchases. By the time I go out on my own, I'll have more of a refined set of needs based on my experience.
I still want to make a movie, but I haven't gone back to my script in a long, long time. I'm selling a majority of my Xbox games pretty soon so hopefully that will help (hit the road, MW2!). I need to focus on the real and stop escaping into fantasy. It's not doing me any good to just sit around all day long and do nothing. In fact, I think my behavior has rubbed off on Sariah to the point where she's just depressed all the time. That's a whole other can of worms I don't have time to open right now.
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( 3.1 / 15 )Troxartas
Thursday, July 15, 2010, 09:23 AM
Is it really hard to find or switch jobs? I haven't tried in a couple of years and I'm not currently considering it. I know Payne was struggling, but with his criminal record and the fact that he can't stop doing drugs for one straight month it's a no-brainer why he's having trouble. Hell, for all I know he could already have a job. I doubt it though since he hasn't come to get his stuff yet.
I was summoned for jury duty. This is the first time in my 33 years on this planet that I've had to answer the civil service call and hopefully I'll get pre-screened out. Most people would look at it as a great opportunity to get out of work, but to me it would be more like work than my actual job. I was drinking last night so I don't remember the exact details of it, but I know that I have to contact someone or send off a letter in the next few days.
Sariah is off today. It's 9:18 and Tom still isn't here. No emails or calls either. I know I'm going to catch shit for allowing that to continue, but I'm waiting it out as it doesn't really bother me. Once Laymon starts jumping my ass about it, I'll have to have a talk with him. The weekend is rapidly approaching and once again I have no plans. I share the universal problem of having a lot of ambition to do things, but don't really know what I want to do.
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( 3.1 / 16 )The dull days
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 11:29 AM
My beer collection video got some notice recently by another beer reviewer on YouTube. He had a lot of nice things to say. I've been thinking about doing more Talkin' Beer episodes although it's kind of difficult now with all of my beer boxed up. I tried to record some new stuff last week and I'm dumping it into my Mac now to see if any of it can be used.
One thing I'm starting to realize is that I need a editing workstation at home. I could get a lot more done and experiment a hell of a lot more with motion graphics if I did. The only problem with doing that is the notion that I will find it extremely difficult to come into work when I can potentially do my job from home. It's all just crazy talk though as I don't have the money to afford a decent workstation. I mean we're talking about $4000 on hardware alone, plus software which will definitely put it up around $6000 at least.
There are a few things I know I can't live without, one of which is Telestream Episode Pro. It's a damn good encoder and it handles pretty much anything you can throw at it. I use MPEG Streamclip all the time, but I'm starting to believe that there is nothing special about that encoder and that the only reason I think it's great is because it utilizes all the high-end codecs I have on my Mac through FCS and Episode Pro.
Had to go talk to the telephone guys so they could repair our fax line. Before that I was syncing the Lumiere fight footage in FCP. It's been a bitch because the mix video DVD was corrupt and caused a lot of hang-ups in the video and audio which keep throwing off the overall sync. I have to make adjustments here and there and be sure to catch the audio drop outs when they happen so I can cover them up or edit them out if possible. I'm definitely earning my money on this one.
I never heard back from any of the other fight promoters I emailed. I think I need to take a more active approach in contacting these people. Too many people rely on the internet as their sole means of promotion and advertising. I need to get out there and represent. Still....I hate representing that I can do these things I say when it all hinges on Cass. It's an uncomfortable feeling.
I would say that a year from now my situation will be better, but it won't. The Scion will be paid off, but there are so many other bills that we have that still need to be paid off. I'm hoping the extra money from the car payment will help. The hardest part in all of this is dealing with Sariah. She is having a really hard time dealing with not having very much money and I imagine if things don't improve soon she'll start getting really pissed off. I don't want her to be upset, but I don't want her spending us into oblivion either.
I'm just babbling now. I've got to get back to work.
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( 2.9 / 11 )Back Next
