Thursday, July 28, 2005

Good news!

Did you guys know we’re not at war anymore?

Now we’re just struggling.

Who the fuck do they think they’re fooling? ‘If we stop saying war, people won’t be mad at us anymore!’ That’s like saying ‘if I ignore the problem it’ll just go away.’

Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Jim Aparo 1932-2005


At a time when I didn't even realize it took people to write and draw comics, Jim Aparo was the first artist whose name I could remember. He drew some of the first comics I ever read. His style was smooth and simple, yet dynamic and emotive. Whenever I write Batman, in my head I see Jim Aparo's pencils.

Jim Aparo died today. He was 72.

Consistently underrated, and one of my favorite artists.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

The infinite wisdom of Canon

I am an amateur filmmaker. Or at least I pretend to be. I sit around and I talk about making movies and how I have a ton of ideas for movies and how I really want to make them and then I go read comics or sleep. So I suppose I'm more an amateur filmmaker in mind than in action.

But that's all going to change. As a graduation gift, my parents purchased me the Canon GL2. The Canon GL2 is, as far as I can tell from the Canon website, the second best miniDV camera on the market. Not the top of the line, but the one right under that one. This is a nice-ass camera. With this camera I can finally become the amateur filmmaker I already consider myself to be.

So I went to my brother's tonight to play around with it. He has a Powerbook, which is a nice-ass computer and what I'm thinking about getting to go along with my nice-ass camera. My plan was to hook my camera up to his Powerbook and to screw around in iMovie with editing and other stuff. I mostly wanted to see how fast the processor on the Powerbook would react to my editing digital video.

So I hooked up the Canon GL2 to the Powerbook.
And I went into iMovie to take the footage from the camera and put it onto the computer so I could edit it.
And nothing happened.

Further investigation revealed to me the problem.

The Canon GL2 is not compatible with iMovie. Canon, in their infinite wisdom, decided one day that the GL2 should only be compatible with Final Cut Pro.

Who the fuck does this? More importantly, who the fuck does this and doesn't tell anyone at all about it? Nowhere in any literature that I read about the Canon GL2 did it say, "The Canon GL2 is only compatible with Final Cut Pro, so get ready to pony up $500 or more to buy Final Cut Pro if you want to be able to FUCKING USE YOUR CAMERA." Of course, I didn't spend the two grand for the GL2 because I wanted to use it. I thought I'd just put it in the corner and look at it and say, "Wow, that's a nice-ass camera." These fucking fucktards. iMovie is standard with all Macs, so does it NOT just make sense that the GL2 would work with it? I know it's a good camera, THAT'S THE IDEA. If anything, this camera should be compatible with EVERYTHING. That seems to make sense to me. It makes sense that, perhaps, a lesser camera wouldn't be compatible with Final Cut Pro (as Final Cut Pro is a nice-ass filmmaking program), but it simply does NOT make ANY logical sense to me that this camera, which is the second best camera you can get, does not work with a program that is standard across the board on Macs. Fucking. Fucktards.

That's all.

Friday, July 15, 2005

The __:38 Phenomenon

I have noticed recently, within the last few weeks, that I always seem to look at a clock at 38 minutes past the hour. At first I thought it was amusing to look at the clock at 11:38, for reasons that are clear to anyone who enjoys the Star Wars films. But I have noticed that I do it during the day, as well. Just twenty minutes ago, I looked at the clock and it was 12:38.

Is there some strange force which compels me to look at a clock when this combination of numbers comes up? Perhaps it's my internal clock, which I never used to believe existed but which I have come to have a great deal of respect for in times of trouble. I don't know for what reason I would have set my clock to go off consistently at __:38. It's just such an odd time to go off.

I have had similar experiences in the past with looking at clocks, but in the past, it's been the following: I always look at a clock when the numbers are in sequence. There's nothing cooler than waking up at 3:45 in the morning and being just lucid enough to recognize, 'Hey, those numbers are in order!' And it seems like when I'm at school I always go to bed at 12:34 at night (one minute before Conan starts, because I know that if I am awake to hear the theme song, I will not sleep for another hour). I would gladly take this strangeness over the current __:38 Phenomenon.

And I wonder, if I were surrounded only by analog clocks, and not the more common digital clocks (and anyone that doesn't know what an analog clock is...hit yourself on the head with a hammer), would the same thing hold true? Perhaps the simplicity of reading the digital numbers is inherent to the __:38 Phenomenon. Or, perhaps, in time, I would simply become accustomed to the position of the hands on the clock. Perhaps the phenomenon itself could even becomed finely-tuned. Instead of simply looking at the clock at __:38, I might find myself looking at the clock at __:38:21, or even at __:__:21. That second would be so fleeting, would I even realize that the phenomenon was occuring?

Who knows how many of these momentary phenomena occur (or recur) throughout the day without us even realizing it? One could be happening right now, but you missed it because you were reading this.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing. I don't know who I can blame this situation on. George Lucas. The inventor of the digital clock. Some omnipotent creator of all life in the universe. Whoever's behind this, I find myself really creeped out by the __:38 Phenomenon. It always makes me stop and take notice.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Someone has a crush on you!

I don't use my aol e-mail address all that much anymore, but every now and then I still get mail there. Mostly it's spam, and I expect that. I think it's been five years since I got a piece of meaningful mail in that box.

I got some mail there today, a grand total of two messages, and one of them was an e-mail with the subject line "Someone has a crush on you!" I used to get mail like this all the time when I was in high school, but as time went by, it came less and less frequently. I think it says something when even spammers have given up on you ever being in a relationship.

I would always open the mail and jump through the thirty hoops you have to jump through in order to find out who sent it to you and, in the end, never discover the identity of my secret admirer. I even knew, as I was doing it, that all I was doing was screwing over my other friends. You had to provide e-mail addresses of people who you thought might have sent it to you. The spam company then adds those addresses to their little list of people to spam. I knew that this was what they did, even as I was entering as many addresses as I could think of because I had to know who had a crush on me. If this person had taken the time to tell this random internet website that they had a crush on me, why shouldn't I do whatever it took to find out who they were?

I never really thought about what I would do once I found out who it was, if it was anyone at all. Perhaps I assumed I would recriprocate their feelings automatically, regardless of who the person was or how I really felt about them, and that, as I have always suspected it would, the internet would solve all of my problems. Unfortunately I never found out who sent me the original letter, and thus I will die without ever knowing who my true internet spam love is. I know who I would have wanted it to be at the time, and I know that what drove me to open the mail and to jump through the hoops was my misguided hope that it was that person, the person I cared about, that had sent me the e-mail to begin with. The odds of that ever happening are ridiculously low, and I'm sure that in the back of my mind I knew I was just on a wild goose chase, but I still hoped. It was what the spammers wanted me to do.

The thing I never thought about as I was jumping through the hoops was the fact that I had to jump through hoops to begin with. As if jumping through the hoops of finding someone to love in real life isn't hard enough, there I was, hunched over my computer at 2:30 in the morning, giving away personal information and pinning my hopes on the machinations of a computer program. If this program had had my best interests in mind, it would simply have given me the identity of my admirer. I wouldn't have had to enter any information but my name, and I would have been rewarded with my admirer's name simply for clicking on the link. Perhaps, though, the hoops of the website are meant to mirror the real world experience of finding someone who loves you. Or perhaps I'm an idiot.

Over time I got tired of the hoops, of navigating ten pages of filling in fields just to face ultimate disappointment. That's probably why the e-mails stopped coming. They realized I wasn't a sucker anymore, or that I didn't have that many friends whose e-mail addresses I could give them, and they moved on to other people, people with the same insecurities that I carried, but who had actual relationship prospects and who considered it worth their time to find out what the website knew.

I still wonder, though, who it was that initially set me up for the spam. Somewhere in the world is someone who thought enough of me to either tell a random website that they liked me or to put my name down on a list of people who they thought might like them. I wonder who that person is and what they've been doing since I was sixteen. I wonder if they even remember who I am, and if I were to see them on the street, would I have any idea of who they were. I wonder if we would shake hands or hug, and then go somewhere and get coffee or ice cream, or just sit and talk and laugh. I wonder if the spam would ever come up in conversation, and how we would react to that. I wonder what it would all feel like.

And I got one of those e-mails again today, along with a piece of mail about increasing my penis size. I clicked on one and I deleted the other. Which is which will be my little secret.

The Cave-In

Hey any/everybody.

I assume if you're reading this that you already know me, so I'm going to skip all the introductory crap that everyone else does. If you're a total stranger and you've stumbled across this somehow, then may God have mercy on your soul. I shall remain a mystery to you, and you'll get to know me as we go along. That might be fun. Probably just boring.

I feel the need to lay down some ground rules.

This is not a journal. If I wanted a journal, I'd keep that on my own time and I wouldn't make anyone else read it. As such, I will never complain here. I will rant - I promise you, I will rant - but I will never be that fifteen-year-old girl who thinks she's the most important person in the world, that her problems are the worst problems that have ever existed, that no one else has ever experienced those problems, and that everyone needs to know about them so they can pity her. I will never be that girl. (You can consider that your first little mini-rant.) So that's what this isn't. If it ever becomes that, you are fully authorized to slap the living shit out of me.

I will use this blog as a place to muse, to contemplate ideas and issues, and to write. There will be times when I just up and write an essay or a short story or a script or something here. This is the place where I can expend my energy towards something useful. From this point forward, when I have an idea, I actually have an excuse to run with it.

I've never had a blog before. I probably won't post to it every day. I probably will forget that it exists for weeks at a time. This is an experiment, basically. Bear with me. And by all means, argue with me, criticize me, make fun of me. Anything to keep it interesting.

-Joe G.