What are you ashamed of?
In my early 20s I was friends with a woman named Penny, I turned her in to her BF when she admitted to cheating on him at a party. I never should have turned her in, the BF didn’t care and I ended up alienating a number of people. I shouldn’t have said anything to anyone.
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
So, since I had the time and the desire, I rebuilt nitemayr.com. I am very happy with how it turned out!
I had an idea in my head about how I wanted to go about building it again, I was already happy with the PHP back end and the aggregation I was doing from the various places I am leaving a nice detailed RSS trail so all Iw as really doing was rebuilding the front end.
Of course, some of the back end contained some display code (bad bad bad) so that was excised and I streamlined the RSS code and some of the Flickr stuff. This made some of the code useless, but I left it in the source just in case.
The first major challenge was the gallery. I has previously used a nice JavaScript gallery, but wasn’t happy with it’s lack of keyboard support. So I switched to the flickr flash gallery, which was great. I almost want to switch back to flickrviewr or a variant of it. So I settled on an open source FLASH gallery this is actually kind of buggy, but I will eventually get into the source and fix it all on my own. So there’s a win.
The UI is set up to resemble an old-school computer, solid-state and green-phosphors. I covered it in hand-written labels and stuck on crap. There is a spattering of paint and rust on it and I think it captured what I saw inside my head. I kept the original source materials to rebuild it.
Converting from the TABLES that I originally built it on to CSS turned out to be easier than I thought, [I should point out that the site was entirely CSS driven before, the redesign started as a tables layout]. Once it was all laid out, getting the content in was fairly easy.
The last challenge was making all of the old content available, along with what was previously available on “LIVE” which I think I have achieved. So there we are a new site built from the remains of two others and laid out like and old-school computer.
I hope you enjoy checking it out.
I’ve had some cold calls this week, wish me luck!
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
Much like John Carpenter, Richard Kelly has a massive lust to tell us about his vision of the end of the world. John does it with Ghosts and Demons and eventually got to politics. Richard has gotten to it on his second attempt. Bravo Richard Kelly.
Additionally, bravo to Mr. Kelly for including a musical sequence (or two) in your film. This was a brave choice.
I can't say that I disliked "Southland Tales" any more than I can say that I disliked any John Carpenter film, as I have loved every John Carpenter film I have watched and own. So what can I say about "Southland Tales" that approximates a critique?
I could comment that the plot was transparent, but the same is true for Mr. Carpenters films.
I could say that the acting in places was … poor. However, I have seen "Escape from New York" and it is hardly the magnum opus.
One might actually point to Dwayne Johnson (the eponymous 'Rock') and look at his affectations in the movie and question whether this was a bad movie at all. To get the kind of believable soul-depth panic that appears in Mr. Johnson at points in this movie, one would have to be a great director indeed. MR. Johnson is known for being a movie tough guy who raises and eyebrow for emphasis, when he twiddles his fingers in desperation I saw a scared little man who was lost in a scarily bad plot of his own creation.
That is of course the crux of it, the bad dialog. the insane plot, the wild references to greek mythology. It is all the plot of a movie created by a Porn Star and Action Star. No wonder the lines are terrible, they are supposed to be terrible. When "the hero" finally confronts the Furies he is told that he has cheated fate, he is a man who escaped his own death and now lives outside of it. This is incredibly deep for a movie that has the line "I am a Pimp, and pimps don't commit suicide" delivered with a serious face in the ensconced hideout of a political rebellion.
Then there is the Hummer Sex. Jen tells me that my face looked strange during that scene, like it was more entertaining than it should have been. I simply could not believe that someone paid money to make such a thing appear on screen.
One more thing, this is an end of the world movie; why the Repo Man moment at the end?
So did I like "Southland Tales" Yes. I loved it like I love "Prince of Darkness". Am I going to watch it again. hell yes. I have to, I'm not sure I got under the skin of it. I'm sure there is more there.
What if there is no "there" there?
Um, here is a squirrel.
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
I really should have shot this against a dark background… Oh Well!
NiteCat, NiteGirl and I hit the theater yesterday and watched “Ghost Rider”. There was a line outside, leading us to worry that we would be late for the film and that we had greatly underestimated the drawing power of “Ghost Rider”
We were wrong on two counts.
1) We got in to the actual theater in time to see the end of the Spider man 3 trailer.
2) We greatly underestimated the drawing power of “Wild Hogs”.
I could not believe the stream of Nascar driven humanity that was waiting to see “Wild Hogs”, and openly celebrating it.
Wow.
Anyway, Ghost Rider was great. It meshed the Dan Ketch and Johnny Blaze Ghost Riders into one. It was a good movie, lots of action and good special effects. NiteCat LOVED it.
Nick Cage was great as Johnny Cage (giving him a chance to be Elvis on a Motorbike without singing)
The ONLY thing I hated was that Donal Logue was killed. No love for the redhead scotsman?
Crossposted from: http://blog.nitemayr.com/2008/03/04/ghost-ride-it/
First please check out this lifehacker post on the subject… I'll wait. Did you read it or right/middle-click on it to read it later on a tab?
If you did the latter, good for you. If not, welcome back.
I've been using Picasa to manage my photos for a couple years now (well over a year and a half at least) and have gotten used to it's foiables (lack of flickr support) and it's strengths (opening pictures in a new app or even in explorer)
(Yes, I use it in my awesome XP install. I may love Linux for my servers, but I game in XP.
Here is my typical work flow:
(if I used an external app, I sometimes strip the EXIF data from the images)
Now you've learned two things:
1. How I use Picassa.
2. I actually choose what images to upload and not just random images from my camera.
Now we should do the Salmon Dance
Hmmm, I've left off another option.
On my 'rents PC and the Laptop. I use Windows Live Gallery instead of Picasa, it's better. No Joke. I've just gotten used to Picasa on my own PC.
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
We spent the Majority of the past two days watching season 5 of Buffy… we're about 6 episodes from the finale as I write this.
The picture is of my iPod which I love.
What are you going to be doing tomorrow?
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
When I was a teenager, and visiting Scotland, my friend Stuart and I dissected the remains of Industrial and postwar Scotland as it appeared around Bathgate. We dug through old paperwork in a broken farmhouse, climbed stairs that hadn't seend feet in 20 years and destroyed (through misadventure) a wall that had been built before Churchill had walked on the planet. We had our hands in the guts of living and dead history. You'd have thought I was going to be an anthropologist or archaeologist of some stripe the way I immersed myself in the past. Arms deep as it were.
We squatted in those fields and with our rough tribe of peers we listened to music and some of us got high and drunk in the remains of the British Empire. Not the grand houses or castles, but the forgotten entrails of industrial estates and disused farms.
I watched kids lose themselves in what may have been the former grounds of their Grandfather's employer. They didn't see the irony of their idle decay among the decay of their country. They faced a future of service jobs and had no idea that the only thing that they would ever produce in Britain again was culture. This was before the REAL worldwide rise of Brit Pop in the 90s. These guys are Mothers and Fathers now, last I heard Stuart was a surfer. Still exploring the reaches of the British Empire.
Now you ask yourself, what does this have to do with Music?
Well, British Music exists solely as a reflection of the Music that has come before, all Music in Britain is measured by it's predecessor. This is true in the case of "Kasabian" as it is in the case of "The Beatles". All British culture is just "how is this better than this other thing that came before", which is probably an outgrowth of the fact that the British isles are filled to the brim with the remains of the past. One can hardly walk in one direction for more than an hour without stumbling over some piece of history older than the houses on your block.
It's no wonder the kids squat in fields filled with relics, it's fairly unavoidable.
I haven't been home in over a decade, I don't know if those fields are gone or developed. I apparently left Scotland for the last time just before a huge development boom, when the people were still hard and the CCTV cameras hadn't overpopulated the towns. So I don't know how things are now, maybe they have cleaned up the Past and moved on.
It's just a story after all.
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
Yikes, it’s been nearly 14 years since Kurt Cobain died.
That’s twice as long as my youngest nephews have been alive.
That’s a long time.
I loved this song when I heard it, I’m kinda glad that it was released posthumously, as it was likely to be lost among the rest of the dust of Grunge. We might not have appreciated it as much as some of us did when it was released.
Yeah, they were right. Sucks don’t it?
I'm still trying to settle in here in London, after what seemed like forever up at my Parents and even longer back in Eugene. I have NOT slept a good night's sleep yet.
Add to that the worries of setting up in a new place and you get some poor sleep.
On a lighter note, my house is about 10-15 minutes away from most of London, which makes getting around fairly easy. I'm looking forward to the nice weather to encourage us to walk around the city more. I'm in a residential area, but we have a nice park near us an a theatre that I want to try walking to.
I've taken pictures here and there but nothing I'm too proud of. I need to get out and really work. The friend that promised to model has totally flaked and I am going to have to start looking for a model or two here in the city, That should be easy as London is home to a number institutions of higher learning. I will have to update my Model Mayhem account to reflect my new location.
I'm excited to be back on my own (relatively) but I would love to have a couch and chair along with a bed to make things a bit more comfortable.
Oh, and thanks to my 'rents for the new (kinda) computer chair, it makes things by the PC much more comfortable.
Anyone else moving/moved?
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
Freedom may not be free, but platitudes about it certainly appear to be out of place in imperatives delivered in Valentine form.
Why, on the day of hearts and flowers should we be given notes about the state of Freedom of those beings?
I dunno if my 7-year-old nephew really needs this kind of message on February 14th.
Maybe we're all just wearing the sunglasses today.
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com
