New Dwellings, Online and Off

After three years, I've moved back out of Burbank and into the city of Los Angeles.  The house where I was renting was a money-losing operation for the owner, and he decided to sell.  I thought that I would be safe from eviction, since the owner only referred to me as "the other one" when announcing his decision.  It's pretty tough to serve papers to "the other one."  But then the day came when he called up one of the roommates to ask what my name was, and one day later, boom! NOTICE TO MOVE OUT.

So I did.  I'd been looking forward to it, even planning and counting on it, sometime this year.

The last time I moved, I was Improving My LA Experience, and it was the keystone in that project.  The general quality of LA-livin' has been better since then, but I haven't spent much time actively improving it, either.  So maybe that's something to do.

What I do know is that I seem to have, in the past, made a habit of using a move and fresh start to make as many other changes at once as well.  Not in a new year's resolution-y way, but in a hopping-in-to-the-pool way:  I'm about to have to adapt and adjust, so I might as well do all of that at once.

What I'm trying to say here is that I'm going to do a new web thing for a little while.  I've decided to take www.normalwebsite.com away from Leopold the robot, because it's a pretty great domain name, and it lets me try new things without blowing up my old site, to which I will be able to retreat in the event of catastrophe.

There are old posts here that I'm proud of, and others that seem embarrassing, and I'm reluctant to mention either since I am not trying to encourage you to look through the archives.  I'm encouraging you to check out the new thing, and I hope the few regular readers I had there will join me over here.

504

Here's a short documentary about Los Angeles comedian Joseph Patrick Larkin.

I have Joseph's first two comedy albums and his book, and he's been gracious enough to let me produce shows of my own in some of the clubs he owns.

The Transit

Something like seven years ago, I heard the story of Le Gentil and thought it would be fun to do in a Reading Rainbow style. We could do a whole series of cartoons about people who lost in a big way while doing Science.

Later on, I made friends with some people who were pretty well equipped to make it happen. And it did!

Also, this year, a Transit of Venus actually happened, so it was nicely timed.

#1,820: The House on Skull Mountain

Sometimes old posts get stuck in draft form because they need more thought and revision.  I have no idea why capsule movie reviews don't get published.  These seem to be from December 2011.

-Hugo - Great 3D, and identifiably Scorsese, from the first shot, a long tracking through the station. Weird script though; characters exclaiming stuff in the same room instead of listening or talking to each other. Also, hints of a hated trope: Can't Spit It Out.  That is, if one character would just speak up when they're a) in trouble and b) in no danger as a result of just using their words, so much trouble could be avoided, and so easily.

- J. Edgar - A perfectly good telling of the story of J. Edgar Hoover.  If you've ever seen or read anything about him before, you've probably got the story down already.  Saw it in the theater with a bunch of chatty audience.  But they were a few guys in their 60s, so nobody had anything to say to them.

- The Lie - This seems like something that would be sold as a drama, but actually: pretty funny. Dark, and funny. Jess Weixler is great. Especially her reaction to her husband's terrible rock song.

- Real Life - Albert Brooks on reality TV.  Really good. I love the nonsense presented as good science and sociology.

And of course:

- The House on Skull Mountain - a mostly black  version of Dark and Stormy Night, or any other meeting for the reading of will in a spooky old house.  Above all else, this was a movie that lives right on up to its title:

This is the very next shot:

Monkeying with the blog

Spent the evening trying to make the blog look a little better.  Preparing a theme all on my own isn't something I wanted to do, so there's a struggle to find a theme that looks okay and is maybe kind of obscure enough to look original.  A lot of the stuff that popped up early in the googles is just awful.  I don't want a big billboard for the theme designing company with a little square for my words. There's a thing where you play with a mass market tool / toy for a while, like Garageband, and then you've heard all the good loops, so you notice them in things other people make.  And now I see where a lot of the site designs for dreadful SEO-gobbling linkbait sites come from.

Anyhow, I found something that looked okay, and ended up digging around in the code for a few hours anyway to make it a negative version of the main site, snip out some broken javascript, and to add some rules to fix the links in the sidebar here. The Tron Legacy soundtrack made this feel like a much more sophisticated project than it was.

The google reader box is gone, since it's dead.  There's a new page with accurate information on ordering a copy of The Dialysis, in case anyone's been in need of an update to the 2004 info page.  It contains the forbidden secrets and unstoppable techniques of our ISBN!

Also, if all goes according to plan, posts found here at http://notArt.org/log will now be duplicated over at http://notArtist.tumblr.com for people who like to tumblr.

If you actually look at the site on the site and have a suggestion, let me know.  I don't think I'm quite finished, but apparently it was time to change things up.