What a letdown. Boo!
Today was a miserable day, but I don't feel miserable about it.
Words and photos*
First off, I'm writing for Sketch Cram at the UCBTLA on Saturday, Feb 9, 2008.Writers start scribbling in the morning, performers come in and learn the stuff in the evening, and by the time YOU show up at midnight, we've assembled a show you'll love like a precocious niece.
Also, last week, I wandered around LA county looking for billboards and taking photos. See the fruits of this effort on the internets, and go visit Project Nightlight (the organization responsible for said billboards) if you want to.
*Photos, while still valued at 1,000 American words apiece, are now only worth an embarrassing 978 Canadian words.
If you haven't anything nice to say....
Separate thoughts:
Some websites have a space for users to leave comments on content. This is almost never a genuinely useful feature. Some blogs, maybe your slashdots or your ars technicas, they can attempt to foster a discussion of some kind. This is their purpose, they take the good with the bad, for the sake of community. Your imdbs, your youtubes, those comment sections are part of What's Wrong With the Internet.
Websites that 'take over,' (whether it's by stealing focus, or sneaky pop up triggers, or playing audio unbidden, or redirecting users to a rick astley video) are also What’s Wrong With the Internet. These aren't sites with a well-meant feature gone bad (comments), they're aggressively taunting users, flicking their ears and stealing their erasers.
I've sometimes been good at getting people mad at me without trying. I think this is because I assume things will work out great. Sometimes this occurs while trying to make friends, in events that backfire in spectacular ways.
I listen to more podcasts than I can hope to keep up with, and starting in on new shows from the beginning of their run doesn't help the situation any. I've been burning through one in particular lately, maybe more because of how it sounds than what it says. I don't learn anything, I don't think about it, it's just background chatter.
SO:
Why on earth would I write a message to a stranger and include any kind of negative comments? About anything? What good could result? In what situation does that turn out well?
...and this isn't even the first time a radio host has told me not to listen to his show.
Honest-to-goodness updating!
Mostly just little things around the site. Did some work for the fine folks of Project Nightlight this past week:
Home, and back again.
I took a trip from the LA (to the Phoenix to the Chicago) to the Cleveland to the Columbus (to the Phoenix) and back to the LA lately. On the way home, I took pictures of all the empty aeroports. I also took some pictures of joyously reuniting family members, but you can just get a copy of Love Actually if that's what you're looking for.
The things the terminals had in common were being empty, festooned with holiday decorations, and being ever-so-slightly creepy. Apparently I wasn't just flying United anymore:
And over here, the stanchions keep people from walking through the big empty space:
The most remarkable of the considerably-larger-than-I'm-showing-you-here set of empty airport photos was this. I meant to capture the frustration of being in an airport for a couple hours and able to see food and beverages, yet unable to obtain them. Instead I seem to have captured the image of a child and his dog in the midst of a great adventure.
And last is something fantastic available in Chicago's O'Hare-port. There's a little placard nearby that explains that the bones are totally fake.
While I was home, I collected a lot of heavy books and DVDs that I then hauled back across the country. I saw more family than I expected to, and some other peoples' families who were all super, super-nice to me. I spent some time with Kristy, who is my favorite, and I gave her an enigmatic Christmas present that she has not yet solved. We found a geocache together and were finally rid of a cursed (dancing) pirate DVD. I won games of scrabble with words like 'squeeze' and 'zulu' and lost games of Mario Party with spaces like 'this one means you don't have stars anymore.'
Most of all, the weeks spent back in Ohio cast into sharp relief what I'm giving up in order to be in California, making movies, or jokes, or terrible terrible video projects that nobody will ever see.