Some weeks I'm busy.

Jobs and opportunities in LA are fleeting. Here one minute, gone the next. Sometimes they move on without you, sometimes they simply cease to exist. It's a lesson you (meaning me) can learn over and over, as much as you want.

So when I tell my dad about a project, it means one of three things:

1. I've been working there for two days.
2. I'm trying sound less like a failure.
3. I have gone and made a classic error of optimism.

You work on a pilot that gets picked up, and the series doesn't hire any of the staff from the pilot? So it goes.

Offered a cool job on a studio movie, and it actually goes to the star's nephew, who has no experience in your job? That's just the nature of the business, it seems. Or the town. It's okay. In some ways, it's better, because at least you didn't lose on merit.

The contract for $20,000 worth of work dries up after $200? That sucks, but it'd be worse if you told everyone you had a big windfall coming your way.

I get repeat business from some producers, which is terrific. But when they haven't got anything for me, it's time to go out and sell. A day like today, I've emailed 3 feature films that are looking for an editor. On many of them I'll never hear anything at all, but in a given week I'll probably talk over between 1 and 5 possible new gigs with possible new clients or collaborators.

I'm not going to tell my dad about most of them. It's like sending out 'Save The Date' cards featuring a woman you saw, but didn't actually meet, on the bus. It's going to raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about her health and whereabouts.

I'm not sure that any project that has put me 'on hold' has ever come through. I don't think it's because I told my dad about them. NDAs were not involved. But when I call him up and tell him about an upcoming movie that says I've got the job and I'll be staying in a hotel in another state for two months, and then later it turns out the company that was going to pay for all that went bankrupt and didn't make any movies at all, well, those are the more memorable examples.

Put another way, I have no objection to trying and failing, but usually, I prefer to do so in private. I tried an experiment sometime last year where I applied for every job on every want-ad type site that I could possibly do (related to media production, that is), regardless of budget. By the end of the week I had met in person with producers and agreed to edit a complete feature film for free, color correct an 8 episode web series, also for free, and co-host a daily podcast about video games from an office in Santa Monica, whilst living in Burbank. Hands were shook, tentative dates were booked, and nothing was produced. And nobody had to hear anything about it.

It happens all the time. Like actors auditioning or surgeons blending horses and monkeys. It just got me again. A decisive factor in moving to my current apartment was convenience and proximity to a job that probably doesn't exist. But, y'know, I'm an optimist. Sure, the rent on such a place would be a lot more affordable with the job than without, but that's just motivation to keep looking for new gigs.

This isn't a "woe is me" kind of story. I mean, I manage to keep kinda busy. Some weeks, I'm so busy I only spend a couple of days thinking about which of a thousand tiny mistakes spelled my doom as the potential second full-time employee at Sandwich Video. Not this week, of course, but sometimes.

#1,892: Dirty Harry

Here are some recent movies, including an inadvertent trilogy of films with doubt about ghosts:

The Exorcism of Emily Rose - Pretty satisfying. Almost everything I would expect a courtroom drama about an exorcism to be, I guess. B+.
Existence of the supernatural: [UNCONFIRMED]

Hereafter - Three intertwining stories of people dealing with the possibility of a spirit world. The main thing in one of these movies is that you're just waiting for and/or trying to figure out how they'll all eventually intersect.
Existence of the supernatural: [CONFIRMED]

Red Lights - I was so excited to see this one. It's from the director of Buried, which I liked, and here's the setup: Sigourney Weaver is a James Randi-like debunker, Robert DeNiro is a world-renowned psychic, and one of them has to be wrong. Sometimes a movie sounds so great , like Time After Time, (Jack the Ripper steals a time machine, and it's up to HG Wells to stop him!) that I wonder if I should just never see it, in case it's no good. Red Lights didn't go how I might have guessed, and maybe the first half was more fun than the second half, but I still liked it.
Existence of the supernatural: [REDACTED]

Also…

This Film is Not Yet Rated and We Are Legion: The Story of Hactivists - the former is about the secretive MPAA ratings board. The most fun, if morally dubious, section is when private investigators track down the identities of the raters. The latter is primarily about the organization Anonymous), and interviews the no-long anonymous anons who were arrested and punished for the actions of the group. I'm grouping the two movies together here because in both cases, they offer a pretty decent primer to the subjects, but if you're already familiar with either one, there's not a lot of new information presented. I do remember when Anonymous' Scientology protests were taking place, so I was surprised to see the film report that thousands of people participated. Maybe they were all down on L. Ron Hubbard Way, and not at the Celebrity Centre, which is located across from the UCB Theatre. My memory of it is of maybe 6 heavy guys holding their cloaks and masks and sweating like crazy, sitting on the sidewalk. I wish I'd gotten pictures.

The Nude Vampire - This is an italian horror from the 1970s, which doesn't feature much in the way of nudity, and no vampires at all, unless the one nude girl, who doesn't appear to figure into the plot in any way, happened to be a vampire and nobody mentioned it. I'll accept that as the answer, but if so, it's not an especially apt title. It's definitely no Big Fan or Constant Gardner.
Existence of the supernatural: [CONFIRMED]

Chernobyl Diaries - This sucks. Look through the website that probably inspired the movie instead. Or don't. Go fishing. Write a poem. Do what you want.

Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal - Press Your Luck was a fun game show where your money could get taken away by little cartoons called Whammies that were drawn by "Savage" Steve Holland, director of Better Off Dead. In 1984, a guy noticed that the patterns on the board weren't random, so all you have to do to win a lot of money is learn them and not stop on a Whammy. There you go. Whole movie. You are free to go about your day, citizen.

Dirty Harry - This was great! Sometimes, you see an old movie that was groundbreaking or influential in its day, and it's boring, or trite, because it's been so thoroughly ripped off. But not this one. This was great! A clear precursor to the Die Hards and Lethal Weapons yet to come. Can't wait to see the next 4 movies in the series!

Solon City Schools Closed Tuesday

Neat. When I was there we had snow days, and exam days, a flood day caused by burst pipes, and even a bomb threat day, but never did we have Hurricane Day.

But then, I also missed out on the 2002 Veterans Day Weekend tornado outbreak that took the roof off of my middle school.

Speaking of which, it sounds like this lovely new web site is going to be taking some time off due to the server on which it is stored slowly filling with water. So… see you around sometime, I guess.

Solon Schools Closed Tuesday

The Coolest Game I Never Want to Play

I love to read about EVE Online. In particular, the exploits and adventures EVE players have devised for themselves. I like a good con man story.

The game's learning curve is infamously steep. Players can strike out on their own, mining asteroids, earning money, buying new ship parts, and fending off pirates - that is, other players who have discovered a more efficient route of earning money: killing weaker players and taking it.

Alternatively, they can form gangs, or you might say, corporations, to combine their resources and achieve economies of scale in mining, or researching, or pirating, or hiring security to run off pirates. Or banking. Or investment firms. Or mercenary guilds. And the players do. The framework is there, and players make their own games within it.

Now, when these heists go down, they don't just rob other players billions of ISK, the in-game currency, and months and years of the players' time, which is what it takes to produce the billions of ISK. ISK is also tied to real-world money, based on the exchange rate to PLEX, which are in-game items that extend a player's subscription to EVE. So, a successful player might continue playing indefinitely without having to pay his subscription fees. He might buy PLEX with ISK. And then load PLEX into his ship. And then have that ship blown up. And then the company that makes EVE laughs and laughs.

Imagine: You've been collecting cans on the street, taking them into the recycling center for a few cents apiece. Eventually, you've got a whole mess of coins, so you take them to the coinstar machine. You ask the machine to convert your coins into a gift card for the supermarket where the coinstar is, so that you can buy food. You use the food to sustain your existing subscription to being alive. But then you are mugged! And the mugger takes all your gift cards for food, and runs them through an industrial strength shredder that he carries for exactly this purpose. And the grocery store that issued those gift cards laughs and laughs.

Recently, pirates scored a possibly record-breaking kill of a careless pilot, destroying enough property to have let the owner keep playing for free for ~30 years. Now, that's exciting, but I call it less exciting than than a group running an enormous Ponzi scheme, or a single guy that opens a bank and then decides one day to wander off with all the deposits.

Of course some players and corporations establish elaborate security plans to prevent this sort of abuse. Here's the business plan and security detail of a company called Titans4U. And here's the forum thread that contains a) people reacting to the news that the Titans4U CEO had just circumvented all the security described above and stolen everything, and b) the Titans4U CEO gloating about his caper.

These events are among the most notorious in EVE history. In part because of the huge financial windfalls, but also because of the boldness of the players in these events. Some people pay their monthly subscription to this Massively Mulitplayer Online game to essentially work a second job, devoting dozens of hours per week to running fictional businesses. And others pay their dues and play for months, accumulating the good will and reputation it takes to defraud them.

The king of EVE heists is still one of the earliest. It didn't rake in the ISK like its successors would, but the story of it must be the tale that launched a thousand software-executables-that-turn-out-to-be-mainly-screens-full-of-menus-and-spreadsheets. Bad Bobby, the aforementioned CEO of Titans4U, would call the Guiding Hand Social Club "pioneers."

The club was contracted by one corporation to take down a rival. Guiding Hand members thoroughly infiltrated their target, with members taking jobs at various levels throughout the company, including as the CEO's personal bodyguard. Battles were staged and rigged to make the undercover agents look like heroes, earning them the relatively fast-tracked promotions they'd need to gain positions of power in the organization. The preparation took months. And then one day the order came down, and the sleeper agents woke up and took everything. Hangars emptied, assets seized, CEO ambushed, and her corpse delivered as a trophy to the client.

There have been EVE tie-in novels. I don't know what they're about, but I like to think they're the stories of miners methodically stripping asteroids of ore, or people slowly and carefully copying sets of blueprints over a period of weeks. They ought to be about the adventures of the Guiding Hand Social Club.

I originally read about GHSC in an issue of PC Gamer in 2005. Read the scans of the original article, if you dare!

Humans must be shoved! Shove Pro is the answer!

“You know how in an action movie foot chase, the guy being chased will go to unnecessary lengths to shove any extras who are even remotely in his way?

We made a game about that.”

— shovepro.com

Can't wait!

...actually, it'd be fine all they made was this video. The gameplay sections don't look so hot. But it's an excellent idea!