Quiche of the Day

2002-04-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

well, I just spent the whole evening playing Mega Man 7 on my computer instead of writing or doing something productive. I guess I'm kind of justified since I wasted very little time with anything for the past week or so. Plus, there's a Jurassic Park level!! I was gonna update some of the movie stuff on the website, but that would have taken up way too much time, since I basically haven't touched it since December I think. A new site is in order. I'll do what I can.

2002-04-04T01:16:00.000-08:00

I'm a slacker. Fine. I'm in the process of dealing with that. In the mean-time, here are some pictures!

Note to my parents: it was coercion! My hair looks normal again now, I swear.

2002-03-18T23:53:00.000-08:00

My life has become screenplays. Today I read one about a married couple living in a lighthouse during the Cuban Revolution of 1959 today, wrote one about frantic teenage hi-jinx in a video arcade today and began brainstorming one that may or may not be about a road-trip gone terribly wrong. Don't get me wrong -- it's a lot of fun, and pretty rewarding, but really rather taxing, especially since I force myself to do something new and challenging every single time. I'm actually getting some pretty good stuff, and am finding out that I have more stories in me than I thought. You know how they say that if you wanna be a writer, you've gotta write? Hey, it's true! School's great, because it really forces me to be creative and keep pumping these things out like a screenwritin' machine (of love!) I hope that I'll be able to keep doing this even when I don't have prompts and deadlines. Anyway, that's why I haven't updated for a week -- I've had to be writing constantly for class. Webpages = extracurricular! When I get a bit of free time I'm gonna put some of my screenwriting exercises up on the web so I can feedback and whatnot.
Ok, and speaking of movies, guess who hates the "Academy" these days? Oh! oh! I know, it's Aaron! No best picture, actor or director noms for Memento? Only screenplay for Royal Tennenbaums? Who picks these things? Seriously. Worst crime, though: no mention of Waking Life anywhere, which so should have been natch for best animated feature! Jimmy Neutron gets a nom instead? That movie looks like a friggin' Playstation game! Anyway, lament the snubbing of Waking Life by going to the movie's sweet-ace website. If you haven't seen it, it'll make you want to.
Additionally, I'm coming home for spring break on Friday!! If'n any of you d-town (shudder) kids reading this are gonna be in town too, drop me a lizine. Word.

2002-03-11T00:14:00.000-08:00

Look, I don't care what the commercials tell me. No matter how big my plans for this weekend are, I am certian that my period isn't going to "ride along." I'd really like to be able to watch cartoons without corporate intrests telling me that I'm a woman. Seriously. It shouldn't be that hard, but there it is. It's just one more sign of how corrupt and materialistic our society has become. Oh well.
Grant and I actually got to Aikido class a little earlier than usual last week, so we got better spots in front of the Dojo Mirrors. I usually wear clothes that are a lot baggier than the outfits we have for that class, and I don't often get to see myself in a full body mirror, so it was the first time I've really gotten a good look at what my body looks like. Here is what my body looked like: a stick wearing a martial arts uniform. Thinnest guy in class: me. Now I can become a super model I guess. No wait! I have to remember that I'm not a girl! Stupid TV!
I also weighted myself today on a scale at the thrift store (they had a lot of them) and found that I weight a whopping 125 pounds (or around there). If you're supposed to gain the "freshman fifteen" pounds at college and I lots 10, does that mean I gained the freshman -25? I sure hope so!
I had a hamburger for the first time in a while today, and it made me fell kind of sick. I don't know if it was because it was cooked wrong, or if it's because school has taught me that beef is the worst possible thing to put into your mouth except for most things that aren't food. I dunno, can guilt affect your tummy? I sure hope not. That would mean I'd have to stop eatting other people's food without asking first. Well, only if it makes me feel guilty, I guess.
Ok, that's all for tonight. I promise that's the last time I talk about my body for a long, long time.

2002-03-10T01:23:00.000-08:00

Today is my sister's birthday! Or actually, I guess yesterday was my sister's birthday, since it's not today any more. Stupid time doesn't make any sense. Days end when you go to sleep! duh! For whatever it's worth, as of right now I've had a little sister (who will very shortly yell at me for calling her little) for 17 years and a couple of hours and some additional minutes. How cool is that? Cooler for her, because she's in France right now eatting crouisants and bagettes and chevrolettes, all of which are French. And I am in Orange County eatting Hershey's Kisses and water, neither of which they have in France. There is no water, so everyone has to just drink wine, which they have a lot of there. It's not illegal for little kids to drink it, because that's all they have. It's probably illegal for them to drink water, come to think of it. Anyway so everyone in France drinks wine all the time, so they are always drunk, and that's why they talk funny and forget to shave their legs.
To make a long story short, I am glad I have a sister, even if she's in another country wearing a "beret," which is the french word for "it looks like a beanbag that you wear on your head."
For Christmas I got my sister some comic books about a fashionable girl superhero called . . . well, see if you can guess it (trust me, you can!).For her birthday I got her . . . I'm not telling. I'm told that they have The Internet in France, too, and I don't want to spoil it!

2002-03-05T00:40:00.000-08:00

I cannot leave any kind of food-related material in my garbage can any more. Here's the equation for trouble: Aaron likes eatting food in his room. Ants like eatting food in Aaron's trashcan. Aaron does not like ants. Ants say "too bad, suck it up, loser!" Aaron says "eat watery death!" and washes them all out in the shower (no room for garbage cans in the sink). But not before he films them! Here's some tasty screenshots from my new movie Ants in My Garbage Can (not really my new movie), which I filmed over a month ago. It's really not the same without being able to see them scurry around, but I can't figure out how to upload video yet. Oh well. Bask in the glory of fuzzy black spots!

That last one's Grant. You could say he's a grrrrrrrrrrr-ant! Hoo boy! I swear I am too funny for this earth. Bedtime.

2002-03-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

Too much stuff since my last update to recap everything and remain coherent. Fortunatly, God gave us lists.

Famous film stuff I've done:
*Kicked it with some of the world's leading cinematographers and a whole lot of other film students at the American Society of Cinematographers' annual open house. They had no punch, no cookies, and had run out of name tags by the time we got there, so no one knew who I was. That's ok, though, because I didn't really know who most of the world's leading cinematographers were, either. I mean, sure I knew about Laszlo Kovacs (of Miss Congeniality Fame!), and I'd heard of Conrad Hall, but I didn't bring my Cinematographer flashcards, nor had I been studying them, so I didn't really have much of a clue. However, I did get to chat with Ameile cinematographer Bruno Debonnel, who's up for an Academy Award, and listen to Pearl Harbor cinematographer John Shwartzman talk about his dog. Also ran into the guy who films Barry Sonnefield's stuff, who spent most of his time walking around (without a name tag!) looking a little dim, while telling us that he didn't work on movies like Orange County, which he did work on, and saying he really didn't feel like answering any questions. All in all it was pretty cool, though I wish I'd studied up a bit more before going and gotten a name tag. Next year!
*Chowed down with semi-legendary director John Badham and possibly up-and-coming director DJ Caruso. Thanks to Chapman, us college kids have that kind of thing to sigh up for at least once a week. John Badham's the filmmaker-in-residence this semester, and the film school uses these weekly dinners opportunity to turn as many industry pros onto our side as possible. It was also cool to listen to the pros talk about their experiences and stuff in an informal setting, and also the food was good. They even offered me wine! ha! (I turned it down, though)
*Took a two hour bus ride up to Warner Bros. studios to see the taping of a pilot episode of a new sitcom staring Sandra Bullock (of Miss Congeniality fame!), only to find out that they had over-booked, and we were the books that got shut-out. Instead of free food and fun times, we had to stop at a grocery store and then take the bus back to the school without so much as a glace at Ms. Bullock. Oh well. I guess that's what they call in french "la vie."
*Found out that my screenwriting prof. was taught by the likes of Milos freaking Forman! If that means nothing to you . . . you're not as much of a film geek as I am, because I freaked out.

Movies I've seen lately (go to IMDB for links, I'm lazy):
*Count of Monte Cristo - It's got pirates, sword fights and jail breaks, et al . . . it would have taken a lot for me to not like this movie. Thanks to the Classics Illustrated adaption that my dad bought for me many moons ago I knew most of what was going to happen, but the movie still managed to keep me in suspence most of the time. This is the kind of movie everyone tells you Hollywood used to make -- pretty straightforward, but well-crafted and relatively nuanced. Plus the sword fights are the most sword-sy fights I think I've ever seen. Neat!
*Seven - Can David Fincher be my new favorite director? Fight Club was good, but this movie proved that he can handle stuff withoug the cruch of "unconventional narrative structure" just as well, if not better. Something about the ending didn't quite work for me, but the rest was great, and oh-so-noir. Can't wait for Panic Room.
*SubUrbia - It's got more of a plot than the other two movies I've seen by Richard Linklater, but it's still a lot of young people doing a lot of talking and not much else, so it wasn't too much of a departure. What's interesting, though is that while all of Linklater's films I've seen (this, Slacker and Waking Life) have similar elements, they're all unique unto themselves -- each movie has a distinct theme, tone and structure. When you've got that, who needs a story?

What I'm doing now
*Running out of interesting things to say.
*About to go to bed.
*Hoping to update again soon, and more frequently.
*Wondering where this page has been all my life.

2002-02-24T02:37:00.000-08:00

I woke up Thursday nearly out of clean clothes, desperatly needing to clip my fingernails and with no knowledge of how either happened. My hectic, no-time-for-fingernails week really started on Sunday and was over by Wednesday, but it seemed oh-so-much longer. I met a number of semi-famous people, finished a bunch of projects and basically kicked it like the cool kat I am. From that point on I didn't have quite as much to do, but I still kept busy (mostly trying to get my laundry done). Hey, hows about I tell y'all tomorrow? It seems far too late to recount the harrowing adventures of this lone desperado. And this lone desperado needs his lone desersleep.

2002-02-16T00:14:00.000-08:00

Now that Valentine's Day has safely passed, I don't have to listen to my roommates Ed and Grant complain about what a stupid holiday it is. However, thanks to The Marvels of The Internet, you still have the opportunity! Grant seems to think that love = fast food. What kind of anti-corporate revolutionay is he? A poor one, I guess. Poor in the monetary sense (cents! ha!), that is. If you wanna continue feeling bad about food joints, go here, here or even here! If you want to continue in blissful, complacent ignorance . . . don't, I guess.
News flash! Sleep is bad for you! College kids rejoice thanks to science! Technology rules!
Comics also rule. I imagine that the Alternative Press Expo held last weekend did quite a bit of ruling. I dunno. I didn't go. I should have. Oh well. Good news is that it's only three and a half months until FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!! Just so you know. Right now only the big publishers have got info up on the free comic book day website, but oni press is also gonna have free books avaliable then, and hopefully other alt-publishers will, too. Just so you know. You really don't have an excuse not to go.
Seems like I really had something else to talk about tonight. Hmm. Guess we'll never know. Everyone here is obsessed with that hi-tech Tony Hawk game, but I likes my gaming old-school or not at all. Good for me, since I've got a screen play to read, a novel to finish, and a text book to slog through this weekend. Glad those guys found out that stuff about sleep.

2002-02-10T01:04:00.000-08:00

Thursday nite I went to a preview showing of Interstate 60, a new movie written and directed by Bob Gale, who co-wrote the Back to the Future movies (and apperently just finished a stint writing Daredevil for Marvel Comics!). It was a decent film. Used up all its cuss words in the first 15 minutes (in a Micheal J. Fox cameo, no less!), so it's certianly getting either an R rating or the razor blade, but other than that it played mostly like a PG movie. Here's the tasty, high concept plot: college kid with basically no real character flaws doesn't know what to do with life so he embarks on bizzare, episodic road-trip down a mystical highway. Here's a shorter descrption of it: fluff. Took me a while to warm up to that idea, but once I did, the movie ended up being pretty funny and kept me watching. It was too straight-forward and good-natured to be made by anyone under 35, though.
Yee Olde Santa Anna winds are blowing like nobody's business today. I can actually see my my reflection plusating and bending in the windows next to my desk as the wind slams into them. Not a comforting image. Today's the kind of day they invented capes for. If only I had one.
Saturday night rocks my room esta noche. Got some new comix (Bone, Allison Dare, BPRD and Akiko for you folks playing along at home), watched some Jackie Chan (Police Story 2) and ate cheesecake (chocolate with whipped cream). Grant bought a copy of that Tony Hawk game (number 3) that all the kiddies crave, so you know that saw some serious console action. Good times. Great oldies.
I'm gonna try to keep the updates rollin' out here reguarly for a while. If you sign my guestbook, I'm sure I'll feel better about it.

2002-02-05T01:15:00.000-08:00

Went to open mic nite at the local coffee shoppe tonight. Had a pretty good, culturally-enriching time. One guy sang covers, but everyone else played their own (mostly emo-punk) stuff. And there was an accordion, which was played by the only girl performer there! There was also a one drink minimum, but no one played that. I didn't have any money to get something hot, so I picked me up a root beer in one of those fancy brown bottles. As a result I ended up walking back to the dorm afterward with what was very obviously a bottle of beer, though its "root" content may not have been obvious to the casual viewer. I felt oh-so-college. Or maybe oh-so-high-school? I don't know. I never really went to those parties. When I come back home, everyone else has wacky "and there were these guys who were sooo drunk" stories to share, but poor Aaron on the Substance Free Floor just gets to say "I don't go to those parties." Maybe I should. I feel like I'm missing out. I really have no desire to drink (my parents, reading this breath a sigh of relief), but it seems like I should at least get to laugh at some other people getting drunk. I mean, everyone else is doing it . . .
I'm reading The Poisonwood Bible, which is the longest, non-comic, non-text book I've read in months I think. Sad, but not cry your eye out sad, fortunately. I really like it and say "yay books!" but most of the other kids in my class are like, "eh, book." I'm such a dork. I actually like doing work, I think. I really thought I got a lot out of the big old honors science class which apparently everyone hated. But then again, it's a lot easier to say you hate something than you thought it was cool, so maybe just a few, really loud people hated it (true), and everyone else thought it was ok but kept quiet (probably false). Oh well; so I'm a dork. I mean, I just used a semicolon in that last sentence; for crying out loud! Here's further proof: in my editing class today the prof. was explaining how we could back up our projects on tinny little floppy disks, and then the system could use that little bit of data to reassemble all of our huge audio, video, etc. files on a different computer! Our of the blue, and I swear I was not even trying to be a smart aleck about this, I exclaimed, "Just like DNA!" Well slap some glasses on me and call me Poindexter; I totally thought that was the coolest, most obvious analogy ever, and wondered why the professor hadn't thought of it himself. I found out why when the whole classroom went silent. My lame attempt to regain some non-nerd like dignity was, "Well, you know, 'cause it's like the building block for the project?" I think all my brain's resources were too busy trying to figure out why I had brought up DNA in the first place to be able to access any useful social skills. I mean, I can go days, weeks even without even thinking about cellular biology! I'm sure I'd be a better person if I did, but, well, it's just seems so square!
Roommate update:
If Grant's page has been updated in the last couple of days, send him an e-mail and tell him to go to bed instead of updating. He's doing post-production for Blue Me, and suddenly I think he regrets laughing at me for when I had to get up at four in the morning to film it. Because now he's coming home at four in the morning from trying to make our DNA-like editing system just do something right. That's what he gets for having no problems editing his visual storytelling projects while I was coming back from editing at the same time normal people are having breakfast. Aside from our Aikido class, I think I've seen him for less than one hour total in the last four days. Feel his pain. I know I do.
And after you've done that, go feel Ed's page. He promises me that it's updated. I know he's been yelling things like "no! why won't you work!" pretty constantly the last few days. He reassured me that it wasn't me he was mad at, so I guess it must have been his computer. They seem to have squared things up now, though, so go take a look!
Christina will yell at me if I don't mention her.

2002-02-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

The other day in class my editing professor reminded us to always back-up our work, no matter how good our system was, because "computers screw. That's what they do." Well, they do other things, too. Different computers can do different things, but they all have one unfortunate thing in common: they all are really good at screwing up. I was typing on my usually stable lap-top not five minutes ago, when out of no-where my computer mysteriously crashes and I lose all my work. Why? I don't know. Maybe I hit the stupid key. All I know is that I really want to hit something, that's for sure.
I also want to go to bed. So, while I can assure you that I had an insightful and rather witty entry ready to post tonight, you're never going to get to see it. Neither am I. But if you could see it, it would look like a more insightful, wittier version of this:
Usually comic books aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the biggest disaster to strike the U.S. in recent memory. Or maybe they are. I don't know. If you can tell me why they are the first thing that comes to mind (in 300 words or less!), and convince me that you're right, I'll send you one of my prized vinyl albums from 1977. This is not the kind of thing I offer lightly.
Now that that's out of the way, it's story time!
Last Sunday I made my bi-monthly-or-so visit to the comic book store, and picked up, among other things, a copy of "September 11th 2001: Artists Respond," the latest in a number of 9-11 tribute/benefit books put out by a number of different publishers. I hadn't really bothered to look at any of the pervious books dealing with the subject, I guess because I figured they'd be an over-wrought, one-note kind of deal. You know, like the news. Hey, sometimes I like it when I'm wrong. Artists Respond is a collection of 1 - 4 page pieces all written and drawn by more comic book creators than I care to count, and turned out to be filled with genuine intelligence, emotion, and craftsmanship. The varied perspectives and styles of storytelling were refreshing and gave the book a thoughtful feeling to it. As someone who kind of shut out the whole big deal after a few weeks, I found this collection of comics to be helpful and achingly relevant. Really, you owe it to yourself to check this, or one of the other tribute books out. All the proceeds to go help those affected by the attack, so you really don’t have an excuse.

2002-01-28T23:41:00.000-08:00

There are people in our room discussing the movie Meet Joe Dirt and laughing hysterically while repeating the film's best jokes. ALL of which had to do with poop. No, that's an exageration; one of them was about incest! Ha ha ha. That stuff gets me every time.
"You guys should seriously rent that on DVD and tell me so I can watch it, too!"
"Yeah! Why don't you want to watch it, Aaron? I mean, from the trailer I thought it was going to be stupid, too, but it turned out to be --"
The film snob in me can't take any more. All of a sudden, I seriously can't stop laughing:
"Wait, wait wait! Then you found out it had poop jokes and you decided it wasn't stupid right?"
No one else thinks that's very funny.

2002-01-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow my second semester of college gets its official start. After a whole month of doing basically nothing except working on other people's films and carrying out my dark, bloody vengence against the ants that made the mistake of crossing my path one times too many, returning to a structured life of peace sounds rather refreshing. I'm ready for it as long as the ants are.
Things are getting pretty bad on that front (and by "that front" I mean "the ant invastion of our room front". Last night I dreamed that all the ants divided into teams and had a great big battle in our sink. They had little spears, flags with clan crests on them and little sculpted bettles for good luck. The first thing I thought was, "wow, that A Bugs Life movie was a lot more realistic than I thought at first." Then when I woke up I wasn't sure if it really happened or not. Yeah. Too bad I'm not taking a sanity class next semester. I think I could use it.
Everyone's back in the dorms now, too. Ed and Christina have triumphantly returned, which we all get to hang out and listen to pirated music and throw stuff at each other every night. Observe!

Ed

Me:

Christina:

Grant:

Grant's jar of peanuts:

Saw that wacky Brotherhood of the Wolf flick last night. The guys on the poster looked like ninjas in leather trenchcoats and three-corned hats, plus the whole poster oozed gothic, colonial ninja style, so there was no way I was gonna miss the movie. Unfortunatly, the ninja quotiant was a little low for my taste -- the guys only looked like ninjas for about five minutes, the kung-fu was decent, but was cut together in an obtrusive style that failed as often as it worked (which is a pretty good ratio, actually), and there was one pretty good ninja-esque sneaking around scene. Of course, I like my movies to have more ninja action than most people, so I guess for a non-ninja, non-hong kong movie it was ok. The monster parts of the movie were a lot cooler than the kung-fu parts, but in the end there just weren't enough of them. If I had a monster that was as original, scary and straight up cool as the one in this movie I wouldn't simply forget about it, but I guess the french think it's cool. Instead we got a Desperado-style vengence showdown culminating in an over the top sword fight between two guys with shoulder-length hair that looked like every piece of non-pokemon anime I've ever seen. Overall, it was an enjoyable film, and the cinematography was amazing, but time I would think "ok, now we're settling into a groove," the plot, genre and themes would shift direction again. There were about three really cool films in there, but we didn't get to see any of them and just got a really long, semi-cool movie instead. Still worth my money I guess.
See what I got up at unspeakable hours of the morning for here!
Thrill to the wonders of my guest book!
Eat some cake and call it a night!

2002-01-24T21:35:00.000-08:00

Being a sound recordist for a movie without dialouge is not the most exciting way to spend a day, but it's what I've gotten to wake up for at 4 AM for last week, and what I get to wake up at 6 AM for this week. Wahoo. Working at CBS studios was ok, because once we finished up with sound work, we were able to go home and sleep. However, for the three days that we're shooting at Chapman, there are important professors that everyone hates running around and telling all the student filmmakers how to do stuff. Which means that even if recording sound would actually be detrimental to the whole shooting process, we still have to stand alert and be ready to look like we're doing something in case a prof comes in to check on us. Today I recorded one scene with sound. I still spent ten hours on the set. This is why my web page doesn't get updated that often. I've got a bunch of stuff to upload, honest I do! I've just got to find the time to sit down and do it. I'm still brainstorming ways to make this whole outfit more interesting and useful. Currently it is time for me to go to bed so that I don't fall half-way asleep while I'm busy not doing anything tomorrow. More later!

2002-01-19T19:34:00.000-08:00

My day today began at four in the morning. I'm working on another film set, and that means lots of long days and getting up before much of the college world has even gone to bed. We're actually filming on the New York City backlot at CBS studios, which in not particuarly impressive at five AM, mostly because you can't really see any of it. By the time the sun comes up, however, it's a kind of crazy place to be. Excpet for the fact that all the stores and houses end with a painted backdrop about ten feet into them, the whole illusion holds up pretty well. The fake brick looks like real brick, and the stores actually look like their real-life counter parts excpet for the whole backdrop thing. There were some distinctly New York shops I'd never heard of before, too. Chock Full o' Nut, anyone? Yeah, I guess it's really a coffee chain. Hmm, go figure. It was freezing for the bulk of the time we were filming, which seemed rather bizzare, until I remembered that although we were in Southern California, it was indeed the middle of January. The shoot went pretty well, and I held my boom mic with all the skill and conviction I had in me. Us sound guys (all two of us) got out a bit early since we weren't needed for the last couple of shots, but it still took us an hour and a half to drive home (triple the ammount of time it took us to get there), and I was still trying not to fall asleep in the car (fortunatly, I was not driving). I went to bed immediatly after getting back to the dorm room, which was completely deserted, Grant having gone to go kick it with his brother, and Ed having returned to the mountians to get his snowboarding on. When I woke up the clock said six, and I thought about that for a while. Finally, I panicked, realizing that I had slept through my four AM call time for Sunday. I jumped out of bed and started calling myself names and trying to figure out how I'd deal with this stupid miscalculation, before it dawned on me that dawn in fact was not due for another twelve hours, and the most pressing issue I had to deal with was finding something to eat. No one was around to laugh about it with, and I stumbled down to the cafeteria, pillow creases still fresh on my face. When I got back, ants had discovered my dirty dishes from the last couple of days, but I resolved to deal with them later.
I finished my food, cleaned everything off the plates on the floor, and wrote this webpage update (technically, I'm still writing it). Now I'm ready to sleep again. If you've got the time, please send me an e-mail or sign my guestbook, so that I'll have something to read before I pass out again tomorrow. Here, now imagine that I just wrote something funny. I'm too tired to do it myself.

2002-01-18T00:59:00.000-08:00

Just typed out entry. Computer crashed. Stupid entry didn't get stupid posted. Aaron too sleepy to try to do the whole thing over again tonight. Fresher, juicier entry tomorrow. Until then, please enjoy the moist hospitality of my band-new guestbook! If you don't sign it, you'll only be hurting yourself.

2002-01-14T02:11:00.000-08:00

Here's what I'm up to these days:
One week ago was my birthday! woo! Since it was Sunday, the mail did not go through, so none of the birthday packages my family sent would arrive for another day, and I wouldn't be able to pick them up for another two days. However, it was my last day in a while to sleep in, so I happily took advantage of that fact. Grant stuck a birthday candle in my stale piece of cake from the cafeteria and I watched the director's cut of Almost Famous. All in all, it was a very decent birthday.
Monday was the first day of shooting for "The Trouble with Treefrogs," a senior thesis film that my RA Chris roped me into crewing for. It was my first time ever working with actual film instead of video, my first time working with a decent-sized crew, many of whom had more experience than myself, and the first time I had to wake up before seven in a long, long time. Grant decided that he didn't want to get up that early and work on the movie, so he stayed back at the dorms and did the same thing I would have done in his postion: nothing (more or less). I was glad to be occupied and learning stuff.
Everyday of the shoot was about twelve hours of work, and three hours of eatting and relaxing once I got back home, then hopefully about eight hours of sleep before I got to get up and do it all over again. The shoot wrapped on Friday and since then I haven't had too much to do, which was nice yesterday, but is kind of getting old now. Tomorrow I think I will ban myself from using the computer so that I'll have to do something if not productive, then at least different.

What I'm reading:
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons -- the classic 1985 superhero tale that apparently was a major turning point in the industry. I wasn't really paying attention to the industry at that point in time, but the word on the street is that it was quite revolutionary. One thing is certian -- it's really long. There's so much depth in the book, and it's taken me so long to get through all twelve chapters that I'm reluctant to call it a "comic book" simply because it doesn't fit in with the quick and dirty style of storytelling that term conjures up. Watchmen's dark tone and its unique, revisionist approach to "costumed heros" makes it noteworthy, but what really intrigues me is the way Moore and Gibbons use the medium to create revealing and sometimes disturbing juxtapostions. Sometimes the technique feels a little overused and predicatble, but it's unique enough and yeilds enough surprising and rewarding moments to make it worthwhile.

Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh -- Soderbergh wrote this book while he was working his way out of a creative and critical slump. I've not made it very far, but it's next on my list after Watchmen. I'm hoping for something as personal and insightful as Robert Rodregiuez's Rebel Without a Crew.

What I'm watching:
Adult Swim -- Wacky, absurdist Space Ghost and stylish noir Cowboy Beebop. The only thing I ever watch on TV, and each time I sit through the commercials, I remember whyh.

Movies I've seen:
Impostor -- There's a reason you haven't heard of this just-released sci-fi based on a story by Philip K. Dick: it sucks. There's enough good stuff in it to fill a 25 minute short film, but the rest of it is just fluffy, repetative chase scenes and jumpy, repetative editing. Fortunatly, after watching this, Grant and I snuck into . . .

The Royal Tennenbaums -- A meticulously crafted comedy that somehow makes funny moments seem sad and sad moments seen funny. The most wholly realized movie I've seen probably since Memento.

What I'm listening to:
Pinkerton by Weezer -- Sure, the poppier, more radio friendly self-titled albums are good, but the true hard-core Weezer fan knows that this melleoncholly, angst-fueled record is their strongest. Anyway, that's what everyone tells me. I like it, so do I get to be hard-core too?

Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five and Rockin' The Suburbs by Ben Folds -- Both feature some of the best use of swearing I've heard on an optical disk, or any other kind of disk for that matter.

Barenaked Ladies Greatest Hits -- This is how I like my pop music -- catchy and frequently funny. I've got problems with the very idea of "Greatest Hits" CDs, but this album makes me forget them because I could leave it in my stereo all day and I don't think anyone would mind.

Where I've done:
This comes out of a page in my illustrated journal. It's me feeling overwhelmed at John Wayne airport on New Year's Eve, trying to figure out how to get back to the dorms. It looks like a rabbit. Grant bought a scanner, but it doesn't work on his computer, so I inherited it. It doesn't fare too much better on my computer, but it gets the job done. I scanned in the picture, then inked and colored it with Photoshop. I think I actually like the black and white version better.

I didn't make this, but it's the only sound effect I brought in from an outside source while cutting together a trailer for "The Untitled Drug Movie," the last film I worked on in Dallas. Tryinging to put a trailer together from the finished movie made me aware of just how differently I would have shot it if I had to do it now. That's good, right? It means I'm learning. Anyway, for some reason I can't seem to upload the trailer to The Internet, so that sound effect is all you kids get for now.

What I hate:
Cars. I want to start and anti-car club. Seriously!

2002-01-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

Tonight Grant and I went to Borders books instead of getting dinner at the cafeteria. As a result, we're having to scavage for food around the dorm room since we are too lazy and cheap to spend money somewhere that would make us pay. My evening meal in composed of Kraft Easy Mac (which is about the most complete meal you can get for 60 cents), which I'm eatting out of a tuperwear container my mom sent me cookies in since we don't have any bowls, a piece of bread slathered in peanut butter, and one tasty glass of water. The macaronni is going cold, but I don't realluy mind; at least this time I got the cheese sauce to boiling water ratio about right, so it doesn't taste like soup for a, change. I think I'll have a Lifesaver for dessert.
I'm not very happy with this website these days. I'll probably get really bored one of these days and revamp the whole thing. Or maybe not. The Internet itself doesn't seem to house all that much to keep me interested. I was reading about the latest MegaMan game that I will never play earlier tonight because at some point I'd bookmarked a MegaMan fansite and it was the only page in my bookmark list that sounded like it could keep my interest. Now that I've been there I don't have any reason to go back for about a month. That's good I guess. I haven't reached the stage of bordom where I just type in urls like www.pirateship.com, www.ninjas.com, www.icecream.com, www.ninja.com, www.funisland.com, or www.ninjas.net, and finally get disapointed enough to quit the whole business all together. Actually, apparently I have since I went and looked at all those sites (the fun island one is highly recommended).
Also, I went back and read some of the reviews I had up in the comix section. Boy, that was a mistake! Not reading them, mind you, but writing them! Please don't go check it out for yourself because a) there's not much there to see, and b) it's crap. Just when you think you've become a decent writer, there's always something like that to laugh in your face. And to think that I was actually proud of that Ghost World review. *shudder* Reviews are hard stuff to write -- I can annylize themes and literary devices in works of art like nobody's business, but I have a really hard time placing a value judgement on something, unless it really, really sucks. And if it really, really sucks, I don't plan on spending the money to read it so that I can write a review of it. I'm gonna have to re-think my strategy for the comix section. It may disapear entierly if I can't come up with something. In the meantime, check out Comics Worth Reading or iComics for excellent examples of good, straight-forward, comics reviews mostly about non-super hero comics. That's what I do anyway.
Tomorrow's my birthday! I can't decide if I'm going to feel depressed about it or not. I don't feel excited about it, so I guess I figure that I ought to feel something. I don't know why it has to be the opposite end of the stectrum, though. That's the logical place to look, I guess. Being depressed is stupid and self-indulgent so I don't think I could let myself be depressed. Still, look at what I've written today . . . everything's kind of a downer except for the part about food, which I thought was funny. I'm not depressed, though. I'm sorry. None of this must be very interesting to read. Next time I'll try to have something cool to talk about.

2002-01-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

This morning I woke up at about four o'clock in the morning thinking that I must have slept in forever. I looked at the clock, realized that I hadn't. Then I went back to sleep and got up again some time between ten and eleven. I had some cheap (four for a dollar, it sounds cheap at least) bananas left over from my big shopping trip yesterday, so I had banana and Kool-Aide for breakfast. I checked my e-mail, my voice-mail and the Internet in general. As I suspected, nothing had happened. I've got a meeting for the Location Filmmaking project I'm doing for our winter interterm at nine tomorrow, but no one seems to know where it is. That's college anyway. Oh well. Brandon, one of the guys I share a bathroom with showed up around noon to streak his hair blue about the same time I was planning on taking a shower. We traded hellos, he finished his hair, then I got my shower.
Afterwards, I decided that I could either a) sit around the dorm room for the rest of the day waiting for something cool knock on my not-so-proverbial door, or b) go out and have a wacky adventure that I'd probably end up regretting. In cases like these, b is always the right choice.
My last wacky adventure consisted mostly of trying to get my boatload or bags and skateboards from the airport to my dorm room . . . made especially difficult since I didn't have a boat. I left for Dallas with one back pack, one duffle bag and one laptop bag. Christmas-time was good for me in terms of getting all sorts of sweet stuff, but bad for me in terms of being able to truck all that stuff back to school unencumbered . . . especially without an actual truck. Not only did I get a bunch of sweaters and a deluxe Scrabble game to cart back (without a . . . nevermind.), I also received a longboard, which is a kind of skateboard that is used only for transportation, not for doing tricks, and is oh-so-hip with the college set. Long story short? I didn't have enough hands to easily carry everything from the baggage claim part of the airport to the transportation part of it. Nor did I have a clue as to what kind of transportation I should take. I waited for, well a really long time for a bus to come, only to find out that it wasn't going the same way I wanted to go. This meant that I had to go somewhere else and pay a good sum of money for transportation. But actually moving me and all of my stuff was not something I wanted to do again, at least not in the grueling, sweat-inducing try-and-hold-on-to-everything-and-stumble-around way I'd done it before. Fortunately I was smart and rigged up a way to pull most of my baggage around on my skate board. It probably wasn't the best way to travel, since I had to manually turn the skateboard if I wanted to adjust its trajectory, but it was pretty easy going and made me feel very resourceful. I half-expected some random person to comment on my inventiveness. No one did. When I made it to the taxi-and-shuttle area my plan to scope out all the options and pick out the most practical one was shot down by the fast-talking, all-too-eager shuttle employees who hustled me into their van, then made me wait twenty minutes to see if anyone else would either decide to not take a taxi or look, as I did, like they needed to have the decision made for them. Meanwhile, I listened to some radio station play old Michael Jackson songs over and over again. In a way, I figured it was a good thing I was taking the shuttle, because otherwise the guys who had been so anxious for my business would be unable to feed their families. Or something. There's not too much more to that story.
There's not too much to the story of my wacky adventure today, either. I decided to take the bus and make a trip to the comic book store in Garden Grove, which I normally would have to beg for people to take me to. Aside from walking in the wrong direction hoping I'd find a bus that was going in the same direction I was walking, before realizing a few blocks later that it was a really, really dumb idea, I didn't have too many problems. I had to do some walking and some waiting, sure, but I figure those are both good skills to have. Plus I managed to pull the whole trip off all by myself without getting hideously lost, so I felt pretty good about that. Plus it was the first time I really felt like I enjoyed going to that comic book store. They had everything I was looking for for the first time in months, plus some other books I wanted to check out. There were lots of old 90s pop-rock songs on the radio and I didn't have anyone with me who wasn't hip to the scene, so I got to do more browsing than usual. I almost left without getting my debit card back, though. Actually, I made it all the way to the bus station before I decided that it might have been a good idea to go back for it.
I got back to the dorm at about five and all was still quiet on the western front. I was just about ready to fix me a Cup O' Noodles (chicken flavor!), when Brandon showed up again and asked me if I wanted to go to In and Out with him and his friend. I said sure; I certainly didn't have anything better to do! Brandon couldn't remember where the closest branch of CA's favorite burger joint was, so we drove for a really, really long time before we found one. Apparently at In and Out you can order x by y burgers where x is the number of meat patties you want and y is the number of slices of cheese you want. I just got a 1 by 1. Brandon ordered a 6 by 6. Brandon’s friend kept getting calls of his cell phone from his girlfriend who NEEDED to know how to get through ChronoTrigger. They had their prom at the Nixon library. twice! All in all, it was a very entertaining evening.

2001-12-31T23:03:00.000-08:00

It's New Year's Rockin' Eve tonight; woo. There is no real rockin' going on in Aaronland tonight. My vacation ended this morning, and my school doesn't start again until Wednesday, so I'm shlumping in the deserted dorm listening to Christmas CDs, which are not, as their name would imply, full of holiday cheer, but rather CDs that I received for Christmas. Got some Barenaked Ladies, Ben Folds and (*gasp!*) Ben Folds Five doing the shiny disk shuffle in my hi-fi. Good stuff.
Which is more than I can say for my dinner tonight. Since no one is here and everything is closed, I just bought some Easy Mac and Kool Aide from the corner market us 406ers affectionately call The Chinese Liquor store. I was smart enough to only buy food that said "just add water!" on it, but I was not smart enough to actually figure out how much water to add. In both cases it was too much. Oh well, I'll know better next time and I never really liked Kool Aide all that much anyway. Being too diluted doesn't hurt it much.
Anyway, it's just me, myself and the computer tonight. Christina typed to me that she was boycotting New Years. I said me too. Except that I don't really have a choice. Oh well; it's kind of nice to just chill out with my Hawaiian punch and stale potato chips. My Christmas break was a very excellent one, but I never really had a break. I was either doing something or pacing around trying to figure out why I wasn't doing anything, which didn't leave a whole lot of time to write or listen or just take it easy. So ha! I may even go to bed early tonight! Yeah. Right. Gotta stay up ‘til next year. Why wouldn’t I?

2001-12-12T00:22:00.000-08:00

Wow, lots of movie news these days! Out here in student film land, I recently (as in less than a week ago) finished my fourth and final movie project for this semester. Yeah, it's the werewolf one. Grant and I spent fourty dollars buying a fancy-pants firewire cable for his computer so that we could edit our movies on his computer. His computer had other plans, though, and proceded to forget that it actually even had a video capture card. We said to Grant's computer "Hello, it's right there! We can see it and we've got stuff plugged into it!" but alas, Grant's computer does not have eyes to see or ears to hear. Stupid technology. It's good to know that we're still smarter than it at least.
It's also good to know that my friendly little laptop was more than happy to accomadate us in our editing venture. He's a good kid. Don't have much hard drive space, but man, he's there when it counts. I was able to edit the whole thing with minimal technical problems and ended up with a very slick looking final product. Oh, and the movie turned out pretty good, too. We used a not-quite legal copy of Preimire 6 for our editing needs, and though I'd never actually used it before, I was able to get in there and make it do what I wanted almost without trying. After using programs Final Cut Pro and Premiere, which cut through video like butter, I'm actually amazed at how unecessarily cumbersome and painful it is to use discreetEdit is. I don't know if I can go back.
Right after my movie wrapped Grant began on his, and by "began." I knew this because I came back to the room to find him on his bed with papers spread around him and he announced "I know what my movie is called. It's called Beauty!"
"So," I asked, "what's it about?"
"Um . . . beauty?" Grant suggested, "I don't know, I just decided to make an animated title sequence with the word beauty, so that's the name of my movie."
In my mind things were not boding well for Grant's next movie, since he had just spent probably two hours making a title, which he would then have to build an actual movie around. However, from such humble beginnings are born all sorts of neat stuff, and Beauty ended up being no exception. It's a kind of trippy, but it's cool. I'm proud to get to say that I co-wrote and stared in it. It's Grant's movie, but he's going to let me put some stuff about it up here on my site . . .
. . . which is horribly out of date. There are no screen shots from Blood is Thicker, no info at all about Werewolf Movie, and none of the pre-college stuff I promised a while back. That's all changing, though . . . the whole movie section of the website is getting an overhaul and will feature a bunch of new info and such. Check out the Out of Hand section, which now has a ton of added pages, if you feel like it. I've got the frame-work laid down, so I should be able to get the other pages updated pretty quickly. I'll keep you posted.
No links today, since I need to get up waaaay early tomorrow for my class's final film screening. Woo!

2001-12-04T00:19:00.000-08:00

Last night it rained in a way that lots of people have described in lots of neat and eloquent words many times before, so I'm not really going to try. Frankly, for a while I didn't even know it was raining last night and probably would never had known if the light fixture closest to my desk hadn't started dripping. The first time I had come back from class on rainy days before to find someone else's wet towel bunched up next to all my chair and everything on my desk pushed to one side, I didn't have a clue as to what was going on, though I was a bit disgusted about the whole towel thing. My roommates were quick to inform me that I had indeed gotten stuck with the leaky side of the room, but they'd been nice enough to take care of the problem. No one, however, took care of the towel for a couple of days.
I'd never been around before to actually witness the dripping light fixture, I usually showed up just in time to clean up from the aftermath, or to tell someone else to clean it up. This was the first time I had to take a pro-active approach against the water. And wouldn't you know it -- it happened on the night I was ready to make good on my promise to myself to go to bed before two. Explaining how Ed, Grant and I managed to rig up an effective water retention and protection system would take too long and not be particularly exciting, however I will say that our final engineering masterpiece involved one giant water cooler tank, a modified water bottle from a vending machine, some scissors, some napkins and a good deal of electrical tape spread out in number of places around the room. I will also say that it worked like a charm, that we ended up with about three inches or so of rain water in the water cooler jug (and not, as nature had planned, on our carpet), and that I didn't make to bed until three.
Last time I mentioned something about making some kind of werewolf movie, but I’m happy to report that now I’ve got not only a finished (and typed script!) done, I’ve also got the whole thing almost entirely shot! I’ll probably finish up the scenes tomorrow night, edit all day Wednesday, and if all goes well, be ready to show it in class on Thursday. If all goes well (and it rarely does), this will be my quickest turn-around of any movie, ever. It’s also my first to feature internal monologues and heavy make-up work. Fancy that.
Mankind’s most important new scientific breakthrough is a super scooter? That is so cool! Can our next one be rocket shoes or a hat that lets you fly?

2001-12-01T02:44:00.000-08:00

Got some new comix yesterday! Magic Pickle, Powers, and Akiko, plus the first issue of Hopeless Savages, which I had missed. Yum.
Also Deejayed a pretty good radio show tonight. Spun the usual punk and alt stuff, but also threw in a hearty dose of ska. My only mistake was not peeing before I left for the studio. KNAB may be well-endowed in its selection of indie-rock albums you've never heard of before, but it unfortunatly lacks any kind of restrooms. Apparently, it also now lacks a website. The above link should take you to the Chapman radio website, but it, uh . . . doesn't. I'm not sure where it takes you actually, but has far as I know the station hasn't adopted some kind of interstellar adventure theme. We're just pirates. Arrr!
I need to go to bed now, since it's way too late again, and I've got a movie to shoot this weekend. I think it's going to be a werewolf movie based on my life. Should either be really cool or suck really bad. On the other hand, maybe it will just be mediocre. I'll let time do the telling.
More later!

2001-11-28T01:27:00.000-08:00

When did Thanksgiving get to be so close to Christmas? The word on the street is that the two have always been amount a month apart chronologically and that Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. That's just crazy. I don't know if I buy it.
I went back to the ranch for the big Thanksgiving break, which was nothing to complain about. However, either the holiday wasn't long enough, or I've either got too many friends. I'm pretty sure I'd rather have too many friends than not enough, though. Speaking of excess (and believe me, we really, really are; more than we should be), I've got too much to talk about here. Which means it's bullet time! (Eat that, Keanu!)

*Went to the very sweet Salem Cinema over break with my very cool indie film friends to see the very OK movie adaption of the very excellent comic book Ghost World. The movie was good, but the comic was so much better. The original themes and ideas that were so potent in the comic were just watered down by the required linear story and various sub-plots. The essence of Ghost World was still there, but it was awfully dilluted. Plus, it's a lot easier to relate to Becky and Enid on the page than on screen. Oh well. As an adaption it was good.

*Also hung out at my friend Andy's new apartment and played some new Gamecube. Got down and dirty with Luigi's Mansion and Rouge Leader, which was definetly a good thing. I've really lost touch with the modern gaming world, so I'm not really qualified to make a value judgement about either game, but I can feel cutting edge for a couple of weeks now. Mostly I'm just waiting for the new Super Smash Brothers game, which Andy will have by Christmas break unless he is hit by a car or a comet or something.

*This will mean nothing to you if you've never been enrolled at Dallas High School or live with someone who was, but we had Mr. Steve Travis over for Thanksgiving dinner. We played Scrabble. It was crazy, but not entierly uncool. One of these days I'll post info the documentary my friends and I shot about following him home from school. Now that was intense.

*I also saw my family and a bunch of my friends over Thanksgiving. It was way cool. Did I already say that?

*I finished the second, much improved, and slightly longer version of Blood is Thicker. I'll get some screen shots and new info about it posted up soon, or at least eventually. I think it turned out really well. Unfortunatly, it's not perfect, which means I just want to go back and fix it until it is. It's not gonna happen, though. An improved version of Out of Hand is coming up, though, and hopefully some all new stuff! What a concept!

*I'm also working on a new section of the site where I can post stuff that I've written, including my research paper about why broadband connections are going to destroy The Internet. You know you want to read it.

*I've got a big science presentation tomorrow, so I should sleep.

*I didn't spell check this page. I am a loser. Goodnight.

2001-11-26T00:05:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been a full ten days since I quit the Internet. Today I finally went through my list of bookmarks and checked up on all my old sites after what is probably my longest hiatus from them in years. I didn't miss much. I actually felt kind of bad going back to The Internet, because I never really missed it that much. Take that, technology!
Yes, I had a nice Thanksgiving, thanks for asking. Bigger, cooler update tomorrow. That wasn't a sentence. I don't care. Click and make the world a better place while I go to bed.

2001-11-15T01:14:00.000-08:00

Tonight I was taking a break, lying down and feeling very at peace with the big old world, when I made a silly mistake. I closed my eyes. Instead of going to sleep I just let images play in front of my mind however they found themselves arranged. What I saw was The Internet. That's about it. My imagination had manifested itself into sidebars and flash animations, banner ads and those three or so lines of copywrite and contact info that's the last thing to read on lots of pages. I disturbed me a little. I tried to think of happy things like lush forests full of trees, but they all appeared in quicktime windows. That disturbed me even more.
The Internet's fine I guess. I mean, it does lots of things that I want it to and a few of things I need it to do. I managed to find a bootleg copy of the new Star Wars trailer, keep updated on the comic book scene and read a bunch of reviews of video games that I'll never actually consider buying -- none of which actually makes a difference in the long or contributes signifcantly to my existence. I like The Internet plenty, but I don't like it being what I get up for in the morning and I hate it being the filter I use to make sense of reality. The world is not The Internet and The Internet is not my world.
So I'm done. I'm not going to do any surfing until after Thanksgiving unless it's the real kind, which I've never actually done. I'll update this page to keep y'all informed of my progress and continue doing the e-mail thing, but that's it. I've got this strange feeling that I've typed this kind of thing before, but maybe that's just because I should have done it earlier.

2001-11-14T02:03:00.000-08:00

Hi kids, remember me? My name is Mr. Update! Hadoken!
Wow, I've really forgotten how to write these things after taking a week-long break to do, you know, have a life and attempt to pass my classes. Grant, on the other hand, can't get enough of this stuff, and keeps the blogwheel spinning pretty regularly. The best thing about his site of course is that it's got pictures of me! Ed's not updated his page because his computer blew up. Or something similar to blowing up that computers seem to be oh-so-friggin fond of. One case in point coming right up . . .
I used to really like editing back at my high school where I got to essentially take the scrumptious Final Cut Pro out for banana splits and mini golf whenever I felt like it. Sure it may have kind of screwed me over a couple of times, but every relationship's got its kinks, and in the end we always managed to resolve our differences and emerged stronger because of it. Here at Chapman we've got some kind of spliced together mega-network that's powered by discreetEdit, a program no one's heard of. It's not a terrible program, and if I twist its arm far enough back and cuss a little bit I can usually force it to do everything I need it to. However, the limited amount of disk space available to me coupled with the fact that there's usually at least a dozen other film students trying to make the system obey them at any given time makes for a generally nerve-wracking and too frequently time-wasting experience. Once you get everything into the computer, you're usually OK . . . until you have to get everything out of the computer again. Tonight was my first time in there in almost a month, and after two and a half hours of logging footage, the system decided to corrupt my log file, effectively shutting me off from reaping the fruits of my editing labors. I may still be able to retrieve it, or I may have to start from scratch again. That's the great thing about the system here -- you never know what kind of wacky hi-jinx it's going to pull on you next! Keeps me on the edge of my doggone seat. Anyway, I really don't like editing on computers. Back in the day I hated editing on a VCR-to-VCR system, but at least then you could usually crank something out even if it looked like crap. No, I take that back. That system frequently decided to hate us, too. In the long run, I guess technology sucks. I wish that I could edit my video with a nice tree or a rock or something. Good old nature never lets you down! Well, except for that whole El Nino thing.
I knew being a college DJ would eventually treat me to a look at the mystically hip world of alternative rock. I'm listening to some Ben Folds Five right now, and yes, I know it's not anything new . . . but why didn't anybody tell me I'd like this stuff? *sigh* Look, do me a favor and let me know about cool music before or miss out on something else. Please?
While you're at it, go vote for me! There's not even really a choice.
Also, if you like comix (and you should!) and don't know about these guys, please go aquaint yourself.
Need to get rid of some of that nesky free time? My mom tells me this site is lots of fun, and my mom is never wrong. Well, except about turkey burgers. And maybe milk.
Guess I'll update the fan fic.
My leg is falling asleep, which I think is my cue to do the same.

2001-11-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

Whoo boy. My life is spiraling out of control like, I don't know, some kind of spiral thing. I've got way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Yesterday I spent most of the day at class or working on projects for class, most of the evening doing research for my ethics term paper and most of the early morning writing up stuff for my sciene project, and basically all my free time was spent moving my damp laundry around my room and trying to get it dry. Yes, we do have dryer in the dorms. No, it doesn't work.
Anyway, today I've been just as busy, if not more-so. The Busy Machine chugging along at full speed, and tends to neglect silly things like updating webpages. Just so you know.
In the meantime, those of you who haven't already been exposed to it in one way or another, can find my only real attempt at poetry on Grant's shiny new poetry section. I guess the rest of you can check it out, too if you want.
Also, prepare yourself for a onslaught of refreshing alternative and independent media coverage, then take your browers for a ride down to the the Independent Media Center. Unless you like being blindly force-fed your views of the world, you really don't have an excuse not to.
Um . . . they're named after one of my favorite foods, and I, too want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket. How's that for an ambiguous, esoteric sentence? Ha!

2001-11-05T02:23:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to spend all this weekend shooting video. I'm trying to re-cut my first two film school movies with new scenes and stuff, but it's proving to be kind of difficult because I've got to gather all the elements (like actors and props and locations) that I had before just to shoot a few really short scenes. It's frustrating to know exactly what needs to be done, yet be unable to actually get all the piece together in the right place at the right time and just film it. Grr. Plus, putting charcoal briquettes in a tinfoil pan and lighting them on fire didn't produce the heat wave effect that I wanted, which left me, Ed, Grant and Christina all crouching around a flaming lasagna tin in the middle of the grocery store parking lot for about 20 minutes. Someone else probably got a kick out of that, but it wasn't us.
On the other hand, the one that likes to slack off and have fun, I actually got out and did quite a bit of cool stuff this weekend, which included watching three (!) movies. And none of them were for class!! Crazy. I'll toss out some mini-reviews here, 'cause I'm tired.
Monsters Inc. - when it comes down to it, you really can't beat squishy, marketable and decidedly non-toxic fun. Someone's getting rich off of this movie, but at least I enjoyed myself while watching it. The character development gears certainly didn't get stripped while churning out this movie and it takes a lot longer to care about the characters than it should; the most entertaining character is not any of those wacky monsters you see on the teevee commercials, but a little girl who finds her way into the Monster Dimension or whatever. Even though she's "human," she's just as imaginary as any of the one-eyed, five legged jello things in the movie -- if real kids were as sweet and funny and cute as this moppet is, everyone would want one! The one time she cries, it's a plot device. The rest of the time all she has to do is gurgle something and smile and the audience busts up. Ah well, there's some good stuff in here at least. In a world filled with monsters, Steve Buscemi's "evil" monster manages to be genuinely creepy, and John Ratzenberger (hey, he was in Star Wars!) plays an abominable snowman that rivals even Rudolph's. Plus the whole thing climaxes in a great action/chase sequence that's at least as good as the one in Toy Story 2.

Pi - Not as crazy as I thought, but definely out there. Visually, this movie is astounding, although I can't imagine that it would appeal to the same audience as Monsters, Inc. The whole thing is black and white, over-exposed and a little jerky, but I don't think it would have worked any other way. I usually associate black and white with noir-style lighting and composition, but Pi used it completely differently. Rather than being iconic, the images were chaotic and convoluted; light collides with darkness and all you're left is the contrast to pull meaning from. It actually reminded me of the thick black brush strokes of a lot of indie comix, Paul Pope's in particular. Gotta ask Aronofsky if comics were an influence when he's out shooting that new Batman movie.

Almost Famous- What, I've seen this four times now? Three maybe? No other movie, not The Empire Strikes Back, not even Memento continues to impress me and show me new things after this many viewings. There is so much in this film that is excellent. The acting, the script, the editing, the mise en scene, the music . . . wow. I was simply overwhelmed by the shear amount of detail in this movie; I cannot fathom making anything better. There are certainly more important and revolutionary films out there, but I this one is still my favorite.

I finally put some new comix reviews up! Read my take on Hopeless Savages and Magic Pickle, then go eat some cake. You know you want to.

2001-11-03T01:52:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what I'm going to do this weekend. After last weekend, my friends don't like to take me out in public any more. It probably had something to do with me getting yelled at by employees of fine establishment on four seperate occasions over the course of less than 24 hours. The first time wasn't really my fault, though. Mars Music (where Ed happens to be gainfully employed) has got this big old piece of billboard/sculpture in the shape of an unnaturally large electric guitar. And by unnaturally large I mean huge. And by huge I mean it screamed "Look, I'm just like a jungal gym at the playground, except I'm a freaking huge guitar that you can climb on! How could you have any more fun?!" To tell you the truth, I really didn't know, so I decided to see how far I could climb up it, because if I knew one thing it's that you don't build a giant replica of an electric guitar for people to not climb on! Unfortunatly, whoever designed it didn't know much about fun, because the guitar was too steep to easily frolic upon. Just as my feet hit the ground after I abandoned my attempt to scale the musical monolith, a Mars Music employee rounded the corner without missing a beat just in time to deliever what I guess is the company line: "Please don't climb on the guitar." Sure thing, buddy, I didn't want to climb on your boring old freaking huge guitar anyway.
It was about this time that everyone else (and by everyone else I mean the four other people I came with) decided it was high time to visit Old Navy! Yeah, too bad I hate Old Navy ever since I went shopping there with my sister, picked out a pair of jeans in 15 minutes and then waited around for two and a half painful hours while she decided that there wasn't really anything there that she wanted. This extended piece of my life that I'll never get back was particuarly excruciating because Old Navy gets off on playing the most annoying techno-pop sounds in the world all the time. I think I'm actually wearing a shirt purchased from one of their storespawn right now, but it's not any fun, I'll tell you that. Wearing shirts isn't something I usually equate with fun, but if it makes Old Navy sound bad, it will further drive home my point that I didn't actually go into the store when the chance arose in the previously established narrative from which I have significantly strayed. Instead I took a trip to the Virgin Megastore and looked at all the graphic novels that I'd previously browsed through extensively. There wasn't anything new. The rest of "the gang" showed up after a while and decided to make like the proverbial bannana and split. I was still looking at all the comics I wasn't going to buy, so I decided to ignore them. Eventually they pulled the old "we're leaving without tactic" that my mom used to employ so well, and I sprited to the door, launched myself into the air, did an arial spin thing and kicked Virgin's back door wide open. Now I've kicked open a lot of doors in my day, but this was a particuarlly impressive effort. I was so proud of myself, when a Virgin employee subtly asked me "What, you can't use your hands?" I really couldn't figure out what she was trying to get at. "No?" I suggested, not sure if I was being clever or stupid.
The next day we took a trip to Disney Land! If you've been there recently, you've probably seen the new parking structure that dwarfs even the freaking huge guitar in front of Mars Music. It's hard to miss since it actually envellops the whole park in darkness when it eclipses the sun from 8 until 10 in the morning. Anyway, they've got escalators as the main way to exit the parking structure, and as usual there was one going up and one going down. We needed to go down, and at that moment, so did everyone else using the escalator. Obviously the most efficient way to get through the human traffic was to take the up escalator down. It was also the most fun way to do it. I had almost made it down when one of the Disney empolyees (sorry, cast memebers) cast me a disapointed glance and said, "You can't go down that way." I said OK, the started riding the mechanical stairs back up just long enough for him to look away, then finished what I had started. The other cast member there smiled as I got off, "You know you're not supposed to do that."
Yeah, I also knew that I was supposed to keep my hands and arms inside of the car at all times when riding Big Thunder Mountian Railroad, but I didn't know that a mechanical voice would remind me of the fact when I reached out to try and touch the stalagmites in the creepy caves part of the ride. The things college teaches you!
I don't feel like linking to all those corporations that I ticked off. Try www.{insert company here}.com if you really want to see their stuff. Otherwise, fight the system!

2001-11-02T02:23:00.000-08:00

Comic books are neat.
So is fan fiction.
Hunger is not. Go fix it.
I guess milk isn't that great either. Sorry, Mom :(
Grant's page has stuff.
Sleep is neat, too I guess.
Can we pretend that I'm
Cool and all this is in hiaku?
No? Then I go sleep.

2001-11-01T01:31:00.000-08:00

I’m eating popcorn out of a caldron tonight. Doing that Halloween thing. “Technically” it’s not Halloween since it’s after midnight, but in my book the day doesn’t end until I go to sleep, so I can still go trick-or-treating if I want to. I think on my birthday, I’ll not go to sleep for something close to the length of time known conventionally as a week, except for me it will really be my birthday the whole time, which means people will have to keep giving me presents and treating me nice. I’m just telling y’all in advance so that y’all can have time to get 144+ hours of neat stuff for me. My birthday now officially runs January 6 – 13. Just so you know.
We’re not very festive around here tonight. Christina’s playing Commander Keen 4, and Grant’s sulking around dressed like The Crow, disillusioned because even though he’s got creepy make-up on and has electrical tape wrapped around his abdominal area, he still doesn’t have anything to do that’s more interesting than eat corn chips and cheese sauce. Ed is lying on a couch in the lounge and pretending that he's actually doing work. Me, I finally beat Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Knuckles with all the characters and all the cool stuff tonight. Yippee. Mostly I’m just glad because now I don’t have to play it any more. The Floating Island is safe and I can get back to doing homework and reading comics.
I got Grant to take me on my bi-monthy trip to the comic book store today. Picked up new issues of Bone, Usagi, Hopeless Savages, Castle Waiting, Magic Pickle and Ancient Joe. Yum. When I get my act together I’ll actually update the comics section with reviews of all this stuff. Until then, check out Grant and Ed’s web pages, which they actually updated and in true blog fashion linked to a tonna stuff.

2001-10-30T02:09:00.000-08:00

I just finished typing up a nice long essay about everything that's wrong with capitalism for my science class. Yeah, one day we're inoculating test tubes, the next day we're writing social critiques. Only in a class with a name as ambiguous as "In Search of Knowledge" is all this possible. I think it's pretty decent, so I'll give 'er a post up here as soon as I take out all the esoteric references that only smart people will get. Not so much because y'all are lacking in the brain cell department (though if you are, there's still hope!), but mostly because I was just trying to sound smart and probably screwed them all up. Also, I've also finally hitched a ride on the comix review train, so a bunch of new stuff should be rollin' into the station any time now.
Until then, here's another route to get your kicks on. It seems like there should be a lot more fun pirate links out there scouring the seas of The Internet than I've been able to find. If you know of any, there's a reason that reply button is there. Avast!

2001-10-29T00:07:00.000-08:00

We're watching Behind the Music on VH1 in here and learning about Ozzy Osbourn's wacky adventures back in the day. Turns out he snorted up a line of ants on the sidewalk, licked up someone else's urine and tried to defecate in an elevator full of people all on the same day! "Up next: a drunken binge leades to utter madness and Ozzy almost kills his wife!" Rock stars are so cool because they're the only people who can get all screwed up with drugs, attempt suicide and destory the lives of all those around them, and then get "director's cut" documentaries made out of their lives. Forget making films, I'm gonna start some serious rockin' and rollin'!
Well, first I've probably got to learn how to properly field a phone call on my radio show. Friday was my second stint as a deejay 9no, not that one), which, despite from the constant "oh jeez oh jeez oh jeez" tension that results from to make sure that I'm broadcasting at any given moment and will still be broadcasting something five seconds from any given moment, was pretty fun. I've found enough stuff that I like playing that I didn't have to scramble every time song got down to its last 15 seconds. However, I still haven't figured out how to put a caller on the air, or actually play a song that lasts more than "not very long," ie, long enough to cover up my half of a phone conversation with someone I didn't know over the radio. Once I realized that realized that instead of hearing the indie rock that they love so much, the kids out there in college radio land got about two minutes of me saying "so wait, you want me to play what song?" I decided to cover it up the best way I could. Which was of course, turning the whole thing into a game called "See who can call in and make Aaron look as stupid as possible!" Fortunatly, we had no more contestants, but I for one can't wait until next week! By the way, the Chapman radio website can be found right about here. It's got a load of tasty flash stuff that makes it look pretty slick, but it hasn't been updated since last spring. Hopefully they'll fix that soon, and get the promised web radio broadcasting online, also. Then everyone can play along!
Until then, there's always fan fic.

2001-10-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I probably should be sleeping. Stayed up too late last night writing a paper about Run Lola Run for my film aesthetics class, and woke up too early in the morning (actually almost too late) to attend said class. As a result, my body's been sending me these nagging "need to sleep" messages all day, but I've been fighting back by . . . um . . . not sleeping! Take that, body!
I've got this theory that things like sleeping and eating are work just like writing term papers or doing your laundry are work -- you gotta do 'em. Frequently, as Mary Poppins says, the job . . . becomes a game! You know, the "let's see how much of this candy I can eat," or "let's see how long after noon I can sleep in!" It's kind of like the "let's see who can go the longest without talking game," except people actually play along with the eatting and sleeping games. In the end though, they're not really games. They're a job, and don't let anyone tell you any different. Your body is like a fascist regime -- it makes your work as the way it wants you to work. If you slack off or neglect your duties, the regime kills you. You cannot hand in a two-week notice to tyranny!! There's no escape -- it's just like 1984, I swear!
So anyway, I was kind of tired today. Just the same, Grant and I decided that it was Happy Fun Go See a Movie Time, so we took field trip to the local movie theater where we rode the Mullholand Drive train, and it delivered 2000 tons of I have no idea what. The beginning started out kind of slow, and the theater was as and dark and quiet as my seat was nice and comfortable. My body said "take a nap, it won't hurt, comrade!" but my mind countered, "yeah right! I just paid six dollars to watch this thing!" After a couple of minutes though my body started enforcing its command and I was having to blink an awful lot in order to keep my mind open. I've started falling asleep during movies before, and what usually happens is I miss some parts of the movie, and make up other, different parts usually involving bunnies or birthday cake to fill their places. The result is not a very coherent movie-going experience. I'm still not sure what exactly happened throughout the entire first half of Das Boot, though I think there was something in there about checking for lice. On the other hand, I can remember snippets of dialogue from Nosferatu, which is peculiar because it's a silent movie. I was afraid that this kind of thing might happen again with Mullholand Drive, and was beginning to think that it might be better to submit to the will of my body, but then the creepiest freaking guy I have ever seen in a movie (or in real life probably) showed up for about six frames. I actually jumped and made some kind of vocalization that was not a scream, but more of a "hrrm!" From that point on I was completely awake. Not that it really made any difference. The only real difference between watching this film wide awake and half asleep is that now I have to figure out who dreamed up the entire last quarter of the movie, because I know it wasn't me. My dreams usually make reasonable sense (and feature early '90s pop stars!)
I'm not convinced that writer/director David Lynch is a genius. He probably isn't, but I'm also not convinced that's what he wanted us to think in the first place. The whole thing felt like a stroll through a modern art museum, except a little bit funnier. It all looks very nice, and certainly conveys some kind of abstract meaning, but I don't think that it's got any definite point or way to figure it out. It's too blatantly over-the-top and disjointed to be pretentious, but too creepy and tense to be rollicking. Whatever. I haven't had that much fun in the movie theater since The Mummy Returns.
I'll put some links up in this post tomorrow. Until then, enjoy this great line that I cut out:
"Mighty calamity, sensei! Or how much water holding is your red-hot metaphor capable? Can you not quit from jobs regular?"

2001-10-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

I’m wearing a sweatshirt and jeans tonight, which is a pleasant feeling I’ve missed down here in the desert heat of the semi-desert known as Califor-ni-ay. Of course, it’s 11 at night and we’ve got the air conditioning on, so I guess I don’t really have a legitimate reason to be feeling this warm and comfy, but heck with it, I’m gonna pretend that I’m back home where it’s nice and cold and dreary and I can watch the streets smear with rain. Mmmmm . . .
CA’s all about fabrication anyway, so if I want my anti-CA fantasy, I’m entitled to it. Technically there shouldn’t even be trees and grass and people living in nice little houses with their dogs and cats and fast food joints down here. There are no rivers to speak of in Orange County and the average number of inches of rainfall here is roughly the same as the average number of donuts (or cabbages even!) in a dozen. Yeah, that’s twelve inches or rain or less a year. Yet all the grass here is an unnaturally healthy looking vibrant shade of green. My science class has been talking all about this crazy water stuff, which is a lot more interesting than the old H and 2Os seems at first glance. We've had the whole truck-load of water-related reading assignments too, so my hydro-awareness has increased significantly in the past couple of months.
I was actually reading Cadillac Desert while capturing video footage, so I must be amazingly dense not to have realizde until recently that my second movie is all about that kind of thing. It's kind of an alternate reality sort of thing where the city’s got too much heat and not enough water and how people deal with that. I tried a number of new things for this movie, like only putting in sync sound and a couple of sound effects for the soundtrack (that means no music or dialogue), but didn’t do anything that’s going to beat you over the head and say, “hey, check this! Look at my ‘innovation!’” It’s a nice little movie, and since I don’t want to be the next Guy Ritchie, that’s probably a good thing.

2001-10-20T01:36:00.000-07:00

Hello web page! Hey, I know it's been a while, but I still love ya, you adorable little hyper-text amalgamation! How's that old hit counter doing? Yeah, people generally stop coming when you stop updating. You should work on that, buddy. Do I have to do everything around here?
It's another Friday night in OC, and we're cool kickin' it like we do so well. Ed's writing a paper comparing and contrasting Amazing Rock Legends Jim Morrison and Scott Weiland, so he's embarked on a kind of musical holy week by only lending an ear to the sacred music produced by the aforementioned rockers/essay topics, and we all get to come along for the ride! I'm learning oh-so-much about rock 'n' roll history, that it's incredible that I was ever even able to pretend to be cool before my resent enlightenment. Now I understand the delicate intricacies of life (and death as well!) thanks to the supreme coolness and tasty irony of Rock And Roll!
Oh, who am I kidding, I don't have a clue about music. Otherwise I might have been able to pick songs for my radio show tonight based on something other than which albums had cool covers. As it stood, I was able to provide wacky behind-the-scenes commentary like "OK, that last song kind of sucked, but it had an elephant and a rhinoceros on the cover, so it looked cool at least. Coming up -- track four from some band with a sofa on the back of their cover because I'm not sure what's on the front!" That, coupled with my undeveloped knowledge of all that technical stuff that spins those radio wheels (like having the microphone on when trying to talk) made for a the kind of edgy, alternative and entertaining show that you'd only find on college radio. Well, it was edgy because I was always just skimming the edge of not having any music within reach to play next, and I know that I'd keep my grubby mitts from touchin' that dial if I heard the deejay say, "That was Ben Folds Five, er, maybe it's just Ben Folds now, since there's not a Five on the CD, so that was Ben Folds, and this is Steely Dan. No wait. This isn't that song. Um . . . it's track six! Alright, this is track six of something and we're just gonna listen to it, so it's like a surprise! Yeah, track six." A good time was had by all. I'm just glad that I only said my name once, and that I don't carry any lunch money.
Fan fic? Si, esta en este paigna de los gatos y viernes para beber!

2001-10-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

Blame Sonic the Hedgehog.
Ed’s got an old Sega Genesis that he brought with him to school, and I’ve been studying it extensively. I’m sure that I’m not the only college freshman to lament the fact that there’s no way to major in playing video games, but doggone it, things sure would be a lot easier if slacking actually part of a class instead of something I had to clear out time in my schedule for. Good news? I got all 14 Chaos Emeralds! Bad news? No one cares.
Today I actually managed to get some work done on my next, yet untitled film project. Gonna try and get some editing done tonight, come up with a title in the shower tomorrow morning and get a preview posted up soon. This one’s not quite of the epic proportions that characterized Out of Hand, and my resulting epic lack of sleep, and I wrote out an extensive shot list for it before I even picked up the camera. Hey kids! Know how the establishment (i.e. your teachers and parents) is always telling you that if you plan stuff ahead of time it works out better in the long run? Yeah, they were right about that! Honest! You can trust me, because I’m cool enough to have my webpage!
Screened said epic-sized 10 minute film before my film class last week. Basically they reaffirmed my suspicions that it wasn’t gonna win any awards, but it was generally pretty well received. I think I’ve got a handle on all of the flaws the movie has and am pretty sure what I’d need to do to fix them. The one major problem here is that this imaginary world in which I re-shoot and re-edit to perfection cannot possibly exist within my current schedule. Will I cry about this? I haven’t so far, but . . . um, I can’t think of a clever way to end that sentence.
Arrgh . . . Nostalgia!

2001-10-13T01:11:00.000-07:00

My science class is set up as one of those crazy cross-disciplinary courses where professors from a bunch of different departments come in and lecture about how their field relates to the issue at hand. In this class the focus is the versatile and multi-faceted, all-star topic known as “water.” Yeah, not that it matters, because most of the profs just talk about whatever they want anyway.
We starting in on water ethics this week, after a rousing exercise in confusion known as water economics, which was taught by one Professor Don Booth, who is shaped like a rather large pear. Last week he asked us a bunch of questions about how we like paying for our water and whether we thought people should be able to build hotels in front of other people’s houses, and then assigned a six page paper on something completely different.
Monday we got a lecture on utilitarianism from the ethics teacher, who passed out some readings that suggested ways for dealing with environmental policy other than cost-benefit analysis. Wednesday, the ethics teacher went MIA, so Dr. Booth, who seemed to take this whole ethics thing as a personal assault on all he held dear, took the opportunity to fight back by passing a number of pro-economics articles, (which none of us had the slightest intention of even looking at), and deciding to give another impromptu lecture.
Apparently he felt that because someone had told us that sometimes some economists refuse to assign values to stuff (in all its sundry forms) based on anything except how much people are willing to pay for it, that we had been completely turned of from economics, and this did not jive well with the Boothmeister.
As he stood in front of us, dry-erase marker held high and ready, the thought had let itself in and was reclining comfortably in the back of my mind: “this man is evil.” Logically, I knew that the idea had more to do with the fact that the man looked like every evil fat cat tycoon from every film noir I had ever seen than his place on the scales of absolute truth, but it sure wasn’t helping his case any. He could have actually won a lot of points with the class if he had a) given us any information we could use in the ambiguous (ie, stupid) paper he had assigned, b) actually made any tangible amount of sense and/or c) let us leave early.
Instead he chose to explain how economists occasionally choose the will of the community over the will of the individual. Well, I think that was what he was trying to explain. His example was that here in the United States, we’re allowed to have as many kids as we want, and the choice is up to us, being the good individualists that we are, while over in China, they’ve chosen to cap the number of children that most couples can have at a hearty amount of one. That was it! The one example he used to combat the evil ethics empire came from a communist country that denounced nearly all of the Western economic ideals he had laid out for us the week before! If you’re peddling logic, that’s what you call a market failure.
No, wait, there’s more!
A while later, after he’d gotten suitably off track, Dr. Booth drew a circle on the board, divided it into four equal pieces.
Booth: “OK, so say we’ve got this pie, alright? Now we want to divide it equally among all of us, right, so we split it up like this, and then you let me take the first piece, but I take a bigger piece than I’m supposed to. Now how does that make you feel?”
We proceeded to give all the standard answers like “that’s not fair!”
Booth: “Yeah, but you let me go first, that’s what happens. But -- but what if we had this other pie that was bigger, and when I take a piece off of the other pie, my piece of the big pie gets bigger, and that makes the whole other pie get bigger, so there’s more for everyone. How would that make you feel?”
Student: “So is it a magic pie or something?”
Booth: “No, that’s how it works. It’s still the same pie. When I take away a big piece from this pie, it adds a little tiny piece to this bigger pie, and makes that pie bigger.
Aaron: Hold on, you’re saying that by taking a big piece out of one pie, you actually take a small piece out of this other pie, that’s really the same pie, but you make it bigger, too, but the other part of the pie stays the same size? Somehow I don’t think we’re talking about pies any more.”
At least he admitted that I was right. He never did explain what exactly he was trying to say, though.
Eventually we started talking about what had happened to our dear economics professor. He suggested that since we were all paying tuition (or at least our parents were), it was worth about $1000 for Prof. Warren to show up for class. In order for her absence to be justified, he argued rather reasonably, that whatever she was doing should be worth more than that to us. What if, he speculated, she had found a limping puppy by the side of the road and decided to save it and return it to its owner. He told us he knew what our answer would be, and had a pretty good reason why we would say that. The class all agreed, for whatever reason, that saving the dog would be worth missing class, so Dr. Booth began concocting permutations of the situation. He kept going until the hypothetical Prof. Warren met a hypothetical ameba on the side of the road.
Booth: “So how would you feel if she missed class to help this microscopic organism find its way home?”
Aaron: “Um, well it’s microscopic, so she couldn’t exactly see it on the side of the road in order to help it, and she wouldn’t really know how to help in the first place even if she could see it, nor do any of us in the class have any idea how an ameba could possibly be in peril on the side of the road, or what kind of aid it would need even if it was. The analogy doesn’t hold up because there’s no way we can imagine how we’d feel about Professor Warren helping a microscopic organism when we can’t even come to terms with the fact that there are thousands of microscopic organisms crawling around on our eyelashes alone.”
Booth laughed under his breath and changed the subject. We never found out why he knew what our answer would be.
I know that Dr. Booth is not evil. Nor is he probably as stupid as these stories make him out to be. Even after Prof. Warren returned the next day to pollute our minds with more ethical garbage, I don’t believe that economists are evil. However, economics is the science of determining how much everything is worth, including life, love but assigning an objective value to it, and in Good’s eyes, that’s quite often the definition of Evil.

2001-10-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

I got a bowl of soup today for lunch and brought it back up to my dorm room to eat it. It was alright as far as soup goes, nothing to write home about (although I guess I kind of am anyway), but when I finished it there was still some broth left. Thinking I'd be neat and tidy, I dumped it down the sink. Too bad we've got some little grid thing over drain; now there are little pieces of vegetable something or other floating around in the same basin I wash my hands in. Oh well, college is all about learning, right?
Yes, I'm quite aware that I've been spelling sense with a c, which I guess is the "wrong" way to do it. Don't I at least get points for being consistent? I guess it's time to start spell-checking, although that seems so unothodox on The Internet where every1 types lik this.
Longer update coming soon . . .

2001-10-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

Went to see the movie Zoolander today with some other kidz from the dorm and "around." It was alright; Ben Stiller and Owen Willson have made some of the greatest movies ever, so I had at least moderate expecations for their newest offering. Mostly I wasn't disapointed. The editing was sub-par, but that doesn't matter to most people. Though the middle sagged, there were a couple of really funny bits in the beginning and the end that made up for it. Just the same, none of us had anything to say about it after the credits rolled.
I have no grip on the current national movie scene any more -- someone told me that you don't have time to watch movies when you're in film school, and so far they've been right. I'm gonna make myself see the 35mm showing of Raging Bull on Monday, though; good stuff is still good stuff whether you've got time or not. And then there's The Mummy Returns, which has a special place in the trash bin of my heart. Its plot is translucent, its character development . . . scratch that, it has no character development, its sence of danger and/or suspense registers just below an episode of Blues Clues, and it doesn't even make an attempt at realism. The action scenes are good, though. And it's hilarious. If writer/director Steven Sommers knew all that going in, he's a genius. If he didn't, he's a hack. Unfortunatly, I missed the chance to find out to ask him about that when he came to our school last Thursday. The school had a showing of the just-released-to-video flick in quesion, with Sommers and his editor there to field questions afterwards. I was torn between going to judge the man's self-awareness and not wanting to be spotted at a showing of one of the most artistically vacant films I've ever seen.
In the end, my silly sence of pretension won out and I stayed at home. I think part of it was the fact that all the Kevin Smith fanboys, who are without a doubt the most annoying people in the film department, kept asking me if I was going to go see it. It's just like high school -- if you're popular, even if it's for a bad reason, people want to hang out with you.
Just the same, I still would have liked to ask him about that scene where the CG rocket-powered blip is flying through the CG canyon pursued by the CG wall of water superimposed with a CG face of our boy favorite mummy. Now that was classic.

2001-10-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

No radio-station fun for me tonight. There's some problem with the magic card-swiper thing on the door that lets you into the station, which can roughly be summed up as it doesn't work, which means no one can get in. Oh well, maybe next week.
No one's been around for the last couple of hours. People are usually bursting at the seams trying to get into our dorm room and kick it with us, but tonight they're all no-shows. It doesn't help that my room mates, who are much hipper than me aren't around. Grant is visiting his hometown of San Jose, and Ed went to go play soccer about four hours ago, so his status is now effectively MIA. I've just been surfing the web, finding some pretty good comic book sites and just generally wasting my time. I'm going to the beach tomorrow morning to do science research, so I've got the perogative, OK?
People are finally starting to filter into the hall, so I'm gonna go get my social groove on. Tonight = bonus fan fic time!

2001-10-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving soon for my first ever radio broadcast! I'm a deej/djay/deejay/dj from 7:30 until 9:30 on Friday nights here at the local radio station. Or at least I will be come 7:30. The word is that they'll be broadcasting over the Internet soon, so I'll give y'all the hook up for that when I get it. Until then, read new fan fiction and visit the new comix review section! The first (and currently only) review up there is Dan Clowe's angst-filled, adapted-into-a-movie, really-good trade paperback Ghost World. Plenty has been written about the movie and the comic, but I want a piece, too. So there. More reviews coming soon!
Time to break out the turn tables!

2001-10-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

The ants first showed up about a week ago. I didn't really worry, or for that matter, even notice for a couple of days, so I'm not sure exactly when they made their debut apperance on my desk. I do remember thinking something like, "Wow, an ant! Hee hee, they're fun!" and then going back to typing. After a couple of days, they started showing up more frequently, and I began thinking of them as my little six-legged pals; there was always a couple of them hanging out, and one of them was always on the wall right above my desk. I liked that one the best, and never really questioned what he was doing there -- I just figured he liked to live vertically instead of horizontally like all the other ants. He was a rebel! A nonconfromist! He was a kindred spirit! The night I had this revelation I went to bed thinking about naming friends with my ants, learning their little anty personalities and giving them names. It'd be like a big ol' ant party on my desk!
The next morning, I found out that the ants were indeed having a fiesta -- all over my desk. It was a lot less fun than I thought. For one thing, there were more than enough of them to saturate my fun-with-ants tolerance levelsl; you know, two's a company, three's a crowd, and if you can't count them, it's clobberin' time!
Or it would have been if I didn't want ant guts all over my computer, CDs, stereo, various papers and action figures, used cups and dishes, cookie crumbs and basically everything else on my desk, and if I didn't have the sneaking suspicion that the ant population would quickly replenish itself after anything but a cataclysmic event. There were enough ants crawling up and down the wall that it was obvious that a) the indepentent, "vertical living" ants had sold out and become main-stream or b) they had been crawling all across the room and were using my computer cables as a bridge to cross over to the hold land of my desk. A quick scan of the room confirmed that the second was the case. They were snaking (can ants snake?) across the corner between the wall and the celing, down to the air conditioner, which seemed to be a very hip place for today's ant population to hang out, before finally making the exodus to my Desk of Milk and Honey and getting stuck under my keyboard keys.
My first thought was "wow, I wish I was an ant so that I could climb on the walls and celing!" My next thought was, "Jeez, that's really gross!" Ants don't usually register on my gross meter, but for some reason their large and rapidly growing numbers really disturbed me. Even though they were looked cool, had six legs and could defy my perception of gravity, they were as worthless and annoying to me as little walking pieces of trash. I like my trash to stay where I put it -- usually on my desk or in the corner. I don't like trash walking across my comic books.
Besides, I thought I was part of the dominant species around here, and as dominant species, the other, lesser species should listen to what I say, doggone it! I tried yelling at the stupid ants, and even tried being nice to them, but my room mates just laughed at me. Ed said, "So, uh . . . I guess they don't have many ants in Oregon, huh?" I just fumed.
Eventually that turned out to be the answer. Someone brought over a can of Raid, which I reluctantly tried on my home-grown ant farm.
That stuff is the friggin' scariest stuff I've ever seen packaged in an aresol can. There's be something downright evil about a mist-like substance that can kill on contact. Humans aren't the dominant species on the plant, deadly chemicals are. :(
That's my political statement for the night. I "stabalized" the situation thanks to good old Death in a Can, but I was left with an empty feeling inside and a lingering sent of insecticide in the room. Neither was pleasant. The next time I found an ant on my desk that wasn't severly impaired in the living department I actually started jumping up and down and cheering for the little guy. The speicies persisted! I had not comitted an act of genocide! There was a single ant crawling up and down the wall.
It was so cool!

2001-10-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

I'm in a lazy mood tonight, and I really don't feel guilty about it for a change. I've got a paper to write, and I'm confident that it will get written. Since I don't have the slightest inclination to write it myself, I'm not sure how this is going happen, but it will. No worries. I feel like I've just gotten back to my hotel room after swimming in the hotel pool and soaking in the hotel hot tub. Part of this is probably because the air conditioning is turned on really high, as it tends to be in most of the hotel rooms I stay in, and part of it is probably because . . . uh . . . well part of it isn't because I just went swimming, because I didn't. Haven't been swimming in a looong time.
All is not so quite on the massive never getting my doggone movie finished front. I managed to squeeze some magic Working Juice out of the computer system for a change this morning (actually, they just happened to be working abnormally fine when I got there), and salvaged a better cut of the film than the one I printed to tape yesterday. Or was that today? Anybody out there wanna explain time to me?
A girl from down the hall just came to the door and did that annoying knocking thing to it. Grant, who's chatting on the Internet and watching either his priated copy of Fight Club or listening to his pirated collection of punk music, remains as glued to his chair as he is when I say "Hey, what's that panda bear doing in our room?!" which is to say, he didn't move. Ed was busy having a life somewhere, so it was my job it ensure that our room remained in social contact with the outside world.
"Hi, do you know if these are contaminated?"
Annie, a girl from down the hall wass holding up an orange starburst and confusing the old bejeeubs out of me. I responded with kind of brevity of frequently lacking in my written thought:
"What?"
"They put these out there, but I don't know, do you think they're poison or something?"
She still wasn't making any sence, the crazy dame, so I decided that it'd make it easier for all of us if I figured this out myself. I decided to start looking in the direction she was pointing. That's usually how these things go. Someone had left a bunch of orange and lemon (orange and yellow) starbursts, and exactly one mini Resses peanut butter cup on a paper plate in the hallway. The plate said "take one" and had a smiley face drawn on it. It would have looked mighty sinister, except for the candy and the smiley face, two things that always seem to say "fun is on the way!" I said that they were probably OK to eat, but Annie said she didn't care, because she had just gotten back from working out, and figured that she deserved one. She just wanted someone else to eat one too, so that if she did die, she wouldn't die alone (for someone health concious enough to work out, she sure didn't seem to be particuarly worried about long term health risks like death-by-poison).
I was just a pawn in her confection consumtion plot, but it was candy, and it was free, so I didn't really care. I did wait to make sure she didn't die before I ate my starburst, though.
I've got comic reviews and fan fic to post, but somehow I think I should check and see if that paper's written itself yet. That stuff will go up soon, though.

2001-10-02T01:20:00.000-07:00

You know what's cool? Typing something out for your web page, and then having your Internet browser screw up and lose it all! It gets even better if you're really tired and sore and just want to go to bed, and would much rather be sleeping than prentending you've got something important to say.
No, actually, none of that is very fun at all.
Movie is on VHS, ready to show to class. I'm too mad at it to care any more.
Sleeeeep . . .

2001-09-30T23:24:00.000-07:00

Someone out there really doesn't want me to finish my movie, because every time I go into finish it something goes wrong. Yesterday I couldn't get it to remaster my footage, which it had no problem doing four days ago. Today, the whole system crashed. Me, I'm on cloud friggin' nine.
As a remedy, I'm watching Cartoon Network's wacky Adult Swim line up and eatting ice cream. Just got word that the system is back up again, so I've gotta go back and try and make stuff work. *sigh*
More content is coming soon. The usual fan fic + comic reviews, coming soon!

2001-09-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm in college and have things like waking up, doing laundry, foraging for food and protecting the tribe to keep my busy, I'm not as hip with current events than I used to be. I'm don't know what movies are coming out, and I'm frequently missing out on my daily dose of Star Wars. I've been trying to keep up with the September 11 aftermath, but it's really hard to gauge the nation's public openion when the only openions I get are from my friends, who generally share my personal openion.
I guess there's quite a bit of war-mongering going on, though. The other day I saw someone wearing a tee-shirt that said "Osama bin Laden, wanted dead or alive" with the alive part crossed out. Ha ha. Good old death. Boy we sure haven't had enough of that. Enough time has passed that it's time to take a good hard look at what exactly is going on. We might get some of that from TV and presidential addresses, but it's most certinally not the whole story. Here's where I've been finding some of my alternative news and openion:
The OC Weekly Orange County's free arts and entertainment paper. It's also got more than its share of ads featuring models and call girls in various states of undress, but since said ads pay for the frequently insightful and startling pratical editorial content all across to board, I'll deal with it. Check out Jim Washburn's columns here and here if you read nothing else. That man is my new hero. Seriously. Go!
I ran across this site today that's run by a Muslim college student. The opening page is thought provoking, and the info he has about the news footage with the Palestinian kids that everyone except me saw is a good exercise in media literacy.
Normally I'd be linking to MediaWatch all over the place here, but all they've had up for over a month is an ominous "Please stay tuned as we rebuild" message, which roughly translated probably means, "We seriously got screwed over." I'm glad I haven't had to write a research paper yet. I don't know what I'll do with out those guys.
The good news is that Gurrilla News Network is still up. Combining grass roots, alternative news and literature with a slick site design, you could do a whole lots worse than these guys. They always give me something to think about, and their coverage of "America @ War" is pretty varied and in-depth.
And I'm sure that The Onion has some funny stuff to say, but I haven't been able to load the page. Hmmm . . .
Be educated on what's up! It's that or Pokemon, kids.

2001-09-27T23:42:00.000-07:00

My friend Christina tells me that my webpage keeps getting funnier every day. I'm not sure that's an accurate interpretation of the facts, but it's best to be safe anyway. I need to put a stop to this whole "funny" thing before it gets really bad and I have people rolling on the floor, with their keyboards in a death grip typing "LOL!" over and over and over again. I've got to be careful that this whole humor thing doesn't corrupt me. There's a reason that evil people are always laughing, after all. Anyway, I uploaded some new screen shots on the Out of Hand page, so give 'em a click. You will find nothing funny there except for my poorly written captions.

2001-09-27T00:58:00.000-07:00

Rough cut of movie is finished!!! Music and sound fx still aren't all there, but man if feels good to have something tangible to show people! I'll try and get some screen shots up when I get some time, and maybe even some tinny-screen video if I can find a server that will host it. I showed it to the Kids in the Hall,er . . . kids in my hall and they all seemed to like it pretty well. Of course, they all seem to like me, too, which either means they're biased, or they have don't have particuarly good taste. Maybe both. Tomorrow it makes it debut apperence before people who aren't expected to give me high-fives after the end credits roll. More news as it breaks!

2001-09-25T00:58:00.000-07:00

Good news, true believers! I finally figured out what was wrong with my video files on Chapman's editing system and tonight -- for the first time in what has seemed like far too long (really about two days) I made some tangible progress. My irrational feeling of hope has returned, and even though I wanted to be completely finished by tonight, I was so excited to be making any kind of headway, I returned to the dorm feeling like a Triumphant a/v Warrior. My old mantra was: I will finish this timeline before I go to bed! My new, revised mantra is: I will be in bed by 1:00 tonight! You can decide which one is more worthwhile.
I'm also getting tired of talking about my sleeping habits. While I can still think of witty spins on the mystical ying and yang of AM/PM, it no longer holds any thrill for me. And if I'm talking about getting thrills by describing sleep at the same time, something's very, very wrong. The moratorium starts here!
Went to a big ol' Christian rock concert yesterday; woo! The only other concert I've been to in my post-Raffi years was when I went with my mom to see James Taylor because my dad couldn't go, so I didn't know quite what to expect. I was going from fire and rain to fire and brimstone.
Or I would have been if that whole faith by fear thing was still in vogue. Coming from a rather traditional, more stoic (which does is not the same thing as bad or boring) church, I'm still not quite sure what to do with this new, hip evangelism. So far it's not quite as uncomfortable as I'd imagined. The concert was set up inside of a Disney Land-sized parking lot, which meant there was no shade, no chairs, and no water unless you wanted to pay two bucks (even Christians gotta make a living, I guess), but that's nothing you wouldn't find at a secular concert. In fact, except all the Jesus fish tee shirts and bumper stickers, it wasn't really that different from a "normal" concert (not that James Taylor provided me with a whole lot of perspective there). As fun as it is to call Christian rock an oxymoron, I've got an aching suspicion that it's just the same old rocker pretension. Music is about expressing oneself, and not singing about sex and drugs doesn't delegitimatize it, that's just silly. I can't understand the lyrics (secular or religious) most of the time anyway, but it's comforting to know when I'm jumping up and down and yelling rock-concert style, it's nice to know that I'm not inadvertently supporting mass murder or anything. If the music's good (and it is), it's still rock. Even though it was a Christian concert, the bass was still revebering inside my chest cavity; I still had opportunities to buy over-priced tee-shirts, and was still surrounded by plenty of rock-savvy kids with band patches safety-pinned to their backpacks who were oh-so-much hipper than I. I'd write something insightful about the weird anomaly of rock culture here, except that I can't really figure it out.
Do you like your fan fic served up on a tasty blue background? If the answer's yes, you're in luck! And "Have you ever wondered about the history of fan fiction?" If the answer is a resounding "no!" you'll be joining me in not spending a lot of time here, except to look up the meaning of a word like twincest (yeah, and it has something to do with Harry Potter fan fic).
More later!

2001-09-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

Orange County is never colder than when I'm walking back to the dorm from the editing lab, and every time I start to feel hopeful about my project something comes up that replaces it with a feeling of anxious desperation. After working until seven in the morning last night, I had my roommates make sure I didn't leave the dorm room after midnight. But of course late nights just yeild more late nights, so now it's 2 AM and bed is the farthest thing from my mind, and from the looks of it the only thing on my Ed and Grant's respective minds. I could easily sneak out and do some more work. It's a little weird because it seems like a very real and tangible possibility. If I didn't have class tomorrow . . .
Grant, in his free-media feeding frenzy has been downloading Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, Fear and Loathing, et al. Today he and Christina were searching in vain for a copy of Clockwork Orange to infringe some copywrite on. I keep telling him that we're at a film school, and can check out pretty much any movie ever for free without commiting felony (or a resonable facimilie), but he always seems to forget that I'm talking when I bring that up.
Of course half the time I'm talking I don't even make sence any more.
Aaron: I'm going, but I shouldn't be back before . . . no, after -- yeah. I shouldn't be back until after . . . I'll be back before after you guys are asleeps. Again, this time.
Grant: Um . . . what?
Ed: Are you sure you're OK to go out?
At this point I start v(word starts with v . . . vehemonlously? vigoursly? I'm fine really!)ly denying that there's anything wrong with me. Man, sleep's not a drug, not sleeping's a drug. I mean, jeez, half of my posts are about not sleeping in one way or another. I can't get enough of this stuff! No, really, I promise I'll quit . . . once I have less to do.
Triumphant Return of Fan Fiction! It's short.
All sorts of exciting, action-packed stuff on my Chapman friendz' web pages. Christina's got a picture of me (scroll down) mixin' it up deejay style, Ed talks about my movie and in some inexplicable typo says he's been giving me a hard time, and Grant decides to give up on his web page in order to have more time to download Michael Jackson videos.
Next time: something interesting, honest!
Now: it's yummy insomina time!!!

2001-09-22T18:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to say how late I stayed up last night, because I know my mom reads this web page. Let's just say that I'm no longer clear when night stops and day begins anymore, or vice versa. The old Busy Machine is chugging along as fast as ever, but so far everything's running on schedule. It's not much, but I started a section for my films the other day and forgot to make a post about it. There's a little bit of info about the movie I'm working on now, but not much else. I think I've got a set-up going that will serve as a good template if or when there's a lot of content on there. I haven't had anything to eat all day except for a bowl of cereal, but that's probably because I slept though lunch (um . . . hi, Mom!). Gonna go get nourishment now.

2001-09-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Jim suggested that I put a reply button at the end of my posts, so I decided to put my mad hacking skillz to the test and attempt that brave feat. Everybody reply and tell me if it works, OK?
So that this post isn't all about me, check this: The Hunger Site is back online! These guys put Internet banners to good use, and helps save starving kids -- how cool is that? Go donate some free food! Scope out The Breast Cancer Site while you're there, and also drop by The Ecology Fund. All it takes is a couple seconds and a willingness to look at banners for businesses that at least pretend to have some humaintarian interests. It's easy -- arm chair activism.
More later!

2001-09-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

As we all hurtle through the Forest of Fate on our Wheelbarrows of Destiny, there's no way to tell where we'll end up in the end. Even the corn flakes-boring animated Indian Princess knew that the (proverbial, and I guess also physical) "river's always changing. Always flowing." That said, I'm pretty sure that if my life continues on the route it's recently been traversing, I know one thing for certian: by the end of next week I will never sleep again.
My bedtime keeps being drastically pushed back into the realm of the obserd -- last night I didn't get back from editing until almost five. AM. That means that waking up at ten yields only a paltry five hours of sleep. It'd be OK if I knew that this was a one (or two, or three) time thing, but the wild part is that I plan on doing it again tonight. So far my late-night excursions have yeilded no fangs or bloodlust, and I've yet to shrivel up when faced with sunlight (although I do tend to close the blinds when I get home, because these days that when it starts getting light again), so I'm doing well in the Not Being a Vampire category, but I'll keep you updated.
Oh -- check this out! Here down in sunny, smoggy CA if there's one thing people luv, it's their stupid cars and parking spaces. It's all a big waste, if you ask me, and even for all its potential for getting me lost, I still prefer the bus. Anyway, I meant to mention this sooner, but Car Free Day is this Friday, so go out and show your support of alternative transportation methods by not driving. The truth is that no matter how much you like your car, you probably don't actually need it, especially if you live in la ciudad. Adbusters also has all sorts of sweet posters and bumper stickers to print out. Go there and get in tune with your grass roots!
Speaking of grass roots, I've inspired my roommates Grant and Ed to put up their own Blogger pages. Is this what they call copycat crimes? Anyway, scope them out -- it won't be long before they start dishing on me and you'll finally unearth all my deep, dark secrets. My friend Neil also updated his web page!
Fan fic!
My friend Peter doesn't have a web page, so I just steal his stuff and post it on mine.

2001-09-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Cargo shorts rule. They're like purses for guys! You know those make-up commericals where the girl holds up her purse, dumps it out on the table and says, "this is my life in here, so I need to wear tough eye-liner," or something like that? Yeah, for me, it's the same thing, except with my cargo shorts. And that whole eye-liner thing. Right now I've got my wallet (which also holds a good portion of my life), two floppy disks, a MiniDV tape, some change, my sun glasses, my regular glasses (in glasses case!), my keys, and my ID card for the cafeteria all hanging out quite comfortably in my big old huge pockets, and I've still got four more pockets to put stuff in!!
And the best part is that unlike girly purses, us guys (generally) don't have to worry about leaving our shorts anywhere! I still manage to somehow take my keys out of my pocket and leave them somewhere every single time I walk into the dorm room, and then forget to pick them up again when I leave, which is really annoying when it's 2:30 in the morning and my roommates are asleep, but at least I know that I still have my sunglasses!
Site updates!
I update the archive section over there on the side a couple of days ago. Even though September isn't over yet, some of my posts were getting scrolled off the page, but fear not! Just head over to the September archiveto read all my now-classic posts from earlier this month. Oh, and check out that counter on the side over there, too! It's only been running for a couple of weeks and I already have almost 400 hits, which probably means somebody's been hitting the refresh button an unhealthy ammount of times, but it still looks impressive!
Fan Fic!
Here's another Zelda one! I was gonna say something else about it , but I forgot.

2001-09-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Well, kids, it's been a pretty crazy week, hasn't it? Right now there's too much college and not enough me, so I'm not gonna type too much today. Stayed up until 3:30 last night editing, got back to the dorms and realized that I had left my tape in one of the VCRs. Grant and Ed are sound asleep when I get back, but a slumbering Grant sits straight up in bed, as is his habit. "Left tape in lab," I mutter, hoping that he'll be kind enough to go get it for me. Of course, he's less in tune with that part of the brain that allows you to make sence than even I am, and collapses back into his sheets. I briefly think about how much I like ice cream, knock Ed's guitar over twice, climb into my bed, remember to brush my teeth, and then climb back into bed again, fall asleep and dream about how Brazil's going to start World War 3 by forcing everyone to learn Portugese.
Today I'm not much more cognizant, and I've spent most of the day trying to get through my huge reading assignment for science, which was partially about all the cool ways you can die from thirst. Unfortunatly, it's all gone down-hill in the "interesting" category since I finished that part.
Fan Fic! My friend Peter does a couple of things better than me. One of them is being smart, and the other is playing video games. There are a bunch of geeky kids on the Internet who also do a couple of things better than me. One of them is lacking any basic skills that don't have to do with video games (such as writing, talking to girls and finding food), and the other is . . . playing video games. These kids like to try and expand their horizons by making up stories about video games (fan fiction) and posting them on the Internet. These cracked Peter and me up, so we started writing our own. I only wrote a couple, but he kept at it, and the result is a series of engaging (if rather short) adventures the life of your favorite video game characters using such thrilling literary devices as theme and variation, nouns, verbs, and poor sentence structure. I'll post some pretty reguarly until I run out of them. More later!

2001-09-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

Remember that promise I made about yummy fan fiction? Well, it's not happening tonight. I'm trying to finish editing my first video project for my Visual Storytelling class, but it turns out I did something wrong the last time I saved it, and now that I'm on a different computer and can't access it. If I could get into the room across the hall for like five minutes I'd be able to get to it from any computer I wanted to, but some girl's working on her video project in there, or rather, some guy is working on some girl's video project in there and he doesn't seem to think that me, my happiness, or my well being are things worth turning away from the computer screen for. She said they'd be done in about half an hour, but it doesn't sound like a whole lot of editing is going on in there -- he seems to be giving her lessons on basic editing and how easy it is to annoy others (namely me) through laugher (namely his). blah.
At least now I've got time to do some reading for science!

2001-09-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

Whose idea was it to make California so dang hot? I'd like to have word with them.
I guess it's only been three days since . . . what do you call it? The incident? Usually you don't even have to say anything and people know what you mean. I'm still not sure how to deal with the whole thing. Tuesday dragged on for so long that I had to keep reminding myself that yes, a couple of airplanes did explode into the World Trade Center, and yes the buildings did indeed collapse like concrete sand castles, and yes it all happened this morning. It was weird to walk around campus and know that everyone was thinking about exactly the same thing. I tried to listen to some CDs and read some comics to unclog the World Trade Center, the Petagon, the airplanes and everything else from my mind, but it all seemed so petty and trivial.
It still kind of does, and I guess it still really is, but I need the surface of my life to retain the illusion of normalicy, because I don't know how to keep ahold of those ambiguous Things that Really Matter. I still can't come to grips with the idea of Thousands of People Dead.
Man, I was gonna write something funny for today. Maybe next time.
To be encouraging, give some blood, donate some cash, light some candles, do anything that will help, as I'm sure you already are. Nearly all of my bookmarked activism sites haven't updated recently, probably for a number of reasons. Like everyone else, I'm sure the editors there aren't quite sure what to do, but anti-corporate web sites have got to be even more careful -- they're primarily against what the WTC and the Petagon stood/stand for. More fundamentally they're against violence and repression (hey, who isn't?), and it's clear that the growing anti-globalization movement had nothing to do with Tuesday's events, but everyone's got to be a lot more careful now. I may write more about this later, but I think that a lot of what we've been seeing over the last couple of days has been another kind of activism, and not necessarily a bad kind. It's just too bad that it takes a major attack on our country to get most people stirred up enough to make a statement, and it's also disconcerting that participating seems, if not mandatory, at least expected if you're any kind of real American. I'm all for the whole "united front" thing, but it's not clear what we're uniting against. It's like saying "Woo, America! We rock! Now what?"
Next time: Fan Fiction! I promise!
Last time: I managed to spell "own" wrong. sorry . . .

2001-09-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

Got a phone call at about 7:30 this morning, which is usually one of my favorite times to be asleep. It was a wrong number, some lady trying to call her daughter's cell phone. Here's my side of the conversation that my roommates heard: "Hello? . . . no, this is 714-516-5356 (don't know if that's right, can't remember my oewn phone number). Yeah, I think you have the wrong number . . . What? They blew up the World Trade Center? . . . ok . . . thanks."
Crimeney, that sounds like a joke that would end "and then I went back to bed." Either that or some recycled sci-fi. Jeez . . .
Everybody do some praying, ok?

2001-09-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

Before I left for college, my mom got me two ten dollar rolls of quarters so that I could easily do my laundry, thereby not smelling like something had crawled up my shirt, made a nest out of rotten meat, and invited all its friends to do the same, except with other, fouler smelling, nestable materials, like my old clothes. Now that I'm actually in college, I like to keep those two rolls of quarters in my desk drawer, safe and unmolested because I can't use them!
For some reason the big wigs at my college must have been doing that "institution of higher learning" thing by getting mind-blowingly high on hallucinogens, then forgetting that they had anything to do with learning, or being smart for that matter. The aftermath of this trip down impractical lane spewed upon our doorsteps in the shape of a flier informing us that the washing machines on campus had been streamlined and would no longer take our shiny twenty-five cent pieces that they had told us to bring expressly for the purpose of washing our clothes. Now the system runs on debit cards that you actually have to first pay money for, and then take to a machine in order to transfer cash onto them, and then finally put the card in the washing machine to have your money transfer off of it. Fortuatly, you can use the same card for washers and driers. Unfortunatly, someone who was helping "streamline" the system came up with the bright idea, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the cards only accepted five dollar bills?!" and amazingly no one nearby told him, "NO IT WOULDN'T, IT WOULD SUCK!!" So even though I have twenty freaking dollars in laundy money, actually doing my laundry often involves a trip to the bank before I can even start thinking about wearing clean clothes. And then there's the whole sorting and folding part of doing laundry, too. And that weird "light" and "dark" thing. Frankly, I don't have time for that kind of crap. And what's really more important, my time or the way I smell? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Disturbed about the way America's quickly becoming a corporateocracy (look, Mom, I made a new word!), and also have too much time on your hands? Theyrule.net holds the potential to both a) make you more disturbed and b) quickly dispence of any free time you've got. I mean, if you're into that kind of thing.

2001-09-10T00:56:00.000-07:00

For those of you who've been following our riviting angst-filled, epic story of college life since day one and have found it lacking all the drama, angst and epicness (epicicity?) you were expecting, let me recomend the now classic WB show Felicity! For those of you who don't really care about being rivited, but have still read a couple of our newsposts, you might (or might not) be interested to know that I've finally filled the empty place that's been tearing up my heart since this site's nativity (that link continues today's teeny-bopper theme, and the sheer amount of info there is frankly disturbing -- now's a good time to mention that I'm not responcible for any outside content). In other words, I finally found some comic books I was actually looking for!
Still haven't gotten anyone to drive me to an actual comic book store, but the local Virgin Megastore actually stocks a mighty impressive selection of hi-quality graphix novelz. The only other mainstream chain I've found that carries my drug of choice is Borders, but whoever orders their stuff obviously doesn't actually read it, since it's mostly all Batman, Star Wars and manga. Virgin's selection was a lot more balanced -- about 1/3 manga, 1/3 capes and tights and 1/3 other stuff. I was surprised to find most of the books and series I had ever considered looking into and lots of other stuff I decided that I should have. Ended up with a cheap, pre-movie Ghost World TPB, a yummy, Eisner-award winning Usagi collection, and the creepy The Coffin, a book that grabbed me by the face and screamed "Read me!!" the first time we made contact. Bad news: I've actually got homework and projects to work on now, so I may not get to start, or for that matter finish, these comix for the unquantifiable period of "some time." Good news: I won't waste time or cash buying comics again for a some time either. Still need to catch up on my favorite monthly books tho . . .
Once I dig into these recent aquisitions to my Fun Collection, I'll get something like a comicx review section up on my web page. I'm also gonna try and get my friend Peter's insane, and not entierly un-brilliant fan-fic parodies up soon. Whoo! Actual content!
Oh crap, I still have laundry to do! More later!

2001-09-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's after midnight! Um . . . I was gonna post my expose (that's friggin' sweet noun ex-pos-EH, not the lame-o verb ex-POHS) on the alt-burgers here on campus, but I don't really want to sleep in until 10:30 again tomorrow morning, as has become my habit when I stay up until two, which has become my habit, ah . . . because I can? Now I really dig that old Ben Franklin guy, and I'd appreciate it if you'd send me any of those green rectangular papers with his picture on them that you have. See, I'm kind of collecting them. I've got lots of Washingtons and a coulple of Lincolns if you wanna trade . . .
Now where was I going? Yeah, Ben Franklin -- that was one frood who really knew where his towel was, 'cause not only was he a father of our doggone country, he also invented lots of stuff, and he said that one thing about "early to bed, early to rise," et al. Lately my rising's been a little out of the "early" sector, and my bedding's not scoring too well either, and I can really see old Frankie's therory holding some weight. I had a headache most of the day and even felt a little nauseous in the morning (which I guess would be normal if I was pregnant -- but I'm not), so there goes the whole "healthy" part. I'm also far removed from "wealthy," but I've gotta be wise if they let me into college, right? Right?
Crap, I forgot the point I was trying to make again. Oh yeah -- it's late, I'm tired, I'm going to bed. Blah. That's all you really wanted to read anyway.
More later, and I was going to write something else funny about Ben "Frankie" Franklin here, but that hinged on anything else I said about him being funny, and . . . I really have no excuse for any of this. Good old Internet.

2001-09-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

In only a few short days of inhabiting the Web, I've noticed a very startling trend, which is that
all of my posts seem to grow by a factor of something very large compared to the previous day's post. It's time to put and end to this disturbing word cancer once and for all! Fortunatly, this happens at a very good time for me, since the network is moving at the speed something closely resembling a 14.4 kbs modem crawling up a mountin of gravel with its legs cut off, probably because people have gotten very good, perhaps too good, at hacking past the server's firewall to download things like copywrited movies, copywrited music and porn (which I guess is also probably copywrited), and plus I have homework to do, and some other reason that I forgot about while I was spending too many words describing my sluggish Internet connection.
Right, so -- I don't have too much to say tonight.
This should make my mom happy, though. Any time I've watched a movie with here where one of the characters is smoking, even if it's, say Satan or someone with similar evil qualities, she'll invariably comment on how the movie is setting a bad example and that lighting up is completely unnecessary for the movie to work. She's probably right (and she's also probably reading this -- hi, Mom!), but I'd hate to watch a film noir with her. Anyway, our pals at the recently quite ground-breaking Marvel Comics have finally caught on to what my Mom's been saying for years, and they're making all their comics smoke-free except for those in their new, "adult" MAX line.
As a comic book fan, this deeply upsets me. Wolverine's cigar is a major part of his characters! And what will Spider-Man comics be like if JJ isn't lighting up in the newsroom all the time? Huh?? This is a major step backwards for Marvel, and they should be ashamed! Next thing you know they'll be publishing comics without any colors! Then we're all done for. All of us. (In case you didn't catch it, I'm kidding)
Argh, post is already to long. Must . . . study . . .

2001-09-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

Alright, how am I gonna start this thing? How "HOLY FREAKING COW, YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME!!!"?
Nah, that's a bit over-done. But jeez! Ok, now that I got that out of my system, sit back and enjoy Aaron's Amazing Comic Book Adventure!! (note after the fact: this gets really long. You may just want to skip to the part at the end where the building blows up and they escape in on the magic pony)
It was not too long ago that I was whining about wanted to go to a comic book store but not being able to get to one, blah blah blah, so today I decided to put an end to that and take matters into my own hands -- I asked Grant if he would drive me to one. I had the name and directions to the closest comic book store in the phone book, and he had a car, so that was really no way anyone could stop us. The biggest problem was that I forgot to write down the actual address of the store, but I figured it would be easy to spot. Wrong! The street it was on turned out to be just a bunch of construction places, auto body shops and office buildings. Plus, it wasn't long before I realized that I had no idea what I was looking for. I guess I had assumed that there'd just be a big sign that said COMICS with an arrow pointing to it. There wasn't.
Eventually, I suggested my favorite solution for getting un-lost: asking to borrow somebody's phone book. The first place we tried was a reputable looking building with lots of beat up cars out front and no lights on inside. They were either closed, or a front for some crime ring. Either way, I couldn't seem to open the dead-bolted front door. We moved on.
The next place we decided to stop had a sign hanging across the building that said "Thermal Examination," or something to that effect. They had nice looking fake trees in the lobby though, so I figured that they must do something very corporate and probably pretty boring. But there was no one at the front desk, so I figured that they were probably pretty closed, too. But if they were, they forgot to lock the door.
No one appeared to be close by, but I still didn't want to go digging through the receptionist's desk, since "I was looking for a phone book!" probably wouldn't sound like the most legit excuse in the world. Instead I wandered around the office. I didn't have to go very far before I found what I was looking for. As far as I know, there are no phone books anywhere on the Chapman campus, except for some abridged Spanish versions, so I briefly thought about liberating this yellow-paged tome from its life of corporate drugery, but instead I just ripped it out the page with the comic book directory on it. As I left I noticed an untouched roll of Spree, a stapler, a computer, various Important Documents and lots of other fun stuff sitting out on the receptionist's desk, which I also I thought about taking before someone more unsavory came in with the same idea, but I wanted to get out of there before someone showed up and started asking emberassing questions about why I violated their phone book.
The address in the phone book was 1071, so we drove until we found a large building containing many different stores and offices that had a large 1070 printed on it. We looked around the entire area, and even checked out similar nearby buildings labled 1010 and 1060, but found no comic book store. What we did find was a whole lot of open offices with no one in them. By the time we actually found an occupied computer store, Grant and I had started to wonder if somehow the Rapture had come and no one had bothered to tell us about it. Then we noticed a guy making copies in an office that had a Jesus fish on the sign, so we knew that we were OK as far as Eternal Salvation goes.
We were not, however, any closer to finding the comic book store. Until someone started our brains and we realized that unlike 1070, 1071 is an odd number, and would therefore be on the other side of the street!
Sure enough, we found the building we were looking for, but it didn't look like what we were looking for. No sign that said Comics Here! or Comic Books! or Sequential Art! or even any sign that didn't say Western Air. Figuring that these travel kids could at least tell us what happened to our comic book store, we went in anyway. It looked just like every other empty office we'd been in so far. We looked around, trying to find something comics related, or at least someone to talk to. As I looked up and down the hallways of Western Air's office building I had this dawning realization that all of the posters on the walls either had Spawn on them or some other fantasy/sci-fi related theme.
Then I wandered into a relatively plain, boring looking room that was pretty empty except for some office furniture and shelves with nothing but action figures on them. Then Bingo! It all made sence! The comic book store we were looking for was called Image Comics, but I hadn't thought that it actually would be the office building of THE Image Comics!
Me: "Freaking a! I can't believe they actually let us in here!"
Grant: "That Spawn guy looks really cool."
I'd accepted the fact there there would be no new comix for Aaron today, and I didn't usually read Image stuff, but dang, this was cool! We hung out in the lobby area for a while, but still didn't see any real people. There was a big rack of Image comics next to the receptionist's desk that we looked at for a while before Grant noticed a sign that said "Help yourself" hanging on it.
At this point, Aaron is completely blow away. He's wishing that he was better at cussing, because now would be a perfect time to do some. All those smooth glossy covers and yummy art-and-word-filled insides . . . crap, it's like giving away ice cream or puppies or something! OK, maybe not puppies. Maybe, friggin' comic books!!
Aaron turns away, because frankly, I can't believe it. There's no way-- you just don't-- I had just tore a page out of someone else's phone book, but there was no way I was going to steal someone else's comics!
Then a guy comes over to us and asks what's up. We, or rather, I explained that we were new and just looking for a good comic book store. He suggested a couple and then motioned to the rack of comic books we were looking though and said "take all the comics you want."
Made my freaking day. No more words! I've got lots of free comics to read!!!

2001-09-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

You know what's dumb about Labor Day? Nothing works! I'm sure the rest of y'all check to make sure the metro is running before you a) buy a ticket, b) race all the way down to the station trying to catch it, the have to c) race back home once again in order to call your friend to tell him not to take the bus and meet you at the station, only to find that he's already left, before finally d) collapsing on the floor, sweaty, frustrated and thinking that "Big Stupid Piece of Crap Day" would be a more appropriate name for the holiday, but I didn't, so I was kind of screwed.
On top of that the school's eattin' joints were all either closed or opperating on weird hours and because the banks were also locked up and I had spent most of my cash on an invalid metro ticket I couldn't get food from any resturant that wouldn't smile and say "thanks, take what ever you want," when I showed them my student ID, which rather limited my ability to gain nourishment, or eat for that matter. Of course, if the our postal workers hadn't been taking their precious two day vaccacion, I'd have gotten the food-filled care package from my family yesterday when I was starving instead of today when I just ate it because it was there.
So my labor day stunk. Labor Evening wasn't too bad, though. I foreged around the dorm room and managed to dig up some ice cream and goldfish crackers, so things turned out OK. Pretty much everything that my mom taught me about nutrition and balanced meals has been flung recklessly out the window after only two weeks at college. Sorry, Mom! At least I still brush my teeth and take a shower every morning, right?
Oh, you want something worthwhile? Take a look at this. My biggest beef with pornographers has generally been the way they keep sending me stupid e-mails with thinly veiled subject lines, but when you really think about it, it's a horrible way to treat women. And when you really think about it, you probably don't realize how many businesses and companies you support also support pornography. It's food for thought if nothing else.
More later.

2001-09-02T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm hanging out here in my dorm room, opperating under the probably false pretense that I'm hip enough to have my own web page. But then, I've seen plenty of web pages that give new meaning to the phrase "everything but hip," so as long if they can do it, then by jingo, so can I! I'm jonesing for some new comic books, but sadly I'm stranded in the only town I know named after a color, with nothing even resembeling a car. Not that I like cars, but I wish that I at least had a bike or something. Oh well. Gonna have to work up the nerve to take the bus again one of these days. Otherwise, how am I going to satisfy my craving for cheap, independent expression? I'm open to suggesions, but so far, black and white comics are the best way I've found to take a hit. Huh, is information really like a drug? It makes for a good analogy anyway. Here's a similar one.
More later.