And by which I mean, a photography-related humor webcomic… anyone who has been in the photographic trenches will likely “get” most of the comics. This one earns a resounding “My god yes.” So true!
Tag Archives: websites
Jazz Grass
My friend (and former roommate) Andy has a video up on YouTube of him playing guitar… go check it out when you have a chance.
Also, via my friend Mike, Robot Koi!
Happy Horny Werewolf Day
Spreading the Love
I’ve got a few things I want to talk about today. First and foremost, I’d like to point out my friend Beth’s blog, Wandering in the Midwest, which has been an excellent and rewarding read so far. She’s in the process of doing a semester doing art of and about the wildlife and surroundings around where she grew up in Minnesota. She a damned talented artist, so it’s a real treat to get access to a workblog like this. (Fair warning: it’s not as bad as some, but it IS an image-heavy blog, so 56k-ers beware!)
Switching to an entirely different topic, I finally managed to see A Scanner Darkly this evening (I missed it by one day in the theaters… there was much gnashing of teeth, I assure you). Let me just say that while I wouldn’t use it for every movie, I am damn impressed with the rotoscoping techniques they used to animate the movie. Visually, it was a real treat, and narratively, it was an enjoyable rendering of a somewhat bittersweet Philip K. Dick novel (who, while more than a little crazy, was a brilliant writer), even choosing to show the dedication Dick had at the end of the book. The story deals with drugs but isn’t about drugs… the drug itself is imaginary (so far), and serves more as a catalyst for the real story: the progressive deterioration of the mind of the protagonist. Well worth watching, and I highly recommend watching it at your earliest convenience. (For those who are wondering what the hell I’m talking about, the trailer can be found here.)
I’m in the process of gathering budget and information for my move back to Seattle at the end of the month. I won’t be leaving the area until probably the 30th, but given how I drive, that should put me back on the west coast no later than the 4th or 5th. So, sometime between now and then, I need to finish a number of things, pack, and other prepwork. If we’ve been meaning to hang out but have been slackers about making it happen, ping me ASAP and I’ll make time, damnit.
My wireless perch is closing up for the night, so I’m going to have to wrap things up, but I would like to say that I’m really excited about the Apple Tech Talk next week, and both excited and nervous as hell about the move back to Seattle.
On Links and MUDs
Ancient “Warrior” Found in Permafrost, found via Warren Ellis. That man is a treasure trove of neat esoterica (which as I’ve discussed before, I’m rather fond of myself). Also found via his site, I’ve added myself to MyBlogLog, which is a method to track users and links and in general help form the idea of a community a bit. I’d love to find a non-feedburner solution to tracking unique rss users as well…
Sorry for the hiatus from posting. I’ve kept to my goal of writing something every day, it just happened to not include posting on here… I’ve been working on a few projects for AvatarMUD the past few nights, involving some tweaks we’ve discussed doing, as well as a new area (and thinking about what I’d like to do to an old one). None of them are done, but I’m taking a breather for a bit, especially since those “tweaks” involve a lot of number crunching, and I’ve been going a bit cross-eyed with it. Avatar and I have somthing of an odd sort of interaction. I’ve been a player there for nearly a decade now, and an administrator for nearly as long. It’s seen me through several relationships, a marriage, a divorce, and several substantial moves. I’ve graduated both high school and college while there, and it’s even been integrated into some of my work (like my Online Communities paper). I’ve made friends through it, I have friends who even got married after meeting through it. It’s an important part of my life.
Don’t get me wrong, though, it does have its problems. I’m not going to get into details at the moment (though I’ve been thinking long and hard on doing a postmortem-like writeup at some point), but there’s definitely room for continued improvement, and some of those frustrations have encouraged some time distancing myself from the MUD. I never fully left, but it would be hard to argue that I didn’t take at least something of a sabbatical. I’m in something of an upswing in activity on the MUD right now, mentoring one of the new imms, writing, and working on a few projects. One of the biggest things I’m doing though (and reasons I’m back in this surge) is that I’ve taken on something of a Don Quixote role. My particular windmills fall into staff-to-staff and staff-to-player transparency, in terms of taking the time to actually communicate first with the general staff, and then also being more open with our players. I’ve also been pushing for more attention being given to casual players, as there has been a slow but steady trend towards “hardcore” (on all the time, min/maxing your stats and equipment, etc) players. I strongly feel that a healthy game is served best by maintaining a balance of both.
I’m not trying to toot my own horn by saying I’m pushing for these things. There’s been a lot of quiet support among staff and players, and I’m definitely not the only one speaking up and pushing for these things. It’s been energizing, nonetheless.
Links for the Moment
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, discovered via Chris Pelsor’s snogblog. For those of you who dig on this sort of stuff, it’s totally a good find, lots of good information.
How To Be Friends With Your Ex is a good read, kind of relevant to me personally. There’s a lot to the whole notion of staying friends with an ex. My own personal philosophy stems from the idea that just because a relationship is ending, it doesn’t mean you suddenly stop loving someone. I still love all my exes, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. My opinion is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to process the loss of the relationship if you’re not trying to also suddenly “un-love” someone. Acknowledge that you still love them, and that they still love you, but that the relationship wasn’t working out. Something to consider is that you started dating this person because you felt they were good people. I won’t say that there aren’t some wolves masquerading as sheep so to speak, but generally, if you trust your judge of character elsewhere, you should trust it in this as well. If you trust your judge of character and believe that they’re good people, then why should that abruptly change because they’ve decided the relationship wasn’t working out? If you can accept that they’re still good people, but simply couldn’t remain in the relationship (for any number of reasons), then it becomes a LOT easier to become friends again a hell of a lot sooner. It’s a lot better in the long run, in my opinion, to change the nature of your love (from more eros to an agape-centric love), than to try and kill all feelings for someone and then maybe become friends at some distant future point.
There’s a lot more to all that than I’m really writing down, but for now that will have to do. It’s already a kind of cluttered explanation, but until I sit down and let it percolate for a while, I don’t think I’m going to do better.
Announcing BeMyPatron.org
BeMyPatron.org went live as of a few minutes ago. The site still needs to be fleshed out a fair bit, but I did want to keep to my schedule of launching it “today”. Things still on the to-do for it: add some custom buttons for people who’ve donated, add a list of projects I’m looking for funding for, and some little stuff.
Bigger update later. Currently it’s 3am, I’m in Florence, SC, and I really should have just gone to sleep rather than try to keep my silly launch schedule. Anyway, time for bed. Much love!
The Half Moon Hung Low Tonight
I spent the evening out with Mike and Mariah, driving around and chatting. They were both pretty tired, so it was a pretty mellow chat. Still, it was nice to see them, as it’s been a while since I really went and hung out. The holidays are an excuse, since nothing is open and/or it’s absolutely crazy in the commercial districts, but mostly I’ve just been hiding out at home. Sometimes it’s good to do that. And sometimes it just makes you insane.
After dropping my two cohorts off, I wandered into Hanover and hung out in my car, leeching bandwidth in front of the closed-for-the-holidays Hopkins Center to get some work done that really properly needed bandwidth to complete with any semblance of speed. I finally got around to catching some videoblogs I’d been meaning to catch, notably Sexerati’s Future of Sex video blog, put together by the lovely Melissa Gira (who, upon reading, sounds like an incredibly interesting and cool person that I’d love to sit and talk with). I first found Sexerati through Warren Ellis’s blog, and have been pleased with the posts on it thus far… for the sex nerds among you, I’d definitely suggest checking it out. (And if you’re curious but worried of being scandalized, don’t be: it’s geeking out about sex, not sex itself, ie there’s no porn or anything.)
Now I’m back home, because my battery was low and I didn’t want to dig out the inverter just to sit in my car and browse the internet, though I’ve been known to do similar before. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about finding a way to essentially live out of my car for a while, and just take off wandering. Realistically at this point there are very few places you can go where you can’t find a wireless network within a reasonable distance (if you know where to look), so I could even continue to work on things and stay in touch and just roam around for a while, do some writing and some photography. The main issue is that I can’t really afford to do that right now, because of already existing bills. Still, think positively and a way will open itself up. I know there are a lot of freelance photographers and writers who do exactly this, the question is how to get into that loop.
I’ve missed my goal of posting today, but only by maybe half an hour, so let’s all pretend this was posted on the 27th, shall we? I don’t feel like modding the timestamp for something as silly as that. (Really, the only time I modify timestamps is when I’m using it as a method to write posts in advance… which doesn’t happen often, but may in the future.) As I’m sure some of you might have guessed, I’m trying to do the whole “post every day” thing, but I don’t want to jinx it by calling it a goal or a resolution or anything. It’s not an exercise or a project, it just is what it is.
Wrapping things up, a few other things I wanted to point out: 1) my friend Dano has a new site up: http://www.thedano.net, so go check it out when you have a chance; 2) a Battlestar Galactica pen’n’paper RPG game was just announced, done by the same folks who did the Serenity RPG, for those who might find that nifty; 3) in the tidal wave of social networking sites (I’m on linkedin, facebook, myspace, friendster, orkut, okcupid, gdconnect… *thinks*), I just added yet another, called Consumating, found through Sexerati, because it sounded like a neat idea (if higher maintenance than some of the others). I’m still not entirely sure what I’m going to do with it, since (barring a very small select few) I’m not really looking for a relationship (or casual flings) right now. (If you’re wondering if you’re that small select few, you’re probably not, since I’m pretty sure the ones I’m interested in already know I’m interested in them. I’m not one to beat around the bush, for better or worse.)
That offer of heading to wherever I’m invited for New Years still stands, though we’re fast approaching the cutoff date for heading to the west coast and still making it in time (it’s already kinda pushing it). Failing that, I may just go wandering and see where I end up. (And before you say “Hey, I thought you were broke,” I am broke, however if you’re willing to camp or sleep in your car, you can travel for remarkably little money. I find it’s also a productive time for me, in terms of resetting myself and having time to process ideas, feelings, stress, etc… the wander down to the Cape was remarkably cathartic on a really low level that I’m only starting to become aware of now.)
More Links
No, I’m not trying to turn into a linkblog. There’s just been some interesting things out and about lately, and thought I’d share.
Setting Your Night Photography Goals
I found this blog through my father, and have been enjoying the photography and writing he posts. While he’s primarily focused on the topic of night photography (as fits the topic of the blog, and a subject near my own heart), what he talks about with keeping yourself motivated and on track by setting yourself good, clear, reasonable goals is really worthwhile no matter what sort of creative work you’re endeavoring to do.
Grr, Argh
I’ve become increasingly unhappy with my Gallery solution. Gallery 2 is feature-rich, yes, but at the cost of being a pain in the ass to use in terms of administrative interface, and customizing it is… well, painful to say the least. All those promises of making it easier to customize than Gallery 1 haven’t really panned out, in my humble opinion. In short, I’m not happy.
So, I’ve spent snippets of free time over the past few months looking at alternatives… most of which suck just as much or more. I found one that I really liked (ZenPhoto), but discovered to my chagrin that it has absolutely NO support for multiple users, which is unfortunately a dealbreaker right now. Reading through their forums, it’s on their possible to-do, but isn’t a high priority (argh!). Razzifrazzin’ sonuva…
So the search continues. I found another lovely app (Tableau) that looks PERFECTLY suited to my needs (including multi user support, huzzah!), but it requires Ruby on Rails, which my current web host doesn’t support. I’m otherwise very happy with FutureQuest, so I’m reluctant to leave them over this, especially since there really aren’t better options right now… if or when I finally do leave FutureQuest, it’ll be because I’m co-locating my own server (probably running OS X 10.x Server, replete with my own jabber and calendar servers), which is currently decidedly outside the realm of cost feasibility.
So, I’m putting the call out: anyone know any nifty gallery solutions? I’m looking for something that is lightweight and easily customizable, but also has the features I need like multi-user support, and will run in a LAMP environment? I’m aware of the ones currently up on OpenSourceCMS already, and am unhappy with the offerings, to be honest. Frankly, it’s this frustration that I think has caused more people to move to collective gallery solutions like Flickr. I really don’t want to go that direction, though, unless there’s no other choice. Damnit, I LIKE being able to host my own stuff.