I’m lying in bed, catching up with the world for once. Yes, I’m on my dreaded MAC.
It’s been about 10 months since I got this laptop and I haven’t done much with it. The original intent was to turn this into a multimedia machine in order to process old pro wrestling video tapes onto dvd format so I could finally get rid of my boxes and boxes of tapes. However, I couldn’t use the format I wanted to use (MAC smash MPG-2!) and getting it from the formats here and onto my PC to do anything with it was an excercise in frustration.
For most of the past ten months it’s been my instant message machine. Every so often I’ll take it to my bedroom in order to watch recorded TV or movies over the network (if it can find the network because Leopard’s networking to windows machines is about as crazy as I am) or to do a late night shift. I don’t use it that much, it really is a shame because I’m sure someone would probably be able to work magic with it.
So I’ve decided to use it more, even if it’s just to blog with.
BTW, I’m a goober about blogging.
ANYTHING can interrupt my blogging. The dog barking, someone ims me, there’s a spider on the ceiling (no really, I just stopped to get a cup and scoop him up and put him outside), if it’s more than three minutes and I lose my train of thought then I just close the window and give up on blogging for the day.
My other excuse is that I have now 3 wordpress blogs. I’ve used random passwords for them so I never think to write down which one is which. In Firefox, they all load the same except if you sign into one, firefox goes nuts and assigns the stored password to the other two sites. So when I get one working on one computer, I stick with it. That’s why you haven’t seen a lot of this or 3rd Person Guy. It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just that having to look up passwords is something that throws my train of thought off enough to make me throw out whatever I was going to say.
SO, as stupid as it sounds, I’ve designated my main computer as my reallycoolsite main computer (for owned, techtv and animation updates) and I’m going to use the MAC for late night (or early morning) ranting. 3rd person guy will probably go one one of my TV computers since I think he’s coming back as animated short movies.
3rd person guy was intended to be my anonymous observations about life as I worked at the store. Sadly, a lot of the ideas behind it died when I quit. That was nearly a year ago. I can’t believe it either. I quit in spectacular fashion (for me anyway) then never went back (I had cleaned out my locker the night before). I miss the extra pay check, but with gas prices so high and my gas mileage so horrible with my suv, most of the money from the second job would be spent on gas. In any case, as soon as I work out the kinks in Iclone3, I’ll probably bring it back.
Iclone3. Sigh.
For those that know me, Iclone has been my obsession for a couple of months now. It’s an animation program that lets you make Sims2 style movies on it. It’s actually pretty amazing for a lower priced ($200 range) animation package. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into learning Iclone 2.5 and now that 3’s out, it’s going to be amazing what I can do with it… once they work the initial kinks out.
I have about 20 stories written for the super hero role playing game that I’m running. I’d say about 10 of them could work *as is* as outlines for 1 hour episodes of a TV show and 2 or 3 of the remaining ones could work as two hour movies. Now that’s ME talking, I admit that I’m in love with own ego but my intention is to make movies of these adventures.
The problem is that yeah, I’m doing everything myself. As usual. I’m writing, directing, producing, animating, scoring, etc. At the same time I’m learning just about everything I can learn about movie making. Let alone animation. I can see why people shun film school. I know that if I went to film school, sure, I might make some contacts in the industry and my productions would be technically sound, but they’d be soulless. I know I’m learning more by doing all of this stuff myself and frankly, I want to surprise everyone with the depth of things to come.
The stories aren’t going to be for everyone, though. The setting is your classic Utopia. At least on the surface. The world I’m writing about is (spoiler warning) a play on the classic cross over series in comics. I’m sure you’ve seen them as DC and Marvel churn out something new every year. The classic idea is that they come up with an epic story that “changes their universe forever” and then crosses over through nearly every comic in their line in the course of the story (hey, they have to sell comics too!). At the end of the story things pretty much go back to normal with one or two “big” changes that usually last six months until the next big cross over starts and undoes everything from the last one.
The idea for my world is that the big cross over event happened 10 years ago. The entire world changed. But the world didn’t go back to “normal” and there was no follow up big event. There are mysteries about the event, there are voids that need to be filled, there are things to parody and there are a lot of (hopefully) entertaining things to come in the future.
Hopefully. Maybe. I don’t know. As long as I don’t get distracted.
Oh look, a moth on the ceiling. Where the heck did I put that cup?
Jim