movieguyjon

On New Years Resolutions

Last year I wrote up a post about my new years resolutions. Out of the 20 I posted, I ended up completing only one. So this year I decided to re-think the resolution thing and come up with more attainable goals so I feel less pathetic when the 2011 rolls around. Although, I have a feeling that history will repeat itself like it usually does and I’ll be writing a post similar to this one next year. Yay for New Years Resolutions, eh?

Anyway, here’s the list in all it’s listy glory.

Finish a final draft of Year of the Con, my nerdy road-trip comedy.
Acquire an Agent and a Manager to help sell my script and future ones I write.
Complete writing of two web series I want to produce.
Get at least one of the web series produced.
Write a third screenplay.
Get Photoshop CS2 and Flash 8 back on my compruter. Srsly, the newer ones blow.
Write every day.
Find either a better-paying job or a second job.
Start up my old webcomic.
Go to more shows.
Go to a rave.
Go to at least 2 nerdy conventions. Dress up for both of them.
Go to comic con.
Write a sci fi novel.
Complete Script-Frenzy this year and do NaNoWriMo again!
Write a spec script for a sitcom, hour-long drama, procedural, and whatever you call the ooey gooey goodness that’s on HBO and SHOWTIME these days.
More dates. Some blind dates perhaps.
Do one of those speed dating things and have at least as awkward a time as Steve Carrell did in The 40 Year Old Virgin.
Drink more cranberry juice. So delicious.
Get a suit. I’ve got the pants. Just need to get the rest.
Co-write a film script with someone.
Hang out more with friends and be less of an anti-social bitch. God, srsly.
Do two things I would never otherwise do.
Get my toon to level 80. God, srsly. I’m such a terrible nerd.
Visit at least 2 Friendfeed people. ROAD TRIP!
Take Killer (my cat) to the groomer. Be able to afford that.

Here’s to the new year!

The Best Music Videos I Saw This Year

Posted on December 13, 2009 by movieguyjon Internets Music Youtubes 0

I was going to save this post until much later in the month, but then it dawned on me that I might forget to make a top-list post and then January will hit and it will be too late. And I don’t think it would be all that timely to post a best-of ’09 list in the beginnings of ’10. So, with that in mind, I say let’s push forward with The Best Music Videos I Saw This Year. The criteria for this list wasn’t all that complicated. The band had to have a really good song, not be too insanely popular, and be more than just a band playing for an audience. It also had to keep the viewer engaged by not beating it’s gimmick to death. Might seem like vague rules, but when you see these videos, you’ll understand what I mean. Also (and this is a MINOR criteria), the videos needed to be in a high quality format (HD) and be easily embeddable on any website.

Let’s do this.

5) Do You Want To Date My Avatar – The Guild

This video makes it onto this list because the song is catchy, and the nerdy references are cranked up to eleven. It’s an ode to those of us who play MMORPG’s (pronounced: meh-mor-pe-guhs) and anyone who knows what a level 50 paladin is. Also, the costumes are rad and there really isn’t a band to speak of, so the conceit of playing to an audience doesn’t exist. If you like this, check out the show.

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4) French Navy – Camera Obscura

I like Camera Obscura, a lot. Their newest album, My Maudlin Career, is simply a gem and this video captures the essence of that. It’s shot to look like old footage, and it’s cut fast enough to keep you from being too bothered by the band playing music together in a flat. Sure, the mushy lovey-dovey story within the video is a little gag-worthy, but the music keeps it from getting too obnoxious.

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3) Lessons Learned – Matt and Kim

I like this band well enough, but their other music videos haven’t really caught my attention. They’re you’re typical indie music video where they just have the two band members playing an instrument in a weird environment. This video breaks that conceit and it’s all the more refreshing for it. I also like this song much better than Daylight, which you could hear for awhile on some alcoholic beverage commercial. Also, naked people who are fairly good looking make this music video a win in my opinion.

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2) Sick Muse – Metric

This video makes it this far down the list in it’s simplicity. It’s a band goofing around and not really playing their instruments. They aren’t playing to an audience and they are dancing around like fools. It helps that the band is amazing and the album is perhaps the best one I’ve heard this year. I wanted to put Gimme Sympathy on this list as well, since it had an interesting gimmick, but there wasn’t an HD version on youtube. Also, I like this song just a teensy-weensy bit more.

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And the winner of best music video this year?

Drumroll…

1) Cousins – Vampire Weekend

The film student in me loves the low-tech of the video. It’s just the band playing their instruments on a dolly in a back alley somewhere. It fits the tone of the song, which differentiates itself from the previous album with a bit more energy than A-Punk and plays around with time and space editing which I love in music videos. Check out near the end of the video where they wear the other band members’ faces behind their own. It’s an editing gimmick that makes the video editor in me SQUEE with delight.

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And of course, the runner up..

Dimmer – Bishop Allen

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Remake It

Posted on December 6, 2009 by movieguyjon Blather Screenwriting Writing 0

The HORROR! THEY'RE REMAKING WHAT?!

I’ve got a rather novel idea that I’d like to share with the world, something which I think everyone can agree with on some basic level. Something, which when I say it you’ll say “amen” under your breath. Ready for it?

We don’t *need* remakes.

I was looking at some stills for the upcoming movie remake The Karate Kid and suddenly this revelation hit me in all it’s clarity and wisdom. Why was this remake needed? What wasn’t told with the original story that needed to be re-told? What other kind of spin could anyone actually put on this to make it suitable for a new generation? Last I checked, the original source material still holds up and isn’t that painfully dated. And it’s not the casting that bothers me about this remake, it’s that the best option was to just re-do everything and call it a Karate Kid movie.

What if instead of remaking everything under the sun people decided to just take the basic story structures from these older movies and make something new entirely? A young, troubled boy finds an outlet for his untoward behavior in karate, thanks to a sage neighbor. Why does it have to be called The Karate Kid, and furthermore, what’s so important with it being a remake? Is it just to bring in the nostalgic moviegoers? Is it because remaking already established properties is fiscally safe?

How about this? Let the basic story stand on it’s own feet and trust that audiences that like that type of story will come in and see it. Since there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s not like you’re going to get sued for having a similar story type to the Karate Kid. If that were the case, I highly doubt a lot of “original” properties wouldn’t exist today.

Just something to think about. If it ain’t broke..

On NaNoWriMo

Posted on December 1, 2009 by movieguyjon Blather Writing 1

I R A WRITER NAOW

Dudes (and Dudettes), I totally frickin’ did it!

I wrote a 50,000 word novel. That’s about 93 pages using your standard Times New Roman font and the basic margins set up by Microsoft Word when you open a blank document. Seven more pages and I could use one-fifth of a ream of paper to print out my novel. Reading my words would take a few trips if you took the public transportation here. So, now what? What happens now that I’ve done the unthinkable (or at least have done what I thought to be unthinkable..or doable)?

I dunno.

I think I’m going to take the next month or so and let the project simmer so I can get a feel if I want to actually do more with it or if it’s going to remain merely a means of cheap therapy. There’s not really that much of a plot to speak of, since it’s based loosely on me and my life after graduation. And every few thousand words I throw in something fictional to spice things up and make it readable on some level. But for the most part there’s a lot of incoherent ramblings about the craft of writing, which perhaps works well with the crazier parts of the story as one would have to be a bit nutty to fictionalize themselves.

The process of writing out this monstrosity was kind of interesting as I forced myself to write at least 2,000 words on average every day. On days I took off, I made up for it by doubling and in some cases tripling the word count. By the fourth week, I started to feel the strain of the deadline and let myself get a little looser in what I allowed on the page. But what I didn’t expect was that all this writing would spark my creative juices in such a dramatic way. I started going back to my other projects and re-examining them, planning on what I would do when I finished my novel. On one particular day, I even planned out another novel that I want to write. I imagine that there will be a NaJaWriMo or something in my future.

This fire to continue writing hasn’t stopped since I passed the 50k word limit. In fact, I wrote two short scripts on Sunday and outlined another project. And as you can tell, tonight I decided to blog a bit.

If I could impart some advice from what I’ve learned doing this whole project it would be that you just need to write. Don’t get hung up on whether it’s good or not. Tell your story and save the validity of it for draft two. Be as raw as you can be and you’ll find that the words come quite naturally.

But fuck poetry, because that’s just stupid. :P

Putting the Rant Pants On

Posted on October 26, 2009 by movieguyjon Blather Internets TV 0

ORDER! ORDER! HE made the internets stupid!

It’s been too long since I’ve updated this blog, internets, but I don’t really plan on apologizing for that today. Instead, I’m going to don the rant pants and do some serious bitching. Here’s the short version: Facebook is stupid, twitter isn’t worth squat, and Hulu is about to get one less user. Whew. Now onto the long version.

Facebook is still hard to use. They’ve added a new feature where you can have a live feed roll down the page in “real time,” except it’s not real time. As a fairly adept internet user, I’ve usually got a minimum of four tabs open, one for each service and then random site hopping. If you are on another tab, the facebook timeline doesn’t update. You have to actually go back and make sure the site is the focus before it will do anything. You can tell that the idea of the “live feed” came from the Friendfeed guys, but it looks and feels like the Facebook guys are the ones who implemented it. Granted, the Friendfeed guys ARE the Facebook guys now so I’ll rephrase: Good idea, shitty implementation.

They’ve also removed cities from networks. So I guess the only networks I *can* have are schools or jobs? I question the usefulness of networks now, especially now that friend lists are becoming a big deal. Also, what good are networks in a twitter-ized environment anyway?

I heard somewhere that Twitter was worth billions. I kind of wish *I* had thought of a service with poor uptime and a shitty API so I could be worth billions too. Oh yeah, they’re coming out with lists, a feature that every other service has had for some time now. Hell, even twitter clients have list-like features.

You’ll remember a blog post I made awhile back bitching about users who couldn’t be bothered to pay the small fees from Pandora. Yeah, those people are still tight asses, but there’s some news that might make this “pay for online content” debate a little bit more complicated. Hulu is expected to charge for their content by 2010. I think this is a fairly retarded decision, considering the fact that the service isn’t out of it’s infancy yet (my opinion). Also, for a service like hulu to start charging, it needs to change the way it’s delivering it’s content. First of all, to me, pay for online content means zero advertising. It also means the service (like the article says) needs to extend beyond the website and extend *reliably*. Also, this eight day delay between episode air date and hulu release would have to stop. In fact, I would say that Hulu should just release the episode as soon as it airs.

Now, there was mention that there could be a tiered pricing scheme, which would make this into a less-sucky idea. But I’m going to put it out there that there won’t be much to the free tier. Sorry, but at this point, I see no reason to move to Hulu from Cable, or to even pay for both. Cable sucks, but at least it’s reliable and it won’t buffer if your connection isn’t as stellar.

Ugh.

On Fall Television

Posted on September 21, 2009 by movieguyjon TV 0

It’s begun. All the fall shows are starting up again. It’s an exciting time for the avid TV viewer as we have a lot of good premieres to look forward to. We’ve already gotten three exceptional premieres from Fringe, The Office and It’s Always Sunny. And this week we’ve got others like House and Dollhouse.

I’m definitely going to try and catch as much of these premieres as I can. What are you anxious for?

Let the Busy Times Roll

Posted on September 16, 2009 by movieguyjon Blather My Life 0

Hey all, I’ve been fairly busy the past week or so with extra work, which is why I haven’t updated this thing or ranted about some inane topic that you probably don’t care about. So, I thought I would just give some twitter-like blurbs about various things throughout the past week.

– Patrick Swayze died. Add this to the list of reasons why ’09 sucks.

– Kanye West decided that he wasn’t douchey enough and humiliated Taylor Swift during her award speech. But hey, that’s what the voice of a douchey generation does.

– I made it to level 30 in WoW. I hope I can get caught up to the newest expansion so I won’t feel so left behind when Cataclysm changes everything.

– Social networks continued to be social.

– The diet coke of Facebook was released. It reminded me of what I liked about the older iterations, namely the simplicity.

– I didn’t see any movies in the theater.

– I started watching This American Life, the tv show.

– I thought about working on my comic, but got distracted with the internet instead.

And there you have it. I’ve been busy.

On Fraud and Credit Cards

Posted on September 8, 2009 by movieguyjon Blather 9

Via The Consumerist:

Enter Merchantfraud, a group of well-intentioned but foolish outlaws who advocate having customers ask them for stickers identifying the companies as violators, then sticking them on offenders’ storefronts.

I agree with the author of this article to an extent. Calling business establishments robbers and thieves is a bit over the top, but at the same time I am a little bit miffed that stores can get away with this. I remember coming across this problem in a bar a few years back. I had just ordered a drink and was about to pay with my card when the bartender told me that I would have to spend at least $20 before she could ring it up. Since I had already consumed about half of the drink already, there really wasn’t any way I could go out and seek out an ATM somewhere, of which there wasn’t one to be found (I know because I looked later that night and it was blocks away). So, naturally I drank $20 worth of booze and got way more blitzed than I planed. This would have been a different story if this were the Hopleaf, but I digress.

Point being, it kind of blows to find that stores can get away with this, especially if it’s “prohibited” by the credit card companies themselves. But I don’t think I care enough to go around defacing store-fronts with stickers.

On Snow Leopard and Upgrades

Posted on September 7, 2009 by movieguyjon Internets My Life 0

With the exception of security updates and the occasional ZOMG THIS IS BROKEN NEEDZ FIXIN patch, I’m not all that big on upgrading my softwares. A big part of me thinks, “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Unfortunately, that’s not how the computer industry works and in no time flat I’m running out of date software and getting prompts left and right to update my OS or face certain terror. It’s almost like they hired H.P. Lovecraft to write these warnings. I’ve most recently felt the push to upgrade with the newest version of the Mac OS, Snow Leopard. I dismissed the update off the bat, citing no real need to update. In fact, my software still works fine and my laptop still runs like a dream.

And then I heard that Snow Leopard was $30, and that you could upgrade straight from Tiger (the version I have). My first thought was, “Wha-?” But then it kind of clicked for me. What if this was a way to encourage people like me to take the plunge and upgrade? I mean, $30 to Apple is better than nothing, right? Apple isn’t really known to try to reach out to the non-fanboys like myself, but this update almost seems like a peace offering of some kind. “Hey, we’d like your business. Here ya go.”

Of course, I could just be under-thinking this.

On Birthday Wishlists from Amazon

Posted on September 1, 2009 by movieguyjon Internets My Life 0

A most special holiday is approaching (hint: it rhymes with ‘sly firthday’) and I thought I would share my wishlist with you guys, since I know y’all want to buy me nice things! I’ve had this Amazon wishlist set up for years and went through it a bit last night to get rid of old listings and items I’ve gotten over the years. Kind of a strange trip down memory lane. “Oh yeah, I wanted that once!” or “Why did I ever want THAT?”

Anyway, enough about my weirdness. Let’s recap my wishlist!

1. Apple OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

I don’t need to have the most up to date things, but being behind by two OS versions is kind of ridiculous. The Chromium builds don’t work, and a few other programs that I’d like to use won’t install because my OS is as old “as the dinosaurs.”

2. Bones: The Complete First Season

I like this show, and would love to have it be a part of my collection.

3. Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 2: Scott Pilgrim Versus The World

Read the first book and I’m interested to see where the story goes. There’s also that movie coming out in the not-to-distant future so I’d like to be caught up before that releases to the general public.

4. Six Feet Under: The Complete First Season

Perhaps the best and worst summer of my life was spent watching the entire Six Feet Under series. I’m very interested in re-watching this in the near future.

Yep. So, that’s pretty much it. I’ve reached a new blogging low. Join us next week when I ask for spare change.