| Closing Time |
[01 Jan 2009|03:15pm] |
This is it, my friends. The end of an era. For a long time I've been unhappy with the format and customization options available at Livejournal, so I've decided to make the big move over to Wordpress. Over the last few weeks I've moved all my old posts over, added special bonus commentary and separated the out the best-of-the-best for your reading ease. You can find all this and more at my new blog:
Milkshakes & Dinosaurs!
Hope to see you all there.
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| Squeal, Slumdog Swindler! |
[30 Dec 2008|07:39pm] |
I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" yesterday. It's about a poor boy from the slums who goes on to compete in the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". It shows how significant events in his life provided him with the answers he needed, and how he's doing it all for the girl of his dreams.
"Slumdog Millionaire" was given the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has been named the best film of the year by many prominent critics (such as Richard Roeper, and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times). It regularly appears in the Top Ten lists of countless other critics. It is, without a doubt, a fantastic film.
Since it's release in November, it has earned about $8 million at the box office.
I have no doubt that if it starred white people and was set in America, it would have made over $100 million by now.
*sigh*
I realize most of my readers are clustered in a small town in Nova Scotia, and thus access to independent theatres is difficult. Nonetheless, if you have any opportunity whatsoever to see this movie, I highly recommend it. It's a damn good film.
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| Shocking News! |
[27 Dec 2008|07:33pm] |
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Just a quick heads-up to you guys that, in a few days, this blog is closing it's doors forever. Keep tuned for more information.
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| Life at Home |
[22 Dec 2008|09:18pm] |
So, my forays into Youtube remain completely unsuccessful. I really don't know what to do about this, except possibly consult with Jeff when I get back to Vancouver. However, consulting with Jeff tends to be unpleasant.
*****
One of the things living away from home does is give you perspective on just how strange life at home is. For example, did you know there are no desks in this house? It's crazy. I'd like a desk. I even asked for one a few times when I lived here. There's no good reason for this to be.
I brought my desktop back in order to get some work down, and I had to set it up on top of a cabinet in the living room. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to actually do any work, since I'm sitting with my back exposed to the entire room and I find it impossible to do any serious writing when out in the open with the computer screen available for all to see. I tend to be very touchy about people reading over my shoulder, and about people reading my work uninvited, so this set-up creates a sort of perfect storm where I can't actually accomplish anything.
In a related note, I find it very uncomfortable to read in my room, because if I try to sit on my bed and lean against the wall my bed rolls away. My bed is on wheels, you see. There's also no good reason for this to be.
It's little things like this, taken in aggregate, that make it impossible to live here for any length of time. I need to figure out what I'm doing next summer.
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| A Quick Question |
[19 Dec 2008|08:30pm] |
Question: Does anyone know what's up with uploading videos to Youtube? I've been trying to upload a 200mb video and it's been taking hours. I'm not even sure if it's actually doing anything at this point.
In other news, I'm back on track with a major blogging project I had put on hold for months. It should be finished by the end of the month. Expect any number of exciting things in the future, people.
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| No Wii-Related Puns, I Promise |
[16 Dec 2008|07:02pm] |
So, three years after it came out, the Wii is still pretty difficult to get. It's been selling out around the city, and you're lucky to grab one if you can.
However, I didn't realize how desperate people were to get them until yesterday. I was in an EB Games doing some Christmas shopping while a woman was buying a Wii. The clerks congratulated her because it was their last one and they were unlikely to get more in. Apparently she had rushed in as soon as she found out EB had got them in, and arrived just in time.
The clerks were trying to ring up her order, but there was some kind of problem and they ended up taking a long time. Frustrated, the woman finally told them "Look, just so you know, I think I'm in labor".
I looked over. She was very obviously pregnant. It seemed incredibly likely that this woman was giving birth right now.
This was a woman who wanted her Wii.
On one hand I find it hard to imagine why, having gone into labor and found a Wii more-or-less simultaneously, this woman would rush to the store rather than the hospital. On the other hand, she probably wasn't going to get this opportunity again.
Sometimes you do what you have to, I guess.
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| Home, where my music's playing... |
[14 Dec 2008|11:55am] |
Well, I'm home now. It's okay, except the door to my room doesn't close. I have to sort of wedge my duffel bag underneath the door to keep it from sliding open.
Also, it is cold as fuck outside.
Seriously. Yesterday it was -37 degrees. The kind of freezing where it loops past 'cold' and you end up with this terrible burning feeling. I cannot leave the house because any attempt to go places would result in me freezing to death. I'm sure as hell not waiting at a bus-stop for anything.
So I'm stuck in the house, and need to find things to do.
It's super exciting.
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| That's It |
[09 Dec 2008|10:20pm] |
Okay, kids, here are the haps.
In a lot of ways, it's been a shitty year. Very little good has come out of it for me. I'm not going to get into it; anyone who cares to know probably already does.
As of yesterday, though, it is for all intents and purposes done. I finished my last exam, and I have no real responsibilities for the rest of 2008.
There's a lot of people I've put through shit I shouldn't have, or haven't kept up with as well as I could have. This blog is largely a way to keep in touch with the League, and by not updating regularly I'm cutting you guys out of my life. I'm really sorry, guys; I just haven't had a lot of happy things to write about.
Right now, I have about three, four weeks where I don't have to do anything. I can use this time to recover and get things back on track. If anyone has any suggestions for stuff I should be doing, I'd love to hear them. Some options (mostly mutually exclusive) I've been floating;
1) Drop a class next term and do an internship somewhere in the film industry
2) Take a fun elective
3) Drop out, run away, wander the Earth like Caine from "Kung Fu"
4) Don't do any more than I have to, take it easy for awhile.
There's a lot of problems with all of these options. I'd be happy if people could come out with something better. Another major problem is that I feel I've been lacking long-term goals. As such, I'm going to ask people to suggest things I could be working to, places I could be going, skills I could be developing, anything that would give me some direction in life.
Good luck, kids. I'm counting on you.
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| TV Shows! |
[28 Nov 2008|10:46pm] |
I had problems, and then watching Arrested Development made them better.
Unfortunately, I'm almost done watching the last season. I need to find a more long-term solution.
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| In Which I Describe People I Know in Terms of "The Cheese to my Macaroni" |
[24 Nov 2008|02:03pm] |
Alyssa Brandt is the Seinfeld to my Kramer.
Danielle Brown is the Butch Cassidy to my Sundance Kid.
Mitchell Crouse is the René Belloq to my Indiana Jones.
Stephen Lawless is the John Lennon to our Rest of the Beatles.
Ruhi Patel is the Montresor to my Fortunato.
Jonathan Rushton is the Luke Cage to my Danny Rand.
*****
In other news, I've failed to do any real blogging lately. Oops.
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| I Worry About Strange Things |
[14 Nov 2008|11:11am] |
You know, I'm a bit of a stickler about book-binding. If I'm going out of my way to buy a book to add to my collection, it shouldn't look like ass. It's a pretty basic thing, and it's not a problem very often. However, the other day I needed to pick up "The Prestige" for class, and I ended up not buying it because of how downright hideous it was.
Gaze upon it and despair
Now, there's a lot of things wrong with this. I've never been a fan of books that announce "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture" or something similar on the cover. It's tacky, and those editions end up looking incredibly dated. Most of the time, though, the movie announcement is just a little seal in the corner that can be ignored. Here, it takes up about 1/4 of the cover.
What is this shit? Who needs to know there's a movie that badly? Why are the words "Fall 2006" so damn big, bigger even than the authors name? Is 'Fall 2006' really such important information? Does it really need to be conveyed with such huge-ass font?
Another major problem is the lack of symmetry. The top of the page has the biggest text, and then it gets progressively smaller from there on out. The whole cover is unbalanced and ugly looking, as if the title were teetering on a stack of tiny words.
And of course, the order of the things is entirely arbitrary. Above-center is where you generally want to put the most important information, the title. But since the title is stacked so close to the top of the page, "Fall 2006" ends up falling closer to that space. Is "Fall 2006" the title? No? Then don't put that shit there!
There's a lot of other problems, but I'm going to focus on just one more; how utterly generic the cover is. Big words! Ominous glowing fog! Black! That's.... that's swell. Absolutely nothing about that sets it apart from nearly every other book on the shelf. If I didn't already plan on buying to book, would this cover encourage me to do so? Would it suggest that this book is something new and exciting I should be reading, or does it suggest that it's just another run-of-the-mill paperback that you'd buy at the airport and throw away after? Fuck, other than how hideous the design is, what sets it apart from other run-of-the-mill paperbacks?
So, despite needing to read the book for class, I haven't bought a copy. I plan to go downtown and try to find a bookstore with a decently bound edition. This is how terrible the design is here; I'm willing to go half-an-hour out of my way to find a different edition, because this one looks so bad.
What we've learned here is that how you package your books is important. Don't be an idiot about it. Don't make the same mistakes as the guy who designed the cover of "The Prestige".
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| Directing and Blogging: A Winning Combination |
[11 Nov 2008|11:53pm] |
Something odd that I've noticed recently is that I get very intense while directing. Under normal circumstances I tend to be fairly laid back and just sort of going with the flow, usually to the point of procrastination. But get me behind a movie camera and all of a sudden I'll be snapping off orders for lighting set-ups and working without pause to try and get as many shots and set-ups done as possible. Also, I use the word "sweet" a lot.
It's kinda weird.
In other news, I find it really strange the kind of hits I get on this blog sometimes. I don't really advertise this thing or tag my posts in any meaningful way, so I always find it interesting when people I don't know leave comments. We're all familiar with that Wordsworth guy, of course. And just a little while ago my post about the fish got a comment from some guy in Houston. He suggested it looked like a "Roger Dean Fish". I have no idea what this means.
My friend Alyssa has this same problem, but much worse; her personal blog, aimed at her family and friends, has a host of regular readers from places she's never been to (including, I believe, Rochester, New York).
How do people find these random blogs? Why do they read them? What's so interesting about the minutiae of a complete strangers life?
If there's any lurkers reading this right now, please go ahead and answer in the comments. I imagine it would be quite interesting.
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| Film is Tiring |
[30 Oct 2008|10:28pm] |
I'm exhausted. Yesterday afternoon around six I got a call from Stirling asking me to come help out with a film shoot. Everyone got together to meet at 8:30pm. We finished at about 6:00am.
The entire night can be summarized in two texts I sent out during the ordeal.
From: Jacob McNeil
To: (Name Withheld)
Time: 10:51pm
Sometimes, in the course of making a film, it is necessary to break the law.
From: Jacob McNeil
To: (Name Withheld)
Time: 3:26am
Stirling Bancroft owes me big.
I need to get a lot of sleep.
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| No One is Interested in This But Me |
[27 Oct 2008|10:53pm] |
The word "they" should function as a singular gender-neutral pronoun.
There. I said it.
In the English language, there seems to be a lot of confusion over how to refer to singular entities when the gender is unknown. For an example, let's imagine a contract that can be signed by men or women. It could use the pronoun "he" regardless of gender ("he who signs this agrees..."). It could use an awkward construction like "he/she", which sounds terrible when spoken aloud. Or it might use one of the many artificial and downright ugly constructions that have sprung up over the years as a potential solution, such as "hir", "xe", or "squir" (I shit you not, these all actually exist).
All these ways of referring to an unknown gender are either implicitly sexist or unbearably awkward. What's needed is a gender-neutral term that's already in common usage and can pull double-duty as a singular pronoun.
And we have that word. "They".
Now, the problem here is that "they" already functions in the plural sense, and so could result in confusion. However, this isn't a serious concern if you think about it; we already use the word "you" to mean both "you (singular)" and "you (plural)", and nobody has any trouble with that.
More importantly, "they" is already in usage in this sense, and has been since the 15th century. It's already an accepted variant, though it sometimes doesn't receive much use. However, some grammarians reject it because of the difficultly in contrasting it against plurals. Here's an example I just found:
"The person saw a creature creeping towards them from out of the forest. Its eyes had a gleam in them that made them think of all the fierceness of a lion."
In the second sentence, it's unclear except from context what each "them" refers to. In an extended passage this confusion would be compounded and potentially render the work unreadable (again, I've seen examples). This is a legitimate concern, I admit. However, it seems to me that the clarity you gain from not arbitrarily assigning a gender balances out against the diffusion of meaning (again, context helps significantly in this case).
Why is having a singular gender-neutral pronoun so important? Because the most commonly used alternative, simply using "he" to denote both genders, is both confusing and sexist and leads to all kinds of confusion. Take, for example, the extremely gendered "He" used to refer to god; as a matter of logic an omnipotent, bodyless being would not be gendered, but this use of the singular pronoun allows people to refer to a god as a man, usher in all sorts of talk about "the father", and elevate men to a higher level of importance than women.
Not to mention how insulting it must be to read over something that repeatedly refers to you as the wrong gender (for example, a contract that keeps using the pronoun "he").
Though it doesn't cover all the bases linguistically, 'they' does fill a nice gap and should be used in discourse as a way of avoiding weird constructions and incorrect gender-attribution. People should use it more often.
Like most of the things I worry about, there's a relevant Dinosaur Comic to this, but I can't find it.
*****
For the record, most of my problem with artificial constructions like 'xe' is that they are cumbersome and seem to have little basis in the English Language (their letter structure and pronounciation just doesn't mesh with other common English words). Additionally, their very nature as artificial constructions rather than naturally arising words makes them unlikely to catch on. They strike me as an impractical solution to a practical problem, though I will admit that they can have a legitimate use in some circumstances.
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| This is of no interest to anyone |
[21 Oct 2008|09:43pm] |
A couple quick updates:
-Film-A-Week is going rather poorly at the moment; in both the last two weeks our actors bailed on us, and now we're pretty far behind. We may need to seriously consider the feasibility of this project.
-My life has taken a significant turn for the better now that I've got some major projects out of the way and there's less stress. I've even stopped having those weird-ass dreams.
-I've just watched the entire first season of Arrested Development, and it is glorious. I had no idea what I was missing all this time. The folly of my wasted youth!
...although that, too, is partially responsible for the dreams.
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| What the Hell |
[17 Oct 2008|10:59am] |
You know you've been watching too much Arrested Development when...
...you dream that you were actually adopted and that Jason Bateman is your real father.
O.o
I've been having incredibly bizarre, surrealist dreams all week, which is especially weird because I usually don't remember my dreams. They keep interfering with my sleep and screwing with my head during the day (such as two nights ago, when I dreamed that I had forgotten to do important projects for classes I'm not actually enrolled in).
There is considerably too much stress in my life right now.
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| Just a Small Note |
[13 Oct 2008|11:57pm] |
On Wikipedia today, this was the Featured Picture:
The world is rough sometimes. People can be obnoxious, life can be unfair, sometimes everything seems against you. But to live in a world where something that splendid and beautiful can arise naturally, crafted by chance in the forge of evolution over the course of billions of years... well, that's something special. You can forgive a little harshness in the world when it gives us things as magnificent as these.
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[12 Oct 2008|04:28pm] |
As many of you already know my girlfriend and I broke up a little over a week ago, thus triggering a whole lot of shit and amounting to a really shitty time.
For those interested, the break-up was at least reasonable amicable. We still talk and even ended up going to a movie together (we already had tickets, so it seemed like a waste not to go).
But anyway! The best part of break-ups are, of course, rampant speculation. Everyone who finds out naturally begins speculating on what happened, and how, and why. As much as most of this has bothered me, there's one person's opinion that I found fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I had to text Jon about it as soon as I found out. I present to you know the entirety of our conversation on the matter.
Jacob: So apparently my ex-girlfriend's mom thinks we broke up because I'm gay.
Jon: But you're not.
Jacob: I know, but she thinks I am because I kept talking about how dreamy Aaron Eckhart is.
Jon: He is!
Jacob: I know!
For the record, Aaron Eckhart is so dreamy.
*****
One other exciting thing to come out of the break-up is that Mariana decided to write me a farewell letter including advice for future relationships.
This advice included (I kid you not) very detailed and well-labelled diagrams.
...I think I just got told.
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| My Life at 24fps |
[01 Oct 2008|11:42am] |
We filmed and edited another "Film a Week" on Sunday; these seem to be going pretty well thus far. With any luck they'll start appearing up on the interwebs near the end of October; I'll let you kids know when and where. Our latest shoot involved a homemade cat puppet and an abandoned bus which we never bothered to get permission to shoot in. Later, the "James Bond Theme" started playing really loudly as if from nowhere. The whole thing was impossibly surreal.
Right now my life is crazy, it that it is full of things I have to do which make it difficult to take on a bunch of stuff I want to do. Apparently the National Film Board is offering internships, and as much as I'd like to apply I'm not sure I have the time. This is incredibly troubling. Perhaps the only way I could achieve this is by cutting all my friends out of my life.
I'm sure they'd understand.
Speaking of which, it occurred to me the other day that most of the things that would make all my friends hate me would also be things that would make me a total badass. So I'm a bit conflicted on what to do there. You know how it is.
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| Random Thought |
[28 Sep 2008|07:21pm] |
Before getting into the Film Program, I never drank in the middle of the day.
Industry functions are weird.
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