Studio Korrekt, Stockholm, 1988.
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Decided that, now that I've got more free time, I may as well give my computer a clean install of everything.
For OSX: Attempting to install Chameleon Bootloader so I can use a 64-bit kernel.
For Windows: Trying out the Win8 Release Preview.
For Linux: Switching to OpenSUSE.
So far it's been rocky. Something's not quite right with Chameleon and I can only boot OSX in 64-bit mode if I do it in safe mode. Haven't been able to determine where the problem is, as the last few lines of verbose boot happen whether it's in safe mode or not. If it's not in safe mode I get a freeze on a white screen, with mouse pointer visible. While I'm considering trying to upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion to see if that fixes the problem, I've seen people report similar issues in ML and I wouldn't want to spend $20 on discovering I still have the same problem. (Plus if I switch to ML I won't be able to fall back to a regular, non-Chameleon EFI boot like I can with Lion.)
Win8 -- well, it's set up. The parts that look the way they're supposed to look pretty damn good; the icons, tiles, and fonts are all really attractive. A lot of legacy stuff -- like program installers -- looks like blurry hell, but I'll give MS the benefit of the doubt and suggest that maybe that's because I'm using a beta. Not sold on the Start Screen yet, the shit that's moved is not easy to find, and switching between Metro and Oldschool-Style programs is unintuitive as fuck.
As for OpenSUSE, well, haven't had time to install it yet. Stay tuned.
Per uploader Dagomir Marquezi:
One of Frank Zappa's micro-operas. By Mike Keneally and the Orchestra of Our Time, conducted by Joel Thome. Recorded at the Ritz, New York, November 1991.
"Be a jerk, go to work" -- here's hopin'.
(Note: I would not apply the phrase "here's hopin'" to any other lyric in this song.)
The biggest problem with my interview clothes is that I've lost a bunch of weight and now they're all baggy. I didn't really think about this until I put them on right before my last interview -- by which point it was of course too late.
So since then I got a new pair of pants, and dug out some old dress shirts from my grandparents' house.
The pants are fine but today I discovered that one of the shirts is still too baggy, and the other one is sheer enough to see my nipples through. So I guess next I'm going to have to buy some undershirts.
I went back and forth on whether to wear my sport coat. On the one hand, I've never worked for anyone who wore them -- not even company VP's. On the other, they're inline with the salary this place is offering.
Finally, after actually putting the thing on and looking at myself in the mirror, I decided that yeah it was a little over-the-top. Think I made the right call; nobody in the office was even wearing a tie, including the company owners.
And the company owners were interviewing people directly. And between that and just generally being busy, I did spend a good big lot of my time there just sitting around waiting. And I had to wonder what the protocol for that is. Can you whip out your cell phone and just find something to do while you're waiting? I didn't want to chance it, so mostly I looked at the wall and scribbled some notes in my notebook. Most of which formed the outline for this post.
I'm not complaining, though. I think it all worked out pretty well; I like the company and I hope I get this gig. Nice bunch of people, and a good, growing industry.
But I should still buy some undershirts. Just in case I do have more interviews on the horizon.
And speaking of birds:
Uploader mewrth sez:
One of Frank Zappa's early records from Cucamonga, with Ray Collins on vocals. This record is the A-side to 'The Worlds Greatest Sinner' on Donna Records, cut at Studio Z in 1963. Snork r&b at its best!
Welp, another Halloween, another Rifftrax Live. This year: Birdemic.
It is increasingly clear to me that House on Haunted Hill is far and away the best movie Rifftrax Live has ever done.
I mean, House on Haunted Hill has Vincent Price and a handful of other colorful characters, is competently written and directed, and is unironically fun to watch all by itself.
Birdemic...Birdemic doesn't even have the homemade charm of Manos.
I mean, it is homemade. It's homemade as hell. But it's homemade in an era when any-damn-body can make a homemade movie.
Manos was shot on a shoestring budget with primitive equipment in 1966. Birdemic was shot on a shoestring budget with primitive equipment in 2010. Manos took effort to make; it's surprising the damn thing was finished at all.
Referring to Birdemic as "finished", on the other hand, makes for liberal damn use of the word "finished".
Not only does it feature CG that actually looks substantially worse than if they had just used stock footage or rubber birds (and presumably cost more, too, unless it actually came with the video software they used to make the movie -- which, to be fair, is a distinct possibility), it is the most amateurishly, sloppily edited film I have ever seen, and that's coming from a guy wearing a Crow T. Robot T-shirt who has namedropped three separate Rifftrax Live events so far in this post. I have seen some bad movies, is what I am getting at.
Manos -- well, the entire damn film is dubbed because it was shot without sound. And yet, the inevitable sync issues aside, the audio editing is solid. The audio of Birdemic cuts out, constantly -- just straight-the-fuck-up cuts out. No sound. And that's without getting into the multiple scenes where you can't hear what actors are saying because they're shooting on a windy beach, the multiple times actors clearly flub their lines and they don't reshoot, and the bits where going from one character to another comes with a very long pause in the dialog and a substantial difference in background noise.
Of all the bad movies I've ever seen, this may be the only one where I wasn't struck most by the quality of the acting, the writing, the shooting, or even the effects (and trust me, all of them are pretty terrible), but the editing. It is shoddy, shoddy work. This movie makes Sci-Fi Originals look like...well, at least as good as House on Haunted Hill.
And here, for contrast, are Ossi Duri and Ike Willis 3 years later, performing Packard Goose. Vinadio, Italy, July 2004.
Applying for more jobs today. Hitting up some old contacts, shakin' some trees.
Despite the vexations it actually feels pretty good -- there's a sense of momentum you get, like you're at least moving in the right direction, that doesn't come with a temp job.
Course, if I'm still doing this a month from now I don't think "momentum" is going to be the thing I'm feeling. So, y'know...fingers crossed.
Covered by a group called Ossi Duri, 2001 -- according to uploader ossiduritube, they were only 15 or 16 years old.
The man on lead guitar and vocals is, of course, the great Ike Willis.
All right, so I'm phoning it in with another Doctor Who review I already wrote. Just because I've got free time doesn't mean I've got ideas for things to write about -- hell, the opposite may even be true.
So here goes. Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2008-09-03.
The Ribos Operation is a mediocre story saved by interesting characters. It's probably most remarkable as the first appearance of Romana, who isn't one of them. At this point she's just a know-it-all college girl and general ice queen (as made less subtle by her costume). While this is the only serial I've seen with Mary Tamm in the role, I can reasonably assume she and the Doctor warm up to each other over time -- but I can also reasonably assume she never achieves the same chemistry with Baker that Ward had, what with Baker and Ward sleeping together and all.
This is the first part of The Key to Time Series, AKA Collection Quest: The Movie, wherein a generic good-guy overlord tells the Doctor he has to collect a series of MacGuffins before a generic bad-guy overlord can get to them first. The plot from there is simultaneously simple and needlessly convoluted: as the Doctor and Romana seek the first piece of the Key, they find that a royal exile and a pair of small-time thieves want it too. The series shows the pacing problems faced by so many early Who serials in that nothing really happens until it's half-over.
That's saved, as I said, by a good cast of characters: the lovable con-men, the ambitious villain, an alien version of Galileo, an entertainingly over-the-top augurer, and a rubber-suit monster that doesn't get nearly enough screen time.
It ends with what I've so often complained that RTD simply can't seem to do: a short but satisfying goodbye scene.
All in all, it was probably worth the rental but leaves me fairly nonplussed about the whole Key to Time series. I assume I will find the next serial, The Pirate Planet, much more impressive, as it was written by Douglas Adams.
I expect I will get to reposting my Pirate Planet review at some point here; suffice to say it had its moments but I was largely disappointed and I didn't stick around for any of the rest of the season arc. I did watch the Black Guardian Trilogy from the Fifth Doctor Era, and wished I'd stopped after the first serial.