(no subject)

Had my first random encounter with a fan of The Gameshelf today, when someone stopped me on the street to tell me they liked the show. OK, so it was novalis, but still, it got me wondering if it's gonna start happening with actual random people, after the meme starts to percolate. (Assuming it's percolatory. I think that it is. I just watched the show on TV for the first time, testing the DVD I burned for SCAT, and: wow, it actually looks pretty good.[1])

This would not be an entirely new experience for me. I used to get stopped by strangers around UMaine who enjoyed my columns in the student paper and recognized me from my photo. (Oh man, what an awful photo that was. I not only had greasy shoulder-length hair, and sported perma-tinted aviator glasses, but also pursued the good Maine-boy fashion of wearing a ballcap day in and day out. At least I tried to be different by wearing only blank ballcaps. Those were damn hard to find and I was proud of my small collection. Also I possibly had raging acne. Good times.)

If I am babbling a lot about this experience it's mainly because I've been away from working with mass media for so many years, and I'm having such a nice time re-introducing myself to it. A semi-little-known fact about me is that this is what I went to college for, more or less... I got degrees in English and Journalism before I got eaten by the dot-com bubble and discovered I could be a hacker, too. And hacking paid more. So.

Anyway, just to make it clear, I never want to be actually famous, but I think that being kinda-vaguely famous, even just regionally, might be kinda fun. Who knows.

[1] Though I also ran into some NTSC bugaboos I didn't foresee. The font I used for the closing credits just fails, for example... it involves a lot of thin horizontal lines that will go wubba-wubba on most TVs. Also, during the lengthy freeze-frame effect in the SoC clip (the part with the big red X) mrmorse and queue 's images get all wobbly, like they're flickering between two frames. It's the same effect you get when you pause a VCR, sometimes. I dunno how to fix that in FCP but I'm sure there's a way.

(no subject)

I just realized that the Diplomacy shoot, when we do it, is going to look about half as cool as it should because I almost none of my friends smoke. And the ones who do don't smoke nearly enough for this. Ideally, everyone should really be smoking constantly through the entire shoot. Not smoking classily like cartoon diplomats, or even moodily like film noir diplomants, but smoking like they've been locked in the situation room and awake for the last 40 hours, the hopeless, spiraling paranoia mounting with each new butt ground out, followed by a weary sigh and a rubbing of the forehead with shaky hands. By someone wearing a fez.

There are drinkers, though. We can have lots of tall, square bottles and forgotten half-filled glasses used to frame shots. But without mountainous ashtrays next to them... just not the same.