(no subject)

Had a very good game shoot. Lots of people showed up, most of whom hadn't been on the show before. radiotelescope drove cthulhia and me over, rikchik showed up with M-M, and ruthling dragged G along. Everyone got some camera-time (and many donated quarters to the ZarfMobile meter-feeding fund, which was nice). (Why am I being so blog-coy with names since I'm going to put them all in full in the show credits? Force of habit, I guess...)

We played Carcassonne as planned, and while I brought Metro we ended up shooting The Very Clever Pipe Game instead, since rikchik brought his copy (as it certainly fit this episode's tile-placement theme) and I liked the idea of getting a Cheapass game on the show for the first time. It will also make a natural segue into talking about Pipe Dream, assuming I talk about Pipe Dream.

Setting up the studio from scratch takes a hella long time. I allowed an hour this time, thinking that would be more than enough, and it took half again as long as that. This includes not just the physical work of assembling the set and rigging the lights, but monkeying around in the control room to get all the cameras in agreement after the last studio user calibrated them all crazy for whatever it was they were doing.

I make it sound like I'm doing all the work, but really Joe and Lee handle the majority of that stuff. Joe actually encouraged me to try taking over direction for the first game, as I sat it out, but I didn't wanna. I did sit in the control room watching him direct, though, which I hadn't seen before. whee

We set up a "board-cam" again, perching my own camcorder on a ladder near the table; we'll see if I make use of its footage this time. Unfortunately it suffered an owie when it got accidentally knocked off. The tripod is busted and its battery has a nice, big, very likely unsafe crack in its casing, but the camera itself seems fine. I need to get a new lens-cap for the thing anyway, so maybe I'll just go on a general accessories shopping run later.

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We've got to figure out makeup, I think, starting with the next shoot -- the paler among us [raises hand] need something to cut the edge off the studio lights, at the very least. While the lights don't make me consciously hot, I still get a highly reflective sheen all over my skin from them. You may have noticed this, if you've been watching the show, and more to the point watching my glowing forehead.

I also had a lovely scab on my cheek today from a pimple that decided to visit earlier this week... fooey. I haven't reviewed the footage yet, and hope I don't look awful.

(no subject)

Well, the moderator of davis_square just put the community on approved-posts-only lockdown after a few people offered criticism of her management style. She also deleted several people's comments, and is presently declaring to be close to deleting the community altogether. I consider this behavior a breach of the social contract inherent in any moderated message board's user/admin relationship, and reason enough to just drop the joint and move on elsewhere.

However, it is a useful and friendly LJ-community -- much (more reliable / less idiotic) than, say, b0st0n -- and I wouldn't want to lose it, nor see it splinter off into wee fragments. Any suggestions from the crossover portion of my f-list on how to follow up on this?

Update: daerr just pointed out that davissquare now seems to exist, created by komos, whom I don't know. I don't know if this person took part in the meta-discussion on the first community since that all got blown away... any insight?