The New Boredom

I don’t really want to be friends with campfires, the beach, texting, reese’s penut butter cups, camping, or any other non-human shit. Just stop. It’s bad enough that “social networking” is anything but social considering you do it all by yourself. I don’t really want be friends with or fans of any non-person or place or activity or whatever that I can just go out and experience in 3D. I don’t see how bookface notarizing my appreciation for something makes me any more well defined as a person. Thanks for keeping me in touch with friends all over the globe and all, but fuck off with the “hey you should be friends with Gravity!” garbage already.

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California’s economy is in the crapper and I’ve noticed (in the rare event that I’m around a tv for more than a half hour) that they seem to be advertising a lot for attracting tourism via tv commercials. I don’t know about you but seeing a bunch of celebrities gallivanting around the state talking about how awesome they are doesn’t really make me want to visit the place.

What they should have done is just played this entire Goldfrapp video and at the end say “California: Full of Pretty Girls on Skateboards” and they would have seen a record spike in tourism dollars from all over the world flooding the state’s economy.

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Which brings me to my next point, the rating system. Not the MPAA one, the 1-10 scale of attractiveness on which you place everyone you see whether you know it or not. There are some rules that I may get into some day on here but for snap reaction judgments (possibly my favorite kind of judgements), here’s a couple:

Girl smoking: If she’s an 8-9, she loses 4 points, a steep penalty only because of how arrogant it is to flaunt yourself and then spit in the face of what you got in the body lottery by smoking. If she’s a 5-7, loses 2 points, basically sidelines the girl. If she’s a 2-4, minus one point because everyone has room for self improvement. 1, sorry.

Girl riding skateboard (riding well, pushing off, turning, etc): If she’s a 5 or 6, add two points and give me a big high five. If she’s a 7 or 8, add one tentative point only because this seems too good and I suspect she might be crazy. If a 9, add no points as a ten is not even approachable, possibly dangerous like looking into the sun.

Girl says “like” as a place holder, not making any kind of analogous statement: Any starting number, minus 2 point for initial offense, minus another 2 if repeated within 30 seconds.

Girl calls you “dude” as if she’s totally down/one of the guys: Plus 2 on any starting number, plus 3 if “Dude” is followed by a compliment such as “nice burp/fart/bodily function”

… add on points shall never make score exceed 9.7

Back in the day…

My friend Mike and I had this idea to make a movie ripping on a little piece of local Colorado Springs culture. This weird video store let a bunch of hippies camp in their parking lot as a protest for going to war in Iraq. It was called Camp Casey. Anyways, these hippies lived in this parking lot for a couple years before they realized that all they were doing was pissing off all the driving by right wing military types in Colorado Springs.

We shot this mockumentary about a rivalry between Casey Scottsworth and Wesley Mandrake as if it were back in the time when rich white guys were all about physical conquest of the world’s features (unlike now where it’s conquest over money and power).A couple weeks after this Camp Casey called it quits and packed up having accomplished basically nothing.

With the help of Pancho and Mike, I shot this over a weekend and turned in a shortened version for my final project in a video production class. It’s not technically my best work but it certainly was the most fun I have ever had on a project like this. We’ve had a notebook of ideas for years that we haven’t got around to shooting. Maybe some day we’ll make some more.

Thanks to Mike and Pancho for all the laughs.

Get Out of there hamburger helper.

You don’t belong in my milk. You’re hamburger helper.

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I grew out my disgusting throat beard for sea otter for the last, I don’t know, 2 or 3 months… just so that I could get the placebo effect of feeling like I was being kept warm by the thing. And then what happens? It’s the hottest, sweatiest, sunniest Sea Otter that I can remember. Great. At least I got to walk around looking like crap and itching the stupid thing all week. It’s now shaved down to the creepiest mustache that I can muster.

flipper.co.za

Thanks for the shot Flipper. I’ll be your model any time you want to break your camera on me.

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Then while rummaging for old files, I stumbled onto this shot taken of LA at about 7AM last September when half the city was socked in by fog. It was the only time that I can ever remember thinking that LA looked serene and charming.

and right next to that photo in the archive was this one, proving once and for all that TJ is awesome. When are we riding again TJ, it’s been about a thousand years?

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I had a bigger rant about this subject but I decided it probably wasn’t very appropriate and maybe not very well thought out. But here’s the basics:

It’s spring time and the weather is getting good and the ladies are all coming out in their scant clothing. It’s late April and early may- a time when every woman is beautiful (or at least should be) and should feel pretty in the sunshine. When I go out around town and I see these girls with no class it just feels like a giant waste. When will all the “regular” hot girls realize that they are not hot at all? In fact, quite the opposite.

If the way you dress makes guys react by immediately thinking “I’d hit that” then you’re missing the point of being hot stuff.

Nothing could be farther from “hot” than a lady looking like she wants to be full of dicks.

Take some pride in yourself and your image, ladies. You can still be revealing and sexy and hot and (most of all) classy at the same time. Make it a goal for the way you dress to make a guy’s third or fourth thought be “I’d hit that”… then you will have powers you can’t imagine.

And guys… if you ever say “I’d hit that” then you should reward yourself with a swift kick in the balls. Don’t ever say that kind of trash. Ladies should be classy and dudes should be respectful. It’s 2009 for christ-cakes…

My wonderful friend Maggie posted this and I feel it fully deserves as much attention as possible due to the sheer magnitude of patience that it requires to produce such unique and imaginative animation:

I’ve been a big fan of the guy’s prior work. The trilogy that was in the first Animation Show was fantastic and luckily, it’s all up on the intersurfs.

Adam Elliot’s writing is just so sharp. It’s so brief but revealing. Then a second later it’s insanely depressing and real. And then a second after that it’s hilarious. I love it.

You should also check out Harvie Krumpet, it’s in three parts: Part One – Part Two – Part Three

If his shorts are that good then I’ll probably just pee my pants for a feature length one.

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This was taken in the San Jose airport at about 4:30 am. The guy showed up all ready to go for his flight in two hours and walked up to security, following the maze of little dividers instead of just ducking under a single line. The TSA workers did not have the security check point open yet. So the guy stood there for probably 20 or 25 minutes, right behind the line that a TSA sign said to stand behind. And he waited. Alone. Being bossed around by signs and line forming dividers. It was the most depressing thing I’ve seen in months. People were not meant for this.

A good portion of my day was spent looking for a new place to live. After hours of that all I wanted to do was stab myself in the eyeballs and run away to live in the woods again.

Rather than sack up and go find a shack near Walden pond, I wimped out and spent the rest of the day going over test footage from my camera and tried to get used to the silly thing. We shot some stuff in Kansas recently and I just got to looking over the footage. Some of it looks okay. If it were up to me, I would just shoot on film and not worry about a damn thing.

Watching all the raw footage served as a pretty decent reminder that I’ve got some good friends in my life and that shit ain’t so bad…

yup. Bikes are fun. Friends are great. Life is a-okay. I could focus on the lack of sleep and general anxiety and stress of the last week and how I made an awesome ass of myself in front of that pointy waitress in Kansas… or I could realize that in the long run, I’ll only look back on the hip jump, the fun turns in the wind, and laughing a lot in a few hours followed by bowling a 235.