The Ambience

That one thats supposed to cover alot of ground

mutesaint — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:56:47 +0000

So, much has happened since I last blogged. I will try and make this informative bastard as short and simple as possible as its 1am right now and I’m in the middle of a net argument over rather or not modern bands can compare to the rock icons of the 70′s. First off, we finished Night Staff. The website is currently under construction and should be up soon. Also, as you can read below, one of my cats died. Not a good day. I’ll spare you a repeat of the details save for one. I guess because I was there at the moment of death but Django’s passing did more to shake me up than any prior death(and I have sadly experienced my fair share of death). It was strange how much it affected me. Oooh, I also got laid off. Well, basically the whole company did. Something like 80% of the workforce got vamoosed. Humorously it was the very day we finished Night Staff that it happened. The good lord obviously has a wicked sense of humor. Since then I’ve been looking for work while Sadie substitute teaches. I’m also involved trying to get a friends production company off the ground which, if it happens, would mean that I would not have to go work a 9-5 job. *crosses fingers* That’s it for the immediate. For some reason I’ve been putting off this post for a while. Hopefully now that its done I’ll be posting more frequent. Sorry for the short compacted nature of this post.

Our Sweet Boy is Gone

The Sade — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:19:23 +0000

Yesterday was one of the worst and most painful days of my life. You see, we had to put our sweet boy, Django to sleep. We knew something was wrong when we first adopted him because he drank way too much water and had dandruff, but he was overall a happy guy. He also was losing weight, but we didn’t think it was that much and thought it was because of the new food we were feeding him. However, two days ago he started to look weak and in a daze, he wasn’t eating or drinking, and he was wobbly on his feet. Needless to say, we were scared, so I made him an appointment. We were similtaneously worried that he wouldn’t make it through the night and also hopeful that there would be a fix for him. The next day we visited the vet. She was amazing… honest and caring. Turns out that Django had hidden many years worth of kidney damage and ulcers in his mouth. He had lost 10 pounds and his ability to regulate his temperature. Aaron and I both knew that as soon as the doctor said, “No matter what Django will not be able to go home today,” that we would be saying goodbye. There was an option of feeding tubes, etc., but we could never afford that and the chance that he would return home afterward would be highly unlikely. The doctor gave us a moment to “make our decision” but we knew already what would happen. It gave us a chance to cry together and talk to him and pet him. The doctor came and we told her our decision. She affirmed that she believed that to be the most humane choice for our boy and she took him away to put in a catheter. When she came back she asked if we were ready or wanted a few minutes with him. Aaron said we needed a few more minutes. When the doctor came back, she asked again if we were ready. I responded that, to be honest, I would never be ready, but I knew it had to be done. We got to stay in the room and watch him go. The doctor gave him the injection and then the flush. I looked in his eyes while I petted his head. Aaron laid his hand on Django’s neck. After a few seconds his heart stopped. His eyes never changed, he just laid still, and I said goodbye to him one more time, although he could not hear me. She took him away. I cried. Aaron cried. We held each other. Then we reassembled the kennel that we would now have to take home empty. I told Aaron that I was ready to go out to the lobby, but as we started out I saw a lady with a sympathetic look on her face and I burst into tears. We paid our fees and one of the nurses came to show me the paw print they had made on a circle of clay with “Django” written at the top. The lady I saw when I came out of the room came up to me and gave me a huge hug. Probably the sweetest thing a stranger has ever done. After we left, we didn’t know what to do. Going home would be too painful. We ended up going to a restaurant and tried not to think about it so we wouldn’t burst into tears in public. Since then, I’ve made myself sick from crying so much. My whole body aches and everytime I think about him I cry. It may seem silly because we really didn’t have Django for very long, but I guess we got more attached to him than we could have imagined. He was our big ragdoll boy, with beautiful blue crossed eyes. He had gorgeous fur and an even sweeter personality. He was just so laid back and the perfect match for Chloe, our high-strung kitty. To say he will be missed, is an understatement. I would like to get a large print of this photo to hang in our home in rememberance of our sweet boy, Django.

things i like today

mutesaint — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:55:53 +0000

:this picture of a hula girl going all godzilla on my keyboard

“run it’s godzhula!!!!!!!”

: this photo i took this morning of a cart driving on a semi major north austin road

“only in austin”

:the work pants i bought yestarday that used to belong to a man named Manuel Lebedev. i shit you not. he was both hispanic and russian.

: the new clean look of the apartment after a short amount of time cleaning

:the collered greens the Sade just cooked

:the a,b,c’s of awesomeness (copy and paste as it wont identify the link for some reason)

http://comicsnexus.com/2009/06/21/neils-a-z-of-awesomeness-vol1-a-f/

geeky austinite ftw

mutesaint — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:31:22 +0000

so rehearsals for the webseries are tonight. i’m freaking out. like really really freaking out. i have never been to a real rehearsal ever. i’ve done the whole college thing but it was a bunch of geeks getting together and blundering in the dark basically. nothing real. now not only am i going to my first one, but i am leading it. my fear of being found out for a fool who doesn’t know what hes doing is in full bloom right now. i’m hoping to get by on charm and charisma, but i’m not too sure of myself. i’m about to dig through the script to come up with notes as i am clocking out in….5….4….3…2…1…..

and i’m clocked out. feel much better now.

still recovering from yesterday. worked a late night+early next morning/afternoon in the 100 degree heat and it had its effect on me big time. The good news is that i am feeling a high that can only come with accomplishing a ton of little things all throughout the day. also, i have tomorrow off. i plan on spending the entire day gaming, laundering, and doing quite a bit of script work on night staff. looks to be both a busy and fun day indeed. ooh i might watch an old funky b-movie too.

i was at work today surfing the net a tiny bit. it was actually a busy day but i had some time to spare and needed a break from freaking out about rehearsals tonight. while exploring my digital domain i discovered two awesome bits of net fun on twitter. one is a small gallery of photos that this amateur photographer took. the neat thing? its a mix of star wars and chipmunks. its both cute and geektastic. had me making girly ‘awww’ sounds and geek giggles a plenty.

the other, and the highlight of today’s water sports, is this blog i found. its rarely updated. in fact the post i saw was the first in 3 years and was just posted this past week. this alone brings thoughts of some higher power wanting me to have a good laugh. add in the fact that this guy is apparently based in austin, my own personal home, and there you have it. The mysterious god of the internet, Al Gore, wants to make my day even better, and he succeeded. i present to you this story:

http://happywaffle.livejournal.com/5890.html

It tells the tale of a unfortunate geek who lost his iphone, and found it. it is filled with seedy bars, giant celebrations, crime, intimidation, at least one foot chase, and rampant use of geek tech. needless to say it is fascinating and everyone should read it.

to close out this little post, i continue to be amazed with blu-ray. i saw ‘there will be blood’ and its even better in blu. my next movie test will be ‘transformers’ at my good friends request followed by either ‘kingdom of heaven’ or ‘the descent.’ both are movies i love to death so it will be a hard battle as to which. i’ll report back here with results.

*edit

this is the link to the star wars photos that i mentioned earlier. forgot to post it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/5558770/Star-Wars-figures-and-chipmunks-by-Chris-McVeigh.html?image=4

wow

mutesaint — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:38:01 +0000

flipping love this guys artwork.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iri5/page1/

At work early.

mutesaint — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:04:17 +0000

arrived at work a whopping 4 hours early today. no reason. misread schedule. im now gearing up to nap, read, do all the other non-work work ive got to do.

i invested in a blu-ray player. it was a pricey endevor but well worth it. several standout titles where you can instantly see a difference. best part. the imax scenes in the dark knight can be seen in ther entirety. the frame actually adjusts when it hits those scenes to fill up the entire tv. they. look. beautiful. gorgeous. sexy. sold me on blu-ray instantly. any doubts i had about other discs being up to snuff went out the window when i threw in an old dvd. i could see the compression artifacting. worth the money in every way.

i saw drag me te hell again with a firend. was interested in seeing whether or not the ending still rubbed me the wrong way it did on its first showing. it did. hated the ending. it ruined the entire film through and through. oh well. it happens.

i have decided that i am getting old. i have finally hit the point where i cant stay up and wake up early. i am sitting here wishing of nothing more than falling asleep for a few hours.

sorry for the short post. i will try to find time to post later on today/tomorrow when i have more energy.

Meet Django

The Sade — Sun, 31 May 2009 06:01:44 +0000

This is the new big man in the house.

Gender: Male

Breed: Ragdoll

Weight: 24 lbs

Eyes: Blue (and crossed )

**This is to be my first of (hopefully) many posts.

-Sadie a.k.a. “The Sade”

Weekly Update

mutesaint — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:32:51 +0000

Well its been an interesting week or so. First I’ll tackle the website. Its going along smashingly. We have auditions next week on thursday/friday evening. Also, the site itself is about to go live. It will start out as a simple blog but we plan to expand it rapidly from there. The only real negative is that I will no longer be talking about the web series on this site.

My day job has been rather enjoyable as of late. We’ve all been getting along and getting quite alot of work done. This nice mood might also be in conjunction with whats going on with ‘The Peacemaker.’ The director informed me that he has decided to go with a professional color correction house to get the film treated. Now this may sound like the project is being taken away from me, but its not. Color correction has been a massive bitch. Because of the camera we used there is no real established workable program to work on it in post. Everything is in the Beta stages and fraught with glitches. Anyone who knows me knows that I have spent the past several months going back and forth between programmers trying to get this stuff to work right with very little success. It has been fun because I have been talking to the guys responsible for the software, but has still been a pain. This company that is handling the CC now has access to software that I simply don’t have. They do this for a living, where I have basically had to teach myself to color correct to work on this film. The good news is that when the web series kicks off I will fly through that. We will be using older cameras that are known to be compliant. I expect to edit and color correct the first arc in no time flat and for it to look golden.

I upgraded my OS to the new ‘snow leopard’ edition. It is perty. Lots of new features and greater accessability. I can also now download some software Ive been needing that require the new OS. Im also planning on buying a new keyboard in two weeks. This guy is designed to work with final cut. It has a jog wheel embedded in it and all they keys are color-coded to their shortcuts categories. All shortcuts dealing with playback are red. All Shortcuts dealing with cutting are pink. That sort of thing. All of the keys are also labeled with their shortcut as well as their normal keys. Oh….I forgot….its also a qwerty interface. Now I didn’t know what that meant at first either, but basically it means it has the same key layout as a normal keyboard and is perfectly usable as such. This is one of the last purchases Ill need to make to bring my editing bay up to snuff for fast and effective editing. The last one, which Ill get in July, is a secondary monitor. I haven’t decided as to whether or not I will get a secondhand apple display or a smaller 23 or so inch lcd tv. Both would work fine. I like the fact of having two of the same monitor but I think Im going with the tv. IT will be 1-2 hundred dollars cheaper. Also, I like the notion that Ill be able to see a true version of what people will be looking at if anything we make is ever seen on tv. This may sound weird, but their is a huge color differentiation when it comes to displays, and knowing that what you see is more than likely the standard of what others see is important.

Did that last sentence make any sense?

Ive seen two interesting movies in theatres lately. One was the new terminator and the other was an advanced screening of ‘Drag me to Hell.’ Both were good, but both were flawed. Now I feel compelled to warn that there will be spoilers in the next two paragraphs.

The terminator movie was nothing but a big dumb action movie. The director, McG, quite honestly knocked it out of the park. He did an amazing job. I was blown away at the sequences that he constructed. He managed to use handheld cameras, often, without devolving into the oh so popular and unintelligible shaky-cam syndrome. There are two really impressive long take sequences in the beginning, one involving a helicopter crash from inside. Just wow. Way to go McG. You may have a stupid….stupid nickname, but you sure can direct.

What was the big flaw you ask? The script. It was terrible. Truly terrible. There were too many main characters. The women were useless pieces of cardboard and underwritten. John Connor is a big wet douche the entire movie and has no arc. He is literally the exact same person he was when the movie started. The biggest issue is a gaping sucking chest wound of a plot hole. A blatantly obvious, how can the writers be this stupid, plothole. It deals with a captured Kyle Rees(John Conners father from the first movie) and why skynet does not put a bullet in him. Really there is no excuse. No story leap that could explain it away. It is simply lazy writing. Now I know this sounds like I hated the movie, but I didn’t. I thouroughly enjoyed it. Its a good movie. Better than the third terminator film. Its stylish and thrilling and the pg-13 rating doesn’t really hinder it. It is just sadly far from T2 level quality and is undeniably and extremely flawed movie.

Drag me to Hell. Wow. Now there is a movie. I just want to go on record and say that this is how you make a PG-13 horror movie. Not once did I ever feel like they were editing around something. Not once did I feel the neutered air that permeates almost every single pg-13 horror movie in this latest trend. This movie is intense and jam packed with action. It has goo of every kind(save for blood as this is no slasher) flying in every direction. It has talking goats. Dancing Demons. A man throws up a cat. Lots and lots of goo. Oh and its flipping funny too. Whether its the Loony Toonssound effect when the anvil drops or the buckets and buckets of goop that gets poured in the heroine’s mouth during the movie, its old school Raimi for sure. You can just feel him stretching those muscles he hasn’t used since Army of Darkness. This is the kind of horror movie that needs to be made more often. Its not an adaptation or a remake. Its just good ol’ freaky goofy gooey fun. The only issue I had with the movie was the ending. The last minute sucked alot of the air out of the film. Its not what happened per se. I am cool with that. It’s the why. Its part of this existential mood Ive been in lately. Ive had this probelm with a number of films recently. It served no emotional purpose. Im waiting to see if this was an initial reaction or a true feeling. Id still say the movie was great. It just had that one hard to ignore flaw.

Ooooh, one last note. Ive started watching the Tru Blood HBO series. Its all kinds of dirty sexy b-movie fun.

Arrested Development Pilot

mutesaint — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:22:01 +0000

I just wanted to officially throw my love of this show out there in the open. It is one of the most charismatic, witty, and well written comedies on the market. It was a shame it lasted only three seasons. I suggest everyone out there click on the video when you have some time and enjoy the Bluth family.

more about "Arrested Development Pilot", posted with vodpod

A quick little rundown.

mutesaint — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:09:53 +0000

This is a quick little rundown of the three apps I have featured along the right side of the screen, for those of you who aren’t tech savvy.

The top one is the calender app. IT basically tracks when posts are made and allows you to click on a certain date too see what was posted on just that day. Its a nice way to keep track of frequency, or if you remember ‘that post I read that same day I had a hair appointment.’

The one under that is my VodPod database. It is an online video version of photobucket or flicker. I can find videos on the net, or upload them myself, and favorite them using this site. Then viewers, or myself, can look at my list and view any of the videos withen it. It is what I use to post embedded videos to this blog. It is a nice way to see what movies, shows, videos, or trailers that I am viewing online at any given time. I will try to keep it up to date.

The third app is my twitter app. It is linked directly to my twitter account. For those of you who don’t know what twitter is, it is a constantly evolving online list of how/what a person is doing. I try to update several times a day, so it stays pretty up to date. As I update there it will appear shortly here and be viewable to anyone visiting the site.