Vox vs Blogger Continued: Vox... eh.

Vox seemed really easy and handy at first. After a couple weeks the charm has worn off. It looks busy. The things that they make easy to do are things I can work around (or do without). And the things it can't do (though they know about them) are really just too frustrating.

Blogger's looking pretty good. Got some other things to try too.

Ted Russell Kamp

My old school pal, Ted, is in town to play a show at the Rodeo Bar tomorrow. So tonight we had dinner and caught up. This is the first time we've seen each other in...damn, 15 years? We both felt that, although we had grown up (somewhat), we were also both very much the same. Pretty cool to see old friends after so long.

Today I got a check from a certain entertainment company for certain work that I did for a certain comedy group last month. I can't say any more about that, but I think it's pretty funny that, in theory, I am now a paid comedian. Not the kind of thing I would ever imagine myself being. The check is for such a small amount, I'm considering keeping it as a momento!

Tim Gunn sighting!

My sister, Wendy, and I saw Tim Gunn when we were going to an ATM near Parsons. His ATM wasn't working, so he left. But before he did, he announced, "There's no cash in that one." He sounded so Tim Gunn-like!

Flickr: Now with more Collections!!

Tonight I noticed a new feature of flickr - you can now make collections of sets. As an organization junkie, I can't tell you how happy this makes me!

To celebrate, here's a recent photo from my flickr photostream. The Red Dragon is from the comic Bone, by Jeff Smith, and Kurt Cobain is my favorite unlikely action figure.

Blogger vs. Vox

So, I'm test driving two blog platforms at once. Is that wrong? So far, what I've found is that:

• They're both pretty easy to set up and edit.
• Both support moblogging (although, setting it up on blogger was so counter-intuitive, I almost didn't do it).
• Blogger lets me add lists of links ("blogroll"), but Vox doesn't have that capability yet (!!)
• Vox lets me directly integrate my flickr account. Not sure yet how useful that will be, but since posting photos to flickr is my primary online obsession, I have a feeling that will be pretty key.

Let's do this thing

Or not. This is a test to see if I really want to do this. It's not like I don't already spend way too many hours a day working and recreating on the Internet.

Here's what happened. I was reading an article and came across the phrase "Uncanny Valley." I find this idea fascinting. Basically, it's a theory that says that the more humanoid and life-like a robot or other non-human thing is, the more positive our reaction will be to it. Up to a point. And then there's a sudden and dramatic drop and the reaction turns to repulsion. The theory can be applied to inanimate things - like a stuffed animal - or ambulatory non-mechanical things - like zombies. There's even a chart!



Anyway, I was talking to someone about it and I said "If I had a blog, I'd post about this." He suggeted I start one. So, we'll see. Just because I'm doing this doesn't mean I'm really doing this.

NYFF 2005

On my first day attending the New York Film Festival, I saw two films. The first was a Czech film called Something Like Happiness (in Czech: Štěstí). Directed by Bohdan Sláma, it's a sort of bittersweet story about people in a small industrial town who all make a lot of compromises and don't get exactly what they want out of life, but somehow that's kind of ok. It's hard to explain, but there's something about it that's kind of pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. It's weird, because I generally really dislike American and British movies on this theme, but maybe that's because Americans and Brits always have to make some kind of point - and that point is usually either big drama about the injustice of it all, or big drama about the triumphant overcoming of circumstances. This Czech film seemed to be saying, "It is what it is, and we learn to love that too." I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The next film I saw, Tale of Cinema, was a painful Korean puzzlebox. I guess, the idea here, was that one filmmaker had made a film about two young people, and another (less successful) filmmaker believed that a lot of the details had been stolen from his life. Interesting idea. The problem is that the "film-within-a-film" part was such a laborious adolescent angst-fest that I fell asleep. I missed the transition to "normal reality," but when I did wake up I realized it had switched over and I found that the adult characters were so awkward, overly dramatic, and unlikable that it really wasn't much better. In fact, this film put me in such a bad mood that I called one of my friends afterwards and had an entire conversation in which I acted like an asshole before I realized what was bothering me.

After I figured out why I was in such a bad mood, but before I left the area, stars started to arrive for the "centerpiece" film, Breakfast on Pluto. I didn't get to see it, but apparently Cillian Murphy plays a young Irish man who moves to London in the 1960s to become "a fabulously attired transvestite cabaret chanteuse." Cillian, Liam Neeson, and Stephen Rhea were all there, along with director Neil Jordan. I snapped this picture of Cillian right before he entered the... well, it was a little more like a snake pit than a red carpet (especially considering that there was no carpet). If you've ever seen that SNL sketch where the photographers yell obnoxious things at the celebrities, it was a lot like that.

P.S. I later saw Breakfast on Pluto and I loved it!