Author: Tim

An animator, video producer, Lego artist, and author—I am moderately skilled at a lot of different things.

Intuitively Counter-redacting Fair Game

Before 2001 I didn’t even know the meaning of the word redacted, and now here I am using it in a sentence. While at the local Borders & Noble, I spotted a copy of Valerie Plame’s book Fair Game: My Life as * **** ** ******** ** *** ***** *****. I had to look up the name of the book on Amazon, but thanks to some embittered prick in Washington, I could recall her name with little effort. What was that book called? Oh darn it, I forgot the name, but it’s by former CIA operative Valerie Plame.

When plugging her book, Plame would point out that large swaths of her autobiography were redacted by the CIA, because they involved classified information. I thought chapter eight on Iraq’s WMDs would make for some extremely light reading, and guess what? Like the WMDs in question, much of Valerie’s chapter couldn’t be found either:

What caught my eye, though, was the one orphan towards the bottom of the left page, standing alone in its own paragraph. What was this one brief word that Valerie wanted to emphasize so badly? My guess:

“None.”

So consider my completely unscientific stab in the dark. It was probably that or penis.

And thanks to all the mentions of the CIA, Valerie Plame, redacting things, Iraq, WMD, and so forth, I would like to say hello to the CIA operative reading my blog. Now stop screwing around on the internet and get back to work transmitting radio messages into my fillings.

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Blog

Toronto karaoke DJs: the worst people in the world?

MobiFestI had a great time in Toronto at this year’s Mobifest. Toronto’s a wonderful city and I would definitely go back. Sorry it took me roughly three weeks to say that. I met some great people, made some connections and got to see some fun videos and animation, but more than that, I learned one important thing: that guy running karaoke at the Holiday Inn was a huge asshole.

I enjoyed the Mobifest show itself (up until the awards part anyway) and I could see in each short what made it stand out to the judges. And it’s true, you do learn a bit about what works and what doesn’t from watching your video with an audience… like sometimes you can be too clever for your own good. I’m not saying that to sound arrogant, I mean that trying too hard to reinvent a tired story, or abstracting something to the point of obscurity, or just having too many things going on at once, you may just trip over your own feet. From that, here are a few things I learned about producing mobile content:

  1. Be iconic. Have a solid, easily-recognizable style, color palette, design.
  2. Don’t rely too heavily on audio; cellphones aren’t known for their sound quality. They’re known for having tiny, tinny speakers.
  3. You’re on a small screen, so don’t rely on a lot of subtle detail. A whole joke can be lost by a compression artifact or dropped frame.
  4. Don’t rush every joke — there’s this thing called ‘pacing’; you don’t have to write like your viewers have ADD.
  5. That guy running karaoke at the Holiday Inn can go suck a dick.
Continue reading “Toronto karaoke DJs: the worst people in the world?”
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Christina Aguilera doesn’t wear panties

At least that was the news over at What Would Tyler Durden Do?.

Christina’s baby-makerAnd you know what? This just makes my latest Emergency 411: Finding Parking that much more topical. Sure, it’s ostensibly about parking or something, but the eagle-eyed viewer may notice a reference to a certain starlet with a pathological need to let her south mouth breathe. At the time it was a joke about looking up Britney Spears’ skirt, or Lindsey Lohan’s or some chick named Paris Hilton (hadn’t heard of her), but now we can thankfully throw Christina into the mix.

Ah, thank heaven for easy celebri-vag gags.

And speaking of how classy my integrity is, when giving an interview for last week’s Mobifest Toronto, I got to talk about girls who don’t wear panties when I was interviewed for Canadian TV’s Much More Music channel. Here’s a pic of me going for the high road:

You can see all the way up her skirt, Matt!
You can see all the way up her skirt, Matt!

I would’ve included a link to the video, but for the life of me I can’t find it. I’ll just have to trust someone is watching me talk about panties somewhere in the great white north.

Finding Panties, er, ParkingBefore anyone realized you shouldn’t put me in front of a camera, I was one of the Mobifest filmmakers interviewed by Bite TV (again, you’re going to have to take my word for it).

In my own charmingly stilted, sweating way, I filled them in on how annoying finding parking is in LA — because no one’s talked about that before — until I remembered I had a much more interesting story about when I got beaned in the head by karma.

All this and more on a Betacam tape that’s being put through a bulk eraser somewhere in Toronto’s Entertainment District right now.

Finally, before you think this is just a scattershot way to gather more hits with free cash, C1AL1$ and debt relief, nude celebs, let me bring it all back and share with you my first encounter with the beguiling Ms. Aguilera, on a video salute to the most Inconsequential Women of the 20th Century.

It’s important to note that people hate this video. At least it went over better than the one about Mother Teresa.

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Blog

The Official Farscape, uh… thing

Every November, I attend the annual Official Farscape Convention in Burbank, which this year happily conflicted with the only other convention I attend. Still, I had to go: after 8 years, this was to be the last official Farscape convention. Not a bad run for a show that got cancelled a year too soon back in 2003, but still I had made my peace with that and I had made my peace with this being the last convention, and the last time I would see a lot of my Farscape friends, as well.

So it came as a bit of a shock when I read to the last page of the program and found these words: JOIN US NEXT YEAR FOR THE 2ND ANNUAL FINAL FRELLIN’ FARSCAPE FAREWELL!

You sons of bitches.

Iit’s not like Creation Entertainment to walk away from buckets of money, but still.

Speaking of buckets of money, I don’t possess the deep pockets to bid $10,000 on the lead actor’s full-length coat, or even one of those sweet pulse rifle props they were auctioning off. What I could afford was a doorbell.

Or maybe an elevator button? Or Farscape’s answer to the tricorder? Truth is, I don’t know what it is, and I’ll probably have to tear through the series again just to figure out what the hell I bid on. All I know is it’s Peacekeeper design and it lights up when I press a switch cleverly concealed under one of the panels.

And that’s pretty cool for …a lightswitch?

Farscape Doorbell Farscape Doorbell - On
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Blog

Join me at Mobifest Toronto!

There’s nothing better than casually mentioning in conversation, “Sorry, I can’t make it — I’ll be out of the country next week.” But indeed I will be, if only as far as Canada’s cleaner, less populous answer to New York City: Toronto.

I’ll be attending the Mobifest mobile film festival, which is featuring two of my Emergency 411 entries. I’m looking forward to seeing the city and experiencing all it has to offer, but am not looking forward to feeling the hurt over the $USD1 = $CA 0.96 exchange rate. Let’s just say there are going to be some very upset strippers when I toss 96 cents in change on stage.

And that's in Canadian Dollars

But before I can do all that, I’ll have to get through three airports. When I get back, I’ll let you know what getting Tazered feels like.

Naming Conventions

The UK Telegraph included a book review of Why Not Catch-21? The Stories Behind the Titles that got me thinking about some other naming conventions.

  • Name your book something pedestrian but enigmatic. Name it after something ordinary, but nothing too specific.
  • Name your website an english word; you can allow one spelling error or clever punctuation, but don’t get all cutesy. NO AFRICAN WORDS.
  • Go ahead and give your movie a long name, as the title of the remakes will be shorter, and shorter, and shorter…
  • Name your video game using three words or less, something like “Ms. Pac-Man” or “Guitar Hero 2” and not “Guitar Hero Encore Rocks the 80s”. Only sequels should have a colon in the title. (And no, a sequel to a sequel does not get two colons.)
  • Do not name your kids after proper nouns.

I don’t know whether timtoon necessarily passes this test, but I’ll bet it fares a lot better than Ubuntu or Utterz. Or just anything starting with a U. For example, you know what you’ll find in My Space, what’s in a Face Book, what to expect from a Live Journal, and what’s kept in an Image Bucket more so than what happens when you’re Flickr’d.

But a name is only part of having a successful site, and since I’m going to forget these helpful tips to having good content, I’ll link to them from a site called websitesthatsuck.com (can you guess what they have there?):

Blogs only work when they meet four of the following five conditions:

  1. Candor
  2. Urgency
  3. Timeliness
  4. Pithiness
  5. Controversy

Content Trumps Design.

I don’t even want to think about how my site rates there.

And while we’re at it, the ages-old list of bad domain names.

Seasonal Effect Disorder

It’s the 15th of November, it’s 82 degrees and you are fucking kidding me.

Winter of Discontent

But apparently it “feels like” 80. No it doesn’t. It feels like July.

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Emergency 411 Video

Finding Parking

I’ve got a little bit of a hangup about finding parking in LA. For this year’s Mobifest Toronto I put together a how-to of invaluable parking tips that border on the criminal—because when looking for a parking spot, it’s every motorist for himself.

Plus, I am fortunate enough that this is one of two entries of mine accepted as finalists for Mobifest Toronto! For more entries, check out my profile, or the other great submissions at mobifest.net!

The Hundred Dollar Laptop, yours for $400

What started innocently as flame bait on thepete.com managed to turn into a full-length tirade, in which I reply to my friend the eponymous Pete, about how the $400 OLPC laptop is just about the most extravagant, useless toy self-satisfied geeks have bestowed upon the third world. The idea behind the laptop is that it is a tool to better educate the children of developing nations so they can become better farmers, diplomats, 419 scammers, and camwhores, but it doesn’t live up to the hype.

And I hope they don’t mean for the laptop to be a literal tool for farming, because things like shovels, seed, and a plough will do a lot more to actually feed a family than a link to subsistence farming on WikiHow.

$400?! Damn you, inflation!This laptop is a luxury item, and to developing nations, it’s a bowling ball present. When the people buying them are singing its praises about how one can chat, surf the web and blog with it, I’m not convinced of the laptop’s efficacy as an educational tool. The thing’s got a D-pad and buttons. This isn’t an educational tool, it’s a Nintendo DS! A school I would believe.

Nevermind that the laptop also needs an internet connection to actually find any of this essential information online, and trained people to maintain that network infrastructure. I don’t know if countries that lost a third of their population to civil war will find the time to spec out an IT department.

But most of all, this sounds like the 21st century equivalent of the wide-eyed optimism of the 1950s that the television would become some sort of learning box panacea. And we all know how that turned out (Baby Einstein, anyone?).

I think the OLPC is a neat little laptop, if a little underpowered and with a smaller HD than my phone, and owning one might be fun. But the idea that this is what the 3rd world really needs, over things like food, medicine, sustainable farming methods and free public education? Give me a break. This is an over-extravagant way of educating one child. A school would be better, and is less likely to get stolen or sold for something useful.

Oh, and we don’t have one laptop per child in America… and we’re expecting this to catch on in Somalia?

A climate of fear

I had just finished reading several articles on the popular link dump site reddit.com (a process I consider just slightly less productive than, say, masturbation), when I realized… I’m more afraid of Homeland Security, the FBI, the RIAA, extraordinary rendition, being Tazered by cops, having my computer seized, my possessions confiscated, or my person indefinitely detained by airport security than I am about any terrorist.