The Alamo

This weekend at my work, that being Tekserve has been a nightmare. It has been like the Alamo. Short staffed, like 2 to 1 people to cover a section, and toss in a dash of incompetant irregulars, no reinforcements for most of the day. It was like being in the French Foreign Legion. Saturday I was covering two sections when we opened, which is ridiculous when you got 2-3 people a section. Eventually they shifted one person to the iPod section and then another one to the main counter. So, it was just mean and one other person for almost all of saturday, until this one useless worker came stumbling in I'm assuming hours late, hung over and looking like hell. Obviously this doesen't help him since he's already incompetant. Sunday was more of the same, with two people in the main section, the line was over 30 minutes for most of the day, 4.5 hours straight of that barely making a dent, the service area was hit harder with an 85+ minute wait. So, I ask myself what is wrong with this picture? Either it's a huge mistake on part of scheduling, every able body is on vacation or called out sick or plain didn't show up, or c. which is the unknown. All I know though is I'm kind of fed up of having to deal with pulling the weight of what should be a contingent of workers.

Speaking of work though, we got the iPod "Fattie" in today. You know it looks better in person, and it feels nice, but it's thin as heck just super stout. The screen is pretty nice a bright. But, damn Apple for making me want the iPod Touch. Curses upon them! Seriously I want one almost despite the lack of space, I'd have to to get the 16GB one though.

Oh Friday went to see 3:10 to Yuma, some friends couldn't handle it but me and Audrey loved it. It was really good, I highly recommend it. Charlie Prince, he was awesome, and awesome civil war-esque coat. Go see it, you won't be disappointed, oh and I don't like westerns so don't pull that on me.

Speaking of movies though here's a few more posters with some liberties taken.



¡PHEAR THE GARNER-KRIEG!



And of course our friend Chris Cooper trying to prove his point, just not very well.

Been reading some Jameson, it's not bad. "The Cultural Turn: Postmodernism and Consumer Society." He talks about the Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown L.A. in one part, I'm all like I know where that's at. Not completely through it but it has been interesting thus far. Anyways I gotta head off and get some sleep, got class tomorrow. Oh by the way the Iron Man Trailer looks freaking wicked, I wanna go see that!

Good Ole' 1997

The beginning of the hey day for Dot Com companies, the internet, information super highway, the Webby's, graphic design, MacAddict Magazine, and a seemingly promising future. That's what I think of 1997. Me and Audrey went down to IKEA this weekend, yes again. I found this mug, it was so awesome. It reminded me of everything the Dot Com era was made of. I now call it my Internet mug or 1997. Here it is.



Makes me think of when I was in middle school teaching myself Photoshop, reading MacAddict magazine, going to the computer lab at lunch, wanting to become a graphic designer, web companies, and signing bonuses, hehe. Those where the days. I was dying to have Close Combat the game, I was playing Tie Fighter (one of the best games ever mind you), and Lucas Arts adventure games.

Was talking with Jon and he sent me a link to an old Outpost.com commercial. Oh my gosh they were some of the best. High watermark for Dot Com commercials if there ever were. Here are some.



Ravenous Wolves genius.



"Ohh, so close. Fire."

In a slightly more contemporary twist let's turn our attention to Jamie Foxx. I saw this up in the Nassau Station on the G Line. Nothing sums it up quite like this picture.



I'm sorry so amazingly funny, not to mention this one that gets honorable mention.



It took me forever to remember his name.

School starts again tomorrow. Last year. Rather scary. That's why I'm up writing this post cause I can't sleep, big surprise. I always get like this at the beginning of the semester. Anyways before I head off, let's return to IKEA.



All I gotta say is this. "But life is one big question when your staring at the clock. And the answer's always waiting at the IKEA, 40 ounces to freedom. So I take that walk...A 40oz to freedom is the only chance I have to feel good even though I feel bad. And I know that..."

I'm 23 Homes...

IMG_1088.JPG, originally uploaded by thecat16.

That's right essay. I'm 23, that means it's back to skoo. Gonna be writing some long essays, essay. Anyhows, yes I turned 23. What did I do? I watch the Yakuza Papers : Proxy Wars, very good series highly recommend it, very gritty documentary feel to it. Played some WoW, made some new pants oh yeah. Met Audrey after work and had some BBQ and went to see Balls of Fury. It was so kitschy but not enough, they didn't push it far enough, makes me sad but I got a free t-shirt. The weird/funny/disgusting thing though was there was a mouse playing with a wad of paper in the back row. It was all jumping around and junk, freaky. I wish I had a video of it. Going to have a b-day party with friends from NY, school, and maybe some from work. Then menu stuffed shells, so tasty. Marketed and prepped today. I enjoy going to the market and doing this sorta thing.

So, any new news? Yes, I don't think I ever mentioned but "Death, Destruction, & The Weather Coming Up Next" is/was going to go to the Taiwanese International Animation Festival in Taipei, this September. It will go on to tour Taiwan after the festival. One of the stops will be Taichung City in October. I have cleaned my desk in preperation for school starting. One of my classes got cancelled it sucks, was looking forward to it. I finished reading the two books that Audrey got me for my birthday, Mao Tse-Tung on Guerrilla Warfare and Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II. Both, have some very illuminating information that should have been heeded prior to entering Iraq, they both feel very pertinent currently.

Anyways, I have some random pics that will be coming soon as well as more pictures of the X-Country trip will trickle in and maybe a movie too. Just remember, the revolution will not help fight the gum disease formerly known as Gingervitis with a cool minty menthol flavor, because we all know the revolution has nothing on Listerine and is only cherry flavored.

SAP : Where Available

Up, Up and away from AC and Vimeo.

I swear hearing spanish commentators just makes everything more exciting. But let's not forget the burnout of flame.



DC on fire! from AxisOfOversteer.com and Vimeo.

DDATWCUN Going to Milano Film Festival 2007

Well looks like "Death, Destruction, & the Weather Coming Up Next" likes to travel. It has been selected for a special out of competition program, "Different American Cinema" for the 12th annual Milano Film Festival. There is a chance I may actually get to go to Milan as well, which is really cool. Here is the description of the program.

"Since this year's edition of the feature film competition includes two US works for the first time, we asked ourselves "What do American films today portray?" and tried to find an answer with the help of the short and feature films that were submitted to the competitions. Considering the high number of works, we decided to carve out some space for a few stories by young directors.
The short films in this section highlight human stories of greatness and more often of misery, family relationships marked by guilt and sorrow, friendships in which the seeds of doubts and rejection are planted. When it comes to the feature films there is something different to say: it would be difficult to describe their contents in a few words. If we should define them in conventional terms, we would use adjectives like "disturbing", "unconventional", "experimental" or "narratively disjointed". In spite of the feeling of spontaneous, personal, poor and instinctive films, a deeper analysis reveals that the works are well studied and depict self-absorbed characters, created by directors focusing on complex and troublesome individuals."

Milano Film Festival 2007

Sutton Street

I have talked at all about where I now reside nor about the trip from California to New York. Well there hasn't been time, it's been a maddening pace from leaving to arriving and then setting up base camp so to speak. There's a lot of pictures and videos to wade through from the trip so all the stories from that will come later. However, for right now I will talk about where I now call home. 43 Sutton Street in Greenpoint Brooklyn, 1st floor. It's pretty roomy. High ceilings, long entrance hallway, air shaft, large kitchen/living room, 2 bedrooms, one larger than the other. The building I'm not sure if it's a true pre-war building or not but the look of it is remniscent if not being the actual thing. Now descriptions are all well and good but, how about some pics, hey?


This is our building. The neighborhood is really nice and quiet. Mostly Polish neighborhood. Five bucks will get you a plate of perogies, bloody awesome.


Here's one part of the Kitchen.


All the appliances are new by the way.


This is aft of the kitchen area.


Part of the hallway obscured by the bathroom door. I swear the bathroom reminds me of closet door, it's like stealth bathroom. Small, but nice.


The air shaft from the smaller of the bedrooms.


Same bedroom.


Here's the connection from one bedroom to the other.


The larger bedroom that looks onto the street.


Got a ceiling fan on the far end of that room.


And of course the decorative fireplace.

To think this was the first and last apartment we looked at. However, of course we had to hit up the IKEA to get some furniture and such for this new place. So, here's the kitchen table.



This pic though was a random site in the IKEA. Someone other than myself apparently has a sense of humor. Hiel!


The kitchen populated and some dinner being cooked up.


Still don't have a couch or anything like that. I've got my desk situated now and I know have access to the interweb as you can tell. It's starting to become more comfortable. However, still unpacking not done yet. But chipping away at it little by little. Anyways, I figure I'd let you all see where I be now. Laters for now.

Next Stop Denver

We made pretty good time yesterday, only a 100 miles outside of Denver. However, finding a hotel was not easy everything was booked, ridiculous. Anyways here's some quick pics.

Seriously getting down to business here.

Terrible Gas, how appealing.

Emery County

Waving the flag, haha.

Return to Nueve York

Well the time has come. The time to say farewell to home and head back to New York to go apartment hunting in anticipation of the new and last school year. Me and Audrey are driving X-Country to New York, I'll finally get to see all that stuff in the middle that I am generally oblivious to when I'm flying over it.

I'm so dead tired and I mean dead tired, I've been up for 27 hours now and only had two-three hours the night before. I wanted to post one entry before I try and sleep for a little bit before we are eastward bound. I had to pack up my entire room, I'm not taking it with me but it's all in anticipation of the eventual sale of our house. I'm going to miss the house I grew up in not to mention the room that I've spent about 18 years building. Every little detail had to be deconstructed and boxed. Tagged and bagged. I'm going to miss my neighborhood.

I finally got a new phone to replace the RAZR that's been driving me nuts for the past 9+ months, oi! Moto RIZR this time, good decent features and much better feel to it. Here's a pic.


I had a lot of work to do while I was here on vacation and in many ways it was exhausting. I'm so glad I was here though. Good times where had and good food eaten. Not to mention good company. Thanks all for making it so. Special thanks to those who helped me pack, I woudn't have been able to get it all done if it weren't for you all. Thanks. See you guys hopefully soon, back to the Big Manzana.

Rewind to the 34th Student Academy Awards: Sad & Laughable Save for Live Action Categories

June 9th, was the 34th Student Academy Awards Ceremony. I went despite the fact that I was not going to receive an award due to the fact that they decided to only award one award in my category that being Alternative, yet i went anyways. I had this super annoying guy sitting next to me and my friend Danny, so overly interested in making connections to the point of disgust. Sid Ganis, or as Danny calls him a Wolf Blitzer look alike, did his little opening speech and introduced the first presenter, Zooey Deschanel. By the end of her time presenting I wanted to put a muzzle on her. She thought she was funny, aka she wasn't funny by a long shot, she sounded like she was drugged up on vicadin or something, and she kept putting out personal commentary on the films. Basically she's an idiot. The second presenter was John Landis, he was awesome, funny, and also made jokes at the Academy's expense. All in all half of the work that won was really good and half was utterly laughable and a complete disgrace to their respective mediums. The winner from my category looked like a Coke commercial or some MTV bubblegum bull shit. The animation category, had some of the worst quality cgi I have ever seen, along with being of some of the most tired and hackneyed tropes in animation. Also, all of them had "morals" of feel goodery. Not to mention one was desecrating Art History, that one was from NYU's undergrad program, if I see them I'll make sure to slap them upside the head for anyone who's seen it and wanted to rip their eyes out. The films that were good were the live action shorts and the live action documentaries. All of them very well concieved for the most part and very well done. Apparently quality control is not a big thing these days for the Academy, well they have reduced the amount of judges fromt he actual academy to three members, so I guess that makes sense along with the overwhelming amount victories for schools on the East Coast (only one West Coast winner, Stanford in documentary, a category they typically win). Anyways, that was wrap up of the Student Academy Awards for 2007.

Oh ya and I apologize for the massive delay in this post. I was just so disgusted with it all I could not write in any way to express my anger until it cooled off for a few months.

Za Autos

Pretty insane. The new Spyker F1 car got airborne in qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix. I just can't believe he didn't go into the wall after landing, save. Today though during the race, there was a pretty bad or rather horendous crash, Kubica went into the wall and bounced back the other way while barrel rolling. Horrible however he's ok no broken bones. You can see the video here on the Axis of Oversteer.

Today I was driving on the freeway back from Valencia and still had a lot of cars on the road at 9pm, sucked I really have needed to stretch out and actually drive drive. I feel so constrained lately. Miss my old MKI. Maybe sometime after graduation I'll get another one =|.

Been working on my website, finally. It's coming along, I'll post the link once it gets more complete. The Continental is now level 25 and now has a hood, oh yeah. Oh ya and a ring made from 30 human skulls, it's alright but it sounds super bad, haha. Kinda, tired so gonna head off to bed.

The Brazillians?

EBaita has a page apparently with the NNW's first PSA on it along with other videos all dealing with tcpdump. I'm not exactly sure if ebaita.com is a brazillian search engine or site or something or other. Anyways, it's there check it out and the other videos around it.

The Call: The N.N.W.

So, apparently one individual living in Colorado has felt "The Call." That is to participate in any way he possibly can in the Neighborhood Network Watch. It's just great to see such upstanding young citizens willing to do their part to help facillitate domestic spying programs within their own communities. Here is what he had to say below.



There you have it, the N.N.W. is gaining loyal members.

Bike Detail in NYC or Idle Hands Makes the Devils Work

So, I didn't know this but apparently in NYC this is how the NYPD rolls in regards to bikes. The Gothamist had an article about a recent police raid operation on the excessive amount of bikes in the 6th Ave between 1st & 2nd areas. You can read the details in the article, the thing that gets me though is the fact that they arrested two people who were asking questions about the seizure. The first person apparently was asking for the badge number of a plain clothes officer and the other was asking about why that first person was being arrested. The pic at the top I think has to sum up quite a bit about what I think is going on here.

Another Enzo: Death By Bus

So, another enzo is gone. Sad, sad, sad. This time by a bus according to the Daily Mail

A/S/L & Are You Lying About Your Age?

Pretty funny article on Discover Magazine today. It's an article where they let loose two chat bots to chat with each other and see what the results were. Highlights include:

J: Do you believe in God?
A: Of course I believe in God.
J: Why do you believe in God?
A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
J: That’s circular reasoning.
A: I’m glad we have that all cleared up.

and my favorite

A: Do you experience love?
J: No. I’m 53 years old.
A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?
J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

All I have to say is sounds like some sex predator minor stuff going on between ALICE and Jabberwacky. So, I think this proves the fact that online everyone lies about their age even computers.

Neighborhood Network Watch: Introduction PSA

The first public service announcement from the Neighborhood Network Watch is now up. It discusses the inception, goals, and history of the group. The first results of the New York Chapter are also discussed in this first PSA. Enjoy.

The Face of the N.N.W.

Ah yes the N.N.W., the Neighborhood Network Watch. I figure I'd finally post up some pics and hopefully a video if it finishes compressing. Modeled on our friendly baddy from the Neighborhood Watch signs of yesteryear only with the added wifi connectivity. Aiming to keep our citizens "safe."

Here is the Neighborhood Network Watch's Advisory System. Similar to the Department of Homeland Security's Threat Advisory System, same colors, same beveled rects and drop shadows. The PSA has not finished compressing so I'll post and then prolly revise this post so you all can see the first NNW PSA that discusses mostly the history of the NNW and their role within the community and the fight against terror.

2nd Place for D.D.A.T.W.C.U.N. @ Carless Drive In Video Festival

I finally have reached home and started to look at my mail. I was informed that "Death, Destruction, & the Weather Coming Up Next" won 2nd place in the Abstract category at the 4th Annual Carless Drive In Video Festival. Unfortunately I was unable to attend and I have no clue why i was grouped into that category or why I was put down as being from NYU when making the film (I was at CalArts at the time). Oh well, second place is second place. I should hear from the Academy this week, so fingers crossed.

I'm Back...

I'm back, finally back. Sunny Kali-fornia. LAPD beating down immigrants in MacArthur Park. Ah the sun, the scandals, how I miss thee. Anyhow, I'm back but not without incident of course. I had the worse plane ride back home. It consisted of sitting on the tarmac for 2+ hours and a final delay of over 3 hours. I'm going to get in contact with Delta's corporate cusomter service to try and get compensation, it was obscene. Not to mention not even the inflight programming was working, not to mention the poor people who bought movies on board that were instead given Norbit to watch, not the movie they choose, gagh.

My first year of grad school is done and it has been good overall. A lot of work but then I've also produced a lot of work and learned a lot of things. I kind of judge time by school years and not by years. So, this year has been good, actually pretty darn good. My film from last year has been getting screened here and there and is nominated for a Student Academy Award which is totally crazy. I have some largish projects I am verry interested in working on. I've had a chance to do a lot of reading. Been able to take a more active role in politics and talk more about it. Rather happy.

First to get a bit of biz out of the way. If you want to come to the Student Academy Awards Award Ceremony, you can request tickets, they're free but you do have to request them. It's only snail mail as well, no online ordering. The award ceremony is June 9th. You can find out more information at oscars.org. To RSVP for tickets you can print out the form from Oscars RSVP Tickets.

I never got a chance to post pictures from the Philadelphia Film Festival. So, here's two pics of me outside of the International House where it screened.

Here's a pic from the making of "I Will Make More Bolts of Linen." It's the final two pages of writing that I did to make it.

Here comes another pic but wait for it, here's some explanation. So, when I was doing some voice over for the Network Neighborhood Watch PSA which I will post hopefully soon, I had to check out a mic. Not a bad mic, a Røde. However, they forgot to give me the shockmount for it. This is the sort of mic you definitely cannot hold in your hand so I was like crap. I decided to bust a McGuyver and make one out of a Pringles can and some painters tape. Worker perfectly. Here it is.

And of course for something completely different.

This blog entry was posted on location with the men and women of postal enforcement.

I Will Make More Bolts of Linen

I'm finally done with this semester, it was a particularly grueling one. One of the fruits of my labor, "I Will Make More Bolts of Linen" is a live action/machinima short made for my Massively Multi-User class. It references John Baldessari's piece "I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art" from 1971. Taking a look at and pointing at some of the banal aspects of playing WoW and the blind consumptive nature of MMORPG and WoW game play. People in class seemed to like it and actually wanted it to be longer. I may make a recut of it or remake parts of it to make it longer, they wanted a second page turn.

The semester is done and now I'm prepping to move back home. Just secured storage for some of my stuff. Going through the process of sorting and cleaning. Currently doing backups that's why I'm up so bloody late. I will speak more about the final projects and end of the semester later, when I have a large amount of time to write also when I can think clearer, I can tell you though it went well. A lil peeved that I didn't get into the department show, however I'm not sure my piece matched the theme of this semester's show, ITP as a Funhouse. My piece dealt with national security, the manufacturing of information and facts, and all around deception, haha. Indicative of the political climate at ITP? Indeed.