FuzzyCo

• How to Disagree
  (tags: politics howto writing)

Which Gerdes got food poisoning last night? The one who ate left-over ribs and potato salad that had been sitting in the car for a few hours the day before? Or the one who ate fresh spinach and cheese ravioli and organic marinara? (Of course it's my own fault. Whenever you say, "well, this sauce has an interesting flavor" you should know right there.)

Russell Peters is incredibly personable. And he sure can do a lot of accents.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Elizabeth has kindly put together a highlight reel from that Blewtenanny show last weekend. It's always interesting to see what of your material someone else thinks is a highlight. In this case, Elizabeth chose my odd Bible nerd bit. It's just a hair racy (though without any naughty words) and is in the middle of that clip (but watch the whole thing -- the other fellows are quite funny).

My first Muxtape. Kinda nerdy and Fuzzy-focused.

I have, at work, a slightly-oversized coffee mug. It's from Crate & Barrel, sturdy, and a pleasant (I think) shade of green. This is, if I may digress from my point a bit, one of the ways I cope with the corporate environment. Years and jobs ago I got that mug and a complete, single set of silverware (knife, fork, tea spoon and soup spoon) specifically to bring into the office. Eating team-building deep dish pizza with plastic silverware will drive you crazy, I believe.

But the point is oatmeal. I make instant oatmeal in that mug for breakfast many days. (McCann's Instant Irish Oatmeal, Maple & Brown Sugar flavor, to be precise. An unsolicted endorsement. All natural flavors, and isn't that refreshing to see every now and then.) And if I hop up from my desk right after I finish my oatmeal and rinse the mug out it cleans up in a trice. Lickey-split. Easy as pie.

If I wait 15 minutes or half an hour or longer -- glue. There's a hard film all over the cup and tiny bits of oatmeal get welded to the bottom. It takes soaking and scrubbing to get it clean.

It seems hard not to think that there's a life lesson lurking all too obviously there. Clean up your messes right away and they're easy to take care of. I just wish I could learn that lesson, at the very least with regard to the mug.

My 367 Days self-portrait project has hit another milestone - Day 60 (or "Day 060" as my nerdiness would have it). It continues to be a mix of inspired days and what I call 'contractual obligation' days, where I just snap a dumb picture before I go to bed. (Did I say the same thing last month?) If nothing else, I haven't missed any more days.

Oh my lord. Here's a new ad campaign for Swedish Fish (long a Fuzzy-favorite anyway). In case you can't read it on this copy, there's a tiny "Nej" (No) under the kitty and a "Ja" (Yes) under the fish and the tag line is "A friend you can eat". There are 4 other images in the campaign, including a redonkulously cute bunny on a waffle.

(Via AdFreak)

Hey, Elizabeth has posted my whole set from Blewtenanny. I just watched the whole thing and I'm amazed that a) I don't seem to be dancing around too much (Erica reminds at me to plant my feet whenever I practice with her) and b) that I didn't swear at all. (Other than the aforementioned "sodomy" mention. And the word "dump" to reference some poo. And "chagrined".) Because usually I'm like a sailor. "Darn that poop," I'm always saying.

I shouldn't even mention the weird way I hold the microphone, because then you might be as distracted by it as I am.

I'm also happy that I went 7 minutes. Bryan said I had ten, but as I may have mentioned this was my first non-open mic standup set so I pretty much did every bit I have right now. So now I guess I need to write 3 more minutes of jokes and get booked somewhere else. Yes?

• Dgenerate Nation - Skate With Me video
  (tags: music video boombox)

If you like puzzles, all kinds of puzzles -- word puzzles, math puzzles, chess puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, geometry puzzles, etc, etc -- then Professor Layton and the Curious Village is exactly the game you want on your Nintendo DS. There's even a special feature where, after you've finished the nearly 200 puzzles in the game, you can download a new puzzle each week. Puzzles! Oh, and it's gorgeous.

Probably my only complaint about the game is that the way the puzzles are integrated into the main through-line is tenuous at best and that, oddly, the mystery of that main plot unfolds on its own, with out giving you a chance to solve it.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I was so impressed with the way The Transporter was sorta-kinda-in-context a realistic over-the-top action movie that The Transporter 2, with its ridiculous drug-dealer with a deadly virus plot, and the terrible, terrible acting from most of cast, seems like a slap in the face. And, and this is the real shame, the fights aren't as good.

FuzzyCo grade: C

It's an Apelad shirt, it's a video game shirt, it's $10 (at least, it is today). How have you not bought it already? Shoo!

Erica had the idea and directed, and I shot and edited this little teaser for Season 3 of Impress These Apes.

(Thanks are due to Kevin MacLeod, supplier of fine royalty-free music.)

Whenever Ultraviolet had talking, it was retarded. Whenever it didn't, it was retardedly awesome.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Hey, it's a long shot, but does anyone have recommendations for dinner in Kenosha and in the Dells?

Update: despite a couple of great suggestions, we had dinner at Smoque on the way out of town, a snack at the Brat Stop, breakfast at Frank's (which was, really, half the point of the trip -- soooo good), and then dinner at Wally's House of Embers.

Metromix is having their now-annual Rock 'n' Vote show -- 4 bands out of the 10 finalists will perform a free show at the Double Door. And FuzzyCo friend Ben Taylor's band JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound is in the running.

Go here, listen to some sample songs, and then vote for JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound (the voting is on the upper right of the page and it's a simple poll -- no registration required or anything).

(And who took that awesome photo of the band? Oh yeah, it was me!)

I get asked to film theater, standup, and improv shows fairly often, and I've seen plenty of videos of the same, and I'm going to share a tip with you that will improve your theater (etc.) videos by 45%*. We're going to learn to use manual exposure.

When you leave your camera on automatic exposure, it's dealing with averages and it sees the vast expanse of the black curtains and jacks up the overall exposure to try and get some detail in those areas -- leaving the human face, the part of the image you actually care about, completely blown out. It's even worse if everyone on stage is wearing dark clothing. I've seen videos where everyone's heads looked like they were on fire.

So what you want to do is find the manual exposure setting on your video camera. On this Sony Handycam I've got here, for example, you go into FN on the touchscreen, then EXPOSURE, select MANUAL and use the - and + buttons to set the exposure. Press OK and then X when you've got it set to step out of the menus. Just dial down the exposure until you can see detail in the face. It's subjective -- too far down and the whole image will be pretty dim.

Ideally, you can get into the space early enough and get cooperation from the tech people to take out the house lights, turn on the lights the way they'll be during the show, and position someone mid-stage to set your exposure (that's what I was doing here with the aid of the delightful Paul O'Toole). Or you might need to wait until the host is on stage. Or just dial it in pretty quickly during the start of the show.

* A fake statistic.

It was interesting how little story or action there actually was in the original Ocean's Eleven. A whole bunch of great actors up there on the screen and none of them really do anything.

FuzzyCo grade: C

I went into 21 with a bad attitude -- the movie we'd really wanted to see, Leatherheads, was sold out and Ben Mezrich's last book had soured me on this story already. Of course, I can't really blame Mezrich at all, because the screenwriters have smoothed out any rough edges (or subtlety or nuance) from his book to teen-movie simplicity.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that the Alamo has good beer and a great Puerco Guisada.

FuzzyCo grade: D*

* Erica liked the movie quite a bit, so feel free to chalk this low score up to my bad attitude.

I don't know if you can tell in this photo, but I've just been hair and make-uped, for my first commercial shoot. I am now a paid commercial actor. That's right, jerks*.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Ken answered a Craigslist ad about a casting. In conversation with the casting agent, she asked if he had other comedy friends who might like to try out -- he said sure and invited our comedy writing group over to his house that Saturday afternoon. We all trooped over (on the rather confusing telephone-tag invite that "this casting agent wants to film some comedians who use YouTube") and were happy to discover that it was a casting for a national commercial for a name-brand technology company**.

With any sort of audition, I do my best to be grateful for the opportunity and then put it out of mind. So it was a surprise when a couple days later I got a call from the casting agent with some questions about my schedule. Yes, I'm going out of town on the 16th. No, I can't reschedule this trip, even for paid work. OK, thanks.

So then it was even more of a surprise when I got another call a few days later scheduling me for a wardrobe 'fitting'*** and a meeting with the director. We did have to cut our trip to the Dells just a hair short (we had breakfast on the road on Sunday instead of eating somewhere in the Dells), but Erica agreed that it was worth it.

The fitting went fine -- they asked me to wear the same shirt I'd been wearing in the casting (I have a small suspicion that the cleverness of the shirt might be why I was cast at all). And the director explained my part of the commercial. As far as I understand, the commercial is going to be about how pervasive the company's communications products are in people's lives. I was going to be a 'hardcore gamer', playing online with my friends. To get 'honest reactions' from me, they wanted me to bring my own gaming PC (which, for me, happens to be a MacBook Pro booted into Windows using BootCamp).

So, Wednesday morning Erica dropped me off at the shoot in Uptown. The commercial is filming all over town with dozens of actors, but that day's shoot had taken over an apartment building in Uptown. (I chatted with one of the house's owners -- twin sisters had married brothers and the two couples and their kids all live in the 6-flat as a single house.) There were two trailers and several trucks parked in front of the building, craft services tables, and so on. It was a for-reals production!

When you're just 'talent', it's a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. I was done with hair and makeup by 8:45 and then waited in one of the trailers until 10:45 or so, twittering and playing Zelda on my DS. When I finally went inside, it was fairly whirlwind getting my laptop setup with a gaff-tape-brand monitor and keyboard and then I started playing Unreal Tournament. I had been planning to do some prep for the shoot, but I'd been having issues with my Windows install the night before, so it was a fresh install of UT. I got started playing as soon as I could to get through the early levels and get to something actually challenging, to give some good reactions. (I mean, I can act -- I'm an actor. But since I had the game in front of me, it seemed easier to give honest reactions actually facing a tough battle instead of just yelling "Oh yeah, take that" while shooting at a wall or something.)

And then all of a sudden they were filming. We got a couple of takes of me being excited ("Take that! Oh no!"). Then the director wanted to get some over-the-shoulder shots, which of course had to be of an approved game. There was a tech consultant on hand who had another computer set up with the approved games on it. Except that they weren't. So there was some hurried installations and then some really exciting footage of me playing the first 5 tutorial minutes of a game ("Here's how you use your gun, soldier.") (I suspect that footage won't be that usable.) A couple of shots over-the-shoulder with the monitor turned off so they can put in anything they want, digitally, and then they were done. And the cameras were off to another part of the house and I tore down my system and was officially 'released'.

I'm guessing from the number of people they were filming that I'll be a frame or two in the final product, but we'll see in a couple months.

* Sorry, none of you are jerks.
** I'm not under an NDA or anything, but I'm always superstitious about saying anything definite in public until it's all done.
*** In my own clothes. Is that normal?

Ze Frank's new Color Wars series of online competitions has a contest called Young Me, Now Me where you try and recreate a photo from your youth now. I was just visiting my family in Austin and dad showed me some old photos he had just scanned. So here's me in 1972, sitting in my Grandpa's old Model A on the farm in Iowa. And me in 2008 sitting in my parents' Toyota in their front driveway.

Update: I'm a winner, in the category of "Most Changed in Appearance".

This last weekend was the first time all 12* of us have been together since Jeanne and Jeff's wedding a year and a half ago. Seeing all that family would be plenty for a long weekend, but we jammed it extra full: we saw some of Erica's old friends, caught up with Andrew for the second time in a month (bonus!), saw Prince Paul and Mike Doughty, and ate way too much good food.

(More photos, including non-silly family portraits.)

* Soon to be 14.

You know, we can talk all day about how lazy and repetitive Will Farrell's frightfully similar characters are. But the problem is that he's funny. Yeah, it makes me mad, too. Except when I'm laughing.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Mike talks about the song here and the video here.

"Every time you sniff and say somebody has 'too much free time,' the part of you that used to love making things for pure joy dies a little." - Merlin Mann

I'm eliminating the phrase "too much free time" from my vocabulary. Even before I came across this pithy sentence from Merlin, I had been thinking that a lot of the stuff that I do, other people would probably think was a waste of time. So, just because someone else has come up with an odd way to invest their energy, that's no reason for me to belittle them. Now, I'm still gonna laugh at them, but I'm not going to question their basic motivation for engaging in the activity. Cool?

Update: Making Light shares a video of Clay Shirky speaking at Web 2.0 and answering the similar question "Where do people find the time?" It's a 15-minute video and well worth a watch.

As a commenter suggested on my The Transporter review, I did enjoy Shoot 'Em Up a great deal. The plot is ridiculous, but everyone treats it with such seriousness -- deliberately riding the line of hammy, without ever quite crossing it -- that it carries it along. And the action is right up my alley.

FuzzyCo grade: A

• Tutorial for Flash MP3 Player
  Using 1-pixel flash player on non-wordpress sites
  (tags: howto flash blog movabletype webdesign)