Austin Film Festival: Day… um… All The Rest

So when I first started attending AFF, I had a fairly ambitious plan to blog daily about my experiences, but… as you may have noticed, this went by the wayside pretty quickly. I’m a blogging wuss, I know, but what can I say? Attending more than 12 hours of festivities in one day tired me out pretty quickly.

Here’s everything I attended after Thursday:

Friday

“TV Drama Today”
“Finding the Voice: Dialogue”
“Writing Comedy for TV”
“A Conversation With Glenn Gordon Caron
“Film Texas BBQ Supper”
Reservation Road
Numb

Saturday

“Juno: From Script to Screen”
“Production Team: Friday Night Lights”
Control
“Conference Wrap Party”

Sunday

Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist
Juno

Monday

Neal Cassady

Wednesday

Two Tickets to Paradise

Continue reading “Austin Film Festival: Day… um… All The Rest”

Why Aren’t You Watching The OC, Bitch?

Okay… I’ll be upfront about it. I love The OC. Despite the fact that _everyone_ I know who used to watch it now turns their nose up at it like two-day-old fish, I’ve stuck by it, and those folks are seriously missing out on some damn fine television. A rollicking good time, even, if I do say so myself.

The fourth season episodes so far have been great, some of the best in the show in a good long time, possibly reaching the quality of the first season (blasphemy!)

Tonight’s episode was a riot, and there is one good reason why: Autumn Reeser as Taylor Townsend!

!{float: left; margin-right: 1em;}/images/autumn.jpg! Not only is she pretty nice to look at, she is absolutely hilarious to watch. Her character is really well-written, but it helps that she’s such a talented performer.

Taylor was already my favorite character last season when the character was just a guest role, so I was definitely crossing my fingers in the hopes that she’d be added to the cast full-time… lucky me!

…Except The OC might not last after this season because none of you jerks are watching it. Jerks.

Seriously, though… the third season was kind of a drag sometimes, but it was still good, and the fourth season so far is leaps and bounds better than seasons two and three combined. It’s rare for a show to have such a resurgence in quality after two kind of shaky seasons, but here we are.

So… this is my call to all of you fair-weather fans… start watching The OC again. Watch one episode and you’ll forget what the hell Mischa Barton even looked like because a far better actress has taken her place front-and-center. So there.

John Hodgman: Not Just a PC, Also Funny

I listened to “The Areas of My Expertise”:http://www.amazon.com/Areas-My-Expertise-John-Hodgman/dp/0143059092/ by John Hodgman today while doing the dishes and cleaning up around my apartment. Hodgman is absolutely hilarious, and definitely needs to write another book and/or get more work (besides those lovable “‘Get A Mac’ commercials”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/.) Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Attack Ad #2: http://old.unsquare.com/mp3/hodgman.mp3

OK, I Am Officially Addicted To:

!/images/bzxk123.jpg!

seriously. i feel like i shouldn’t be so into doctor shows, of all things (scrubs and this), but damn if this one doesn’t seriously catch my fancy. i just watched three episodes in a row… two of them got me a little choked up and all three were hilarious. that, to me, is damn fine television… so i bought it.

always happens to me. amazon.com at 2 am. oh well.

…oh and i guess i was supposed to write up the story of my roadtrip. whoops!

who knows? not me.

recently when rebuilding this site, i’ve noticed that it took for fucking ever for movable type to do its job, most likely because i added the left and right sidebars to every page, thus increasing the page size a good bit (also helps that i have over 500 entries in this journal).

i tried to fix this using php, but “MT 2”:http://www.movabletype.org is not well suiting to publishing php, mostly because it sets the permissions wrong and pisses off my server. i set up “MT 3.1”:http://www.movabletype.org so I could play with it some, but that’s even more complicated…

so, last night, i sat for a few hours and updated all of the pages to use server-side includes, which ended up being not too hard to pull off. i also tweaked the design some more, simply because that’s what i do now, apparently. the best improvement – in my opinion – is that comments are much easier to distinguish from the entries.

you know what else i noticed? i used to write all of my entries in lowercase for the longest time. thing is, when i was looking back at those entries i liked the way they looked a lot better. so… here i am. back in lowercase.

today is my last friday at work. i think tuesday will be my last day, simply because levi is leaving for thanksgiving on wednesday, and if i were to come in to work on wednesday i wouldn’t do anything. at all. and i’m bad enough about that as it is without having to be here all by my damn self but for larry and anne.

tommorow morning is another weekly trip to juan in a million – so far i’ve gone the last two weekends, and i’m trying to make it a tradition. this weekend it’s going to be me, doug, and justin heading over there at 11am tomorrow. i think anyone that reads this that lives in austin is already going, so that’s set.

last week beau and i went and saw “sideways”:http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/sideways/, which was really very good, fucking hilarious and well written. i strongly recommend it to anyone who has a chance to see it. i’ve been going to the dobie pretty much every week too, unless they don’t have anything interesting playing. i guess i’m trying to make up for all those years i had to drive half an hour to go the movies.

i haven’t made any progress with writing anything lately. i know you guys worry about me never finishing anything, but trust me, this is something that i’m working on, and pressuring me probably isn’t going to do anything but make me feel guilty. i’m going to try and keep myself from promising to write anything for anyone until i feel like i can actually follow through.

part of my joblessness is going to focus on this issue… for example, i bought a really great book called the “dramatists sourcebook”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559362472/qid=1100880423/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/002-1927809-5432063, which is full of theatre companies looking for new plays and contests with nice cash prizes. i was also recently shown the “austin chronicle short story contest”:http://www.austinchronicle.com/shortstory/, which i still have enough time to write something for if i choose to. the opportunities are there, i just have to decide that i want to take them.

National Novel Writing Month

so neil gaiman’s website posted info about this contest that i think is absolutely hilarious. it’s called national novel writing month. the object is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of november. the only way to win is with 50,000 words. you win a nice pat on the back and the knowledge you wrote a novel. the idea of the contest is to write something, anything, as long as it goes for 50,000 words. if i think about it, that’s not that much. i’ve written plenty of 2000 word papers in my day. i’ve written a 70-page play. i could do this. not that i have an idea for a novel…. but it doesn’t have to be good. it just is. anyways, i entered. i may be posting a novel on my website, but we’ll see how that goes. the link is here.