Category: Toiling In The Pixel Mines

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Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

That’s no time machine, that’s a space st…no, wait. It IS a time machine, isn’t it? Never mind.

I’ll show you around my TARDIS in a moment. But first, a look at the print ad running for GreenhouseFX.tv in the July issue of Entertainment Fort Smith:

GreenhouseFX.tv ad
(The only difference is that the one in the magazine has my phone number in it.) I’m trying to make a virtue of the fact that, once I’ve got a baby boy running around, I won’t be in a position to go shooting very often (on the site, from day one, it’s said that I do shooting by special arrangement only). I’m hoping I’ll get some decent business off of this ad; as I’ve mentioned, it runs in the bridal issue, so if that doesn’t work, I clearly need to figure something else out, like renting my organs out for medical experiments. (While I’m still using them.)

And now, a fond farewell to an old friend, who, after serving faithfully for 20 years, is going to a better place. Well, if “out with the trash on Monday” is considered a better place:
Old Weather Radio
Never again will your sickly siren wail reverberate through the walls of my home, for now the sound of impending death from above is the sound of a power pellet in Coleco tabletop Pac-Man. Goodbye, old friend.

And now, click here to peer into the TARDIS. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

TGIF x 10,000

Thank God for Fridays. And thank God that this is one of ’em. ‘Nuff said.

I’ve been meaning to post a small version of the print ad for GreenhouseFX.tv that I prepared to run in the July bridal issue of Entertainment Fort Smith. I just keep letting it slip my mind. I thought the way it was worded kind of cleverly gets around whether or not I’d be shooting video or just editing it. With Evan at T minus 86 days and counting from liftoff, I’m hoping the message comes across that I’m doing post production primarily, without that seeming like something that would count points off.

It’s rainy today, and rainy = no swimmy. And no swimmy = no happy. Maybe that’s stretching it a little bit, but I’ve really gotten to enjoy what has become the daily swim. Even if the skeeters made a buffet line out of me yesterday while my head was poking out of the water. I don’t “dunk” well in swimming pools – I can’t stand chlorine getting into my eyes – but I dunked several times yesterday.

I’ve had the misfortune this week of watching a guy I used to work with take a very public fall from grace. I didn’t work with him very long before I left the TV station, but he always struck me as a pefectly nice guy. Oddly enough, he is the second former co-worker of mine about whom something like this has come to light (the other was someone I worked with at Fox over 10 years ago), and it’s still incredibly creepy. There was absolutely no indication of anything like this from working with the guy day in and day out. It’s bad news on multiple levels – I have no wish to see the place I used to work for take this kind of a black eye, and this was the first hire for Drew after he took over as chief meteorologist. (I’m pretty sure Drew had no idea about any of this either. At least not during the hiring/auditioning process.) In short, it doesn’t make anybody look good. Dude…get some help. Please. Before you wind up like my other former co-worker who wound up with actual molestation charges and not just being a peeping tom.

The foot that I’m staying off of is still pretty slow going. Missing a day of swimming (I know, bad topic to mention after the previous paragraph…) isn’t going to help it any. There’s just a zen state that I’m able to find in the water that I think has been missing from my life for a decade or so, and I don’t seem to find it anywhere else. My wife has a hard time getting me to vacate the pool. I’ve found myself wondering lately if this site would even exist in anything resembling its current form if I’d had a swimming hole to devote this kind of time to all these years. I wonder what kind of shape I would be in. Relative weightlessness = bliss. Especially for a fat guy like me. But even then I’m trying to address that a bit – I try to do some actual laps back and forth, instead of just floating around.

And now, a Public Plea for Help: sometime back in ubikuberalles’ Livejournal, he mentioned finding the titanium collection Classic Galactica vehicles. Now assuming that all of this had happened before and all of it would happen again, I went looking for them locally, to no avail. If anyone spots these, please, please, please let me know about it, prices included. I’m not sure which ships they’ve making from the original series in that scale, but I’m after the Viper, the Cylon raider, and good ol’ clunky Galactica herself. If you can get these where you are, let me know – I can paypal you or something, or come up with some kinda trade. If anyone can finagle that, that’s very likely my last toy purchase before the baby gets here.

Speaking of the boy, I’ve been feeling him kick on a pretty regular basis here of late. I’ll put my head up to my wife’s belly and talk to him, and then PTHOOK!, right in my ear. He’s already kickin’ the old man in the head. This bodes well. 😆… Read more

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Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

The Friday recap

And now for a word… I signed on the dotted line today to run an ad in the July bridal issue of Entertainment Fort Smith for GreenhouseFX.tv. I’ll be spending the next week putting the ad together to send to them. I had been thinking of running an ad in there at some point, but a little bird (who happens to write entries in Elabeth’s LJ blog) tipped me off to the bridal issue. I figure a video production outfit that can’t get business from an ad in a magazine’s bridal issue has to be right up there with someone who can’t get laid in a women’s prison with a handful of pardons. 😆 If this doesn’t work, then it’s clearly time to think of something else!

ThreepioStar Wars, nothing but Star Wars… I’ll shanghai my own response from Digital Press’ “post your memories of the original Star Wars” and add more stuff to it here, since it’s Star Wars Day. This way, even the DP folks get something new out of the deal. Kinda like that one “new” song that some band slaps onto a greatest hits CD so you have to buy it.

I was four, just about to turn five, when I first saw Star Wars. So much of what is important in my life can be traced back to my first viewing of that movie – my lifelong fascination with space, my curiosity about special effects and movie/TV production, and even my computer and video game fixation can be traced on a straight through-line from R2-D2 to Pong to Space Invaders to Pac-Man to home consoles and computers. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the soundtrack completely altered my listening palette. I’m still a soundtrack fan to this day, and still have the double LP of The Empire Strikes Back just about memorized, note for note, instrument for instrument. Even my ELO fixation has its starting point in Star Wars – later in 1977, my older brother was trying to get me to be quiet and leave him and his date alone, and finally out of exasperation gave me an 8-track of “A New World Record” and told me to listen to the beginning of “Tightrope” because “it sounds like Star Wars music!” 😆

StormtrooperStar Wars completely altered any course my life might have been thinking about taking. I wasn’t a kid who wanted to be a fireman or a doctor when he grew up. After I saw Star Wars, I wanted to be a Jedi Knight. Upon learning that there really was no such thing, five-year-old me was deeply disappointed, since I had already been running around the house in my bathrobe (which I had hated before, but loved now because it looked like Luke’s farmboy duds) and practicing my lightsaber technique with the family flashlight. My parents suggested to me that maybe I should be an astronaut, so I latched onto that. Turns out I didn’t meet the requirements for that either, and besides, astronauts didn’t have lightsabers or droids or wookiees!

I was truly glad when the prequels came out when they did. I’m not going to try to get into a debate with the camp who thought Episodes I-III were an abortion, but I was more than happy to watch them and generally enjoyed them quite a bit. And I loved collecting the figures again. Yeah, let’s not forget about the figures – I think in the end I stopped just 15 short of having all of them. I’d like to have a full collection someday, and have even done some eBaying to close that gap, but I understand realistically that it may never happen. But there’s nothing like classic Star Wars toys – and even some of the new ones, especially if they’re characters who didn’t get turned into figures back when Kenner was in business – to make me feel young again.

I remember my family’s next door neighbors had a CED player – you remember, the poor relation of laserdiscs that RCA did, where movies were encoded at slightly-better-than-VHS-6-hour-quality onto a non-opitcal medium that resembled an LP in a huge cartridge casing, and they got Star Wars on CED just because we were over there so much. They really had no interest in it, but they knew that I thought grown-ups were kinda boring. (A perception that, now that I am a grown-up, I realize was completely and entirely correct.) Around this time, my dad bestowed me with the nickname of “Luke”, which is what both my parents called me until I was about 10 or 11 or so. Up until I started getting old enough that I thought I was clearly too cool to have a nickname, I just ate that up.

Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and tell myself that there’s nothing cooler than being a kid with a room full of Star Wars toys and video games. Then again, even if I did, my younger self would look at my older self, see he’s a boring grown-up, and ignore his advice! 😯… Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Insomniophilia

GreenhouseFX.tvWell, here goes nothing – GreenhouseFX.tv is out of the “testing” stage and into the fire. There’s a rate schedule in writing, there’s a print brochure available for download (one with which I was mighty pleased, by the way), and there’s also a “cutoff point” at which my wife and I have agreed that, if I can prove that I can meet it regularly and keep the work coming, I can ditch the part-timing stuff I’ve been doing in the meantime. (And that would make me a very happy panda.) I’d really like to prove to her, somehow, that there’s a point to me having dragged her to Illinois last fall to get an extra roomful of equipment that edits video and sounds like a plane taxiing down the runway when it’s just sitting there idling, and that I can justify my leap into unemployment by getting this thing off the ground and helping to support our new family while staying home with the baby when he gets here.

Thanks to those who gave me valuable advice and feedback on the look and interface of the site.

Not much else to say – I’ve had GreenhouseFX on the brain so much that I literally don’t think I have another thought in my head at the moment. (Though I suppose there are some who’d say that’s par for the course. 😉 )… Read more

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Critters Serious Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

Friday the 13th Part 2

Some random, unrelated notes from today:

In what must be the 6 and 9/10th sign of the Apocalypse, I walked into a national chain store in Fort Smith, Arkansas today and bought a Doctor Who action figure right off the peg. Not a special order or anything like that – it was already there. I hadn’t picked any of these up since I got a couple of loose Cybermen last fall from someone on eBay who had already imported them, so I was just utterly stunned. I’m under no illusion that this means that Fort Smith is stepping up in the world; I’m sure they wound up here because they never left the pegs in the Hastings in Little Rock or Tulsa. 😆 One final note: as difficult as it is not to win yourself some snickers or at least weird looks when you’re 30-something and bellying up to the checkout counter with an action figure, a new layer of difficulty is added when the figure in question is a baroque, frilly-costumed Clockwork Man from The Girl In The Fireplace. Trust me, funny looks are guaranteed…and despite that, I hope they get the Ood, Cassandra and/or Captain Jack figures that I’m missing. My trip to northwest Arkansas has been delayed until next week, so maybe I can check any Hastings stores that might be lurking up there. Inasmuch as a store can possibly lurk.

After I went there and went to get dinner to bring home, I stopped to get gas at one of the ubiquitous Murphy Oil stations perched next to Wal-Mart Supercenters. There was a youngish guy ahead of me, I’m going to say 20 or so, who was tweaking. He was extremely agitated, cursing up a storm for no readily apparent reason, and got pissed at the girl working the checkout booth when it turns out he didn’t have enough money for a pack of cigarettes. He then turned to me and asked if I’d buy them for him and I just shook my head. I had half a thought about offering to buy him some nicotine patches instead, but it’s just as well that I didn’t say a word, because he then proceeded to go off on me. Of course, I can already hear the argument that he needs his next pack of cigarettes as much as I need a Clockwork Man, but y’know, if I hadn’t been able to afford that…I wouldn’t have gotten it. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have asked anyone else to pick up the tab for me for something that isn’t exactly – okay, not exactly and not remotely – essential to my continued survival. (I’m sure the jury is still out with my wife about whether or not I needed a Clockwork Man, but hey, at least he’s not gonna damage my health. 😆 )

I’ve finally started getting GreenhouseFX.tv put together. A lot of what I’ve put on there so far is copied over and modified from the original 2002 version of the site. The list of services is still in “flux” – there are a couple of things under “what we do” that I won’t, in fact, be doing. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but hopefully in about a week it will be.

I tried to watch the premiere of Painkiller Jane on Sci-Fi tonight. I’m not familiar with the comic that it’s based on, so I can’t vouch for how faithful it is/isn’t to the source material, but overall I found it just left the taste of apathy in my mouth. Kinda like…I dunno. Dark Angel Minus The Barely-Engaging Backstory.

Tomorrow I’m going to get some dog food, as well as some new cat food that we’re going to see if the kitties like. We’re going to start out mixing it into their Iams dry food, but hopefully we can wean them off the Iams completely, very very soon. The food we’re getting is from an outfit that grows its own ingredients rather than buying them in bulk from, oh, say, Menu Foods, especially since it seems as though damn near everything Menu is putting on the market is either already on recall, or is about to be recalled. The fearsome threesome have checked out just fine so far, and I’d like to keep them that way.… Read more

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Gaming Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Lotsa stuff to look at

Plenty of stuff for you to gawk at today…

I’ve started a “promo blog” for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD project here. I’ve left room for comments, though I’m not expecting anyone to actually make any, and I can’t put my hand on my heart and say it’ll be updated more than once a week. 😆 I figured it’s about time to start beating the drum, and maybe getting a finger on the pulse of how many people are interested in the thing.

The unexpected “re-discovery” of a long-lost DVD of my 2003 demo reel has enabled me to add something to ye olde work blawg that I’ve wanted to add for ages, but thought was lost for good: several news packages that I edited a few years ago. Oddly enough, I found a second DVD which contained the same stuff, only with a running commentary that I had recorded in 2003. This version of my demo reel was a bit of a vanity piece – I made several copies and handed them out at CGE ’03 just in case I made any valuable contacts. I can brag just a little bit here – Howard Scott Warshaw, creator/producer/host of Once Upon Atari (and, oh yeah, designer of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, E.T. and Yars’ Revenge for the 2600), liked it quite a bit. I’ve included the commentaries here just for curiosity’s sake. All of the packages were actually slated with the reporter/photog credits and original airdates, so credit is given where credit is due. Hopefully the talent involved doesn’t mind me posting this stuff after all these years – they should be proud, because it’s some of their best work too. (All of the reporters involved have since moved on to bigger and better markets – coincidence? 😆 ) … Read more

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Critters Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

In slightly less melancholy news…

To offset yesterday’s melancholy-fest a bit, some slightly lighter-hearted news…

Oberon: declawed
Oberon is home from the vet and recovering nicely. If there’s anything that poses even the slightest threat to his speedy recovery from being declawed, it’s…Olivia. Her buddy is back and she wants to play! Thus far he’s taken to curling up on a sofa and going to sleep to avoid having to run from her. Olivia’s been locked up in a bedroom a couple of times too, to keep her from annoying the poor little guy – from birthday girl to bad girl in just one week! Oberon is slow to pick up on a couple of other hints though – he’s run outside twice, though I’ve recovered him both times. I don’t know at what point it’s going to occur to him that he is now more or less completely defenseless. Looks like we need to invest in those expandable “baby barriers” now. 🙄

Also, in PDF DVD news: the recently-rediscovered widescreen theatrical Dig Dug commercial will be making an appearance. It’s going to need a little bit of cleaning up on the visual end, but I’m really jazzed about being able to include it. Just one more nifty item to add to the already insane amount of stuff that’s going to be crowding this project.

While we’re talking PDF DVD, let me ask you (since, if you’re reading this, chances are you’re one of the target audience for this thing) – how much dividing up is too much dividing up? The organizational structure of something like this can get to be overwhelming. How I’m looking at it right now is that there’ll be a main menu from which you’ll pick a year from which to start (1971-1986). Within each year will be a menu that lets you look for a specific item within that – i.e. you’d be able to browse a submenu within each year to go directly to whichever clip you want to see. The problem there is that, once you get into years like 1982 that are absolutely drenched with products, you’re potentially talking about a single-year menu with 100 items on it (spread mercifully over several menu “pages,” with likely 8-12 items per page). I wouldn’t normally even contemplate that, except for two things:

  1. We’re talking about marketing something to a hobby where people obsess over typefaces and catalog numbers on cart labels and release dates and creases in shrinkwrap. Yes, I can see that there would be a call for instant access to a specific game’s entry.
  2. I’m a big fan of random access media – it’s why we went from cassette tape to CD, after all. If we’re not going to use that, this whole thing might as well be on VHS tape.

Let me know what you think there. I can’t guarantee it’ll change my mind on what I’ve outlined above, but I can’t guarantee that it won’t either.

Since there’s no OVGE show in Tulsa this year (a more detailed announcement should be forthcoming from the show’s organizers in the weeks ahead), I’m aiming for the PDF DVD to debut at CGE 2007, where it’ll be available from the Packrat Video Games booth. Whether or not the ones sold there will have any kind of special packaging or other whatsits, I simply haven’t decided yet – I’m more concerned with getting the editing finished at the moment.

Meanwhile, for those still toiling in the pixel mines…I couldn’t help but notice that the credibility of the Arkansas TV News Blog took a big hit, and right out in the open too. I visit it about once a week or so, but I’ve never felt compelled to post a comment there, because so much of the discussion there seems to descend into a pissing match between employees of rival TV stations, with just a dash of slander for extra flavor. Though I’ll admit that the World Of Warcraft spam right in the middle of this particular entry (in case it’s deleted: there’s a comment right in the midst of all the debunking that basically says “world of warcraft world of warcraft” over and over again, each iteration being a link to something different) adds a surreal bit of “calm the beef min” style comedy to the proceedings. There was a time when the ARTVNB was a useful, if slightly testy, way to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the industry; now I’m not even sure it’s good for much more than reminding me a little bit of the environment that I left behind.… Read more

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Critters Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Freezing rainy day kitten cuteness

The freezing rain is coming down – my turn to have a sheet of ice that used to be a street!
Xena and Olivia
Xena and Olivia consider snuggling up for warmth.
What's on Earl's Avid
This is what a half-hour show looks like on the Avid.
What's on Earl's Avid
A closer look.
Technical Difficulties
Spotting whilst flipping through channels: the most irritating technical difficulties screen EVER. It hurts my eyes! (It’s the city of Fort Smith’s public access cable channel, by the way.)… Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Farewell address to the troops

(Sent via e-mail to everyone at the station. Complete with the audio file.)
My fellow Americans, your long national nightmare is over – I’m outta here!
It’s been a fun seven years, but all things must come to an end, whether it’s a peaceful end, or a cranky, noisy (and in all likelihood biologically improbable) end.
I’d try to give everyone a shout-out one-by-one, but it’s 11 o’clock at night, and I’m sure I’d forget someone, so…
To the talent here: thanks for putting up with my incessant requests that you read four or five second snippets of words that, when strung together, might just meet the minimum requirements for “Tarzan English” (or, on my off nights, “Jar Jar English”). I’m a writer even away from work, so trust me when I tell you that you’ve enjoyed reading those as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them!
To the tape ops, board ops, directors and the rest of the control room gang: thanks for putting up with me running in there with promos at the last minute and acting like they’re the single most important things that you’ll ever personally see on a DVC tape, even if it’s dramatic video of someone rescuing a treed cat. And thanks for those times when you’ve let me know that a spot I handed in didn’t have video. Or audio. Or control track. It takes talent to screw up a spot as magnificently as I’ve managed to do it on many occasions (i.e. every night at about 6:57), but even more talent for you to turn around and actually get the stuff on the air.
To everyone else: thanks for putting up with me. Seriously. Thanks for having patience with me when I’ve been in foul moods or, worse yet, when I’ve actually been somewhat chipper and wouldn’t shut up. If I knew where the paperwork was, I’d apply for a bunch of sainthoods for you right now.
I’ve always tried to put cool stuff on the air here that would make the other stations wonder how in the world we did that, and I’ve always tried to save the even cooler stuff for the blooper reels (which, let’s face it, were my best work hands-down). Hopefully, somewhere along the way, I’ve made you folks as proud to work with me as I have been to work with you. It’s been my privelege and my pleasure to be at 40/29 for the past seven years, and as scary as it is to jump right out of the building with no net, sometimes the stuff that scares the bejeezus out of you is the stuff you really need to do the most.
I’ll still be in the area, doing much the same thing I’ve been doing here, only probably in my pajamas and with my cats playing at my feet. (I would’ve done that here, only I think polite society frowns upon the coming-to-work-in-pajamas thing. Or it least it did the last time I tried it.) (Don’t ask, it wasn’t pretty.) Here’s hoping that everyone here can take 40/29 to new heights in 2007. (I sure hope you can, because I’ll be watching.)
I’m enclosing an informative musical guide to the importance of television promotions. If ever you doubt anything I’ve had you do in the past few years, give it a listen. (Man, if this overloads the e-mail system, I am so fired. Oh…wait…)
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/ode2promos.mp3]… Read more