author: Chuck Palahniuk

name: Steev

average rating: 3.85

book published: 1999

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2008/09/30

shelves:

review:

Here's my tweets from yesterday, including me babbling away like all the other political junkies during the debates. I'm sort of ashamed I even clicked over to election.twitter.com at all...

• 08:17 getting ready for screen acting class #
• 13:18 writing in my screen acting journal #
• 14:07 omg. just read horrible news about an acquaintance raped and killed in Oaxaca this week: angrywhitekid.blogs.com #
• 14:37 mi good amigo EC is doing a radio show soon. I hear he'll be tweeting his playlist as he goes: twitter.com/estebancaliente #
• 19:01 just remember that mccain is the candidate that called his wife a cunt. #
• 19:04 omg. iran. threat to Isreal. "second holocaust?" wtf? McCain sure is good at the cheap shot. #
• 19:07 Obama is pulling his punches, just like every democrat for the last 30 years. it's sad. #
• 19:11 Obama is obviously so much smarter and well-spoken. the problem with that is, will the american people really value that? #
• 19:15 Why not negotiate with terrorists? The cops negotiate with crazy gunmen all the time. #
• 19:17 McCain's invocation of Kissinger as a good friend is damning. Kissinger is a butcher. #
• 19:24 Russia "dangerous" again = more money on its way to defense contractors. yay! arms race! #
• 19:44 now the endless analysis by the pundits.... #
• 19:48 it's interesting that everyone thinks the candidate they already favored "won" the debate. wtf?I just wish we could vote "none of the above" #

• 06:59 awake and watching cnn in hotel room. omg it's been a long time w/out tv i guess. so surreal. punky B-52s song as theme for CNN morning news? WTf? #
• 15:48 back from phoenix, conference went well. good eats. #
• 15:50 really feeling tired of activist-spam. at least a message a day from MoveOn, Free Press, and Brave New Films. every day. #

Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury
Henry Paulson

Hah. Heh. Ugh.

author: J.G. Ballard

name: Steev

average rating: 3.61

book published: 1973

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2008/09/20

shelves:

review:

OMG, I just discovered this amazing, perfect rant that comedian Margaret Cho wrote, responding to what some Xian fundamentalists were saying about her after she wrote some critical stuff about Sarah Palin. It's the best. I never really paid much attention to her work but now I'm totally a fan.
Anyway, read it here: http://www.margaretcho.com/blog/2008/09/17/im-a-christian-you-fuckers.html

And btw, that's where it originally appeared, on Cho's blog. I'm glad that Sarah Benincasa (of Sarah Palin Vlog fame) referred to it and reposted it, but she didn't link to it, she just said it was on Cho's facebook page. So then I had to go hunting around on Facebook and after about 20 clicks of that, putting more money in the bank for the CIA or whoever really runs Facebook, I finally found it but found that it was a repost from Cho's actual blog. I would much rather link to her blog than lame Facebook so that's what I'm doing. yay. I guess I'm just a stickler for hypertextuality. Anticorporate hypertextuality.

For some months now I've been toying with, debating with myself about, the idea of going back to grad school and studying film. Each time I go back to the idea, I do research and think about it and conclude that, no, I don't need/want to go back to school, for many and various reasons.

I came across one more really great and reassuring reason not to go, in a book I've been reading about Werner Herzog, one of my favorite directors, whom I respect a lot. In this book, "Herzog on Herzog," he says "I personally do not believe in the kind of film schools you find all over the world today... It has always seemed to me that almost everything you learn at school you forget in a couple of years. But the things you set out to learn yourself in order to quench a thirst, these are the things you never forget... academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion."

author: A.F. Rützy

name: Steev

average rating: 4.07

book published: 2008

rating: 4

read at: 2008/09/16

date added: 2008/09/16

shelves: fun, novels

Here's a story from the Sierra Vista, AZ paper reporting that Glenn Spencer, local xenophobe wackadoo, is complaining that the Border Patrol is inflating their figures of how much new fence is finished out of the required amount that Congress mandated be done by the end of this year.

Of course this in common knowledge. But I think it's funny that they're getting attacked from both sides - the racists griping that the fence isn't getting put up fast enough enough, or secure enough, and more sane and humane people who say it shouldn't be put up at all.

The story also mentions and links to the Sierra Club video that I made. An interesting comment thread follows the story, including an admittedly good point made by one of the pro-wall nutjobs: Sierra Club shouldn't be calling it a documentary. If I've ever called it that I apologize now. It's not a documentary, in the sense that a documentary is at least nominally objective - this film is an advocacy piece that takes a clear position, and I was hired to take that position and deliver a very clear and specific political message. It's not impartial reportage, it's a polemic. Guilty as charged.

Anyway, I'm glad it's getting more and more exposure.

I had a bad scare yesterday. Having stupidly said "yes" to an automatic upgrade that Apple told me to install, I suddenly couldn't get final cut pro to start up. I tried something recommended by one Mac hints site, starting in safe mode and fixing permissions and re-installing by hand the Quicktime update that the upgrade included (the other thing that it included was the new version of iTunes, which includes the new, slightly creepy and very annoying "Genius" feature. bleah.).

That got FCP to start, but i was unable to capture or output to or from firewire devices. In fact I couldnt get any application to not crash when i told it to access my firewire DV deck. I was freaking out. What to do? Would I have to reinstall OS X from scratch? wipe my hard drive in order to go back to the old version of Quicktime?

Luckily after one more desperate Google search I found a page that described how to downgrade to an earlier version of any Apple package using a little program called Pacifist (funny coincidence that a program called Pacifist has enabled me to continue work on a film about resisting war!).

I got the shareware and followed the directions to install the earlier package, Quicktime 7.5, and restarted and things now seem hunky dory again. Whew. I think I owe a registration fee to Pacifist's creator.

Anyway, if you are a user of FCP (at least version 5.1.2) and you haven't upgraded to the new QT, you might want to think twice before doing it. Oh, and I recommend skipping the new iTunes as well. By the way, during my research into this problem I read that the "security fixes" that Apple lists as the reason for the upgrade actually have to do with Digital Rights Management (locking up content) rather than any sort of protection from your machine getting hacked or that sort of thing. So the new version is pretty unneeded anyway.