Anyway, I’ve made a decision. I’m not going to do anymore video blogs and I’ll tell you why. Something I’ve noticed about my own YouTube habits is that, after about 5 video blogs from the same person, I kinda get tired of hearing them talk about whatever they’re talking about. I may get obsessed with a certain video blogger and watch every video they’ve done in one sitting, but even then, after 5 more new ones, I get tired of them and move on.
Sooooo, I’ve done 5 video blogs and I think that’s enough, 5’s a good number. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m done making videos period, it just means that I’m no longer going to be talking about my life & shit on video because really, it’s not all that interesting or different from what everybody else is doing and I’d prefer to write that stuff anyway.
So, for future reference, the 5 video blogs I’ve done so far are forever (yeah right) archived over there (—————–>) under the heading “Hey Guys, Um…“.
What am I gonna do next? Well I’ve got some ideas, but we’ll see what happens. Right now I’m just basking in the glory of the fact that my roof is no longer leaky and I have a whole room to do whatever I want to do with it.
So I pretty much spent the weekend completely obsessed with a woman named SuperLunary on YouTube. Why? Because she’s interesting, that’s all…well, and completely hot and funny too. I found her because a forum I go to was making fun of one of her videos where she filmed herself crying, which wasn’t one of my favourite videos of hers but you have to give the girl credit for being able to do it. Crying on cam is HARD. Not to be confused with acting in front of a camera, I mean crying, as yourself (as opposed to a character) with a camera in your face is hard, putting it out in a public forum is even harder. Trust me, I’ve tried, thinking “hey how come I never see people crying on the internet?” and well, that’s mostly why I think. It’s just hard.
And it’s funny how people react to crying in a public forum, they get mad. Girls on Camwhores have received thousands of minus votes just for such a crime. Weird, huh? People just don’t come to the internet wanting to be brought down, I guess. Mostly they come here to jerk off haha
Watching SuperLunary interact with other YouTubers reminded me of the portal 9 days and then it ocurred to me that SuperLunary probably doesn’t even know what portal 9 was or what Camwhoresis and that sorta blows my mind because if it wasn’t for the almighty webcam, there probably wouldn’t even be a YouTube. I feel a little responsible for this, I was supposed to write the book about that. :| I’m still sorta working on it…sorta not. I don’t have a publisher anymore so it’s more like not, these days.
…but the thing is, I don’t have the time nor ambition to make another site right now, so this is what I’ve got. Not the prettiest page in the universe, but whatever. I’m waiting for Ditsy to figure out WordPress so she can teach me haha
I was going to make this a video blog, but it’s midnight and I should be going to bed soon. Plus, I’m not feeling very photogenic these days as my hair’s a funny length and looks extra stupid right now. I look not unlike Grover, as in the muppet.
Anyway, what’s new in Sunnyland?
Well, my real life friends Alex & Krissy seem to have been bitten by the YouTube bug and have started doing their own video blogs. Here’s Krissy’s first attempt, which is entitled “WoW Rant”:
Right now I’m on this medication which has a lovely side effect of increasing one’s appetite, so I’ve been eating like a cow and I’ve actually gained a few pounds as a result. Since I’ve been doing so much snacking, I decided to make meringue cookies this weekend, two batches, which didn’t last very long in this house. They’re really easy to make and I don’t think they have any fat and they’re sort of like…cookies made out of fluff, they rule. Anyway, here’s the recipe:
Meringue Cookies
4 large egg whites
1/4 tsp Cream of Tartar
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup of sugar
Beat egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer at high speed until soft peaks form (3-5 mins). Gradually add in vanilla and sugar while beating. Drop by spoonful onto aluminum foil lined cookie sheets, bake at 225 F for 50-60 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.
Seriously, they’re amazing.
Other than that, I’ve just been focusing on staying sane until the snow melts. I’ve posted my last post in CammityJane for a while, so if you haven’t gotten caught up, now’s a good time. I’ve still got some things to work out in my head before I start working on that again.
I re-read the CammityJane entry I posted yesterday and I’m not entirely happy with it, but I’m not going to go editing it until I DO like it because I don’t believe in 2nd drafts. I’ve never gone back and edited anything I’ve ever written in my whole entire life, so I’m not about to do doing that now. SO THERE.
Once it’s finished (if it’s ever finished) and I’m thinking about turning it into a book, THEN I’ll play with stuff. Right now I just need to get the story out of me and slowly but surely, it’s coming.
Fiction’s weird. I’m not sure I’ve really talked much about the CammityJane journal, but last year when I went nuts, I had this huge explosion of concrentrated ideas and it was as if I got stuck in my own imagination and the problem was that A) I didn’t realize I was “off” and B) I couldn’t bring myself out of it.
It was during that period where the story of Jane (or more to the point, the other people she’s going to encounter) came into my mind and I spent most of my time in the hospital sketching scenes in my head with these characters (none of whom have been introduced yet), but not writing down a single word.
When I got out of the hospital, I got out my pencil crayons and drew every location of every scene, maps, character sketches and right now, I guess the name of the game is moving characters from point A to point B, which is actually a lot harder than I originally thought it would be and I find as I obsess with that, my characters lose a little depth.
For example, the “strange man” Jane encounters in the latest post is seriously glossed over from what’s in my head and I know that my descriptions aren’t sufficient if the reader’s going to come away with the mental image of him I have. At the same time, I also know he’s going to show up later so that gives me a second chance and the opportunity to round him out a little more. (How he moves, for example, is important, but in the restaurant setting I had a hard time trying to figure out a way for him to move because everything takes place at one table and it was important to the over all story that Jane come to him and not the other way around.)
Anyway, this isn’t a serious project or anything, just something I work on when the mood strikes or a character walks into my dreams demanding attention, which was the case with Good Eat Part 1 and “the strange man” himself.
In other news, my 10lbs of plain ol’ grey plastiscene arrived on Monday and I’ve spent a good portion of the week screwing around and seeing what I can do with it. So far I’ve only made a really stupid looking girl with a lot of hair…
I realize the face is dumb, that part took maybe 10 mins but each “strand” of hair was hand-rolled by yours truly and took about 30 hours total.
I’ve been on Wikipedia practically all day researching dragons, I think that’s what I’m going to make next and there’s a reason; when I was in grade 5 or 6 (hard to say since I had the same teachers and the same classroom for both grades, it was a split class) an art lady came to our school to teach us about using clay and I made this really awesome Chinese dragon, that’s now long gone, and I wanted to see if I could do it again, but better since I’m no longer a chubby little kid with chubby little fingers doing things the way someone else tells me to.
All week, when I’ve told people that I bought 10 lbs of grey plasticine, they’ve all asked the same question: “Why grey?” Well, it’s all gonna end up grey anyway, isn’t it?
The reason I got it was mostly to help me visualize certain things in 3-D and to better figure out where shadows would be (when painting) and I don’t need colour for that. In fact, for my purposes, I think colour would be distracting.
Some folks have suggested that I do stop-motion videos since I now have all this plastiscene and believe me, I’ve been thinking about it, but if it’s gonna happen, it’ll be a long time from now. I’ve got too much on the go between now and the spring and once the warm weather hits, using plastiscene is going to suck because it’ll be way too melty. So, if I ever do a stop-motion video, it’ll probably be next fall. (And if I did do one, I’d have to buy coloured plastiscene, so I’ll wait until I have a good idea first. :))
And finally, this brings me to YouTube and video blogging in general.
A few people have subscribed to my YouTube channel, which is fine, but don’t bitch about there being no context, because sometimes I’m uploading this stuff to be used for other things. For example, there’s a few videos that friends asked me to put up there, that have absolutely nothing to do with my site or blogging or anything, they just wanted to be able to share them with their own friends or post on their MySpaces. There’s probably gonna be a lot of that, so basically, if I don’t embed the video in a blog post and write about it, I uploaded it for someone or something else.
Another thing that keeps coming up is the lack of Madison (my daughter) in the videos I’ve uploaded thus far. Well, there’s a reason for that, a few of them actually.
The first is that, unlike Wes, she understands what a video camera does and as such, she tends to not “be herself” or becomes a different version of herself when it’s around (which is a nice way of saying that she tends to get obnoxious). She grew up with me following her around with a digital camera, so she doesn’t do this with stills, just with video. Wes is the opposite. If I get out the digital camera, he turns into an obnoxious little brat, but with the video camera, he acts himself because he’s too little to understand that it’s recording. He’s seen the videos of himself, but he just doesn’t understand the concept of video yet and he’s barely even aware of the internet, let alone YouTube.
The other reason is simply that she doesn’t want to be in videos that are of just “real life”.
She wants to put on plays and dress up and do fashion shows and stuff like that, which we do videotape for her, we just don’t put them online because she’s self-conscious and doesn’t want us to. We respect that. :) Basically any footage of Madison that gets put online is with her final approval and this is the kind of stuff she wants out there:
(That was from her school’s Xmas concert.)
Since that’s the case, most “kid videos” are going to be put up by Blake over at the kids’ site, Bunnies & Bees, for their aunts & uncles & grandparents to watch (and whoever else wants to, obviously, but it’s mostly a family thing).
In other news, it’s Wes’ 4th birthday on Tuesday and last week a few people e-mailed me to see if I’d gotten a wishlist set up yet, so this afternoon I cleaned up the kids’ old wishlist (deleting unavailable items/stuff they’ve kinda grown out of wanting etc), which can be found here.
I FINALLY got it to work!!!! Absolute shit for quality (I think it compressed a little too much) but I can screw around and maybe figure that out next time. (If there is a next time…)
So here’s my piece of shit video blog thinger for my dearest Ditsy. :)
PS. Take note that neither of those cats are a year old yet and they’re fucking ginormous.
I was up until 5am trying to make a video response to Ditsy’s latest vlog and “bullshit” doesn’t even cover the experience.
First, I tried making the video using my iSight and iMovie because you can record directly from your iSight using iMovie, but for some reason whenever I try to do this, about a minute in, the cam will try to autofocus, freezing the frame and only recording audio. This ALWAYS happens and I really don’t know why. I’m using an iBook, which isn’t the greatest equipment for such a project, but we’ve dumped enough extra RAM in this sucker, this really shouldn’t be happening.
But it is, so I switched to plan B, which was using EvoCam and the iSight to make the video, which worked out well but was lower quality than Plan A would have given me. So I finish and go to upload the video to YouTube, but of course the file’s too big so, using iMovie, I tried to compress it for the web, which wouldn’t work because it kept asking me for my .Mac account info (???) so I used the e-mail compression option, even though I knew it would kill the quality significantly.
So I do that, the file is now 65k compared to 176MB and I try uploading that to YouTube, but it kept failing because it said the .mov file was empty. WTF? It worked on my computer??? So then I just e-mailed the file to Ditsy, but it wouldn’t work for her either.
Now I dunno wtf to do. Making videos shouldn’t be this difficult!!!!! It really really shouldn’t. I have so much video equipment, a decent computer, supposedly the right software….wtf?!?!?!?!?!
And the biggest piss-off to me is that I’ve got this $500 video camera sitting here that I rarely use (bought for a project that’s been shelved indefinitely) because I can’t get the videos from the camera to my computer without a cable I can’t afford (i.LINK cable?) and even if I could, at most I only have 10GB free on my hard drive at a time and I don’t want it clogged up with videos that I don’t have the capabilities of burning to a DVD when I’m done. (Without a DVD burner in this machine, once the vid’s on my comp, it’s a huge pain in the ass with networking & shit to get if OFF my comp.)
Fucking grrrr. *kicks technology*
Also? Last month I shot video (with the actual video camera so the quality’s good) of me, Blake, Jesse & Blake playing this Honey Bee Tree boardgame thing and Wes is sooooo fucking cute and funny and I’ve been dying to edit it into little segments, but the goddamn thing (in 2 parts) is a .WMV file and apparently I don’t have the means to convert that into the .mov I need to edit it in iMovie. I tried some online conversion thing but it just crashed my browser a billion times (probably because the video’s like, 800 MB or something stupid like that) and now I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Technology hates me. :(
In other news, last night we had a slight Hoover Dog incident. In the winter Hoover’s nails get really long because all of the pavement is covered in snow and doesn’t file them down, so last night Blake decided it was time to give them a trim.
Hoover is 85-90lbs of pure, unadulterated PUSSY, so when it’s nail cutting (or bath) time, he howls & growls & barks & whines and carries on like you’re trying to kill him long before you actually even touch him with the clippers.
So Blake’s going to town on his nails and the dog’s freaking out like he always does, struggling (you pretty much have to tackle him and hold him down) and howling and being retarded and then Blake looks down and realizes that 3 out of 4 paws are resting in puddles of blood. BIG puddles of blood. HOLY SHIT that’s a lot of blood. Big dog, black nails, big quick inside the nail and 3 of them got knicked pretty good during the struggle. We didn’t have one of those stiptic (?) pencil things or the cornstarch that Wikipedia recommended, but we did have gauze and flour, so that’s what we did.
Except Hoover wasn’t having it and he basically bled all over my studio for about 3 hours. He bled a LOT, holy crap. Sooooo, Blake & I have decided that he’s never doing that again and next time, we’ll pay the groomers the $15 they charge to do it. I’m sure they have muzzles & stuff (they’ll need it).
Annnnd as if this day couldn’t get any better, Blake just called on his lunch to say that the car’s royally fucked up and is going to cost $500 to fix.
Fuck this “life” shit, I’m painting for the rest of the day.
