A Taxi Forwarding

I got a tune forwarded through Taxi. I, of course, don't even remember what this was for.

I only submitted to one new listing in the past 30 days. They ain't all good listings for me. But we'll see. It's just five bucks to submit to a listing, so I may as well do it when one is right.

On the Highway

On the Highway by City Samanas. I'm not exactly sure if this was what Greg intended when he wrote this. But it's something like what we recorded.

The preamps on the guitar are just the Focusrite Scarlett preamps. I put them through the preamp emulator in Samplitude in order to make them betterized somehow. It does seem to work. Although I suspect we'll be happier overall when we have preamps just for the guitars.

Things in My Brain Today

Of the things that are happening, Adobe is giving away CS2. Here. Maybe. Right now the site is down.
This is a really funny list of things about making a film. Here is my favorite quote:

40. To get a job a director must persuade the producer that they will do a better job than their previous work suggests they will.

An article about making a standing desk. With just, you know, twenty bucks of shelves from IKEA.
Would a standing desk irritate the hell out of me? Maybe. Would it be good for me? I have no idea.

That's pretty much it for what's in my brain today.

DMCA

Up until yesterday my only experience with the DMCA was fake requests placed against my own YouTube videos from slimy European licensing organizations (who were looking to put ads in or next to our videos, claiming that they owned the videos -- I've contested and won all of those.)
But two nights ago I was contacted by an actor who was upset because a clip from one of our movies showed up on a porn site. The videos on this porn site are uploaded by users so I logged on and filed a DMCA complaint. The site had a decent form for doing that, actually.
And by Sunday night the video was down. Whew.
So, that was a new one for me.

It's As If I Mocked the Gods and the Fates Intervened

It begins slowly to dawn on me that I may not have a single commercial bone in my whole body. I have managed to become and remain uncool for almost half a century now. It's quite spectacular.
None of my instincts are toward anything even remotely "hit"-like. For all that's holy, please do not tell anyone who might invest in one of our films that.

I can say for certain however that if I had had the kind of success I thought I wanted in my early 20's I would be stark down absolutely miserable now. If I'd had some minor hits and then at this point in my career I was getting notes like how to get a more "modern, forward-thinking sound" would drive me into insanity.
As it is I can make pretty much any sort of music I like and although nobody will listen to it at least I don't have to worry about "wider note changes".
I'm not even saying this Taxi review is wrong or non-helpful. I suppose it is helpful -- but to someone else. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it though.

iO9 Snarketh

I'd missed that we got snarkily mentioned in i09 recently. They actually quote an Amazon review of Android Insurrection, if you can believe that.

As one Amazon reviewer put it, "This flick is notable for one thing only: Having the only R-rated production logo I have ever screened." Goddammit, now I kind of want to see it.

I do not get all the hate on the Total Recall remake. I only saw it last night (I think I was in production while it was in the theaters so I couldn't make it.) But they do a lot of things right in that picture.
The art direction is spectacular. The tiered city has a fantastic and working geography. Sure, somebody spent a lot of time looking at Blade Runner, and the anamorphic flares started to bug me there at the beginning, but the textures of the environments were pretty fantastic.
The androids were exceptionally cool.
Boy they weren't afraid of putting people of color in the picture. Not in the three leads, of course, but otherwise they were not afraid of non-stereotypes of Africans and Asians.
The script is very clean. They do a number of things where they reduce the number of characters from the original in a very smart way. And they combine some scenes very intelligently.
So all in all that iO9 list is not a bad one to be on.

To Me, Not To You

Another rehearsal with the Samanas, another 10GB of recording.
If you're looking at an email or something in an RSS reader right now you probably won't see the following link to the "album". So go ahead, click on through to the other side. Here are my notes.
The Scarlett's very hot input level makes recording with outboard preamps very difficult. The Neves have to be turned way the heck down in order to not overload the Scarlett's inputs.
I did a three-microphone tree for the drums. Over the span of less than a foot I had a pair of Oktava mics in X/Y on the outside and the AKG C12A on the inside. This did not really work because of phasing issues. So I pulled the tracks with the Oktavas back in time just a tiny bit which eliminated the phasing issues. But I think that next time I will use them more as a spaced pair.

I'd put the M-Audio 2626 in my rack here in the studio and I've really liked having big and straightforward knobs to grab and change volume with. The MOTU Ultralite is not that easy to do that with as it's hard to see what knob you're touching without putting some light on it. That being said, the metering is a tad more apparent on the MOTU. But I think the 2626 has to go into the remote recording rack in order to be fed by the Neve preamps.
The trick is that the 2626 is only firewire. And if I want to use my laptop I have to go USB.
So what I can do is go from the 2626 into the Scarlett via Lightpipe. But at 96kHz I can only get 4 channels out of the 2626 via Lightpipe. The remainder would have to go via the two available channels or S/PDIF or analog inputs of the Scarlett (which are still a pain because of their high input levels.)
But what I've considered briefly is the notion that Tyrannosaurus Mouse simply does a weekly rental at the same studio that City Samanas uses and we keep a computer with a Firewire port at the studio. Along with the rack and such. The cost is $120 a month.
Interesting.
Not to you, of course, but to me.

The Internet, She Is My Notebook

Make the opening more like a Power Point presentation with bullet points.
Call the test something cool like Voight Kampf. But you know, not actually Voight Kampf. Maybe the "Csulik Niles test".
Point out that the Crossworlders speak our languages natively.
Point out the suspicion that Crossworlders are responsible for everything bad that's ever happened to us.
While they are able to experience emotion, they are unable to articulate it in words, lacking the capacity to express abstract concepts or use metaphor or symbolism.
That's freakin' brilliant.
Do we think the alt-humans would call us something like "alpha-humans" or "omega-humans"? Maybe one of the students calls us "omega-humans" and Megan stops them, saying that referring to them as "omegas" marks you as an alt-human right away. So "we don't use that word".
Scene 25 -- should the number of alt-humans that have been eliminated be more like fifteen thousand or such?
Should we establish that people get tested when they're "denounced"?
We shouldn't have anything written down that would need to be subtitled. Overseas distributors hate text on screen.
Scene 36. You know I hate news reports. Ha!
39 -- establish that Pundo sold them out so he could get more drugs.
We keep needing observation rooms. How do we build an observation room?

Points to You

I was talking to someone who works in financing of independent feature films and the way they usually do it is to split half the points to the producer(s) and half to the investor(s). So there's 50 "points" to the investors. On a million-dollar production that's an investment of $20,000 per point.

Hear Hear!

Voice mail is annoying. Especially on cell phones, on which it seems designed by the furies to punish everyone, not just the people who mock the gods.

-- John Scalzi

So Yeah

I found this funny.
The caption reads "I rented Prometheus and found this in the box".

Saw Jack Reacher. It was "workmanlike" both in the writing and directing. Neither was that big a deal, a couple clunky scenes, but otherwise well... workmanlike.

To Do List

I am doing a poopity job of looking ahead at what movies are coming up and then making sure we have something which can draft off of them. Luckily i09 has a list for me.
Elysium comes out on August 9


The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (August 23) looks very cool but I think it is un-mockbuster-able.
Riddick comes out on September 6th. I think Twohy can do no wrong.
Ender's Game comes out on November 1. This book was unreadable. I can't fathom caring about a child who plays war games and then just as it gets interesting and it turns out his dreams come from the alien race, he wipes them out. So what? How can this be even remotely interesting?
The Prototype looks kind of cool. I don't know if there's enough story to it though.

I'm writing off Oblivion and The Host because those movies are coming too soon for us to do anything about anyway.
Snow Piercer looks cool.
I absolutely hated John Dies at the End. It's not even a hot mess. It's just a mess.

Book Report

I read No Easy Day, the firsthand account of the killing of Osama bin Laden. It's a pretty good read.
The pre-release criticism of the book was all around the book having classified information in it.
It so does not have any classified information in it.
Here's what you learn if you're a terrorist: if the US government knows where you are, and decides to send in DEVGRU to kill you, you're going to be dead. There. That's the secret knowledge you will get. Also: you will learn that the guys killing you are allowed to select their favorite guns to kill you with.
One thing that's kind of funny is that "Mark Owen", the author, is very anti-Obama. And he has zero ironic distance.

He complains endlessly about Obama but then talks about the complete mess that the 2007 Tora Bora hunt for bin Laden went.
Then he mentions that the SEALS were given almost carte blanche in training for the actual mission that killed bin Laden in 2011 and points out that they'd never had that before.
Hmm... so what was the difference between 2007 and 2011?
Oh wait, I know. But... that can't be it.
So. Special Forces. I guess they don't select for distance from your ideology.

Ruger

I remember getting into an argument with my best friend when I was like 9 years old that there was a gun manufacturer named "Ruger". He probably thought that I was mispronouncing "Luger".
Anyway, I was right and he was wrong. Furthermore, Red Jacket Firearms makes a sort of bullpup P90-ish conversion kit for Ruger 10/20 .22 rifles called the ZK 20 stock.

This picture doesn't really show what the gun looks like as it has a dummy barrel.

More on the Luger front is their AR15 take on things.

I can't find any Airsoft Rugers. That doesn't mean there aren't any.