Babblefish

Among other things, today I made a website.

The eatten, the digested and the mundane

Just Read: The Barefoot Serpant by C. Scott Morse. Another great comic book!
Watching: The Good the Bad and the Ugly. Maybe I'll actually make it all the way through the movie and not fall asleep this time.

I just found out that if you search for my name on the Chapman website you can find all my old Quiche of the Day pages. If you search for words like "hooray" or "pie" or basically anything else not directly related to school my name comes up, too. I wasn't able to find any other personal pages hosted on their server, so I guess I'm either famous, or the only one to take advantage of the free web hosting there. Every time I read my old blogs I'm surprised at how witty or interesting I used to be. I also spent most of my time talking about food, sleep or laundry. So maybe if I talk about what I ate today, I can reclaim some of my past glory.
Here is what I ate today:
1. Peanut butter toast, made of me by my sweet Erin. Toast is one of the few things I can make on my own, and she's certinally capable of making a lot more than toast -- in fact, she made me one normal piece of peanut butter toast, and one piece with honey added! I stayed up too late working on a Christmas Ninja movie script, and din't wake up in time to make anything else before work. Without my girlfriend, I might be dead. Or at least toastless and late for work :(
2. Nothing.
3. Nachos! Since I missed the traditional lunchtime working in the computer lab and going to my lame Chemestry for consumers class, I ate nothing between toast and Nachos, which Erin and I got from Rutabagorz, the local alt.health.food resturant. They served us a ton and we weren't even able to finish 2/3 of them on our own. But eatting and talking was so fun, I was almost late for class at four! Today was a day for close calls, schedule-wise, I guess.
4. Bible study food. After class we walked to a few blocks to the house where one of our favorite Bible studies was being held. I started going there a little less than a year ago when it started up, when it was just a couple of married couples, their toddlers and myself. We share a meal, chat, laugh and talk about Deep Things. It's always a blessing, actually, and I'm glad I get to go with Erin now. But we were still so full from the nachos that I could hardly eat any of the chicken and pasta. I managed to enjoy the s'mores bars they had for desert, though. Sort of like a desert casseole!
5. Gummy Peach Rings. While watching TGTB&TU tonight, Ed ate our leftover nachos, and because they smelled good and I also wanted something to eat, I had a few gummy peach rings. Always a treat, though they might rot my teeth! See, that rhymes! I also ate a few in Chemestry for Consumers to keep me awake during the Global Warming video.
It seems that I am now the only one in the room awake, and the movie is starting to get really good. But I guess I'll have to finish it again another day, since it's still less than halfway finished. Dang this is a long movie! Maybe they just should have left the Ugly and the Good in it or something, to cut down on the length. I'd still watch it. Jeez!

Film School post

This week I'm deep in General Education requirements, slogging through text books and study guides so I can pass those pesky math and science tests in the classes I've put off until my senior year. It's been a while since I've had this sort of class and I have to admit that I don't really know what I'm doing. More often I'm in film school mode, in which creativity and hard work count more than formulas and equations.
But this weekend I did some film school stuff at least.
Saturday I went to a special session with one of the writers for the new season of Family Guy, put on by my old TV Writing prof. The speaker walked in the room and I thought she was a student up until she introduced herself -- a short, laidback twentysomething Asian girl was not the sort of person I expected to be writing for the I guess "cult classic" show, which is sort of like a more surreal, less cuddly, and much more risky (and, I suppose, risqué) Simpsons.
I was more surprised at how nice and unassuming she was, since I don't think of Family Guy as being either of those thing. But hey, people aren't the same as their jobs, who'd have known! She talked about how she got the job (she mostly knew the right people), and the process of writing the show – after someone write a script, the rest of the writing staff sit around a table for a couple of days and rewrite it, sometimes completely. I was familiar with this process, but wasn’t aware that they also will send people away for a few hours to go to “the gag room” and come back with a bunch of ideas for jokes to use in the script. Writing a TV show sounds kind of fun, at least, as long as you don’t sort of hate TV, like I do.
Later that night I got some real-life filmmaking experience recording sound for my friend Christina’s big senior project. I got signed up for the project after I saw her in the hall one day and she asked me if I was interested. “What’s the movie about?” I asked, because I always want to know. “Waiting,” she said. In fact, the film is called About Waiting, and is a series of three short vignettes of people . . . well, waiting. The one we shot on Saturday was about an old security guard losing his eyesight, and we shot it in a parking lot somewhere in Fountain Valley.
It was a pretty fun shoot. There were cool people to work with, a ton of food for the crew, and for one shot they mounted the camera in the back of an El Camino for a tracking shot. Plus I got to work with a new, super-easy digital recorder. The only real downsides were that it was pretty chilly in the parking lot, and that we were moving at a very leisurely pace – I arrived at 6:30 PM and finally left around 3:30 AM. Everyone else was still working on the movie and I suspected it wouldn’t get done until 5 AM at the earliest. This was after cutting quite a few shots from the film.
When I told Christina I had to leave, she teased me for being a slacker, which I guess was a valid criticism. No one else on the set was leaving (there was another guy there to do sound), and although I had church and a lot of homework to do the next day, it’s not like I was the only one in that boat. I don’t do a lot of movie shoots, even though I enjoy them, and I really admire the people who can slog it out for twelve hours straight for the sake of art, or commerce or whatever. That’s just not my life. A lot of being on set is standing around waiting for everyone else to get ready so you can do your job, especially when you’re running sound, and I can only handle so much of that, especially so early in the morning. I guess from now on instead of saying I’m a slacker, I should just say that I’m a writer.

First Menstrual Ninja Post

I’ve decided that on the first day of every month that I will write about ninjas. That way, even if everything else I’m writing is boring to you, there will always be something to look forward to, like a new page on your “puppies and kitties” calendar, full of adorable fuzzy faces . . . except these fuzzy faces are only adorable in the “whoooa, look out, it’s a ninja!” sense! And they may or may not be that fuzzy.
Also, if you don’t like ninjas, you’ll know not to visit my page on the first of the month. But I can’t guarantee you won’t run into a ninja somewhere else, like your office or the bagel store. Or, I don’t know, a dark alleyway or mystic jungle fortress somewhere. Avoiding ninjas takes Extreme Constant Vigilance, and who has time for that these days? It’s best just to accept that masked, stealthy warriors are running around your favorite health club and apartment, and there’s not much you can do about it.
A couple of people have asked me about the picture that shows up at the bottom of this page. What is it? Is it a ninja? Where did it come from? It came from here, right?
There are long answers and short answers to those questions.
The short answers are “a ninja,” “yes, I already answered that,” “a movie I made,” and “no.”
The long answer is that it’s a picture of Ninja X, the central bad guy in the perpetually-unfinished film Ninja Force. His costume includes two pieces of duct tape on his head band in the shape of an X, which means he’s really evil. My friends and I spent a zillion or so hours shooting Ninja Force in high school, and not nearly that many (although still more than you’d think) working on the script. This was probably the first scene we ever shot using actual lighting and “set design,” which sounds impressive, but for all practical purposes, it was just my pal Peter holding an old stage light and pointing it on a black wall for “the illusion of depth.”
Since it is the First Menstrual Ninja Post, I’ll present yet another ninja picture.



This is me acting in a very dramatic scene in Ninja Force, that we actually filmed with two cameras. I played X Ninja #2 or something like that. Just to be clear, I wasn’t playing Ninja X, I was playing an X Ninja. The other characters for a long time were just named Ninja 1, Ninja 2 and Ninja Ed. We gave them some other names later on, but I still like the originals, since they conveyed all you really needed to know.
I colored this picture to look sort of like the movie Waking Life, which is one of my favorite films from one of my favorite directors, and I’m really just posting it to provide some sort of transition to link to the trailer for his next movie, which is really cool looking.

That’s all.

Oh, yeah, the trailer is here.

Dead Sea Scrollz

It seems almost impossible for me to concentrate sometimes in the middle of the day. Classes between 1 and 3 PM are nearly always a challenge to stay focused in, and today I think I probably fell asleep twice without knowing it while reading The Dead Sea Scrolls. I was taking notes, and started to write down things that didn't have anything to do with what I was reading. When I cleared my mind again, I had no idea where some of the thoughts came from.
Still, The Dead Sea Scrolls are interesting, and I have a certian fondness for old writings with names like "The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness" and especially, "The Coming Doom." The first one seemed to be a plan for an actual war, including battle plans and instructions for building weapons, preperations for the final battle that apparently would cleanse the world. On a cursory reading, it seemed that unlike The Revelation to John, this book was meant to be taken rather literally.
"The Coming Doom" was much less specific, and hardly cataclysmic at all. It asked why people are universally opposed to wrongdoing, yet still do wrong, and foretold a time when the world will be filled with knowledge, wiping away all ignorance and evil. That's gnosticism for you!
There's some crazy and very interesting stuff in all these sacred Jewish and Christian scriptures that exist outside the Bible, and I'll probably be writing more about them soon. Even without being widely distributed and talked about every Sunday, they've contributed quite a lot to the general understanding of Christianity. You might be surprised at how much you think you know comes from a few books you've never read.