Have been working on projects that aren't particularly bloggable -- video, archiving/remaking DVDs, fooling around with a new computer with more video capability.
It's kind of stupid to keep posting links to Vimeos just for the sake of being a prolific blogger.
And goddam it I will not junk up 12 years of pristine text and pic bloggin' with a bunch of embed code stra-a-a-ining to pull up offsite Flash content like every other stinkin' website.
Am having some Dogma-like insights about video shooting, scoring, and editing that I'll want to talk about eventually.
In the meantime check out my bike ride on Vimeo.
Also, am posting "SD" (720 x 480) videos to my Screencast page [deleted 6/21/19] -- it's paid hosting which doesn't do any transcoding where I can create embeds for my barely-viewed "wider" blog.
general
RSS reader list (update)
Some additions to our feed reader list:
Go Read explained in a blog post (hat tip Pretzel). "Open source" but Google login required.
Digg Reader. Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism recommended this initially, particularly as an alternative to Feedly and its design in "hipster Brooklyn green." Later she complained it wasn't so great for organizing large numbers of feeds.
AOL Reader (still in beta) - you have to sign in using AOL's or one of the other big evil spy companies' logins, natch. It's funny how we've come full circle here, speaking as a denizen of the BSW (big scary web). In the '90s AOL offered a closed garden version of the BSW, then the BSW flourished for 6-7 years without adult supervision, then Facebook "perfected" the AOL model, then Google imitated Facebook and ditched Reader, and now AOL offers its closed-garden readers a tool to help them access all the content that's still out there on the BSW (while continuing to drive users to the major players via logins).
Am being judgmental but it's gallows humor because it's only a matter of time before this happens.
plop, plop, transubstantiation
Meagan Day (writing in Full Stop) on Joan Didion (writing in the New York Review of Books in 1989) on Ronald Reagan:
Didion’s opinion of the President himself is best exemplified in an anecdote she recounts in which the Reagans, while traveling during the 1980 campaign, attended a rural church service. Their pew-side experience up to this point had mostly been at places like Bel Air Presbyterian, where during communion congregants treated themselves to individual circular wafers and drank wine out of small cups passed around on a tray. When communion began at the small Virginia church, Nancy Reagan was scandalized that people were all drinking from the same cup. Her aid, registering her panic, assured her that she could just dip the bread in the wine; frazzled, she dropped it in. Ronald Reagan — on autopilot, as if he were reading from a teleprompter — followed suit by confidently plopping his bread into the chalice, never comprehending his mistake, his face radiating piety as his wife and aid looked on mortified. After the final hymn he stood outside the chapel shaking hands and nodding with interest. Here was the President, “insufficiently briefed (or, as they say in the White House, ‘badly served’) on the wafer issue but moving ahead, stepping ‘into the sunlight,’ satisfied with his own and everyone else’s performance, apparently oblivious to (or inured to, or indifferent to) the crises being managed in his presence.”
Funny story but it would mean the Reagans had never been to a Catholic or Episcopal church, where communicants routinely chalice-sip. Is it possible Ron's and Nancy's bubble of conservative SoCal cluelessness extended this far? Guess so if this happened the way Didion tells it. Meagan Day's article reiterates what we all knew in the '80s: that Reagan was (to use that decade's phrase) an "amiable dunce" who acted as a Trojan Horse for vicious neoconservatives (whom she calls neoliberals but the point is the same).
pacific rimmed 2
SM: How did Pacific Rim end? I got 3D battlebot fatigue (enhanced by the size of the screen at the Uptown) and ducked out as Stringer Bell was suiting up for definitive Megatronage.
TM: I saw it in 2D (with earplugs) so I could make it to the end.
The tattooed nerd mindmelds with a Kaiju and learns that the spacetime link will explode unless alien DNA comes into the link first.
Stringer dies by exploding the bomb that was supposed to go with them into the gate, buying our heroes time to get a dead alien and take it into the gate with them for its DNA identification. (I think - it was all pretty confusing.)
Because their old Jaeger is "analog" and "nuclear powered" they can turn it into a bomb.
They enter the gate and we get a brief glimpse of the Kaiju world with a baby Kaiju looking up expectantly. The bomb explodes, sealing the gate, and our heroes escape in pods just in the nick.
After the credits Ron Perlman slashes his way out of the Kaiju that has eaten him.
back from vacation; a whiff of Rhinecliff
Took a few days off to tool around the Hudson Valley and Adirondacks. Word to the wise: avoid the Rhinecliff Hotel, in Rhinebeck, NY. We made reservations a month ago but the day of our reservation, when we showed up travel-weary and holding our bags, we were told they had no record of us and the hotel was booked. Fortunately we had our confirmation email, but until we produced it they were giving us the "what are you doing in our lobby" face. Because we had them dead to rights, they put us up in another hotel. Anyway, they suck.
On a happier note, here are pics of the Ausable Chasm, near Lake Champlain (hat tip SHM):
