I WANT AN IPHONE 4!!!!

This was done by a Best Buy employee, who almost certainly got fired afterwards. I lolled.

It's not just the sentiments about the iPhone in particular, but the "Facts vs. Stupid" frustration that makes this a winner.

The Gods must be crazy!

Over 60% of the video online containing Paul was only uploaded in the last month. Here's another! I'm acting in Mt. Olympus, a new Brown TV show with some really wonderful people involved.


The premise is that the Greek Gods come down every once in a while from Mt. Olympus to let off some steam. During one visit, Hestia, who guards the hearth (and source of their Godly powers) leaves it unattended to take a break, and their powers vanish! What will they do in as students in a college that looks suspiciously like Brown?



I play Hermes, the messenger of the Gods. He's a trickster, and mostly serves as comic relief. The gods go through a number of identity issues when they lose their powers and learn to become mortal, but Hermes is really just there to have the best time he can.

There's about 2:40 introduction with the classroom scene. I'm mostly in the opening sequence after that, until about 5:00. The rest of the episode is quite fabulous, and I've made lots of great friends working on this. Keep watching until after the credits for More Paul™! It was that clip that left my family speechless when I got the rough cut of it over Spring Break.

Also, some of the music (namely the party music that comes in when I enter the dark room at 3:20) was done by a very talented friend I met at Brown, Mr. Andrew Underberg. I remember asking him for a recording of his midterm project in an Electronic Music class we took 4 years ago, because it really stood out as excellent (sadly, I can't find it on his site and lost it in a hard drive death...).

(also, I've updated the post on the Pope and Catholicism, providing reasons why I am so angry, with lots of links substantiating my original sentiment).

Patriotas!

I can write about Spring Weekend a bit later (this was the first and last time I'll do Spring Weekend as a student). In the meantime, I'll procrastinate by posting another favorite video. Sadly for you gringos, you have to speak Spanish to glean much meaning from it:

I used this as the basis for my first major project in an Electronic Writing course I took last year. Other works I did for the course are on the course wiki, my work including a programmatic riff on Pierre Menard, (this also used a text generator for grammar files I coded up), and my final project.

Mooooovies!

I posted these on the last blog, months before I was digitally evicted. Last summer I participated with some friends in the 48-hour Film Festival, making two movies.

The game works as follows: at the start of the 48 hours, you're given a character, prop, and line of dialogue that must be present in your movie. You're also given a genre, with one chance to re-draw if desired.

The first, called Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow!, was a dry run of sorts, where we would identify bottlenecks for Game Time. The plan was to do this in 12 hours, we really did it in about 14.

We drew Science Fiction, a salesperson, a wooden spoon, and the line "I wouldn't go down there if I were you." Understanding the radio address in the beginning is pretty key: it introduces the Sci-Fi element on which the plot is based (namely, a drug has been invented that lets someone re-live another person's experiences with a sample of their hair).

I acted, with a touch of sound design. See if you can spot the errors! I count two.

For the 'real' movie we made for the festival (Not All Who Wander), we drew Horror, a pot of coffee, an addict named Sonia, and the line "I'm pretty sure that's not right."

I didn't act in this, I was one of three involved in sound. Being at the end of the pipeline (sound was done last), it was a hellish few hours, especially considering all the on-site audio collected during shooting was garbage. I am proud of the sound work I did on this, but mostly if I remember what the conditions were.

This one has three major, hard-to-spot production errors. Brownie points if you can find them, one of them in particular is hilarious.