ROLEY

  • Journal, April 21st, 2024

    • I’ve completed 9 episodes of The Pungoverse, which will complete what am envision will be a first season. I’ve decided that these will be vertical videos, which will require me to create visual reps of the Pungonians. I don’t think I’ll be using filters for the most part, with the exception of one character. I’m looking to start filming next weekend. I don’t have an ETA to release, but I’ve shed the guilt of having to do things on any kind of timeline. These will happen when they happen.
    • No one fucking warned me about X-Men ‘97. I love it, but you ripped my damn heart out.
    • The cyberpunk story is about two episodes in. I have no idea where it’s going. I can tell you it’s called TSUNAMI, and it’s based off an idea I had around 1999. Some elements of this story have been transferred from another story I wrote in 1988, specifically the main character’s assistant. The story is in the first person, and I hope to produce this with music and sound effects, rather than an audio book narration. It’s been a tough slog because while the basic idea has been in my head, the direction isn’t something I’ve given thought to until I started writing. I was splitting time between this and the Pungoverse until I realized that I couldn’t switch tasks like that. Now that Pungoverse is written, I will resume this after I complete and schedule the releases.
    • I’ve listened to The Tortured Poets Department three times now. I’m not a diehard Taylor fan, but I do like her later pop synth stuff. Here’s my take on the album: She has said that this is a dark chapter in her life that she’s closed with this album, so I don’t think it’s out of bounds to call this a concept album. It’s The Wall (Taylor’s Version), and of course I’m going to listen to something like that. If you’re looking for banger after banger, this isn’t it. This is a songwriter telling you her story the same way Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon told you about their lives. It’s a good album.
    • After the week that was, I feel like this would be an excellent time to repeat that if you’re forming your opinions from second hand information, you may be getting the wrong info. Never trust hearsay, sources that have a clear bias, or anything online that doesn’t have attribution that you can verify. That’s going to be very important for the remainder of this year.

    I’m going to try and get back to daily posts. No promises. And of course, here be the supermodel

  • JOURNAL: February 11th, 2024

    Yes, I know, it’s been a minute. Several. Welcome to the world of object permanence, where I forget it exists if it’s not right in front of my face. That said, let’s fill you in on where things are.

    Over the past little while, I seem to have made a breakthrough when it comes to my life since 2020. Aside from the fact that 4 years is long enough to be anything, much less sad, I lit upon what I think is an inconvenient truth I had to face: There was a point where the writing was on the wall that I was going to be let go from my job, COVID or no COVID. There were yearly layoffs back then, and I had dodged two rounds. My job had been relegated to rewriting and voicing English versions of Japanese scripts with little to no variation between printer models. I was editing already-produced videos of illustrations with little to no variation either. I wasn’t creating anything new, I was reheating the leftovers. In a sense, I was set up to fail. Once I got to that realization, I realized that it didn’t give much of a base to qualify for a job in the field beyond that. So, if I wanted to do something creative with video, it’s up to me to do that on my own. TikTok is nice and all, and it’s quick and dirty, but I think I need to do something a little more substantial. Now, I’m no Casey Neistat. I’m just some guy with a camera that thought he was a multimedia guy until he realized he wasn’t. So maybe I should do something about that.

    In other news, some progress updates:

    The new Pungoverse season seems to be going a bit better, I’ve written two episodes so far. The premise is very simple. WYRD 101 has lost its broadcasting license due to a huge mistake. If you’ve been a fan of WYRD 101 over the years then this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Roley’s talent agent takes on the whole crew and suggests a pivot to all podcasting. This sets up a little bit of a satire of the current state of podcasting, and what I see as the homogenization of the industry. I also hope to revisit some long lost citizens of Pungo that I haven’t used in a long, long time.

    The other project I’ve been working on is Tsunami. I’ve finished one chapter, and halfway through a second one. Tsunami is my attempt at a cyberpunk story, and I hope I can do the genre a little bit of justice since I’ve been a fan of it for so long. The main character is a Tracker of sorts, and falls into a little bit of a mystery involving augmented humans. It’s in the first person, and the main character is in the vein of the sarcastic type of detective I grew up being fascinated by, from Richard Diamond Private Detective, to Thomas Magnum.

    Podcasting? Well, that’s what these two things are for. It’s possible I’ll serve something up soon, though I am not going to head back to the same old current events pod. It’s boring, and I really don’t want to think about the timeline we’re living in right now, or I’ll get nothing done.

    I have two other ideas in the bucket at the moment, but they’re not fully formed thoughts yet. In other words, just like any other random thought in my head at any given moment. Update next time on that, hopefully.

    See ya next time.

  • PHOTOS: Atlantic Ave At 31st Street

    Saturday afternoon, filling time while waiting to pick up the daughter, thought I’d play with the camera a little. Some selections for your general derision. Enjoy

  • LINK: The Final Days of Coyote vs. ACME →

    In a truly inglorious end, a source close to the movie doesn’t believe Warner Bros. would even announce that they hadn’t found a home for the movie. They would unceremoniously delete it. Never to be seen again.

    I can almost guarantee that there’s at least one generation of folks who would have loved to see this as a payoff for watching Wile E. Coyote plaster himself all over the desert floor over and over for years. I certainly would.

    I hope someone reconsiders this someday.

  • My Unvarnished Opinion of the Apple Vision Pro

    It makes Google Glass — and Glassholes — look reasonable by comparison.

    We’re doomed.

  • Cleaning the Social Media Gutter

    I’m noticing that quite a few people that view my stories on Instagram are people that I don’t know, and want nothing to do with. I started to go through my list of followers, and I quickly realized that leaving my account inactive for a long period of time might have been a mistake. A quick note about weeding the garden: Instagram doesn’t really make it easy, especially on the desktop version. It’s just a small scroll box in the center of the page. I really would like a way to bulk remove/block people. That should be a no-brainer.

    Yes, I realize there are 3rd party solutions that may allow you to do this, the point is that IG should allow you to do this. I’m going to look for those solutions so that I don’t have to waste more time in the weeds than necessary.

  • ARTICLE: More Unsolicited Olympic Opinions

    With the possible exception of the Salt Lake City Olympics, most Games lose money. Most cities that agree to host the Games lose money. After the Olympics leave a city, in some cases those venues fall into disrepair (See: Rio). Finally, depending on the location or other circumstances, some countries boycott the Games like Moscow 1980 and LA 1984. I’ve always felt there’s a viable solution to this, and for that we look to a little cartoon from 1980.

    Animalympics was an absolute sendup of the Olympics, voiced in part by Harry Shearer, Billy Crystal, and Gilda Radner. That alone should get you to watch this movie. Back in the day, you could count on HBO or Cinemax to have it in rotation during the Games. I’m not sure if it enjoys the same attention today, but that’s beside the point. The point is that all the games took place on Animalympic Island. One location made for the Games. Now, it’s not realistic for anyone other than Dubai to whip up an island out of thin air, but that’s not where you’d want to have Summer Games in any event. What would be more realistic would be for the IOC to pick one place where the Summer Games have been played, and one place where the Winter Games have been played. Bonus points if one location could do both, and the event venues are still in good condition or could be repaired for a reasonable amount. It’s got to cost less money than selecting a new place that’s never had the Games before, and possibly even less than a place like LA, who has hosted the Games twice before and about to have it a third time.

    It’s time to give some consideration to making a permanent venue for the Olympic Games, so that we can remove the politics, territorial disputes, and the river of red ink that has followed it for decades.

  • PHOTOS: December 2023

    Some selected photos from the Eastern Shore of VA and (very) Southern Virginia Beach from December 2023. Enjoy.

  • LINK: Marty Krofft Dies at 86 →

    If you’re my age, this man and his brother Sid were responsible for a lot of your Saturday Mornings.

    I always found these live-action shorts more entertaining than the cartoons. Probably because my earliest memories involve the Banana Splits and shorts like Danger Island. Filmation had really great stuff as well, like Shazam and Isis, but Sid and Marty were the Kings.

    Thanks, Marty.

  • MarkWayne Mullin Is Not A Serious Person →

    That’s the act of an overgrown man-child with no self-control. It should be automatically disqualifying; no person who acts that way has any business in that job.

    It won’t be, of course. He caters to a crowd, a constituency that most likely approves of his behavior.