Recently in Audience Participation Category

Well, Film Fest is on us once again, and this year we're determined not to let it slip by us with too many films unwatched. That doesn't mean we're going to do what some friends are doing and take two weeks off just to watch every film on the schedule (much as we'd like to), but we will be seeing a lot of movies. I'll keep the schedule updated here- if anyone wants to join us at any of these sessions, please do so! Likewise, if you're going to any film that you think we absolutely must see, please let us know and we'll add it to our schedule. We'll be at the following films:
Saturday 26 July 2008

1:00 PM ACMI - SON OF RAMBOW
9:15 PM Capitol - DIARY OF THE DEAD

Sunday 27 July 2008

7:00 PM Cooper's Festival Lounge - IN CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE A ROMERO

Friday 1 August 2008
7:15 PM Greater Union 5 - JAR CITY
9:15 PM ACMI - GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Saturday 2 August 2008
7:15 PM ACMI - DEAD END DRIVE-IN

Sunday 3 August 2008
1:00 PM ACMI - THE WAVE
7:00 PM Greater Union 6 - LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

Friday 8 August 2008
11:30 PM Greater Union 5 - JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER

Saturday 9 August 2008
1:00 PM Capitol - CARAMEL
7:00 PM Greater Union 6 - PERSEPOLIS
11:15 PM Capitol - DEAD DAUGHTERS

Sunday 10 August 2008
3:15 PM Capitol - THE CRAZIES
8:00 PM Greater Union 6 - [REC]

I am...

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via Babs. Yes, my blog is totally lame as of late. Yes, I am okay with that.


You are Spider-Man

You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.



Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

strip creator

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Emailing: strip.jpg

Friends,

We are doing a night of shooting for our latest video this coming Thursday evening (the 6th) and we need EXTRAS. I know you?ve all dreamed of being in a music video your whole lives well now is your chance! We need as many people as we can get so bring your friends if they share your dream. It should take only a few hours to shoot and there will be beer and snacks for all comers- it?s really like coming to a party but there?ll be cameras about. The studio we?re shooting in is in Canary Wharf. Please let me know if you can make it (comment or e-mail [myname@thissite.com]) and I?ll contact you with further details.

Thanks so much,

-Dan

Here's a meme, nicked from Pix some long time ago and then promptly forgotten about until now. Head on over to flickr for an annotated look at my bookshelf, and feel free to add any notes you feel are appropriate.

DSCN0721.JPG

The thing is, though, I don't like holding onto books once I've read them. In fact, if I think they're any good, I usually do my darndest to give them to someone else and insist they hand them to someone else once they're done, as I almost never read books twice and I dislike having possessions in general (particularly books as they're such a pain to transport for little gain if you've already read them). So what you see on my bookshelf is actually all the books I haven't managed to give away yet, for whatever reason. So it's not really a great representation of my reading habits/personality, since it's just all the dregs left in the sieve after you've washed the literary potatoes.

Still,

IMtv

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The ludicrously lovely Rockit has assigned herself a rather cool little project for her blog, she's IMterviewing various other bloggers and posting the transcripts for your elucidation, the first of which is up now and is with, well, certainly one of my favourite people, me!

I am eagerly awaiting her bound-to-be-upcoming IMterview with The Sev.

some love for the flickr

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[I swear I wrote this blog before reading Gordon's, but I suspect a lot of people will be making entries similar to this one today]

A while ago, I signed up for the pro account of flickr, the fantastic photo-sharing program which I completely adore. A pro account isn't that different from the free account, it just gives you more uploading bandwidth. I don't really need a lot of uploading bandwidth, and I knew this when I signed up (I generally use less than 10% of my monthly bandwidth). I signed up because I saw a really good product that was starting up, and I wanted to sort of, y'know, recognize how good I thought they were and give them some money, support them.

Today they sent me an e-mail saying that, to thank me for my support, not only are they doubling my bandwidth (from 1GB to 2GB) and doubling my subscription period (from one year to two years), they are giving me two free pro accounts to give away as I please. Which is really very cool of them. I don't know who has sorted their business model out, but I bloody well hope it works (and given the way flickr has taken off, I suspect they're doing quite well).

Anyway, I gave away one of these accounts already, but if you're a shutterbug and need more bandwidth for uploading, comment or write me and I'll sort you out (but only if you actually need lots of uploading space- don't just ask for it for kicks- the free account is fine for beginners)

I've got memes all over me!

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Er, this is my first meme, which was thrown at me by this nice fellow, so please go easy on me if I fail to demonstrate mad l33t meme skillz.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Who started this meme, a High School teacher? Cause seriously, I used to get my students to answer this when I taught Farenheit 451. Harry Potter is almost universally the book most 15-year-olds want to preserve for the good of culture (except that one kid who said 'The Matrix'. Sigh.)

However in terms of the book that it would be the most fun to be for the rest of my life-in-exile, I'd have to choose the joyous Book of the Film of the Story of my Life, which means I'd get to enjoy such fun diversions as losing my wife, seeing posters of her fellating her new lover all over the London Underground, going to a party on an exotic Fijian Island, and masturbating/weeping on the floor of my office in New Zealand House. Good times.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I assume we're talking about characters from books, rather than, say, Ariel, The Little Mermaid (I'll accept you, tail and all, Ariel!). Right! Of course you are. Uhm ... off the top of my head ... I suppose the last character I had a crush on, last month actually, was Stephen Maturin, from (the novel) Master & Commander. Everything he said was so intelligent and interesting and his character was so reserved yet curious about everything around him. As Jack Aubrey observed: "At times I fear to leave him alone for even a moment, yet at others I feel he could command the entire fleet." Just a character I really would have loved to actually spend some time talking with.

Oh, you mean like a romantic crush? Ohhh. Not to my recollection. I do recall, deep in the mists of memory, become quite disturbingly aroused (I was, like, twelve) by a scene in Dragons of Winter Night, when Tanis stumbled apon Goldmoon bathing in a pond. Ruff!

The last book you bought is?

I don't actually buy that many books. I have an enormous pile of them on my bedside table, all of them either given or lended to me by friends. Whenever a book blows me away, I then rush out and buy multiple copies to distribute to my friends. The last book I did this for was Love All the People, by Bill Hicks, which I bought five copies of and distributed them liberally around Christmas. It's just a wonderful, smart, hilarious, thoughtful, and occasionally even touching book that I wanted everyone around me to have read. When I get excited by books, I want other people to be excited (er, by the books, that is), too.

What are you currently reading?

I usually have two books on the go: one sits beside my bed which I read before I go to sleep, the other is usually smaller and lighter (often an e-book I read using my palm pilot), which I carry with me everywhere and read in snatches.

My bed-book is Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. This was lended to me by a friend who described it as "the best book you'll ever read", and he has so far proven extremely prophetic, it is excellent. It's absolutely mammoth in proportion (about 1200 pages- I'm about halfway through), is incredibly well written, very, bitingly funny, achingly bleak, intelligent with a bloody edge, and just good fun. It's difficult to say what it's about: It's set slightly in the future, in which America has more or less sublimated Canada and Mexico, and now uses the border between Canada and America as a massive waste dumping zone. Canadian Anti-American Terrorist cells have distributed something known as 'The Entertainment'- a downloadable programme so entertaining that anyone who views it enters a blissful coma. This is but one facet of a 200-faceted diamond- the book will frequently break away from its main narratives just to devliver unrelated short stories set in the same world. The 400+ footnotes alone are frequently short stories unto themselves. A massive, gargantuan work of inspired genius. I'll put a full review up on this site when I finish.

My 'travelling book' is usually either something to do with Star Trek, or some airport novel I've picked up (Sushi for Beginners, The Da Vinci Code, that sort of fluff. I really like the 'Reacher' series by Lee Child). However at the moment I'm reading the brilliant Post-Captain, the second book in the 20-book Master & Commander series. Oh look I know you're going to say it's all 'boys-own adventure' stuff but it's so much more than that! It's so smartly written it'll knock your wig off. Patrick O'Brien writes so convincingly in the voice of both brutes and intellectuals, and knows so much about the era he writes of, it's difficult not to be impressed, or to learn a great deal, with a great big grin on your face as you do.

Five books you would take to a deserted island

Well, I never re-read books once I've read them, so they'd all have to be 'books I'm looking forward to':

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky - One of the most lettered men I know recommends it highly, and it's quite long, so it would probably help to wile away those desert hours.
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster - Er, it comes in a single volume, so that counts as one, right? Anyway, I've just recently discovered Auster, and am absolutely smitten with him.
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds - as I've read all his other works and, assuming that no rescue from said island was forthcoming, would hate to go to my grave thinking there was still one out there that I hadn't read. Death wouldn't be so bad if, in the afterlife, they just gave me all the books I'd been meaning to read and let me have at them. Plus AR's books are often so dense, they need a good re-reading just to sort them out.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - as you always need a bit o' Neil, and this is the one book of his that has up until now escaped me.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - not just because they are huge and would take a very long time to read, and contain both poetry and plays (for me to put on with my little crabby friends), but because, when all is said and done, there was a reason he was so huge, and that's because he was actually very, very good at what he did.

Oh and probably The Bible or the Koran. Cause, y'know, I should probably read one of them, given the circumstances.

I would of course trade any of all of these choices if that meant I could take the biggest book of blank pagest known to man, and a pen, so I could write stories myselves and read them to the crabs (likewise for encyclopaedias, which make for awesome reading).

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Er, Bimbler, because she's always complaining about having nothing to blog about.
Gordon, because he's smart and I could probably add some good book recommendations to my reading list out of his answers.
And Razorhead because....aw, who am I kidding, these are the only three bloggers who actually read my blog, outside my technical support, who has to read it. Hi, guys! Stop me if you're not memers, or have done this one already without me noticing.

d

My StorTrooper

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This was made using a neat little flash widget that I found via Boing Boing. I don't really look like this, but it's as close as I could get. It's a cute little program, check it out if you are bored at work.

I really need a linklog....

hello, cute-nose

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During my Uni days, my job was a 'mobile DJ'. Not what a Londoner might think of as a DJ (turntables, mixing dance music, mumbling into the mic every now and then), something a bit more provincial.

I'd be the guy who would turn up at weddings, 21st birthday parties, dance nights at country pubs, office parties and the like, with my rig, and play hot hits until the party ended. My rig had 'DJ Moonbeam' written across the front (from the guy who previously occupied my position) which I think explains why I never once got a snog after three years of DJing.

I'd like to think I was pretty good. I wasn't one of those awful DJs who sneers at you when you make a request (and I've never encountered any other kind, to be honest), nor did I ever get on the mic and start whooping or artificially trying to make people dance (I did have a mic, which I usually used to say hello, make announcements, and say goodbye). I could usually judge the mood of the crowd, and alter the music accordingly. You kind of felt ebbs and flows. If things really started to die on the floor, 'I'm Your Man' was always the ultimate fallback option which would garuntee a gaggle of women to drag their mates onto the dance floor. The best way to judge a crowd was, of course, to talk to people continuously and ask them what they wanted to hear.

The reason I mention this is that, if you're one of the four people who read this site, chances are you've surfed in from ur-blog sevitzdotcom, which means you're hopefully coming to the sevitzdotparty, at which I will be DJing a set. Me and Adrian are assembling a collection of likely songs, but I want to be as prepared as possible, so I thought I'd ask if there was any song you wanted played, so I can make sure I have it in my playlist at the party.

All suggestions head for the comments box- even if you're surfing in from outta town, don't know sevitz, can't come to the sevitzdotparty, that's okay, suggest a song anyway! Something crowd-pleasing and floor-filling. And no, not 'I'm Your Man'.

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