6:30am :’(

Alright, I need to blog about something…

Well, I’m at a point right now where I am surprisingly happy in my life. Not surprising so much, just…unexpected. (Is that really any different?)

I’ve made some good improvements in my life in the time I’ve had off from school. My time management is getting a bit better. I’m not quite so lazy these day, I don’t spend as much time on the computer (says the guy writing a blog post a 6:30am), and I’m usually getting to bed and waking up at a good regular time. Yay me!

I’ve still got some things to work on. For one, I’m lazy. I don’t know if it’s just the cold weather making me lethargic or what but I just seem to avoid doing the chores and tasks that I really need to do. Instead, I just want to curl up under a blanket and what CNN of all things. I’m going to make the call of cold weather/not taking my vitamins.

The only other big thing is getting my feelings in order. This honestly isn’t something I like admitting to the whole world but, I’m lonely. Sometimes. That’s the weird part. I’ll have times where I’m just fine, happy about life, not lonely at all, etc. Then, all of a sudden, I’m lonely, I feel kind of depressed, I just start wanting someone to hug and hold tight, then just as suddenly, it goes away…after plaguing me for like a week or so at least. It sucks! I know what the cause pretty much is but I don’t have a fix for it.

Anyway, I see this post degraded down to an ‘emo’ state which means it is time to end it. Now I just have to figure out I’m going to do the rest of the day…

/Later\

Creative Block

Alright, I see in my day planner that it says for today (2/27/2008) that I’m supposed to blog about something. It had this same task for Monday but…oh well.

I’m trying to get my shit in order. It’s all starting to finally come together a bit. I’m getting to bed at a consistent time, getting up at a consistent time, and keeping myself rather busy and productive during the day. Cool beans. Part of this is to fill my day with certain projects and such, like blogging. I’m intent on blogging roughly three times a week if for no other reason that to keep myself busy and having some way to get my thoughts out there…even if not one person reads them.

Let’s see…what all can I write about?

I’ve been having a bit of difficulty with my photography. It’s actually kind of weird. For the longest time my struggle with photography was just that I couldn’t take good pictures. They never came out quite like I wanted or they just plain looked like horse shit on a crackery kind of thing made from dried, formed, fired dung. Regardless, since I’ve become more serious about it and since I got my digital camera I feel my photography has improved. I’m finally getting the kind of results I’m after. The problem I’m not having is that I don’t have jack shit to take pictures of. Some people would scoff at me claiming that all around me are photo opportunities. As true as that is, I hate doing random acts of photography. I hate going out and taking pictures of whatever I happen to find. It’s just like metal detecting. You go out in hopes of finding something worthwhile but you don’t have a set plan, just a place to search and a hope. Granted, this can sometimes deliver some cool photos but it feels like more of a waste of time than anything else.

The logical progression would be that I put some planning into my photography. Choose a type of photography or just some particular subject. My choices on types of photography are rather limited in a way. I’ve no aspirations of being any sort of portrait photographer, wedding photographer, or anything like that. Can’t really do photojournalism without having a job as one. I do enjoy landscape photography but (I know what this is going to sound like…) I don’t have any interesting landscape to take pictures of. I live in Waco and if you look it up you’ll discover that there isn’t any sort of interesting photographic landscapes around let alone much in the way of cityscapes. I do have a recurring cityscape panorama I still want to get right but I don’t have much else to do.

I’ve attempted to find subjects to take pictures of, subjects to analyze through the photographic medium, but I just can’t think of anything. I might possibly be a bit too picky but I can’t find anything that I find interesting. If I don’t find the subject I’m shooting to be of interest then it isn’t worthwhile to shoot.

All of this has led to one frightening and recurring thought. What if I’m choosing the wrong career path? I’m in a degree that is for a variety of media types (though it’s mainly video it seems) but, I’d prefer a career in photography. I’m perfectly fine doing client work, being given an assignment and told what is wanted. That is easy. It’s coming up with the original idea, an original idea, that is the hard part. I’ve never considered myself an incredibly creative person and my difficulties with photography has seemed to further emphasize this. Though, I do remember one of my photography teachers explaining something rather interesting. He was talking about how not everyone in the media fields are creative. Sometimes it takes more than one person to bring a project to life. Many people are creative but don’t have the skills to bring their idea to life and many people are skilled at things like photography but don’t have the creativity to come up with projects. Maybe I should socialize, find and collaborate with creative people, offer my help if someone needs it.

I’ll throw this out there. If you’re a creative person reading this and you’d like to collaborate with a fairly skilled photographer (who doesn’t have much of a portfolio right now ) they by all means contact me. I’d love to collaborate with any sort of creative person on pretty much any project.

/Later\

‘Song BattleRoyale!’

There is a little game I play. We haven’t really given it a name but Bobby and I play it every now and then and it’s always interesting. Basically, it’s a ‘music battle game’. It sounds corny I know but try it and you’ll have some fun.

Things You’ll Need
- You’ll obviously need another person to play against. At the moment it’s just a 2 player game.
- You’ll both need computers with a searchable media player (iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc.). You’ll need your full music collection (preferably neat, organized, and large).

Gameplay
- Begin by choosing who will go first. Use whatever method you want, ‘Rock, Paper Scissors’, coin toss, fight to the death…we aren’t picky.

- The first player chooses a song to play. It can be anything from their collection as long as it isn’t something cheap. (Ex. La Femme d’argent by Air, 12D3 by Gorillaz, Timothy by Jet). It has to be something the other person can work with. You’ll see why in a minute.

- Now player 2 responds.

Let’s say player 1 chose We Might As Well Be Strangers by Keane. Something nice and easy to work with. Now, player 2 has a few options. First off, player 2 can’t respond by using a Keane song and Keane can’t be use for another 3 turns.

Player 2 has to respond by playing a song that uses at least one word from the song being played. That means player 2’s song has to have ‘We’, ‘Might’, ‘As’, ‘Well’, ‘Be’, or ‘Strangers’ in the song title or the artist name.

- What makes it interesting is that there is a time limit. Since player 1 played We Might As Well Be Strangers that means player 2 has 3:12 to find a valid song to respond with. If time runs out or the player can’t find a valid song to respond with then they lose!

It’s as simple as that. Feel free to take these rules and tweak them for your own game. We’ll say it’s an open source game.

I’ll update this later after we play another game so I can give a much better and thorough example.

/Later\

I’m done!

I’m done! I’m finally done! It’s complete, finished, rifinito.

For the past year or so I’ve been working on cleaning up my music collection. Getting it all converted to the same bit rate, organized by genre, getting all the correct artist and album information in there and making sure pretty much every fillable entry in the ID3 tags were filled, including album art. I’m finally finished…sort of. I’ll never truly be finished but I’m at least at like 95%. There will always be something that needs a correction or I’ll get more music that I need to fiddle with. Regardless, I feel I can move on to doing something with all of it. I’m turning one of my spare PCs into a Media Center PC BUAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

I just have to get the 9.35GB of music moved over first

/Later\

And…I’m back.

*psssttt* This is the part where you say ‘wb’

So I’m back to blogging. If for no other reason it’s because I’ve got way too much time on my hands lately. I’ve dropped all my classes for this semester because I need a break, this was my 5th semester in a row after all. I’m attempting to use the time as wisely as I can and get myself organized and whatnot. So far it’s been a resounding failure but I’ve got until June or so to get it under control…

The problem I’m having is that I’m left with considerably more free time than I had bargained for and that I’ve got surprisingly little to fill it with. I could watch movies and play games all day but at the end of the day I feel like I just wasted my time. I’m going to force myself to get back into photography and with any luck I might produce some stuff worth selling $-)

Every picture I take will be posted to flickr, the good stuff posted to the Randomized Productions blog, and the really good stuff will be printed up and sold…hopefully. This is mainly to challenge my creativity but I’m going to attempt to give myself a project. Something unusual but not too difficult. I’m going to pick one subject and work with it, have a focused goal and whatnot. It might take some time but I hope to find something challenging but interesting, something that can hold my interest as well as other’s.

One thing on my list is a really good self-portrait. I’ve been told that in my last one I look sad so I’ll attempt to do something that conveys who I am with a more upbeat feel. I might start up a photographic checklist on either this blog or RP and hopefully I’ll stick to it.

I seem to have run out of things to discuss so I’ll end this. BTW, my birthday is in 3 days everybody!

/Later\

Start

Start me up!

Welcome to The Beguiler! This is my personal blog, or as I prefer to call it, my ‘emo blog’. Here within this digital tome you will find very personal and very random posts about pretty much anything and everything I feel like writing about. These things can range from very boring topics such as, what I had for lunch, to abstract thoughts like, ‘Hey, why are most LEDs blue?’, to extreme topics like my sex life and erectile dysfunction (if I had either of them but, you get the point).

I’ve yet to fully decide how I want to this stuff out there though. I could do the standard and kind of boring text route. It’s tried and true and won’t let me down. But then I’ve got some friends who tend to have their times when they really don’t want to read.

Then again, I could do a podcast of sorts. I’ve got lots of experience with audio but I’m not sure how to do it with flash so people don’t have to download it. It would be easy to do…

Or I could do this as a vlog. This is the one that really interests me. I’ve never really done much with video before and I’d really like to give it a try. I’ve got an idea of how to host the video for free(!). I’ll probably end up trying all three or some sort of combination.

I won’t use my real name for this blog. Nor will I link this blog to any of my others. I like the idea of having anonymity from everyone except for those who find this who actually know me. It allows me to open up about things that I otherwise would only talk to one or two people about.

Well, that seems like a good enough first post. *Wipes hands* I’m pretty satisfied with it. I’ll hopefully have another post up soon and keep this updated on a fairly regular basis.

/Later bitches!\