SamuraiBlog.com

These are some pictures I took traveling back from Montana. The first one, a happy accident taken through a window with a UV protection screen at the top.

Out of all the places I’ve been in my life, next to the Bluegrass festival in bumfuck Hamilton, MT, San Francisco is the most invigorating. It has such a great vibe to it. You can’t seem to do anything in the city without running into a really dynamic selection of people. The people all seem to have energy. There are a lot of artists in the city, and this is a serious part of that energy.

You play guitar, don’t you? Everyone in San Francisco plays an instrument.

I took that picture out the window driving on the 101, still across the bay from San Francisco.

I’m back in it.

What I didn’t think was going to work out, ended out working with a lot of help from my parents. I’m moved into an apartment in San Francisco with two room mates in the inner richmond district. Two room mates: JUSTIN MARCUS and CHRIS MULKEY. They dig on movies and shit too.

As it turns out, I did not get more posts in last year than the year previous. Like I had hoped to. Which is fine because I wanted to only write when I felt like it.

Yesterday was the day I went in for a hiring event at the Apple store. Not so sure about the Apple store anymore. The place gives me the creeps. The people there… I’ve never met a group of people so extremely happy with the fact that their brand, in the past 10 or so years went from a 5% market share to… 7. I knew they existed… but I didn’t know they were real. Like, real people that you can touch, and not just weirdos on the internet. Imagine corner of the store filled with 35 digg-reading, macrumors-creeping mother fuckers biting at the chomp for a job. It’s competitive too. One guy had the gall to say he out-qualified everyone there, without a doubt.

Christ, I’d pop my head like it were a zit, working there. Though, you never know, I still might.

What I really want is a job at Revision3, which I’ve just submitted a cover letter and resume to, pointing them to my new SamuraiFilms website. If you’re reading this, and aren’t using a browser that sucks (you know who you are), then check it out. It’s not all the way finished, but I think it gets the point across. The point of the website is the video, so I designed, basically, a video player application. It’s designed for people with big monitors, or at least decent-enough resolution, higher than 1024×768. It’s also designed for people with new browsers (I don’t even know if IE7 works…), Firefox 2, Safari 2+ and a fast connection, 1.0mbps or more. I figure that’s most people who’ll be looking at the site. Also, blip.tv sucks. Their flash encodes are way jumpy and drop a ton of frames. Fuck blip.tv.Also, it seems that Safari’s javascript is quite a bit quicker than Firefox’s, because the animations and such are way smoother on Safari.

I think I’m going to make a film very soon. Perhaps another mob-themed sort of film, or maybe a horror. My apartment is cozy.

I flew back to Montana yesterday (I will be driving back down to SF with all my shit, to move into an apartment, very beginning of next year). It turns out my dad recently got a Cannon 400D which is a pretty sweet camera in my opinion. I took this photo with it, of my dog, Bella. You can click on it for a full sized version (actually, a very scaled down version, boo on flickr).

I sit upon a perch, in San Francisco. Directly on the corner of Jones and Sutter on the 2nd floor. Excellent people watching spot.  From here I can observe the absurdity of the kids at hut SF (skate shop focused on really expensive wigger clothing), their habits, interaction with people (like watching a silent movie, or at least a movie turned down so you only hear the loud parts, perhaps a poor-white-boy version of an alternate-universe Eddie Murphy flick), and their ridiculous attention to personal  apperance. The homeless. One man who sings, one man who habitually snipes cigarettes and jacks peoples bus fares (and many more). The Sutter ST homeless are largely not aggressive so it’s usually a good viewing experience (watching how people handle themselves around the homeless).

Anyway, I find people watching interesting. It’s got to be why coffee shops always are placed corner-side instead of more droll places, such as in the middle of a block.

Californians. Anyone who’s read my blog for any length of time, or read through the archives, knows that I am not shy to the idea of stereotypes. Stereotypes are real, and I happen to love obsessing over them from time to time.

There is one stereotype that I did not understand until recently. The Californian.

The Californian does not have an opinion, except hating the current US Administration, but all Californians have that opinion, and that’s what makes it a stereotype.

I find that whenever I have to interact with these folks, opinions are not taken lightly too. Californians think people with opinions are “opinionated.” Oh shit, they chose a side.

There is logic to their madness. Maybe. Without an opinion, what will you argue over? Nothing, and I believe that’s the point.  If I point out “dem dere wiggers ovar dar!” a Californian will disregard your observation, or perhaps pussy foot around it with their own, extremely tamed version. I don’t know how they do this because I hand-picked this example. Wiggers are a subset of rich white boy culture that has latched onto an un-attainably cool black hip-hop culture and re-appropriated it into $200 t-shirts with Tupoc’s face on it and shorts that are 2 inches shy of pants. They dress in the brightest clothes, the most over-sized clothes, and won’t be caught dead without their hat and shoes in perfect color-coordination. They are provide a nearly undeniable existence. Californians know they exist, they just won’t admit it.

Another example, hussies. San Francisco is packed to the roof with hussies. But I’ve yet to hear the word spoken here, and I unashamedly listen in on conversations if I can hear em.

So, why? I guess they just don’t want to make a rift. Californians are largely satisfied with their liberal state and city-level governments. Marijuana is practically legal here and can be had by a selection of delivery services. The police leave you alone, and, like I said, the government is already filled brim-full with liberals, so what do they have to complain about? Living here all your life, I can see someone becoming a very passive individual, a Californian.

And that concludes my first rant since replacing this blog. Jesus titty-fucking Christ, it took one [post].

Recently I tried to use Facebook to re-connect with a few friends from Montana since the SamuraiBlog community site became defunct.

For fucks sake.

It’s like Larry the Cable guy designed an interface to an application that tries to encompass the lives of our Banana-Republic-shopping, Crocs-wearing public.  Thanks, assholes, but I’ll use a real website. Even though it’s not the epic mess that MySpace ended up as once website-”personalization” became accessible to the yahoo-toolbar-sporting masses, people take their sites way too fucking seriously, investing countless hours doing absolutely nothing. And why does it take them countless hours? Tools. Well, we knew that, but the interface to Facebook is fucking insane. It takes an entire afternoon to set up a facebook account when it should take TEN MINUTES. How about something like 1) name and age 2) add friends. What the fuck!? How the fuck hard is that!

I digress. So I have this domain. SamuraiBlog.com. Been around since my freshman year of high school. Holy shit.

The SamuraiBlog.com community has long since evaporated into life, and Facebook.

The domain SamuraiBlog.com is not going anywhere (I have virtually unlimited SSH-encrypted bandwidth through Dreamhost).  So any wireless I jump on in SF, I don’t have to worry about using passwords on websites and shit. The domain will just be used as my personal blog, portfolio and to link to SamuraiFilms (nothing new for a while, you just wait!).