Back in front of a camera

Well, I'm still sick and I'm sick of being sick. So, I decided to make a video whether I felt like it or not, just to give myself a boost and help win a little moral victory over this damn cold. The results are slightly better than I thought they'd turn out. In any case, I don't have to look at that "time since last" counter on my YouTube channel continually adding up as I kept waiting to get well enough to sit in front of a camera or record a voiceover. If I want that YouTube partnership, I have to stick to my promise of a consistent output, even if the format changes slightly. I like doing the reviews, but I don't want to get stuck doing them. DeviantART and Flickr Video will still be my main jumping-off point for my more artistic pieces, whereas YouTube will always be a little more candid and personal, with video-logs and opinion pieces.

Well, THAT happened... (Elektra: The Hand & The Devil)

I was a rather avid comic reader in the early 1990s, an era now known in comic book enthusiast circles as "The Dark Ages," a time when exaggerated anatomy, darker stories, morally ambiguous new heroes, and unwelcome overhauls to heroes of yore were the norm. In short, I wasn't seeing the medium at its best. As such, from 1995 onward, my two longboxes of polybagged publications saw no new additions and about as much time outside of my closet. In fact, it wasn't until at least the year 2006, when the special features on the DVD for the Daredevil movie introduced me to David Mack, who would become my favorite comic artist. Also, I rather liked the Daredevil movie (enough to buy up anything with Mack's name on it, from Parts of a Hole through Echo: Vision Quest). I can't say the same for Elektra, and it seemed neither could aspiring director Chris Notarile; In searching for information on Frank Miller's Xerxes, a purported prequel to 300, I came across this short film, presented in full on IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/rg/VIDEO_PLAY/LINK//video/wab/vi2180842521/

Chris Notarile, on his own time, with his own money, created (almost singlehandedly) this 11-minute short film dramatizing the death, past, and resurrection of Frank Miller's red-clad assassin.

Rather than do a full, scene-by-scene breakdown (which short films tend to lend themselves to) I want to go into detail on what is quite possibly the weakest scene in the film, which is saying quite a bit given that the film is only 11 minutes in length. After Elektra is killed by Bullseye, there is a flashback to Matt Murdock's days at Columbia University, where he meets the lovely Elektra Natchios and becomes entranced by her. After trying to get her attention by dropping some of his books near her as he walks past, Matt realizes that he's not going to have a chance unless he does something about Elektra's omnipresent bodyguard. He takes out a multi-colored hackey-sack (which, it should be pointed out, is not made of rubbery materials and is therefore not bouncy in any way) which he then ricochets off two railings before knocking the bodyguard unconscious. What follows the shot of him putting this plan into motion by hurtling the ball off-screen are three long and drawn-out shots that no small budget and no brief filming schedule can excuse. The first shot is the first ricochet, the hackey-sack bouncing off a railing. Of course, not being a rubber ball at all, it doesn't so much "bounce" off the railing as much as it hits it and then falls to the ground. The exact same thing happens in the next shot, which is meant to be the ball bouncing off another railing, but since the ball didn't bounce off the first railing (instead, falling to the ground) the subconscious mental connection that's supposed to form ultimately fails to do so and causes a jarring break in the immersion. At first, I thought he just threw a second ball, as if working on his aim before launching a third ball at the security guard. is that however poorly constructed and edited the previous two shots were, they don't hold a candle to the debacle that is the shot of the supposedly-ricocheting hackey-sack "soaring" in front of Matt's face, depicted by the camera slowly panning left to right, with the hackey-sack resting at the bottom of the frame. The last shot is the sack hitting the security guard on the back of the head, thankfully bringing the sequence to its much-delayed conclusion.

It may not seem fair to say an entire film, however short, is brought down by a singularly weak scene, and that's not the case. This is overall a very bad short film, with the rent-a-cop knockdown just one of several examples of poor editing, mismanaged production values, and a total lacking of clarity of vision by its director.

If I had to say something nice about the movie, I could only point to a single frame, a shot of Daredevil crouched upon a ledge surveying the streets below. It's a brilliant image, but it's not cinematic in any way. It's certainly a far cry from the shot of Batman leering down on an alleyway in Sandy Collora's much-acclaimed fan film Batman: Dead End. Granted, that director's demo reel had a bigger budget, and Mr. Collora had far more experience in filmmaking than Mr. Notarile, but both directors take a more down-to-earth approach and give iconic heroes costumes that don't look like they came out of Stan Winston's studio yet rise above the look of cheap Halloween costumes.

The costumes look rushed and try way too hard to resemble their print-media predecessors. To top it off, Bullseye's costume is this ludicrous compromise between his original blue bodysuit and the trenchcoat-over-tanktop ensemble from the movie. It just begs the question: why pattern 2 of the 3 total costumes after the comics, but pull back on the third? The only upshot to these costumes is that they probably make it much easier for the actors to move around in during the fight scenes.

The fight choreography was horrendous and the camera seemed to wrestle with the dilemma of either zooming in tighter and risk looking like it's trying to disguise the actors' relative inexperience or keeping the shot wide and expose all the pauses and breaks that out the fight as staged. Instead, the camera stays at this odd middle distance that cuts off heads and legs and tries to center square on people's backs.

This is where I field defenses of not what film is so much as what it is trying to be:

"It's not trying to be Citizen Kane."
"They're just students."
"They had no money and barely enough time."
"No one told them to do this."
"It's a labor of love."

True, but despite these shortcomings this film can't even rise to the level of mediocrity.

Yeah, I should probably read fully the interview where Chris Notarile details the 40USD budget (spent on "materials, metrocards, and hot chocolate") so I can potentially get a better appreciation for what this film is and what it's trying to do, but this ignores something fundamental about filmmaking and perhaps about art in general: The end result must stand on its own.

I may not be an executive for a major studio, and my own skills as a director may be questionable at best, but I don't think I have to be in order to make a sound prediction for Mr. Notarile. Much like his Maniac Cop short (which I haven't seen, but don't feel all that enthusiastic about remedying), he's exhibiting his skills to try and land himself a major directing gig. If I were looking through demo reels, trying to handpick a director to helm my latest project, this wouldn't even make it into a "maybe" pile.

I'm not going to say "I could make a better film" because it's a bit of a faux pas for directors (aspiring or otherwise) to bash each other's work. That said, I do feel like I should re-enact the hackey-sack scene and present the video as a sort of critique-in-motion. Maybe that's mean, but I just can't overlook the shortcomings of this piece, low budget or not. The bar on fan films was raised years ago, long before Batman: Dead End, and Elektra: The Hand & The Devil misses it by a mile.

Talking Art Deco Vase

I just had the worst fit of sleep since I got sick just before my return from Albuquerque.

It really hasn't been a great past few days. I won't go into all of it, except it's more than just being sick.

Anyway, I realized it's not going to help my application for a YouTube partnership if I'm not delivering on my promise of a consistent output of about one video per week, so on my way back from a quick drive across state today, I got a little idea for a kind of "filler" video that would, once again, take advantage of my new favorite little distraction: video annotations. I'd thought about doing an entire video made up of them, but this idea of doing a completely silent video (as opposed to a kind of annotated podcast) just kind of came to me, so I ran with it (after a restless bout of half-sleep).

An Updated Video

I'm not sure if this shows up in embedded videos, but I've recently added annotations to my 2004: Digital Backlot Cycle video. Because of the ten-minute time limit, I had to make a few cuts to preserve what I had, including full and proper credits, which I'm normally really good about making for all of my videos. Like I've said before, YouTube might be growing on me, and while I neither confirm nor deny this, I maintain that the annotations and notes are the best feature of video hosting on YouTube.

Oh, and an update on Revver. Revver has finally made my videos live after sitting on them for over 3 weeks. However, they might as well be inaccessible like they were before. Every time I try to access each video's respective page to get the "embed" code to post them in my various weblogs, I get their painfully annoying "500 error, or something broke" message. Maybe it's because of my connection, but that website is so clunky, buggy, and unruly that I can't access my videos to make changes like preview thumbnails (if I manage to select one, I get that stupid "500 error" message when I click "save"). I can't even enable comments because it won't let me check the box to say so. I'm starting to see why Channel Awesome (producers of That Guy With The Glasses) moved their content from Revver to Blip.tv. I mean, I really can't believe this site was ever popular. Maybe it's just current events and goings-on that have led to the site's current state, but really they can't even rise to the level of YouTube or Vimeo despite their claims to be superior services. The only reason I even gave them a chance was because a tutorial video about the Creative Commons mentioned them and I found out they have a Shared Revenue program for the advertisements they attach to videos. By contrast, Youtube has a Shared Revenue program, but it's only following an application process, whereby your channel is arbitrarily judged as worthy or otherwise, depending on how many views you receive as well as a number of non-specific criteria. Anyway, I think I'll just hold out for that instead of trying to get Revver to work for me. There's always Blip.tv, but I had such a problem figuring out that site's tools it just didn't seem worth it. I'm all for Open Source, but would it have killed them to streamline their interface? Maybe I'm just too dumb for it, but I really can't believe anyone uses that service with any proficiency.

Back

Okay, so I took down the Twitter module upon my return, but I didn't offer an update right away. Granted, I did write a rather long journal entry on my DeviantART page wherein--I think I overuse that word--I detailed my return trip (recently-caught cold and all), which I didn't feel like simply copying-and-pasting into Blogger (albeit I transferred part of it to my Gamespot weblog, which sees even fewer updates than Blogger). Anyway, I'm back and I thought I'd do a little "return to form" and give a few quick movie reviews. Granted, I'd already seen Watchmen, but my Dad hadn't, which I knew would make for an interesting experience. Movies by their very nature are meant to be self-contained and not requiring prior knowledge of certain subject matters, so it's nice to see how well adaptations fare on this front.

As it happens, he really liked it despite no prior knowledge of Watchmen whatsoever. Then again, I think that's the appeal; the characters of Watchmen, as many know, are essentially parodies of Golden Age-era Charlton comics characters, among them The Blue Beetle, a noted inspiration for Batman. I think Zack Snyder is a really under-appreciated director (previous film 300 is, without question, my personal favorite of the post-2004 Digital Backlot films). If it sounds like I'm pigeonholing or demeaning him by describing him as a "poor man's Paul Verhoeven" (extreme gore, social commentary, sensational sex scenes) believe me, I'm not; I'm genuinely looking forward to his next film, even if it's an animated feature about owls. I mean, even if that one turns out bad, at least I can look forward to Xerxes, the supposed prequel that Frank Miller is currently writing.

We also watched District 9, which had a few editing issues that make me question its nomination in that Oscar category, but otherwise was thoroughly enjoyable. Some people might be turned away by its seemingly light-hearted tone, but those people are missing the point. The film is very ambiguous, in that we're not sure who we're supposed to want to see win, and we're never sure if we're supposed to laugh at something or not. It's kind of like American Psycho; you'll laugh, but you'll feel guilty for it because every shred of decency and humanity in you will be crying out in horrified protest. The violence and gore in the film is on the level with something like a cartoon or a comic book, but the subtexts and social commentaries they frame are on the level with the likes of Good Night And Good Luck, Munich, Hotel Rwanda, or Three Kings. In short, it's a schizophrenic mess of excitement and intelligence... and it's beautiful. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a flawed diamond. It may not have much in the way of luster or clarity, but it'll still cut glass.
To expand on what I said about having problems with the editing, I mean the way in which the movie presents its own "reality" via various camera techniques. For starters, let me get it out of the way that I absolutely hate and despise the word "Mockumentary." It's just such a hideous word, and was so before it became dreadfully overused. What strikes me as strange about it is that I'd never heard the term before The Blair Witch Project and I honestly don't think anyone ever used it to describe Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, so I feel safe in chalking its origin up to the same modern yet ignorant newspeak that gave us "blog" "lawl" and even "pwn." District 9 ultimately presents itself as a documentary, filmed in typical "cinema verite" style with unsteady camera work and talking head interviews. In film, there are essentially three styles of narration, much like in books:
1st person. Films like Russian Ark, Cloverfield, or even Blair Witch Project fit this category, wherein what the audience is seeing is essentially what its main characters see. As such, the cinematography is distinctly "amateurish" and the narrative is ultimately of a limited perspective as we're only, at best, over the shoulders of our protagonists. This exemplifies what's known in literary circles as "metafiction," that is, fiction that is self-aware. The characters are aware that they're being recorded, and are in full control over what does and does not get seen, whether they turn the camera off voluntarily, lose power, or get eaten by some hideous monster attacking them.
3rd person limited. This one's a little tough to peg down because it's extremely broad and describes a great many films. In District 9, we don't so much get Third Person Limited in the sense of a disembodied film crew that follows the protagonist yet never interferes with the goings-on as much as we get a real live film crew that interviews various characters and even follows our "hero" (at the risk of spoilers, I'll just say that the "hero" is "anything but" one most of the time, and characters you wouldn't think to have any merit or values end up showing more humanity than 99% of the humans in the film) around on his little "errand" to evict a group of aliens from a slum that's risen up around their derelict ship. Think of it like the show Cops; there's a film crew but, while the officers occasionally break the fourth wall and talk to the camera, they go largely unnoticed but can only see as far as the officers they follow around.
3rd person omniscient. This throws out the distinctly "meta" qualities of the first two. No film crews following the characters around, no personal video records, no "found footage" or anything to indicate that what you're seeing is any kind of firsthand account of an event. The best way to think of this is "God's-Eye-View" in that the "camera" is invisible to the characters and unaffected by events unfolding around them, as well as being able to move anywhere and even to any point in time in the film's progression. Dramatic irony is basically gone as any event or occurrence is front-and-center, setting the audience a comfortable distance from our lead characters.
The problem I have with District 9 is that it is not very good at distinguishing between these different perspectives. It breaks the immersion when we have to stop and think, "Okay, is the FILM CREW shooting this, or is this just what WE'RE seeing as it happens now?" Given that the film starts off showing interview and archival footage, we'd expect more of a break when the "prerecorded" footage stops and the "presently happening" footage begins. Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows may not have been a great film, but it had a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek sensibility when it came to its own internal logic of truth and reality when it comes to film and video. It was not distracting or heavy-handed in its delivery, but not subtle enough to be missed or overlooked on even the most casual viewing.
I really hope District 9 doesn't get the Oscar for Editing, but I hope it wins the other categories. I doubt it'll win Best Picture; it's just not the kind of film that Hollywood goes for, it's all over the map in terms of its tone and message, and while that ambiguity is what I love about it, it's not what the Academy generally looks for.

Okay, that turned out longer than I thought it would, and now I've got to try and get some sleep despite not only still being a bit sick, but also getting a rather disturbing bill from the electric company which basically says that they did not receive my most recent payment. I'm going to call my bank later and see if that withdrawal was ever made. If it wasn't, then shame on the Post Office for losing track of an envelope mailed the last week of January. If it was withdrawn, then the electric company will be shown no mercy. Anyway, my roommate has forbade me from even thinking about it anymore, and to just give the bills to her mom for her to handle. This isn't the first time the company has royally messed things up for us. First, a ridiculous deposit they never tell you the amount of up front, followed by a surprise bill from my roommate's previous account that they basically sat on for four years and six months before making the connection between that old account and our new one. Ugh. Anyway, I've had enough of it; I'm seriously going to start looking into solar panels.

Housekeeping

First, as my old Video Art professor would say, some housekeeping: tomorrow I leave for Albuquerque. As such, my Twitter page will be my only means of making updates. I'm going by train, and that's for three reasons:
1. The FAA is run by lemurs who take turns driving nails into each other's heads.
2. Said nails are apparently made of gold, hence the absurd ticket prices and fees.
3. It takes as long, and costs at least the same as driving (if not less on both counts).
In any case, I'll have a lot of free time. Thankfully, I've got my unabridged audiobooks of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountainhead to pass the time, along with my PSP. I've got Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and I'm going to try my damnedest to get some enjoyment out of it this time.

After a little soul-searching, I decided to renew my pro account over at Flickr. At first, I was apprehensive for three reasons:
1. I'm not really making that many photographs right now.
2. I'm broke.
3. I was spending more and more time on DeviantART.

Now, however, I'm still going to be spending most of my free-time on DeviantART, but since I'm not going to renew my premium membership (unless substantiated third-party "permission issue" reports are given the same validity and treatment as DMCA reports), that resolve did give me a little financial leeway (enough for 24 months instead of 12). In short, I'm going to support Flickr because they know how to run their site and listen to their users.

Also, I found out that a non-pro account with Flickr is a little more restrictive than I'd thought; instead of just limiting the number of sets you can display and photos/videos you can upload within a month, they also limit your photostream to your 200 most recent photos. That was a real shocker to me; in fact, there was an honest moment of panic that over 400 of my pictures had been lost. Luckily, they are stored, and by pruning a few of my more recent images, the older ones take their place.

Flickr was sort of my first love before Becca-chan persuaded me to join DeviantART. My Nikon s50c came with 3 months of FlickrPRO, and I was hooked for the next two years. It's a good and strong community, if spread a little thin, and I really love how in touch the site's creators are with their users. I've harped about this before, I know, but I still consider the way they handled introducing video uploads to be an act of pure genius. It's just clear they put a lot of thought into it before going public, and were very receptive to feedback both before and after launch.

That's another reason I reinstated my FlickrPRO account; I want to help get the Video community more recognition. Although it's a nice video community, I feel like no one's really given it a chance and people are very slow to warm up to it. Most videos are lucky if they get more than 100 views, and I don't think I've ever seen a video with views counting over 1,000. So, I want to do what I can by uploading a few more videos (I posted my Pattern 158 animation there first before posting it and the rest of the trilogy here) to my photostream. I haven't decided what they'll be just yet. I'm just fascinated by the 90-second time limit; I take it as a challenge. It makes me think of how, in my video art classes at UNM, we'd have assignments with one, three, or five-minute time limits, and yet despite repeated emphases on length, someone would always have a ten or even thirty-minute "magnum opus" on the due date. Sure, we would still watch it and maybe even give a fair critique at the end, but it was obvious that, despite any praise or comment, what most of us really wanted to say was "Really? You couldn't keep THIS under 5 minutes? Are you THAT in love with yourself?" In our defense, it wasn't out of complete impatience; one of my really good friends always delivered these technical and artistic masterworks that were, by contrast, criminally short, like 10 or 15 seconds (including titles and credits). I swear, one time at least five of us simultaneously let out variations of "damn it" when one of his pieces ended. I can appreciate that a project can start as a small idea and then grow over time into something bigger, but when that happens, you're really supposed to put that project on the backburner or produce it in parallel to a new, but shorter, project.

Anyway, that's the news for now. I've got a few more journal entries waiting in the wings that I'll post once I get back around next Sunday.

How I found a song against all odds today

About 4pm today, I got hungry and decided to make some pasta. Nothing special, mind you, just some orzo with sun-dried tomato cheese sauce mixed with vodka sauce. I got the pot full of water and turned the oven on when I realized that we were completely and utterly out of soda.
"This will not do," I thought, remembering Thomas Pynchon's college diet of Spaghetti and Soda and being hard-pressed to think of a better combination of flavors than cola and pasta. I turned the oven off, and ran out to Walgreens to remedy this situation.

There was this song playing on the overhead speakers. While normally I tune this stuff out, this one particular song caught my attention as I really just wasn't quite sure of what I was hearing. It was entirely instrumental, and sounded bizarrely electronic. If I had to guess an era, I'd say circa 1970 given that the synthesizer being used sounded like a cross between a Stylophone and a reed organ. It reminded me of an old video game, like something that plays over the end credits when you beat the final boss. I just pictured this little starfighter flying over an ocean while credits rolled over it, all in beautiful 16-bit graphics.

I had to know what this song was.

Asking around would be pointless; I mean, it's not anyone's job to know what plays over the speakers in a convenience store, and I know I'd have hated to be asked that if I'd worked there (no way to know and even less of a way to find out). I pulled out my cell phone and started up the voice recorder function. It was notably inferior to my other dedicated voice recorders, but I didn't have any of them with me, so I'd have to make do. Luckily, the song had only just begun when I remembered that there was a surefire way to find out what the song was as long as I had a recording of it. I got a full minute before the next song started. When I got back home, I moved the file onto my computer. Strangely, instead of a .wma or even maybe a .wav file, it was something called .amr, which I could play back just fine in RealPlayer, but I wasn't able to convert it to anything else. Anyway, I went to Yahoo! Answers, a place known for the "What's this song?" question. I uploaded the .amr file to my website and put the file's link in the question. I pressed 'publish' and went about my normal browsing business while my question gathered answers. About four hours later, I checked back on my question, very surprised to find four answers in so little time.

Sadly, it seemed .amr is a file type that cannot be stored. All four answers said the link was bad. I clicked on it and instead of getting a "Download now" prompt or something, I got an error message that .amr is a file type that is not supported by Freeservers. I thought, "What does that matter? It's just data. I'm not trying to play it in the webpage, I'm just trying to download it." I deleted the question and sulked. It was really disappointing because I'd have this little sound file on my phone that I could only share with people I met in person. One thought that occurred to me was playing the sound back on my phone and recording it with one of my voice recorders. The problem is, because the cell phone's voice memo function was barely an afterthought to its construction, the song was way too faint to be heard, and thus re-recorded properly. Playing back to human ears was manageable, but to another microphone would be impossible.

So, in desperation, I went to wikipedia and just looked up "instrumental." At first, I wasn't expecting anything beyond a simple description, "songs without vocals" or something pedestrian like that. Instead, what I got was a list of instrumentals that made Billboard's Top 100. The thought occurred: "if an instrumental was popular enough to be on the overhead speakers of a Walgreens, it must be popular enough to have been on the Billboard Top 100." There were only about 20, and after the first one proved to not be the one, I skimmed the list and came across:

Telstar, by the Tornados.

"Just sounds right, somehow," I thought. I clicked on the link to the article and within two paragraphs, my certainty rose: "This novelty record was intended to evoke the dawn of the space age, complete with sound effects that were meant to sound 'space-like'." Again, more enthusiasm of being completely on the money rose, and that's when I saw the sample button.

It was the song.

So, what did I do? I hopped right over to Amazon, dropped a Lincoln shy of a Washington and within seconds, I had the song that I'd heard over the PA system of a Walgreens four hours ago, a song with no distinct or recognizable lyrics, and an indescribable instrumentation.

It's funny how things work out like that.

Rampart in 3 Parts Has Gone Live

If there's a single positive thing I would ever have to say about YouTube, it's that I actually really like the annotation and interactivity features. Some people use them to append factual updates to their v-logs, which is very useful given the time it can take to edit and upload a video, not to mention what can transpire after it goes live. One of my favorite YouTube videos is an interactive game that uses stop-motion animation of Street Fighter action figures. It's simplistic, but it's beautiful for it. I'm using the middle-of-the-road feature of annotations where I simply put links to the subsequent and previous entries in the series at the beginnings and endings of the videos. That said, I'd really love to do more stuff that takes advantage of the interactivity features. What gets me is, despite the influence of YouTube, no other video-sharing site has anything close to this. DeviantART has a feature for their videos where you can pause the video and leave a comment at that particular point in the timeline, but that's the closest thing I can find. I would have thought blip.tv would try to trump YouTube, but they don't seem interested.

I really don't know what to think. It's like I said in one of my Twitter posts: Could YouTube be growing on me? O_o

Honest Theft

You know what really gets under my skin?
The notion that to admit to a wrongdoing is to be absolved from its consequences.

Here's what I'm on about:
My roommate tells me she found this really cool piece of World of Warcraft machinima on Youtube. I watched it, and admittedly, it was pretty damn good, very nicely crafted with the sole blemish being its horrendous soundtrack (I honestly paused the video just to make sure it was really the video's sound and not just Windows Media Player running in the background). Normally, the only machinima I've really liked is Red Vs. Blue, otherwise I consider machinima a pretty low art form, especially when it just uses existing game graphics instead of modified or otherwise re-skinned ones. That's not what bothers me: what bothers me is the person who posted it. Not only were they not the video's original creator, but they actually provided links to the original author's YouTube channel (which is here).

Think about that:
Someone created and uploaded a video to their channel.
Someone else downloaded or captured the video and repost it to their own channel.
They then post a link in the info box to the original video in the original author's channel.

Now I know what some of you might be thinking: "But they're giving credit, at least. They're not claiming it as their own." Okay, granted, they're admitting to what they're doing, but consider this:
1) Why re-upload it when it's still available and live on its original creator's channel?
2) They may not be profiting, or getting any real undue attention, from the video, but those view-counters are going up and up. Each and every one of those views really belongs on the original author's page.

If you want to spread word about the video, there are dozens of better ways to do it besides downloading it and re-uploading it in your channel. Grant a favorite to the video; it'll appear in your channel. Put the video in a playlist. Write a journal entry about it. E-Mail the link to your friends.

That's what irks me. People take something that's not theirs, copy it, present it, then shout from the rooftops that it's not theirs, as if they're doing the original creator a favor.

"I don't own this." Then why do you have it?
"I didn't make this." Then let the person who did decide where it goes.
"I own nothing." Could have fooled me.
"Give him creds." While you take his page views?

Page views may not have a real monetary value, but they are meant to be EARNED, nonetheless.

Just glasses and utensils now

This has not been a good day, and it's only been morning for about four hours.

I'll leave out the goings-on with my roommate's irritability due to a mishap at her doctor's office resulting in a lapse in receiving her medication. That's been going on a few days and it's mostly tolerable.

This morning I received some equipment I ordered to help with recording my videos, including a Behringer USB mic. I've officially had it installed for about 40 minutes and I'm already thinking about sending it back.

Here's the problem: when I use my webcam to record one of my v-logs or newer reviews, I use Windows Media Encoder as capture software. The main reason for this is that it lets me configure audio and video separately; I can use one device for video, and one for audio (That way, I'm not at the mercy of the webcam's awful built-in mic). Everything seems fine, I set the audio settings to the USB mic, and the video settings to the Ipevo, and set the recording format. Once I hit start, however, I get an error message:

no specified device driver is present 0xC00D0072

This is just impossible as I've installed all necessary drivers and, prior to starting the recording session, the program acknowledged the device's presence and allowed it to be configured. I went to Behringer's site to verify that I did indeed have the most recent driver. I found little to no support articles about the C-1U and ended up having to send an e-mail detailing the issue with WME. I've gotten the obligatory auto-response that it's been received, but a full reply is going to take about one business day. So, that's up in the air.

Then there's the mic itself. It may not work with WME, but it does work with Sound Recorder and Photo Story 3 (though the latter gives me error messages to the contrary despite recordings). I figured that while I'm waiting on a response from Behringer, I'll see how the mic sounds and get a feel for its sensitivity. Ideally, I'd like to have it sitting on my desk next to my webcam so it's not visible in the frame. As a sort of control for the experiment, I just put held it like a Karaoke mic and recorded that way. It sounded brilliant; one of the best microphones I've had. However, when I tried recording again with it on the desk and next to the webcam, it's a whole new story. I should have guessed this might be the case given that putting it on the desk makes a distance of about 2 or 3 feet between me and the mic. That said, it's still really disheartening that I basically have to lean into the mic in order to get the best sound. I'd have to hold it almost directly in front of my mouth while I'm recording, which also means I won't have a free hand if I have to do a review. Me holding a microphone while recording with a webcam would just look horrendous, and it's just not what I got this mic for at all.

So, after days of waiting, and on top of everything else, I finally get my equipment to find that, even if I can get it to interface with my software and recording system, it's completely useless and impractical.

At least I got some of the dishes done before the UPS guy showed up, so the day hasn't started off to a fully-rotten start.