Category: Obsessions

This goes out to my posse in the 402.

Okay. As you probably know, I want to see a movie called Brick. Brick is ostensibly coming to the Baxter Avenue Theatres, but not on the release date (May 26) promised by Brick’s distributor, Focus Features. That’s because May 26 is part of Memorial Day weekend, when Baxter will be busy filling seats for movies that “anyone has heard of” and that “make money.”

The evidence suggests that Baxter now has a print of the film, but is holding off on showing it for the aforementioned financial reasons; it doesn’t help that Focus decided Brick wasn’t doing well enough to justify more publicity spending, and is now recycling prints by moving them from one theater to another instead of making new ones. If there’s no perceived market for Brick in Louisville, Louisville may not see Brick at all.

Every time I’ve called the management offices of the Baxter to confirm or deny a revised release date, they seem a little startled that I’ve even heard of it, much less that I know it’s scheduled to come here. One guy actually asked “how did you hear about that? A rumor? Where did you hear the rumor?” I would like to change that. I would like them to pick up the phone and go “are you calling about Brick too?”

So: if you live near Louisville and you have any interest at all in the movie, it would be neat if you called the management office at (502) 456-4404 and casually asked hey, Brick? Is that coming here? Oh, do you know when? Cool. No need to call if you don’t live around here, and no need to wheedle, threaten or cajole. Just ping a little data against the collective consciousness of whoever answers the phones over there.

Don’t all do it today, either; pick a time within the next week or so and put a little note in your datebook. People on the LJ feed can call dibs on days in the comments. Whatever. This whole operation is very casual, except if you don’t do it you don’t love me.

I really, really want to see Brick. I am going to print out some flyers and hang them down Bardstown Road. I am going to continue talking it up here until you’re all sick of it. I swear, I am going to make an event on Facebook.

I would like you to see it with me, and I’d like us both to have the chance.

The last sentence of this post is sarcastic

Today I used my camera to take pictures of the parade! I got a really perfect shot of Maria which you can never see, and a whole bunch of pictures of inflated mascots, and some inexpert pictures of confetti. I underexposed about everything, but that’s what Paint Shop is for. I also discovered that sometimes the autofocus loves me:

Balloons going away.

I like having a camera! Perhaps I will make my pictures of the parade publicly available. I understand there is a site called Flicker where you can put them on lines.

It is fun to make pictures

Third monochrome image post in a row! This one actually serves a purpose: it’s a very rough (and lazily photoshopped) mockup of what I have in mind for the cover of the Anacrusis book.

Brendan Adkins:  Ommatidia

Image credits: the human eye came from a really nice BY-SA macro shot called fóvea, and the bug eye from a BY-ND shot called drosoph. The latter makes me unhappy, because I’m clearly deriving from a NoDerivs work, but I can’t find the photographer’s contact info to ask permission. If you are the photographer, please write me! Oh, and also write if you have a strong opinion about the cover.

I bet you were hoping for another 400-pixel-wide grayscale image from me today! You are so lucky.

I am obsessed with a particular shot from the first-season finale episode of Veronica Mars (notice how much restraint I have been using in posting about Veronica Mars? NOTICE). I am also obsessed with dark-tinted monochrome images. So here’s a desktop! (All links are zipped BMPs.)

Logan says come here

1600 x 1200

1280 x 1024

1024 x 768

800 x 600

Messing around with my lightbox and some of the more striking images from the Brick trailer. This isn’t quite what I want yet, but it’s getting there:

A girl in geisha makeup in front of a broken mirror, shielding her head.

The same image, reduced to three colors of construction paper.

Click for the 100k version.

There’s probably a Photoshop filter that does this automatically, but I don’t care. I’ll make a wallpaper or something out of this later, and I have more like it that I want to do. It is such a PRETTY trailer. Also, apparently it’s not coming out in Louisville this Friday after all, so I’ve got time to kill.

Sumana and Leonard are getting married, and that is joyous and perfect, and is it okay if I’m a little bit thrilled to see the particular format in which they told us about it?

CONGRATULATIONS, LEONARD AND SUMANA!

You can spell cataloging with or without the U

Hammering on the theme of my inability to escape YA literature, LibraryThing has apparently added a new statistic: the average publication year of your books. I haven’t catalogued everything I own quite yet, but still, did it have to be 1996?

When I get a chance to sit down and do it, cataloging on LibraryThing is one of my favorite, most meditative activities. I compare it to Scrooge McDuck taking a swim in the Money Bin.

One of the hilariously demented* developers who works on this floor has recently posted a sign in his cube, which reads “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” I, being much cleverer and more handsome,** immediately thought “ah ha! This human has printed a corrupted version with the incorrect word order! The correct phrasing is ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.'”

I was so certain of this because my version fits nicely into an iambic pentameter, while his doesn’t (you can make it fit, but that involves stretching a short vowel to a long syllable and vice versa). But it turns out neither of us was right: the Divine Comedy translation which spawned the phrase, by H.F. Cary, actually goes All hope abandon ye who enter here,” which is much better and still in perfect iambs. Bah! Iambs are fickle! That’s why I support dactyls. Want to hear more about the Pro-Dactyl Initiative? Contact your local poet laureate today.


* Developer may be neither hilarious nor demented.

** I am very handsome and clever.