I Kill Spies

“Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines”

I like the art- just the bare minimum.
Web link of note: Spammusement
(At http://spamusement.com/)

This site is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.

Web link of note: Disturbing Auctions
(At http://disturbingauctions.com/)

Aaargh I have way too much footage to sort through, and still I know stuff is missing.

I’m losing track of all this stuff!
I haven’t even started sampling yet… I know that once I get stuff into the computer, it will be a lot easier for me to edit, since that is just the way my brain works (and sort of the reason I am so into film). However sampling every bit of footage into the machine is totally out of the question! I have to whittle it down a bit first!

• OPTION ONE: Notebook keeping a physical set of notes is what I started doing.
  It’s good to have an actual phyiscal page associated with a given tape. However now that I have a bunch of tapes annotated, and not all are in order, it is getting a little confusing. Also, there is no fast way to shuffle the entries or sort them by topic.
  
• OPTION TWO: Excel I absolutely need to sort by topic. How about in Excel? The rows heights are a little distracting- I”m going to have to resize each one to display the notes I write! Also I’ll have to turn on text wrapping for the descriptions, because otherwise the notes will flow into the next cell. It’s very tempting to write a “quick” PHP server application for this, backed by MySQL, but we have to stay focussed here…
  
• OPTION THREE: Plain text (TextEdit) this eliminates some of the insanity of using Excel. However my sorting problems aren’t much better than the plain notebook. Although I would be able to search the documents…
  
• OPTION FOUR: HTML text would let me link all the documents together. Hmmm. But then I have to write HTML pages for every entry! More infrastructure. And we get the server problem again.
  

Okay, I think I have a process going now. It’s sort of a little of everything.

First I watch the tapes and take notes in the notebook and/or the laptop. The notebook is capable of greater detail, and is physical- if the notes are only on the laptop, I print them out.

I summarize the shots I think are important in Excel, using some keywords so I can easily search for shots.

When these entries are converted to Excel, I copy the rows for a given tape into its own file, for later reference., and so I can easily double click on a file and see what was in the tape.

A great summary/introduction of the pentagon crash conspiracy theory… makes you wonder…
Web link of note: Pentagon Lies
(At http://www.muchosucko.com/flash/pentagonlies.html#Main)

Stephen King often supports young filmmakers that want to get a chance to make a King movie. He has sold the rights to about twenty of his stories for $1 and a copy of the finished film.

Web link of note: Stephen King’s Dollar Babies
(At http://www.liljas-library.com/dollar.html)

Cute web cartoon- I like the messy zany style.
Web link of note: PockyBot
(At http://pockybot.com/)

I am preparing to edit my first documentary- taking a few days off from work so I can have a long weekend.

However I have erred a little on the side of overambition in this case; shooting over 50 hours of footage for what I intend to be a 1 hour piece, or at most 90 minutes.

So how do I sift through all these interviews? The action parts are easy to edit; I can watch them at ten times the speed and mark them and sample in big batches. But the interviews? I am going to have to take notes on all of them and then fit them into my outline.

I was reading an analysis of The Invisibles and they mentioned a common experience reported by DMT users- a globular alien presence from outside reality tries to teach you a new language.

Very interesting.
Web link of note: DMT
(At http://www.brainmachines.com/dmtv2.html)

When I was young, I associated collard greens with colanders. But not the coliseum. I’m assuming it’s because of the word similarity. Or maybe I saw them on TV in a colander?

Oddly enough, I’ve eaten tons of crazy things most people have never heard of and some things many don’t consider food, yet I’ve still never had collard greens. Insane.

Sega-produced robotic cat.

Note the slick marketing: the name “near me” is more precisely “NYA- MI” (ニャーミ). You might translate this to be “meow-me” (the noise a cat makes is “nya nya”).

On a related note, the Pokemon character “Meowth” is “NYASU” in Japan. How about that.
Web link of note: Near Me
(At http://segatoys.co.jp/nearme/)