Saving Council is a comedy/drama about one small town, but it’s a movie designed to encourage and inspire all small towns - and all big cities and all Americans - across this country...in much the same way that Franklin Roosevelt used the song Happy Days Are Here Again to lead the country out of depression.
More meaningful to me, however, is the fact that I was born and raised in Council, Idaho.
That fact aside, another thing that is interesting to me is the producer’s tactic for raising funding for this film. He’s utilizing Kickstarter, an on line funding platform for creative projects. I first learned of Kickstarter via film maker, J.A. Steel. My relationship with J.A. is no more than her “friending” me on FaceBook and that she lives near by. She put out a casting call for her current project, Blood Fare and I turned on a “real world friend” and he got the part. Yea for him.
J.A. Steel didn’t raise a ton of money through Kickstarter, but she apparently raised enough. The point being that I think this concept is a wonderful idea especially if you can create a kind of viral buzz via social networks, word of mouth, etc. That’s the approach that J.A. Steel took, and that the producers of Saving Council are as well.
-- the international ban of chlorofluorocarbons in the 1980s that were shown to damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Some scientists today say that closing the hole in the ozone over the Antarctic could have a troubling side effect.
IF YOU’VE ever joked about your boss being a robot, stop laughing, they soon could be. A web service has launched that allows software algorithms to automatically recruit, hire and pay workers to do a wide variety of tasks.
“You wouldn’t even recognize this place back in
the 70s… you’d have been tripping over hypodermic
needles, and fighting off the hookers back then. It was nasty,
man.”
The Federal case against the so called Hutaree Militia seems to be getting off to a bad start.
Federal authorities touted the arrests of nine members of a Michigan militia as a pre-emptive strike against homegrown terrorists, declaring at an initial court hearing that the suspects with “dark hearts and evil intent” wanted to go to war against the government.
Five weeks later, prosecutors are scrambling to regroup after a judge questioned the strength of their evidence by ordering the so-called rebels released until trial and saying they had a right to “engage in hate-filled, venomous speech.”
I’m thinking that if the Feds put as much effort in to vetting out potential Islamic Jihadists as they do “right wing, home-grown threats”, we’d be a bit better off.
Could extraterrestrial aliens really invade earth?
The human race could be devastated if aliens were to learn of our existence and venture to Earth, warned British scientist Stephen Hawking on Sunday. But how could extraterrestrials really invade Earth?
For the record, it doesn’t get much better than a good alien invasion book.
CoffeeCup‘s HTML Editor 2010 is impressive. In fact I really like it. A few years ago I was really into HomeSite, but since then it was sold to Macromedia who then sold out to Adobe. Adobe did away with it in favor of integrating it into their Dreamweaver product.
Shame.
CoffeeCup’s HTML Editor is a great fit for those who are missing HomeSite.
Besides making me want to hurl about 30 minutes in to the film, there are other reasons why 3-D sucks.
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets.
Combined with a film as horrid as Avatar, and it teeters dangerously close to a capital offense.
Because so many people lack the intellectual capacity, or, perhaps intellectual honesty, to get it. Peggy Noonan touches on this.
Now, Arizona has drawn a line in the sand just north of the border:
But the larger point is that Arizona is moving forward because the government in Washington has completely abdicated its responsibility. For 10 years—at least—through two administrations, Washington deliberately did nothing to ease the crisis on the borders because politicians calculated that an air of mounting crisis would spur mounting support for what Washington thought was appropriate reform—i.e., reform that would help the Democratic and Republican parties.
Again, I seriously believe that those on the wrong side of this argument are either intellectually incapable of getting it; trapped behind some absurd feel-good idealistic world view, or they are being intellectually dishonest. Of course the lack of intellectual honesty falls mostly upon politicians hoping to leverage an open border policy to their advantage as exemplified in the above quote.
As far as an example of intellectual inadequacy, one need look no further than Britain’s Gordon Brown:
On the campaign trail this week, he was famously questioned by a party voter about his stand on immigration. He gave her the verbal runaround, all boilerplate and shrugs, and later complained to an aide, on an open mic, that he’d been forced into conversation with that “bigoted woman.”
He really thought she was a bigot. Because she asked about immigration. Which is, to him, a sign of at least latent racism.
Believe me, that sort of ridiculous logic is rampant here in the USA.
It is a fact that unchecked, illegal immigration cannot continue in to this country without grave consequences. It’s really as simple as that, and goes no further than that, especially in to the realm of “race”.
I’ve always written prose in Word, but lately I’ve been having issues with keeping a handle on plot threads and the outlining process, and integrating the whole thing in to an editing process. Really, it has been a real pain in the ass. Because of this I’ve done some searching for some kind of organizational software solution without spending money. Yeah, I know, I’m cheap.
I came across yWriter and, so far, it seems pretty cool. Oh yeah, it’s free.
I, being the simpleton that I am, have not really delved too much in to yWriter as a full on solution, but I have adapted some of its features so that they are very good solutions for me. Basically, yWriter is a program for the novelist. It’s set up for organizing chapters and scenes within chapters. It also allows you to keep character bios and backgrounds. It’s real strength though is when it’s used as an outline tool. Well, that’s for me. It probably has some other strengths, but I just haven’t goofed around with it enough.
For my situation it’s been very handy. Here’s my situation. For the last couple of years I’ve been working on a novel told with short stories. Basically a collection of loosely, and sometimes not so loosely, connected short stories that in their entirety tell a larger story. Yeah, not very original, but it’s a perfect solution for me; being ADHD and all, but that’s a different topic of discussion. What I do with yWriter is treat each story as a chapter. Each chapter is outlined and the characters are fully fleshed out. Throughout this project I’ve taken different scenes within a story (chapter) and moved them to another story. With Word it’s a real pain in the ass. With yWriter it’s simply a matter of dragging and dropping. It automatically updates the outline as well. When it’s all done I’ll be able to export the whole project to Word and then print that puppy out.
Being that I’m by nature a pretty straight forward kind of person I still do almost all of my writing in Word and then import it to yWriter.
So, as I use this little gadget I’ll keep you posted on how it works for me. If I don’t, well, blame the ADHD.
Although no one noticed at the time, the Earth was almost hit by an asteroid last Friday.
The previously undiscovered asteroid came within 8,700miles of Earth but astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before it made its closest approach.
Its orbit brought it 30 times nearer than the Moon, which is 250,000 miles away.
I must admit that I absolutely love “End Of The World As We Know It” scenarios. It’s a guilty pleasure I suppose. No, I don’t consider zombie stories as part of a EOTWAWKI scenario. I simply consider zombie stories stupid.
