I don’t think anybody reads this blog — it’s right there up on my X profile and I’m sure maybe a good 5% of mutuals who’ve clicked on my page have clicked on my website, only to find Worldle results, bad poetry and some old GIFs that I really like. I don’t know what the buffer is – I am productive enough on a day-to-day outside of Discord and Telegram and X and all that. I’m working on more projects right now, I suppose, than I ever have been before. I just won another award for my short film last night; to which end this would allow me to secure funds to keep making more or land a gig working big bucks for fatcats, I have no clue. But as of a week ago, my fiance wasn’t halfway pregnant with our second child. And we came to Texas so we could buy a house – somewhere. I am genuinely thinking of leaving the country altogether, not because America sucks now but because I just don’t want to play this MMO anymore.
I’ve been working on some pretty cool projects – MAGICIAN CITY DISKS, and then some other stuff I probably shouldn’t yap about yet. But none of these are enough. America seems to be on a collision course with Social Credit, and while I may not be nearly as cooked as basically everyone else on the net – I don’t hold very othordox views.
A friend of mine says a Great Flood of Leaks is imminently upon us. Within months. I think I’ve filled up the net with enough junk – innocuous if not benign-yet-bizarre content – that any of my Modern Day Transgressions would go more or less unnoticed compared to everyone else.
I’m mostly just tired of waiting around. There are definitely some other projects I’m interested in and some investments that could really bolster my portfolio – but then, what?! I pay 75% haircut in taxes and get priced out of any high-trust community unless I win the fkn lottery or pull some kind of elaborate scam.
Today is my son’s second birthday. It’s nice, but I think it’ll be another year before he can even conceptualize such a concept. All the presents must be nice.
Attached is my idea for a new film movement: Dogma25.
Will this help me in any way? Probably not. I don’t follow “indie filmmakers,” every “experimental filmmaker” I’ve met is even broker than I am and Dogma95 itself wasn’t a particularly successful project. One of the few things I have going for myself, currently, is the relative success of a single silent short film I made on my phone on the small festival circuit (although I did submit to next year’s Cannes for a very agreeable sum – even the small-circuit festivals will charge as much as $85/submission; I basically submit to as many cheapies as possible, and have spent orders of magnitude more time and $$$ in submission fees than on the film itself). Dogma95 worked because it had von Trier and Vinterberg come out the gate with two bangers; I have no such connections or affinity to European filmmaking in general unless their last name is Noe or Carax.
Magician City has been interesting, but it’s also hard to “sign” like-minded artists because — guess what? Everyone wants to run or is already running a netlabel. The only difference is that MCD is a *disk* label; this includes any kind of multi-media which can be put onto a non-rewritable CD, DVD, floppy, VCD, Blu-ray or CD-ROM. What I’d like to do is have supplementary visual materials to be played alongside the music, or vice-versa. I want have endless loops and hypnotic, pulsing optical illusions and strobes and stop-motion sequences, all pushed through various free downscaling and upscaling software/sites to give it a distinct painterly effect which is fairly unique and aesthetically pleasing.
A long-term failsafe has been to get into scoring game music; my office is currently in utter shambles but all the pieces are in one place for the Ultimate Studio/Laboratory. I just haven’t felt like trying to get a rig going and building another desktop; I can’t help but feel like I’ll screw something up and be further discouraged. I have utterly no clue if my motherboard is cooked or not; it should still work, there are no broken pieces or little chips dangling out like baby teeth*, but it still gives me the willies to even think about having to buy just one more $90 component because some PCPartsPicker site gave me bunk info WRT: compatibility. I mean, I couldn’t even find my motherboard on both of the sites I’ve looked at so far, and it’s not very old and definitely not obsolete. We bought it during COVID for Emma’s gaming and school PC, and the CPU was installed improperly, so… Who the hell knows.
You know, when I was too young to have any insightful thoughts at all really and was fairly self-destructive, my contention was that I wouldn’t make it past 25 – for whatever reason. Seven (7) years later, I am on two-feet and probably more active than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
So, you know… Things could be worse. I just wish I could wake up and get to work and have a core group of like a dozen other guys to either delegate, collaborate with and report to, bouncing across the whole spectrum of various skills I’ve picked up ever since middle school.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to take the blog seriously, which will net me zero (0) most likely. But keep in mind, I spend so much time sending huge walls of texts (or “newsletters” as I call them) to friends and a good majority of the time they simply never respond. I was reading a thread about online dating in the early 00s, and I found it remarkable how Clever and Cool and generally Long-Winded people were back then; they would send four-page love letters, CD-R mixes. They would express themselves in such maximalist ways. I’ve always been the type to read between 2-5 books at a time, and right now I am currently cheating on my third re-read of Infinite Jest with the new Werner Herzog memoir which just seemingly dropped from the sky like a week ago. I always found IJ to be overly twee and needlessly maximalist; I now appreciate it much more, and find it to be a relatable piece in general as a maximalist myself.
Just put Ivo to bed and after a tremendous round of fussing he is out cold after five minutes. Tonight, I will be cleaning and reading and working; hopefully I can squeeze my synths&samplers&mics into the Big Picture but I’ll be very happy if I can get a basic working desktop running regardless.
*BABY TEETH is the tentative title of the very first Dogma25 film; a road trip feature-length which incorporate Emma’s pregnancy and my oral health issues. I just don’t want it to be a road-trip comedy so much as it would be a “car broke down 100 miles out from Corpus Christi, my debit card melted in the backseat and I keep seeing my Mexican doppelgänger.”
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