Category: Writings

Only through the brilliantly disconnected web of Wikipedia could I discover one of the most fascinating articles I’ve ever read.

The article, titled The Process Church of The Final Judgment, is about a splinter client cult group that broke from Scientology in 1965. The Process Church (as it was called) came to be identified as a Satanic cult, for their worship of three Gods: Jehovah, Lucifer, and Satan. They were also (more recently) linked to David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer.

The part that fascinates me about this article comes in way of explaining how the group changed throughout the years, eventually resulting in the removal of its founder. It seems that their focus has strayed quite a bit.

To wit:

Further changes in both name and focus followed, and the organization eventually became the Best Friends Animal Society, which is now one of America’s best known animal welfare rescue groups.

That’s right. From Satanic cult to animal welfare rescue group in just over 20 years.

Oku on odosketch.

This goes to show just how obvious it is that I’m not the illustrator behind The Suckered.

This week is a big one for birthdays: Cari Gregg, Aunt Kelly, Lindsey, and Holly Davidson. If I weren’t exhausted, I’d write something specific to each of them. Something like, I’m sure Bryce’s birthday present to Lindsey was a murdered hobo. I’d also imply, without stating outright, that my Aunt Kelly is fifty years old. Then I’d spend the rest of the time trying to come up with clever things to say for the other two, and they probably wouldn’t be as good.

That said, I’d do all that if I weren’t exhausted right now. As it is, I’ll just say, “Happy Birthday,” and go on my way.

In junior high, we students got our first taste of performance competition. It’s been called by many names, but we called it “oral interpretation”. I can’t now recall the exact categories; perhaps: dramatic, humorous, and poetry, but I may be wrong.

I remember that the most difficult part was picking a piece to perform. I poured over the works we had to choose from, even asking at one point if we could write our own. I was told you can sort of do that in high school. That category, it would turn out, was called “original oratory”.

I remember practicing a piece with the oral interp instructor. The piece used a regular foot and meter, and it even rhymed. As I began to read the lines, the instructor stopped me. She informed me that, for competition, poetry is not supposed to be read that way. Read it by the sentences; don’t pause at the line endings, and don’t make it obvious that you’re rhyming.

Honestly, I was put off by this. It seemed unnatural and contrary to read poetry that way. It felt like an attempt to read poetry as if it were prose. Wouldn’t this do a disservice to poetry? I asked all these questions of myself, but I did not ask them aloud. Instead, I did what I was told, and I reread the poetry, apparently to her liking.

I mention this because I just read some poetry. I mention this because I still think about how odd it felt to read poetry that way and how it runs across my mind whenever I come upon poetry. I think about that, but then I compare it to my own poetry. When I write poetry, I am very much aware of the line endings. That break, that step, is as much an important part of the poem as the meter and foot. It equal in importance to the words themselves. Why, then, shouldn’t someone read poetry for the lines?

I, deliberately, choose the life of each line. To read poetry ignorant of its physical structure is as graceful as somersaulting down a flight of stairs. The steps are there for a reason.

Can’t beat a day at Valley Fair. Especially when the alternative is a day at the nursing home.

Galactic Mail from Asterokid on Vimeo.

Galactic Mail is a project I made along with my friend Jonathan Vuillemin aka Motraboy. It was produced by The Mill in 2008. We used XSI Softimage as a main tool. Check my website for more infos: asterokid.com

Materia from Oscar Santamaria Rojo on Vimeo.

Trabajo de motion graphics y procesing para curso de motiongraphics idep2009

Save The Words!

Happy Anniversary, Holliweather.

Mike Billeter
Because I would need him to explain to me what the other rappers are saying.

Holli
Because I love her.

Bryce

Tony

God
Duh.

Tupac

The cable television industry is broken.  Certainly, it’s not as broken as the economy (DOWee!), but it’s based upon a single logical fallacy, that viewers watch channels.  This is simply not the case.  When is that last time you said, “I’m going to watch a little NBC“?  People don’t say that; people say, “I’m going to watch America’s Got Talent because it’s what I consider quality programming.”  (Okay, maybe no one’s ever said that, but you see my point.)

It was, with this in mind, that I began a spreadsheet.  One by one, I searched out the shows we felt we must keep up with: Lost, The Office (the last episode of which had me in tears, I laughed so hard), Grey’s Anatomy, Jon & Kate + 8, Scrubs (if it has another season), and Project Runway (for Holli).  The goal was find legal, online ways to view all of our shows.  This mission was made exponentially easier by the networks themselves.  Both NBC and ABC offer full video versions of some of their popular shows online.  This means that, as long as what you watch is popular, you can find your shows for free.

Unfortunately, there were two casualties to this process: Project Runway and J&K+8.  For Project Runway we’ve managed to find another, temporary solution (and the show’s almost over anyway), but jayenkayplusay seems to have no decent online presence.  We’ve decided that we can purchase VHS tapes for Carol to use to tape the show for us.  However, with us being short a VCR, this means we will only be able to watch the show when we’re there.  If anyone has any other ideas regarding this dilemma, please leave a comment.

EDIT: After doing some research for this post, I discovered that TLC has added JK8 to their video library, boasting entire episodes of the latest season until the end of December.

After doing the research and adding up the potential cost of this new method, we sat back in awe.  The results were astounding.  We discovered that we could save around $37.90 a month by getting our television online.  iTV was our winner.

It’s been two weeks since we made our choice, and so far it’s going well.  Also, we’ve been doing it a lot more.  And by “doing it” I mean reading, of course.  Holli has turned into a voracious reader, even though her work hours are getting closer and closer to full-time.  I split my time between reading, Half-Life 2, and programming/research.  It’s much quieter, and I feel better reading than I do watching TV.  With all this new reading time, I have a goal to read and remove enough books from my “library” to allow us to get rid of a bookshelf.  There’s one shelf in particular that could use a chucking.

If you’ve been considering getting rid of TV, be ready to fill that time with something.  Do some research to see if your “must have” shows have an online equivalent.  Our goal wasn’t to get our TV for free, but to get it online somehow.  Even if you have to pay $1.99 or $2.99 per episode, that cost will still be much lower than paying for a full cable subscription.

Have any of you done this?  Do you have any tips for would-be switchers?

We are constantly encouraged to think big for our clients.  Whether it’s an exciting new campaign, or way to grow their business outside of advertising, we try to bring ideas that paint upon a broader canvas.  As Jack says, leaders think about what happens after what happens next.

It would seem that Google is elevating that idea times ten (a hundred times).  Project 10 to the 100th (10¹⁰⁰ is the mathematical notation of a googol) is in part a celebration of ten years of Google, but it is also a community project.

From their project’s Why page:

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.

Will it work?  Will great ideas be unearthed?  What big ideas do you have?