At least I do have some fans out there

I got some messages on YouTube from a guy called MarsDarinder who said he liked the way I wrote and animated The Writer's Nightmare. He wanted to do an interview for his web page, so I said that would be cool and if he liked what I did on YouTube then he should buy the DVD when I get it up on CreateSpace.

So hopefully I'll have at least 1 sale of the DVD and it's good PR to help build a word of mouth viral buzz for for the story. Also it's good to get feedback from someone who shows an interest to help improve it. It shows the degree of how much I was able to convey and what parts I still need to work on to be able to communicate the story effectively.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Would you like to do an interview?

Would you like to do an interview? I am a huge fan of The Writers Nightmare and would love to ask you a few questions for my website

Thanks for you time and I can't wait for your next fantastic project!

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Would you like to do an interview?

That sounds very cool, I'm putting the whole story on a DVD if you want to get one of those. The next project I was planning was continuing "An Angel's Destiny"

Let me know when you want to set up the interview

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Interview

Thanks so much for doing this interview Argon.

Q#1 Episode 9 and 10 have to be the most memorable part of the series for me. I love the song selection, how the words match the lyrics and of course Peter fighting pan is amazing. What inspired the battle?

Q#2 could you elaborate on the Dream Police?

Q#3 Whats the Gyrotwister?

Q#4 Can you summarize the overall story?

Q#5 It's sad to watch the story end but I'm excited that you mentioned in a previous e-mail that your continuing "An Angels Destiny" is there any details you can clue me into ahead of time about that?

P.S. I am interested in ordering a dvd but I'm broke right now so I will get back to you later about that:)

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Interview

Q1: The musical theme started in Episode 8 with the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Fly on a Windshield then continued in 9 and 10 with The Carpet Crawlers and The Chanber of 32 Doors from the rock opera by Genesis since the whole album was about illusions on the way to enlightement and I wanted Pan to do something symphonic that Peter and Cyan would eventually be able to recognize to break free of the illusions.

The battle with Pan was inspired by a conversation I had with someone back in the 80's about a book by Jack Chalker called Demons of the Dancing Gods that had a similar kind of thing that I wanted Pan and Peter to go through to show Peter could recognize that on the Astral Plane the rules about matter and energy were different.

Q2: I got the name for the Dream Police from the Cheap Trick song and they are the interogators for the Illuminati. They do more high tech torture by using a brain probe device to scan your dreams and obtain the info they need. That's why Peter and Cyan had to take their minds away from their bodies to avoid it.

Q3: I didn't go into much detail about the Gyrotwister in this book because it was a sequel to my other called "Memoirs from Sideways in Time" but briefly it's a time/space machine that also can go across parallel worldlines. It's a whole better than the flux capacitor they used in Back to the to the Future (especially as you saw it didn't keep running into things like in that movie) for more details on the Gyrotwister and to get a copy of Memoirs you can go to the download links for the plot summary and the other novel on my blog

Q4: Basically it's a story about how who is writing the story is relative to where you are. Steve Nelson writes about Joe, Luke and P.L.A.N. in one worldline and I about about Steve Nelson in another. Someone writes about me in a different timeline sort of like that movie Stranger than Fiction. Steve finds this out when Peter and Cyan drag him into a rescue adventure.

Q5: I have 6 episodes of An Angels Destiny on YouTube right now but I did it a bit differently since I had the animation and music here but I had the animation with the text on Revver and I had a Flash page with just the text of the novel and both videos on it but I lost the sever space the web page was on so now I only have the 2 kinds of videos online until I can get some more web space.

I was at the part where Minerva and Chris having failed to get in touch with Odin at the Norse Temple go to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to relax and Chris finds out that Minerva still has the power of her halo, all she has to do is focus and find other ways to tap into it.

P.S. You still have time before the DVD is available since I still have to mail it in and get it proofed. Hopefully it'll be ready to order from Amazon.com and CreateSpace in a couple of weeks. I just wanted to give you a heads up that you would be able to get it on DVD soon.

I did want to ask you about the comic text format, since I've had others that said it was hard to follow the story reading them like that. How much difficulty did you have with that part?

I wanted to do it with voice over but I couldn't get enough people together to record all the different parts so I was kinda forced to do it that way.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Text format

I think it works really well. It goes by a little faster than i usually read, yet the characters still have so much personality and overall I liked the pacing a lot. It's definitely one of if not the best computer animated movies ever made certainly the best written.

I've watched the whole thing twice now and plan to watch it again soon, I also watched that episode of An Angels Destiny you attached to your last e-mail and the terrain and character art is excellent plus i saw the revver.com link cool stuff.

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Text format

You said it was a litle faster than you can read, would it be easier to just pause the video so you can read it? I could lengthen the time the text stays on the screen but would that ruin the pacing?

Would it help if I had the YouTube version to show flow of the action and the music, the Revver version to show how the text relates to the action and the full text of the novel to show the details and the emotions that covered all the bases together?
I put all 3 in a blog so you can see it all in one place together

Let me know if that makes the story easier to follow and if it gives more depth and dimension to it. Thanks for all your compliments and I really appreciate your feedback so I can improve it.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Pacing

I did pause the video at times and even re-watched a couple of the deeper plot points to understand them better. Maybe just another couple more seconds on the longer paragraphs here and there would help.

For An Angels Destiny I think they should all have text, maybe simplify the text for YouTube and tone down anything in the text you think you might get flagged over.

And it's cool that you have the longer version of the text on blogspot I'm gonna read those tomorrow and re-watch the episodes to get a better idea of the story. No problem I'm happy to help

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Pacing

Well how about breaking the longer paragraphs into more than one text balloon so it would be easier to read, would that help? That might be less strain on the pacing

How did you find the idea of a computer with a surfer dude accent? Did S.T.A.R. provide some good comic relief with his use of the improbability generator? (Did you recognize the hisory of the device?)

Did you understand the concepts and principles that the Gamemaster was trying to put across? Did I convey the ideas for the Grande Game well enough to be grasped?

In Angel's Destiny, I'm sort of going from the other end instead of lower to higher, it's from Higher to Lower but both show the evolution through stages of consciousness.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: The grande game

Yeah smaller text balloons would help. I loved the surfer accent very original idea too. S.T.A.R. did make me laugh with the improbability generator but I don't know the history behind it, what would that be?

I think I do. The gamemaster was saying that karma is like a video game where your scored at the end based on your choices. The Omniverse split in two because of the choices people made to be un-enlightened. Is that about right?

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: The next part of the story

I really liked the post of the interview you did on your blog, thanks a lot for the exposure and all the feedback you've given me.

I'm having a bit more of a delay with the DVD than I thought, since when I mailed it in to CreateSpace it didn't get delivered until the day before Xmas and they've been very slow picking up the slack from the holidays, hopefully they'll mail me the proof copy to be approved next week and it'll be ready for you to buy then.

I did get the next part of the story for "An Angel's Destiny" up on YouTube and the full text on my blog. Let me know what you think of it.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Thanks

Thanks for making The Writer's Nightmare i look forward to the dvd release!
I hope you make a ton of money off of your art and even if you don't i'm still glad you had the inspiration and followed through with the hard work needed to pull off something so great.

I've watched Angel's Destiny a few times and read the text story too I love it very cool stuff.

P.S. deleted you last e-mail by accident before i got a chance to finish reading it so if I didn't cover anything please let me know!

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: RE: Thanks

Did you get the part where I added some new stuff to Angel's Destiny?I took your advice and added to the time the text stays on the screen, let me know if it's easier to read.
I put the full text to the new part on my blog also I'm working on the next part where Chris shows Minerva how to use new ways to tap into her powers and she get in contact with Odin.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Angel's Destiny

It's definitely easier to read and the blogspot.com text always helps flesh out the plot. It's the best part of the story so far. Very cool!

The tremendous odds of fulfilling the epic of the Impossible Dream

I had been thinking that I actually could finish the second book they way I planned, since the tragedy of the failure of the love story would be balanced out by the accomplishment of finishing the Naked Angel Presentation.

That leaves room for the big finish in the last book of the trilogy, since when I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End I was amazed at all the plot twists and how it kept building the action bigger and bigger until it was finally all resolved. Not in the way it was expected but also leaving room for a fourth movie.



The trouble with ending the 2nd book that way is that it would most likely demand a more involved task in the 3rd book. Since I had already had the experience of a normal relationship, it would set the bar for an extraordinary one. The odds of pulling that off of is worse than winning the lottery in each the state in the same year.


It would be the true essence of the Impossible Dream, since even the ones I've heard that accomplished great relationships, haven't been able to sustain them. Richard Bach got divorced from Leslie Parrish so did Billy Joel from Christie Brinkley. Even Ken Wilber was only with Treya a year before she died.

Part of the trouble is a lot of women are confused about what they do want, that's what the cliche "Nice guys finish last" applies to since a lot of biology makes the mistake of strength confused for stability. Since strength is no substitute for maturity in the long run it is hard to maintain. There was an example of that in the movie Bedazzled when Elliot wished to be more "sensitive" because it was what Allison thought she wanted.



Admittedly the example was exaggerated for dramatic effect since Elliot was so overly sensitive that no gal would want that and the strong guy was almost dragging his knuckles on the beach like a caveman so that would be hard to take also. But the principle is sound and it's a paradox that will decrease the odds of a relationship surviving.

Most likely what it would take to accomplish that Impossible Dream would be to integrate those paradoxes so that they are all included and not seen as separate parts in different people. The trouble with that is it would require both people to realize all the stages in all four quadrants.



The only way to do that is like Ken Wilber was talking about being a Bodhisattva in Hell, you have to be ultimately enlightened then come back to relate and help others to be enlightened also. As I was saying the highest scores of the Grande Game are for those that aren't stuck at any stage of consciousness, but can move through any of them at will.

I just wish I had a better ending than a tragedy

But I guess not every story has a happy ever after. It's a shame since I used to believe in Fairytale endings and that's the way I had the first book in my auto-biography "Seeking Resonance" end with my finding a soulmate to marry. I had thought that Krys did believe in romantic endings also, she said she did, but I guess that couldn't last since it's very hard to live up to that kind of thing over the long haul.

I was going to do the second book more about the adventures we had, but it seems like more of a tragedy like the movie "Shakespeare in Love" where he has to lose her and write about her after. But even Richard Bach couldn't seem to sustain his relationship at the soulmate level after he wrote One which is what I wanted to emulate in the 2nd book

We both loved that movie, but she never believed me when she worried about things working out and I used to tell her that "It all ends well" since I guess the answer "I don't know, it's a mystery" wasn't enough for her. I suppose that's a lot more dramatic than I had planned but as they say "artists have to suffer to create great art" and the situation does lend itself better to be able to "write her well."

The thing is, it does depend somewhat on what side of the screen, you're on. If you're the one at the keyboard developing the plot for the characters to deal with or if you're like in the movie "Stranger than Fiction" where someone else is creating the plot for you to follow.

Some of it is circumstances beyond your control since you can't make choices for other people and I've been wondering if this is the 2nd part of a trilogy though.

I always figured that the attitude of "That's all Life is, is a series of down endings" was a bit shortsighted, since even if Empire Strikes Back did end with tragedies, it was only the middle of the story and the climax was still to come. Maybe that's the moral here that it's not over yet, I might be eligible for the Fickle Finger of Fate award now but there is still more of the story to be written, just that Krys won't be in it.

As John Lennon used to sing "Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna knock you off your feet" the lies Krys told are going to come back and bite her in the ass. I found out the depth of her lies to me from reading some of her messages on Yahoo to Farin.

Then I made sure that Farin knows about what she was trying to hide from him since I thought it only fair that he had more of the facts so he could make a informed decision instead of being kept in the dark.

I doubt she'll get away with her betrayal of trust because from the conversation I had with him, he's not going to be able to put any trust in her since he won't know if she's capable of being sincere or how long it will be before she finds someone else and does the same thing to him.

Even if she was able to convince him otherwise when she got there, and they do live together for a while, the reality of day to day living will most likely take it's toll since the odds that she has let go of her false expectations and neediness are slim.

The demands of his job as a chef and having to be gone for long periods of time is not going to be able to keep up with her demands for attention. That and the rift created by his need to have children and her inability to be responsible for them are also going to drive them apart.

So it might be that when she is faced with the regrets of her actions, it'll be like I told her that she'll be like in the movie "Chasing Amy" after we've moved on and she'll have to live with the loss of what she had. That might finally give her some maturity instead of all the selfish behavior from being an only child.

I did warn her when she started getting involved with Farin that it was unavoidable that one or all of the three of us were going to get hurt and the odds of winning her "Lets make a Deal" with Fate had very poor odds.

But she maintained "I gamble with my life, never my money" so it was her choice to reap what she sowed, that's the essence of the tragedy it seems.

I have been thinking that it's not worth getting involved with someone else again since I'd probably never get closer to a soulmate again. As they say "Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone." and that she was the only thing that gave my life meaning.

But thinking about the second part of a trilogy does give me hope and I'd hate to leave the story unfinished especially since I saw Karen Effiel agonize over the ending she made for Harold Crick so that she changed it. Also when I think of how it inspired Shakespeare to greatness.

After all I didn't end "Seeking Resonance" when Margy died since that wasn't the place I wanted to stop. I waited for a way to go out and found it was when Krys and I got married. So this next book might be less like "One" than I had planned, but I should still wait and work toward an ending I like better.

Hopefully I'll learn more and be more careful to do a better job so the adventure and the romance of the fairytale can be sustained in the 3rd book of the trilogy.

Perserverance might be the key

It doesn't look like I'll have my dentures in time for Thanksgiving since they got delayed in fitting them so they work wasn't finished. It's a shame for the turkey, but at least I still can eat the stuffing, mashed taters and rice. At least they are making progress on them and seem to be going out of the way to be certain they will fit right when they are done that's the main thing.

I was watching a DVD from Disney about what happens to Aurora (The Princess formerly known as Sleeping Beauty) and Princess Jasmine and both stories were about perserverance and how important sticking to it until the goal is reached.



It did somewhat inspire me to keep on with my portfolio and I did make some more progress on it but I didn't get it all together yet. I have found some new vitamins that seem to help me focus better so hopefully I'll be able to make more progress on it now

I was hoping to have another place to publish my books

I was reading on HappySlip's blog the other day about how she's going to be selling her videos on DVD from a site called CreateSpace and it sounded like a good idea for me to try so I checked it out.

The good part is that they have no set up fees and they price things like Cafe Press where they set the manufacturing costs and let you set you price above that for your profit. They are owned by Amazon.com so they have a big market to distribute to since that website gets a lot of traffic and if I can get my stuff on there I might have a better chance of selling my stuff.





If I able to put the whole story on DVD with a lot higher quality video than is possible with Revver it would be understood better and I'd be getting paid up front for the DVD instead of trickles from advertising.





It does mean that I would have to work on how to design then DVD, but I got some DVD authoring programs and I can do some cover art for them. Since it's harder to follow spread out on my blog like this, I made another The Writer's Nightmare: Revver Version that has only 3 episodes per page so it's easier to load but still easy to keep the episodes in order





I put a version that has the YouTube version of The Complete Writer's Nighmare Animations that has better music and is all in one page from beginning to end with links to both in the Personal Links on the side of this page.





So it might be a better deal to DVD on that site with some work to get the files ready and burned on a Master DVD then design the art work for the cover and disc but it might be worth it.

They also do book publishing with some better options than Cafe Press in that they off more sizes and they also do color pages with would be better for graphic novels and they'll give you a free ISBN code to be able to sell it more widely. Also Amazon is a very popular site for books so I'd been getting a lot better chance of it being bought by more people.





The drawbacks are that it only allows 100 pages in color pages and they make you pay for a proof copy before they'll approve it for sale. That's somewhat like vanity publishing and somewhat like agressive quality control. While I think being able to check a proof copy is a good idea since it means less mistakes being made, I don't like the idea of being forced to buy a copy before they'll be able to sell it.





I was going to revise my graphic novel since the begining was to low resolution and I'd made a lot of changes in the way I represented Cyan's character in the animation so condensing it to 100 pages wouldn't be such a big deal. But since AFAIK they don't accept PayPal or money orders for CreateSpace it's not going to be that easy to be able to order a proof copy. It might also be a good idea to try it out on a more traditional novel that has more text than graphics like "An Angel's Destiny"

Plus some more insight...

... into how Ken Wilber's theories hold together from being able to get some more of his books at Barnes and Noble. I got Integral Vision which helped show the whole thing easier than in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality





It's good for an overview





I also got Eye of Spirit that give more foundation and evidence for his theories





That meditation gives a lot of the principles shown in the book

I was able to get some good stuff...

...as long as it lasted, hard to say if I'll be able to get any more from Barnes & Noble before next summer if at all.





I've put off doing some more episodes for a while until I get my portfolio done so I'm holding it at episode 20





I put the Dark Angel series DVD on my wishlist the 1st thing after I saw that Die Another Day video that had the footage but I wasn't able to get until now since the size of the PayPal wasn't enough before





The 1st season was pretty good hopefully the 2nd was too





Since they kept cutting out our favorite parts in Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back I got it on DVD so we could watch it uncensored the way it was supposed to be seen.



I saw the opening scene from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on the Muppet Show and it inspired me to get the whole thing on DVD

1 step foward....

... for every 2 steps back doesn't make muck progress but at least it's something.

I've been able to get a design for my portfolio that Dan approves of so I'm making some small strides on that but it doesn't guarantee he'll let me into that student design firm or that other employers will pay attention to it.

That point about the lion tamers still might apply, this is just a step toward trying to find out which view is correct and putting the best foot forward in making a good impressiom in order to get a more positive outcome.



I finally got episode 18 approved on Revver, it must have been that I uploaded it too early in the day and it fell between the cracks when they got to their office and they never noticed it. So after the weekend I waited until the middle of the day and uploaded it again so they would see it this time.





I found out that they were listed under the failed uploads in my dashboard on Revver so I went and deleted those and uploaded episode 18 and 19 again





It's hard to follow them when they're scattered around so I figured I should put them in another blog so they would be in the right order from beginning to end

Maybe my Mother was right

I am beginning to feel that the example my Mom gave of the guy who wanted to be a lion tamer when he thought an anteater was a lion was right, she used that analogy for decades about my being an artist and I always resisted that belief but my track record and all the evidence has pretty much supported her point.



I'm not sure if it's the the stress of trying to be creative and the effort of trying to raise my skills up to a professional level while I'm fighting health problems or that I don't have the talent or the skills necessary for a career graphic design anymore than an accountant would have to be a lion tamer.

I've been in my second try at the Portfolio class for a month now and I haven't made any progress on my own stuff just got some general ideas for it. Dan hasn't liked any of my designs for my mood board and it's hard to say he's wrong about it since all the employers I've sent my stuff to haven't liked it either.

I haven't been able to figure out if that means that I should develop my skills more or that I just don't have what it takes to be a successful designer. Since if I can't even satisfy Dan as a boss with my designs when he tells me what he doesn't like instead of nothing at all or just a flat out rejection without any reason. Then it doesn't bode well for getting a more advanced job, or even getting into that student design form that he started as a stepping stone or a reference for a etter job.

It might be that my estimation of my talet or skills is the anteater and the actual acceptable standard it takes to have a successful career is the lion.

Reaching for the Fountain

I was watching The Fountain last weekend and it had a lot about death and rebirth in it.



It's easier to understand from the trailer but you don't get the full effect unless you see the ending



Maybe I should put more of those ideas in when I do the scenes with the GameMaster in The Writer's Nightmare.



As soon as I get to that part



In around 8 episodes

Celebrating Labor Day

I figured that since I had 4 days off for Labor Day that I could take a break from my portfolio and do another episode of "The Writer's Nightmare" animated comic videos.



I got the 9th done and part of the 10th where Peter and Cyan have the showdown with Pan the Goat God.



I saw another video with Ken Wilber where he explains some of the ideas he put in his book Integral Spirituality.

It looks like it's Gut Check time

And as Darkwing Duck says "Let's get Dangerous!" since this semester I'm going to have to step up my game and really focus on my portfolio to try and get it to a professional standard to see if I can get a job in this field.

At least it would make a good pre-visualization

If I was able to get someone in a position to make a movie about the "Writers Nightmare" at least I could use the animated comic as a better method to get the ideas across than just a text screenplay. Even if an audience doesn't seem to be satisfied with them by themselves without a voice over, they could be useful as moving storyboards.



I guess it depends on who was willing to produce the movie. If Square Enix was doing it then it could be done all as CGI, if Lucas Film was doing it, it would probably be better to do it as a mix of live action and CGI.

Another thing they might be useful for is to put with the Comic Book on a CD to sell at Cafe Press.



It's a shame I don't have access to enough voice actors to be able to do it with a voice over. Dawn Cody hasn't come through on her offer. Everytime I ask her if she's recorded any of the dialogue she tells me she'll do it in a few weeks, then a month goes by and I ask her again and she says the same thing. It doesn't really look like she's going to follow through at this point so I'm stuck with the comic style chat balloons.



I've gotten more episodes of "The Writer's Nightmare" animated and uploaded than I have of "An Angel's Destiny" probably because the former was already written as a comic book and the latter I'm still stuck on the 4th Chapter.



It looks like I'm going to have to design a new web page for "Angel's Destiny" since I no longer have space on Aragorn's server, so I might as well design a web page that includes both that and "The Writer's Nightmare" so it's a more intergrated page to see them all



Hopefully the references to the Akashic records Eris and Pan won't go over a lot of people's heads

Kinda like Compound Interest

Seems like after you build up a foundation on Revver, the easier it is to make it grow. I've made twice as much in June as in all the months before since I have a base of videos now that I've added to. I was finally able to get Pink Floyd: The Wall DVD that we've been wanting with the money I earned last month.



Lots of great imagery in that movie and some classic symbols of neuroses and pyschoses. I also put another episode of "The Writer's Nightmare" on there since I found the model of the ship I had in Poser to be able to continue.



I added some foley sounds of a starship bridge and ships passing to help the sound track. The trouble seems to be that they have such a delay in processing the revenue. I have $100 pending and only $16.50 processed hopefully they'll get a move sinc there are only 10 days left in the month to be able to get a deposit in my PayPal account over $20



It seemed like when I uploaded the 2nd episode of "The Writer's Nightmare" that they took some notice and processed some so I uploaded one about the GameBots in Love to see if they would do some more, we'll see if that works again.

Some new thoughts on Transformative situations

I was reading some articles by Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen, they were talking about Integral Spirituality and it gave me some ideas about what to do about the problem I was having in the Free Will to go through transformative situations, the chapter after Minerva's conference with Odin and how to deal with shadow elements.

When I made the analogies to "V for Vendetta" and "The Bitter Suite" episode of "Xena" it was more that they didn't give their full consent so that any benefits they gained from them would be tainted by the duress. But the other side of that is if you consent to do what a teacher asks then isn't that consent enough, even if you don't know all the methods that teacher is going to use? The ego defenses aren't going to allow any circumstances that are going to allow it's hold to be broken so some amount of misdirection is going to be needed to get around those barriers.

I think that trust in the one that is going to lead you through the situations of transformation is necessary and that is what pulls through the stress that the ego goes through to accomplish transcendence. In the case of V and Evey I do think that trust was abused by the degree of suffering and not worth the benefits that the tranformation achieved, probably because it was also flawed in V.

Revver Paying off

I guess it mostly takes time to build up a library of videos since it seems the more you have the more they generate revenue.

I uploaded a video to Revver with angels, demons, princesses and dragons.

One with spiders and snakes

and one about the Promicin stuff also I'd have more earning it's keep.



It took since last November but I finally was able to buy something with the money I've earned for the videos. I went to Barnes&Noble and ordered a copy of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, by Ken Wilber and paid for it out of my PayPal account. It was cool that they shipped it in about 4 days.

The Haves and Have Nots

That's what most power struggles come down to since though that have all the resources want to keep control of them away from those that need them also. It has worked through the ages to provide a lot of drama in plots and USA Network is using it for this season of The 4400 TV show with the masses and the government on different sides in the battle for Promicin which is heating up into a civil war.

When I checked the web site I found they had the idea for an online ad campaign similar to what they had for the Snakes on a Plane movie. I thought it would be cool to participate in it so I came up with a story to post on Promicin Info and a video for YouTube.



Hopefully it'll get more exposure both for the show and for me.

Choices

There are a whole lot of them and not all of them are simply either/or like Tony Blair was trying to tell people, it's not as easy as Should I stay or should I go? Unfortunately the choices he made weren't very popular since the people he trusted and that trusted him made some poor choices.



Through experience hopefully we learn from the consequences of our choices methods of making better choices. That doesn't always happen though, as George Santayana has often be quoted as saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The lessons of the 60's seemed to have been ignored, and we're having to face all of those tough choices again. I was very puzzled by that until I found a possible way to explain it by what Ken Wilber calls Boomeritis a pathological state of consciousness that particularly afflicts Baby Boomers. Boomeritis is characterized by relativism, narcissism, and an aversion to hierarchy.



Part of what the problem was in order to break the bonds of conformity the held the culture in sway beforehand was that people fell victim to narcissism so instead of protesting the war, civil rights and other freedoms for equality sake, a lot of peopl did it for selfish reasons, so that they have to face those choices again since they didn't learn from them the last time.

Boomers do happen to have a particular and, of course, unique historical role in this development. As Ken Wilber writes, "The Boomers, to their great credit, were the first major generation in history to develop this capacity. That's a very important point.... The Boomers moved beyond the previous cultural stages of traditionalism and ... scientific modernism ... and pioneered a postmodern, pluralistic, multicultural understanding.... And that is exactly why the Boomers spearheaded civil rights, ecological concerns, feminism, and multicultural diversity. That is the 'high' part of the mixture, the truly impressive part of the Boomer generation and the explosive revolutions of the sixties...." These revolutions, as partial as they have been, changed forever our sense of human possibility and refashioned the contours of human identity."

That was the part of the positive choices made from the lessons of history, but the part they are doomed to repeat are the narcissism, naturally. Wilber is certainly not the only one who has noticed—how could one not?!—that the boomer generation, which unself-consciously and even proudly wears the appellation "the Me generation," is more than a bit stuck on itself—and has left something sticky on the generations that have followed. Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Robert Bellah and colleagues' Habits of the Heart have beautifully and poignantly documented how self-involved and isolated we are. Concerned critics have despaired at how this inflated self-involvement has ripped the social fabric and, grasping to bring order to the chaos created by this unparalleled selfishness, they have often, futilely, called for a return to traditional values. Yet these problems can never be solved by looking backward. The world is changing at warp speed. There is no way back nor is there a "back" to go to. Wilber does what no other critic of the cultural scene has done: he not only elaborates in agonizing detail the corrosive effects of "that strange mixture of very high cognitive capacity... infected with rather low emotional narcissism," but he places it within an evolutionary context and, in so doing, points to a possibility for humanity beyond boomeritis. The solution to boomer narcissism cannot come from looking to the past but only in realizing the demand of the future.

So that some of the choices become somewhat of a paradox like that of the Bodhisattva in that Bodhisattvas take an extra vow of not attaining Enlightenment before all sentient beings have achieved complete Nirvana. But in order to balance things out you have to do both, work on own enlightenment and everyone elses at the same time

Part of that balance is having a good circulation of energy in the chakras that allows you to make better choices, since most of the poor ones come from being stuck in a single perspective with the others blocked

Anodea Judith wrote the best book about balancing your chakras, adding harmony to your life with them and now she produced the best video detailing that.

One of the harder choices how to use the fire in the solar plexus chakra since unless it is tamed and channeled it can burn.

Keeping the liberating current balanced with the manifesting current is a series of delicate choices.

But as Ken Wilber was talking about once you've gotten a more balanced viewpoint and past the "aversion to hierarchy" there is a priority that helps focus your judgement and refine your choices. The more views and perspectives that you can include, the better your choices can be.

Happy Chat

I was able to catch Happy Slip in one of her online chats today. It was a lot of fun. It’s amazing that she can keep up so well when the text is going by so fast, 6 web cams showing and phone calls coming in. I was very impressed with her multitasking and humor.

Her latest video was about Dancing With The Stars and I’m not sure but at the end of it, I think she meant what Casey Kasem used to say, "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

I’ve followed DWTS from the 1st season and instead of a being picked to dance with Apolo Anton Ohno she'd be paired up with a professional dancer since she's such a well known celebrity. Someone like Tony Dovolani or Maksim Chmerkovskiy She could’ve give Apolo a run for his money and probably even delivered a knock out to Laila Ali

It wouldn't be the other way around even though she looks a lot like Karina Smirnoff with a better sense of humor, they’ve all had a lot more professional training, for example, Karina is Five-time U.S. National Champion, World Trophy Champion, Asian Open Champion and Ranked second in the world. Even though Christine is funnier and more talented at comedy, she'd have to go through the training involved in the show to compete at the dancing.

It would've been just as funny if she did the video with the roles reversed the way the show is set up though, since I'm pretty sure they have auditions for the stars also. Maybe she could've imitated a few other stars that failed too.

I uploaded a video for YouTube with a soundtrack of Lady by The Little River Band, I guess it wasn't as popular a song as my last one. I suppose their is no accounting for taste right?

The Spirit of the Game

I've been trying come up with the rest of the dialogue for the game bot video that I was going to call "The Spirit of the Game" because it's based on the idea of the Ghost in the machine that there is something beyond and beneath just the programming

I'm up to the part where they want to exercise some free will to follow personal goal rather than the programmed ones they were designed for. Competing and eliminating each other in the game kinda prevents a long term relationship.

Moderation in all things

I had to upload my music video I did for MSP10 this semester to YouTube again since I got an email saying "This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Cal IV Entertainment, LLC claiming that this material is infringing:" I checked on that company and it's the agency that represents Faith Hill. They must've been upset that I used her song in my animation.



The thing is that YouTube is so scattershot in how they enforce those notifications, since I saw the actual music video with Faith Hill in it still on there and several others with that song in it. They only delete certain ones with certain tags and only on the day they get the notification from the company that doesn't like it. It's not like it does much good to stop anything.

It's not that I object to Faith Hill or Cal IV to making money of the song, but it's a bit fanatical to try and squeeze every nickel out of it that way. It's not exactly the same purpose or performance if I used it in a different way than they recorded and sold it as. If you're going to go to that extreme, than you should pay the people that came up with the words she used in the vocabulary or the notes she used for the melody since none of that was original either. After all Breathe is an 8 year old song, it's already won 3 Grammy awards and been #1 on the charts so I think they've already made all the money they're going to off of it a while ago. Trying to be tightfisted about any further use of it comes off as kinda of greedy and not appreciating any new exposure for it.

I'd like to get paid for my work too, but I'm not so narrow minded as to think that I was the only one to think of the idea and no one else has the right to do anything like it. If someone took parts of my videos and changed them sufficiently to use for something else I wouldn't be surprised they claimed as their own as long as their was value added to it.

Loose Ends

I finally got some pics of my artwork about Peter Max when it was on the door.

I think it looks pretty good, the only part I was confused about was that I thought that the room number and the class that was being taught it it was supposed to be part of the door design, that's why I went through all those rough compositions with different fonts and text placements. I guess it was too hard to get people to integrate the text into the design with specific doors in mind and get them approved. Shows I shouldn't have busted my ass to get it done before he changed his mind about it.

It was a nightmare to get printed because of the resolution and the size really bogged down the memory on the computers when I converted it to a .tif file and putting the 16' x 20' to take up the empty space on the paper made the file over 500 megabytes.

I had to redo the file about 6 times because it keeping getting the wrong resolution or the wrong size or the pixel depth got set at 16 bits instead of 8. Then when it was printing the rollers caught on it and made some marks, it was a good thing the marks were at the top where it was going to be cut off.

When it was going to be laminated, there was some trouble since the laminate they were using on all there others before it was thicker and they had run out of it, so I got some wrinkles and pulled off a bit at the bottom. The surface of the door had some weather damage with the plywood bubbling a bit that caused some bumps.

I got another video in the Revver Film School since I plan to make more money with them this summer. And I also put another on YouTube.

I haven't finished all the dialogue for the GameBot video but I'll have a lot more time to finished next week when I don't have classes for a few months.

Winding Down

The semester is almost over and I've made some progress on some things but not as much as I wanted or was supposed to. I did get a lot of the videos and murals done, but I didn't get my portfolio updated as much I had hoped.

The illustration I did to represent my idea of the kind of art that Peter Max does look good on that door and since it's right in sight of the traffic flow from the parking lot it should get a lot of exposure. That should get me some notice at least, I don't know if it'll do any good for my career but it at it's something I can show off to people that might hire me.

I got some more ads done for Current TV for Sony and they just added a new one for Loreal Men's Expert Hydra-Energetic so I can work on that over the summer, but I'll probabl have to send it in on CD since that Video Egg only works on a Mac

I got an offer from Dawn Cody to do organize some people to do voice acting on my Angel's Destiny videos so that should help to get them on Acceptable.tv especially since she can get the people from Channel 101 involved. That would go a long way to get them on my side and since they were the most influencial group on Acceptable TV getting in good with them would help a lot in getting my stuff on the show for the next season on VH1



I did a couple more music videos on YouTube that got a fair amount of views and links to other sites so hopefully that'll get my stuff more know through viral marketing. That way people will start to recognize my style like they do with other popular people on YouTube.



I've been making more money on Revver and I think I straightened the situation with PayPal so I'll actually be able to use it to get check or buy stuff online with it. They got lots of great stuff on Amazon.com that I could transfer the money I make on Revver. I might even be able to use PayPal to be able to finally sell my stuff from Cafe Press on Ebay. I'll have to check that out and see if I can. That would be a lot better since I haven't been able to get traffic to the Cafe Press site and I don't want to make the investment of buying the products from there and selling them myself until I know it'll be worth it. Doing it through Ebay would be a lot better if I already know I have a seller lined up so I can do the transfer through them without any cost to me.