More WWIII Propaganda Posters

Louie from Brian Moore on Vimeo.

“Louie” is a documentary I directed with a couple of people in my Documentary Production class at Emerson (Neight Brescia, who masterfully edited it, and Minting Zhao who produced). Louie Evans, as many bostonians know sometimes (and very well) as “the guy who rides the tricycle making the siren noise”, does just that—he rides miles upon miles around Boston on his tricycle every day.

Other stories from the documentary that couldn’t fit, from his ‘trike getting stolen to the many mileage computers that he’s burned through over the years to the 12,500-member-strong Facebook group dedicated to him, could easily fit the running time of a feature.

Back Bay Bicycles, where most of the interviews take place, pays out of pocket for all of Louie’s repairs and tune-ups (thousands of dollars now), so if you’re in the Boston area, I strongly suggest giving them business. Plus, their student discount is pretty awesome and the guys in there, as you can tell, are pretty cool as well.

Holy shit this game is addicting. Try to beat my score of 115… I’m sure most of you can. I’m keeping track of my high score on Twitter with a #flightcontrolhiscore hashtag.

Grab it on iTunes

(Interesting that my last two posts have had something to do with flying and enjoying it… Odd.)

While talking to my friend Eoban about Virgin Atlantic, he brought up how much he loved flying them. About a year ago, I was lucky enough to fly Virgin America, Virgin’s latest spin-off company in the states. While their ads have been covering Boston lately, I feel like I got sort of a sneak peek into the service, since I was flying before even their first birthday. I told Eoban it was my favorite airline I’ve flown.

Aside of the mood lighting, the nice music in the bathrooms, the awesome entertainment systems, and the high-quality (for an airline) food, possibly the one thing that stood out more than anything was the safety video. Check it out:

Whoever created this safety video did an excellent job. Why? Because, they were able to add humor, sarcasm, and interesting graphics into something that is always boring and mundane on other airlines. Through light jokes and eye-catching animation, the creator was able to make the viewer laugh, stay interested, and learn without making them uncomfortable or uneasy. I am certain that the ability to make a flight safety video funny without belittling the importance of emergency procedures isn’t easily found.

The result of this? Increased knowledge of the viewer.

I bet that if you did a study and had people watch this versus the traditional safety video, they would retain much more knowledge from the former. The other airlines should learn from VA, but maybe they’re just too boring in every other way to get the picture.

UPDATE: With a little bit of research, I discovered that the safety video was animated by W!LDBRAIN, Inc.. Cheers to them!

A noteworthy twitter update (or, “tweet”) should be structured in a way that you could start a decent (however short or long) conversation based on that message.

Examples of good:

• Who the fuck asks for their papers in 10pt Arial? My 5-page 12pt Times New Roman paper instantly becomes 3 1/2 because of this craziness.
• Just purchased $100 in European travel books.
• Ben & Jerry’s creates “Yes Pecan!” Flavor for Obama. For Bush? “Cluster Fudge.” “Impeach Cobbler.” “Iraqi Road.” “Anchovy Fuckup Surprise.”

Examples of bad:

• Beer FTW!
• I walked up those stairs, yes I did!
• I ate a pancake.

Not to say there aren’t exceptions, that I don’t tweet badly (I constantly share mindless, stupid information that nobody cares about), or that the bad tweets wouldn’t be good in some contexts (imagining a lengthy discussion about steep stairs), but this might be a good starting point.

Disclaimer: I absolutely hate it when people say “FTW,” “win!,” “fail,” or “epic!” I’m just a curmudgeon, I know.

So, here goes:

Best Picture
Who will win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Milk (or, Wall-E, had it been nominated)
Who should’ve been nominated: Wall-E

Slumdog Millionaire was a good movie. I enjoyed it through and through, but come on, best picture? I’m an absolute sap for romantic/adventure films, but I don’t know why it’s up there so high. Milk was an excellent film (maybe save for Diego Luna) and while not creamy-cream-of-the-crop, it’s better than Slumdog in my opinion. But, not even on the list is Wall-E, which is the best film of 2008. Even if sad little robots get me choked up easily, it was a great film. It deserves more. Friend Mike thinks that Dark Knight should be nominated. Eh; it’s overrated, in my opinion (no offense, Mike).

Best Director
Who will win: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Who should win: Gus Van Sant (Milk)
Who should’ve been nominated: I’m fine with these nominations.

Again, I guess it’s the same here as with best picture. Slumdog was great, but especially when it comes to directing actors, I think Milk ekes this one out.

Best Actor
Who will win: Sean Penn (Milk)
Who should win: Sean Penn (Milk)
Who should’ve been nominated: Fine with this, too.

This one is definitely going to be a nail biter. Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) was absolutely fantastic. It’s his comeback after so many years, and he really deserves this one. But Penn was just incredible, and it helps having just seen The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. His portrayal of the man is just spot-on.

Best Actress
Who will win: Kate Winslet (The Reader)
Who should win: Kate Winslet (The Reader)
Who should’ve been nominated: Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)

Kate Winslet was definitely incredible in The Reader. It’s interesting, though—I’m not sure this fits entirely as a leading role. Sally Hawkins was incredibly natural and fun to watch on screen. Why didn’t she get a chance?

Best Supporting Actor
Who will win: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Who should win: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Who should’ve been nominated: David Kross (The Reader), Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky)

Okay, it’s hard to fight with Heath Ledger. In my head, I keep on saying that Kross should’ve been nominated and won this one, but I know the whole thing with Heath. He was incredible, and while maybe it’s a close one in my head, I’m totally okay with him getting it. David Kross, though, was absolutely incredible in The Reader, and he wasn’t even nominated. That’s a shame. As was Eddie Marsan in Happy-Go-Lucky, which was an incredible performance as well.

Best Supporting Actress
Who will win: Viola Davis (Doubt)
Who should win: Viola Davis (Doubt)
Who should’ve been nominated: Okay with this one.

This one’s kinda close to. Most people think Penelope Cruz is going to win, and I have to admit that I haven’t seen Doubt in theatres (saw that one on Broadway, suckers!). However, I really didn’t like VCB, and although I liked Cruz a good amount, I think that Davis was probably better (this is sacriligious, isn’t it?).

Best Original Screenplay
Who will win: Wall-E
Who should win: Wall-E
Who should’ve been nominated: Fine with this.

Wall-E was great. Milk was good, but it’s based so much in reality! Come on, lil’ robot!

Best Adapted Screenplay
Who will win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who should win: Eh.
Who should’ve been nominated: Eh.

Not super interested in this one. Don’t read enough.

Best Short Film, Animated
Who will win: La Maison en Petits Cubes
Who should win: La Maison en Petits Cubes
Who should’ve been nominated: Skhizein

I was lucky enough to go with my friend Sam to a screening of all of the Oscar-nominated short animated films. I had already seen Pixar’s Presto, and was sure that was going to win. Until I saw La Maison en Petits Cubes. Beautiful, touching, and has everything, really. Skhizein was a compelling animated short and was better than a couple of the ones nominated.

Best Visual Effects
Who will win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Who should win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Need I say more?

——————–

Well, those are my predictions. Once the Oscars are over, maybe I’ll revisit this. We’ll see!

What’re your predictions, eh?

Maybe because I was too excited. Maybe because I was too busy. Maybe because, as Sam said, the title “President-elect” made it feel like there still was a possibility that he wouldn’t actually replace Bush. Whatever the reason why I didn’t write about Obama and my experiences within until now, I don’t know, but I think it’s finally time.

The first point in time I can remember that I got really interested in politics was about nine years ago, when my best friend Sam and I decided to do some phone banking for Gore in 2000. Phone banking was interesting being 14 and obviously not being able to vote. I also raised money to go with my class on a trip to the Inauguration in early 2001. Needless to say, everybody on the trip was pretty disappointed with the outcome and we left the actual swearing-in ceremony early. Four years later, I went door-to-door with a few organizations and did a bit of work here and there and was able to vote myself, but we all know how 2004 turned out.

So, essentially for the entirety of my political interest, Bush has been president. And that’s why it’s been so unbelievably difficult to comprehend what’s just happened. But, I can say that I was there, and Sam was there with me to witness it.

—————-

Sam & I flew into DC on the 19th and spent our time either napping or wandering around the city, trying to find a single place that wasn’t completely full. Our dinner ended up being at a bar which serves four things including “Chiken Tenders,” which I enjoyed thoroughly. We went back to our hotel in Alexandria, preparing ourselves for what was ahead.

On the morning of the 20th, I was raring to go right away in the morning; I wanted a decent place to see the new President from. We packed our bags, left them in the lobby to pick up later, and headed off.

The Metro wasn’t quite overpacked when we first got on it, but by the time we got to the last Metro stop in VA, it was completely full. Young and old. Black and white. Everybody was excited and happy. It was awesome.

We got off at L’Enfant Plaza (as seen by the map), and headed South as almost every other entrance was blocked off. Farther and farther we went, until we hit a bottleneck of sorts in the Southern most part of the mall. We were pushed in so tightly that at times it was difficult to breathe. We literally had no control over where we moved—it was the motion of the crowd that decided where we’d go. This ended up meaning we’d go over a barrier to get into the mall. After getting over it with a bit of difficulty, we were stuck within, overcrowded and not moving anywhere. People realized this, and ended up forcing us right back over the same barrier we had originally jumped over. It was 11:15 by this point; the bands were starting to play, and we were worried that we’d even be able to see his swearing-in.

Finally, we saw the end of the madness: a small opening at the end of the gigantic crowd. We got in, stood still, made a few friends surrounding us, and watched what became a tiny Jumbotron in the distance and saw history made. The feeling was incredible. We were all together in this. We were happy, nervous, scared, excited, and ready to face the future.

Everybody that day was kind. Everybody. People you bumped into accidentally. The police (we made friends with a Chicago policeman!). The US Army, which was called in to help the craziness. Businesses. They even had hot dogs and hot chocolate left after the ceremony (I can’t believe they didn’t sell out).

We spent the rest of the day wandering the streets, looking at extremely kitschy Obama gear, being cold, and being happy. The parade was not a possibility without tickets—we went through one security barrier which brought us into a cordoned-off area which was 200 feet behind the bleachers for the parade.

We left that night, and now I’m back in Boston, but damn, I was happy I was there!

I did this little short thang for my digital filmmaking class. Let’s just say it took a lot of singing the song two times faster in reverse in the mirror to be able to do this.

Sometimes you’re up late, browsing around on the web, and something hits you. You get immediate inspiration– you’re not sure how you can achieve what you’ve just thought of, it might be impossible, and it might not be worth your time, but it’s too late: you’re going to spend the next 6 hours trying to figure it out.

This is what happened to me last night, after I read a very simple and straightforward tweet from my good friend Clint:

Shit. There goes my time.

Kopp’s Frozen Custard is, if you don’t know already, a frozen custard & burger place whose home resides in Wisconsin. Their food is pretty incredible albeit probably pretty terrible for you, but hey– it’s Wisconsin. I love it so much that I made an extremely dorky YouTube video about it.

Anyway, it was time to create a twitter account for the frozen custard restaurant.

Step 1. Scrape the HTML

The flavors of the day for Kopp’s are displayed on their front page, embedded in an iFrame. It’s just a PHP script that updates every day with the new flavors.

Of course, at this point, Kopp’s could’ve easily made an RSS feed for their flavors and I wouldn’t've wasted any of my time. But, it also means I couldn’t've done this relatively fun project, so I’m a little unsure of my stance on the lack of a feed.

So, since Kopp’s didn’t offer a feed, I had to make one. After a good amount of searching on the web, I found a service that makes feeds from basic HTML sites, an “HTML scraper”. It’s called Feed43.

On Feed43, I was given the ability to input a website (the flavor list) and then given the option to narrow down variables within the HTML. I successfully retrieved both flavors from the list and embedded them into an XML format that would look good on Twitter.. Essentially, it was like this:

Flavors of the Day for [Date]: [Flavor 1] & [Flavor 2]

Pretty simple, huh?

So that (or, so I thought) concluded the scraping part of the process.

Step 2. RSS to Twitter

A quick Google search for “RSS to Twitter” comes up with quite a few responses. A lot of the services have been shut down, but one seemed to fit the ticket quite nicely: twitterfeed.

“Feed your blog to twitter,” they explain on the site. If only it were that easy.

Quickly making a Kopp’s twitter account then inputing the information into the twitterfeed preferences page, I was sadly greeted by an error:

We couldn’t find valid date/time stamps on items. Please make sure your feed contains valid pubDate entries for each post.

And this is where it all went downhill. Twitterfeed requires a pubDate on each feed post because when it checks every given interval, it compares the date of the most recent tweet it’s posted to the most recent feed post. If there’s a newer post, it tweets. Simple enough, right?

Well, the feed from Feed43 didn’t include pubDate, as you could probably gather. Why twitterfeed requires pubDate, I’m not so sure, because Twitter automatically rejects duplicate tweets. I’m assuming it’s just a nice thing to do so that twitterfeed doesn’t bring down Twitter with countless pings (although, maybe it would be a good plan considering what they could do to finally get money out of the project).

So, it wasn’t going to be this easy.

Step 3. Trying (& Failing) to Add pubDate to Feed

Basically, at this point, I had to find a way to somehow inject pubDate into the newly-created Kopp’s FlavorFeed™. It didn’t matter what time or date it injected (because of what I explained earlier about Twitter blocking duplicate tweets), it just needed to be there to make twitterfeed happy.

Yahoo Pipes came into mind right away, so I set off to try and use that.

What a pain in the ass. After dicking around for a good 2 hours or so, trying to insert pubDate into the feed using modules and connections and doohickeys, I had nothing to show for myself besides a mangled RSS feed that changed every time I refreshed it. Twitterfeed threw out every version I could throw at it. I don’t blame it.

Step 4. Taking a Step Backwards

I gave up on trying to toss pubDate into the feed, so I tried to find some other HTML scraper that would give me a feed back with a date in it.

Here’s where Dapper came into play. Dapper seemed to be a Feed43 for those who didn’t know what they were doing (an easier version). In some ways, this was great– it was painless to isolate the variables I needed– but then it also was a huge pain in the ass in itself. It didn’t give me nearly the same editing power that Feed43 gave me. Instead of being able to output what I had wanted before (Flavor of the Day for [Date]: [Flavor 1] & [Flavor 2]), all it could give me was [Date]: [FLAVOR 1], [FLAVOR 2].

But you know what? I decided to take Dapper up on its offer and not stress too much about losing an ampersand and a prefix. Twitterfeed let me add a prefix of my own, limited to 20 characters, which I REALLY don’t understand, meaning I had to do with “Flavor for [Date]” instead.

However, in the end, it worked and now I have a twitter feed that updates daily with Kopps’ Flavor of the Day. Hooray– I finally allowed myself to get to sleep. At 8AM.

Kopp’s Frozen Custard FlavorFeed™ on Twitter (@kopps)

What I’ve Learned & What I Can Do Better

I made a lot of compromises to get the Kopp’s Twitter FlavorFeed™ to work. I ended up having to use multiple web applications which could easily change in a day to completely mess up the feed and then the tweets. I was unable to style it in the way that I wanted. In a perfect world, I would’ve written some code all on my own that would automatically parse the information from the Kopp’s website and then update the Twitter account– what I have now is definitely a rickety, hacked up version of what could’ve been.

Actually, scratch that. In a perfect world, Kopp’s would have an RSS feed for their Flavors of the Day. Lesson learned.

But they still make some damned good frozen custard.

It all started when I decided to update Wordpress. I backed up my theme and upgraded– thank god I backed up. Everything I had got deleted, so when I uploaded my theme back up, the plugins I had installed were missing. A quick Google search reinstated my twitter plugin, but the WP Audioscrobbler plugin wasn’t so easy. This one came up with the message from the original coder’s (Marc Hodges) website:

“You’re probabaly looking for a WP plugin or some other code.
Please note that all development and support of any code no longer happens. In other words it isn’t here.
The reason being that I’d written the code for myself and decided it to be nice enough to share but people kept asking for help or whatever and it was too much bother than it was worth.
Sorry to disappoint you.”

So, it then proved near impossible to find the plugin.

I’m not sure what I think of Marc’s decision to wipe it off the internets due to the questions he was getting about the plugin. I understand that it probably was quite annoying to get endless questions about something he just wanted to make and let go, but it seems a little mean to just remove it altogether with no ability to download it again.

Anyway, I found the plugin and I’ve uploaded it to my website for downloading. Of course, all credit goes to the amazing Marc Hodges for writing it– I don’t have such abilities (hence the downloading and installation of said plugin). If anybody (see: Marc) has any issue with this, let me know and I will take it down.

I have a feeling, however, that he won’t mind it being offered somewhere else.

Download WP Audioscrobbler (6 KB)
To install: Just drag into your /wp-content/plugins folder. Activate and customize as needed.

Thanks, Marc. Where ever you are.