Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:
|
|
|
Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
September 30th 2008 21:43
After several weeks of being more pushed for time than usual due to being heavily involved in the Narnia play, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I now have some room in my life again. Evenings are free, for instance, and I’m even have three days off from work and away from the office furniture!
Which is all giving me time to do a bit more exploring of the Net than I have done for a while. Anyway, came across a site today called Already Been Chewed. The aim of this blog is to serve up fresh media ideas for churches because nobody likes to be fed something that’s already been chewed.
The site is fairly new, I gather. I was alerted to it from another Church/digital site called The Digital Sanctuary, with whom it seems to share a fairly tongue-in-cheek approach to blogging. I’ll talk more about the Digital Sanctuary in another post, when I’ve had time to check it out further.
Meantime, if you’re a nerdy-geeky kind of person, check out the CollegeHumour video under the post, You May Be a Design Nerd…. It turns well-known fonts into characters, with Times New Roman as the most important and business-like, and puts them through a brief crisis (in which Courier is rescued by Comic Sans). Wingdings makes a couple of insane appearances. It’s made in a top professional style, with an excellent music score.
The CollegeHumour site itself has a heap of other crazy videos, such as The Awkward Rap (one of the few rap songs I’ve heard where the words are actually clear!) and 24: the Unaired 1994 Pilot, in which Jack Bauer and co try to cope with AOL 3.0, Internet charges, and phone boxes.
I’m not sure who these are made for, but they’re obviously popular, and there’s plenty of money behind them.
Shared on
September 23rd 2008 08:10
I had to go digging a bit to find out what bpm meant: apparently it's business performance management, as no doubt all three of my readers could have told me.
The only kind of performance management I'm involved in at the moment is the play we're currently presenting: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, about which I've spoken previously.
Performance management in a play is no doubt a little different to performance management in a business, although perhaps not too much. In a play, you've got to monitor your performance at all times, to make sure you don't get slack in it; you've got to be on your toes in case one of the other cast members misses something important (like a cue!), and you've got to keep re-enacting the thing. You can't rely on yesterday's performance to carry you through today: each new performance is a whole new creation. Which is why actors love acting, I guess. It never gets stale (well, I've never got to the stale point at least), because each audience is different, the expectations are different, things that go wrong (or right) are different and so on.
Other artists 'finish' their creations at a certain point, like painters and sculptors and composers. Actors never really do. The play is never completely done with, because there's always tomorrow night. It's a strange business. So much of it relies on a group of people working like clockwork as a team: if one person misses a beat, the whole thing can rapidly unwind. Fortunately people who act are often good at spontaneity, and pick up things that get dropped very readily.
The other night we got on stage to find three important props missing (the 'culprit' plastered the walls of the dressing room with a succession of "sorry's" in various fonts). The youngest actor added in a line, which aided the actor who was relying on the props to find his way through the problem.
In The Magician's Nephew, which we did three years ago, I got out on stage in front of the front tabs only to find that a chair with my 'change' of clothes was missing. Out of the blue came a couple of lines which worked, and which reminded the person behind the curtain to push the chair through the gap - to the audience's amusement. The play was saved.
And yet, on another occasion, in the same play, a young actor gave me the wrong cue, and suddenly everything went blank. It was almost as if I didn't know where I was. That was scary.
Shared on
A lesson in how not to trust (some) answers you find on the Internet.
Mr and Mrs Giraffe by picture taker 2
'Is there such a thing as twin giraffes?' was one of those strange questions that people ask on the Net, and it doesn’t seem to have had any real answers. I’ve written about giraffes a few times, but never about twin giraffes, and getting one of my posts as a search result can’t have been very helpful to the questioner.
But if that first question struck you as at all strange (and perhaps it isn’t), this next one seemed stranger: Why is Dunedin (New Zealand) covered in cute giraffe graffiti?
My response to that is, Is it? I’ve never noticed, and I’m fairly attentive to what’s around me. But here is an answer to this response, as written on a site called Life Assistant. I’m not sure whether it’s one answer or two, as both paragraphs appear to me to be pretty obscure. I reprint them as they appeared:
aha I undergo just what you mean. They're everywhere. I counted how some as I was travel along Kaikorai Valley Road onpostcard printing oad once. I hit no intent where they came from, I asked a discourse kindred to this a patch past but no digit knew!
postcard printing ...It's our helper fear animal, you know. An older Oceanic legend. Apparently, the Otago Peninsula is the cervix of a glucosamine chondroitin of a ruminant which arrived by canoe some thousands of eld ago, and collapsed when it saw the example of the landscapelong distance companies
Is that first paragraph in English? It sounds like it’s been translated (very badly) from some other language by a machine. The second answer isn’t much better. ‘It’s our helper fear animal, you know.’ Is it? Not that I’ve ever heard. And how come an older Oceanic legend includes an animal that doesn’t exist in this part of the world. And what the heck is all that stuff about glucosamine chondroitin, which are both health supplements as far as I can figure out. Perhaps the words have got into the paragraph in error, as it reads perfectly well without them. Equally ‘long distance companies’ seem to have snuck in without permission.
My suspicion is that the Life Assistant site is a bit weird. It's like trying to find something in a storeroom and someone keeps moving boxes. Check out any answer given to questions on this site and you’ll get mangled English as a matter of course. Who the heck runs it?
Shared on
It's been nearly a fortnight since I last wrote in here, which has probably not done my stats much good. It hasn't been because I've been anti-blog: I've just been too busy doing other things, like working, or rehearsing for a dramatised version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of C S Lewis' Narnia stories. This goes in front of the public in about two weeks, so things are hotting up.
Meanwhile, blogging on Orble has been on the backburner, and because my brain isn't functioning at its usual top quality level in terms of blogginess, I've been checking out the results on HitTail to give me some impetus
[ Click here to read more ]
Shared on
More Posts
213 Posts dating from January 2007
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
Mike Crowl's Blogs
13012 Vote(s)
199 Comment(s)
284 Post(s)
|
|
|
Add Comments
Read More
