Category: Toiling In The Pixel Mines

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Gadgetology Serious Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Still Trekkin’, still talkin’

1 min read

This past weekend was the third annual (annual!) TrekTalks telethon, benefitting the Hollywood Food Coalition, and once again I was pushing the buttons that made the whole thing happen. And man, did a whole thing happen – just look at the numbers (as of a couple of days later when I’m writing this):

TrekTalks total

I could be mistaken, but I think that’s the best total yet for any of these events. That’s a lot of meals. That’s a good reason to sweat the details and add another day of live TV to the CV. … Read more

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Gadgetology Serious Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Trekkin’ and Talkin’ Times Two

2 min read

I’m still reeling a bit a day later, but this time yesterday as I write this, we were a little over halfway through the second annual TREKTalks event benefitting the Hollywood Food Coalition. HoFoCo is lucky to count among its membership John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox of Enterprise fame) and David Livingston (who has more Star Trek directorial credits than anyone else who’s directed Star Trek, and was also a producer on everything from The Next Generation forward). Add to the mix Bill Smith and Dan Davidson of the Trek Geeks Podcast, John Champion at Roddenberry Podcasts, and between all of these people you have this vast collective Rolodex of Star Trek actors and creatives, past and present. For year two, we added Yvette Blackmon of the Syfy Sistas both behind the scenes and as a panelist, and Bonnie Gordon (the voice of Star Trek: Prodigy’s ship’s computer) as co-host, and took what we learned from year one, and raised over $106,000 for a good cause.

I’m a really tiny part of this because, you know, if all these other folks don’t have the contacts and make the content that they do, I don’t have anyone to put on the screen for eight hours. My job is to make sure I don’t screw up any of their hard work, and to try to make it look like something. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Arkansas and Texas are adjacent, therefore all points in Arkansas and Texas are equidistant

1 min read

Monday so far.

Robert Half: Hey, are you interested in a mostly-remote graphic designer position that pays $22/hour?

Me: Sure!

Robert Half: Great, it starts Monday morning with an on-site orientation visit.

Me: Where?

Robert Half: Houston

Me: Where…do you think I am…relative to Houston?

Robert Half: I don’t know, I’m the recruiter in Salt Lake City.

Me: You didn’t get my notification in 2020 that I moved out of Utah?

Robert Half: …… Read more

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Home Base Toiling In The Pixel Mines

A chunk of 1995 on VHS

1 min read

It’s a slow, rainy weekend, so I’ve spent a bit of time today getting back to some VHS archiving/digitization, a project I paused due to the move a year ago. I had to watch quite a lot of this to figure out what it was, because there was a lot of disjointed B-roll, and then a looooong stretch of me (and this is back when I had some hair, man) doing what sounds like a video letter to someone describing my job. … Read more

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Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Coffee expertly roasted by dragons

1 min read

Okay, so here’s the thing. I used to do post-production for a living, albeit for a local TV station or four in one state or another. So I know, intimately, what kind of phone call *somebody* almost certainly got at 11 o’clock Pacific time last night to start the process of editing a Starbucks cup out of existence in a scene from Game Of Thrones. I know that call too well. It goes a little something like this:

“Hey Earl, you’ve got some free time between now and ten, right?” … Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Of styro-stuffing, set-building, and starting to feel like home

1 min read

When we toured the house in Utah that we’ve wound up renting, the first glimpse of the basement – an area as big as the living room upstairs, but in a decidedly unfinished state without even so much as drywall in most places – there was talk of contractors coming and going for the first several weeks that we were there until the room was done.

Having come from a house that had, for several years, had bare concrete floors, I took one look and said we’d take it as-is. I saw exposed beams and rafters from which lights could be hung, places where a camera or two could be mounted, unfinished walls where I could put acoustic foam to make the space a better recording studio, and the floor was nothing new to me. I saw the studio that this space could be. … Read more

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Cooking With Code Toiling In The Pixel Mines Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Attack of the Blipverts

1 min read

Ah, the imprecise voodoo of advertising on the web. Too much, and you lose people. Too little, and your site is running at a loss financially and then people lose you because you can’t afford to keep the domain name locked down or exceed your site’s monthly bandwidth or… you get the idea.

And then there’s the current trend, which is to have something which detects ad blockers and throws up a smoke screen to keep you from making use of a site, either partially or fully. I’m not installing anything like that here, ever. I hate that shit.

Still, I have been forming partnerships here and there to bring some new advertisers and affiliate programs to the site. This keeps all the eggs out of one basket (which proved disastrous when Amazon kicked all of its Arkansas affiliates to the curb about 10 years ago), diversifies what’s on offer (while still keeping it very much in theLogBook’s wheelhouse), and hopefully, will eventually add up to the site being financially self-sustaining again in the near future. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

The future of job searching…

…is basically like creating a profile on a dating site.

I applied for a graphic design job which required – REQUIRED! – me to post a “passion video”. Fortunately they described what they meant – sorry, I charge extra for doing O faces on camera – and then I realized…oh wait. I’m doing this during a break at my present job. Um…how to do this without attracting attention? … Read more