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

Cyan Saturday

read!I’m declaring it Cyan Saturday. Not sure why, but it flows off the tongue way better than Black Friday, doesn’t it?

First off, I want to introduce a new tradition, wherein I point you toward books written by several of my closest friends. Somewhere between common interests and all of us being writers at heart, an awful lot of us have written and published books in the past few years. A fair few of the books fall into the same wheelhouse, subject-matter-wise…but not all of them! Anyway, peruse this fascinating list of Books My Friends Wrote and add their works to your bookshelf or the bookshelf of someone who needs a gift this holiday season. You really can’t go wrong – I vouch for all of them as writers and as people.

And my own books? They’re now available through a nice new digital delivery gateway right here at theLogBook.com, a long-needed improvement that finally happened thanks to a little bit of digital drudgery undertaken by my oldest. The new system is really neat, and unlike the old one…it just works. And to celebrate the “grand re-opening” of that component of theLogBook.com Store, I’ve added a couple of crazy bundle deals (they’re the ones with green buttons) that’ll save you…well…a bundle.

Books. They’re what’s for dinner. Go getcha some.… Read more

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Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Camera…action

1 min read

So, for the first time in over 10 years, I’ve gotten myself a video camera.

Camera

Technically speaking, there’s been one built into my phone all along, but here’s the thing: I have to take great pains to make still photos from that same phone come out not looking like crap, and…it’s my phone. Yes, I use it to play music, surf the web, and catch the odd Pokemon or two. But…it’s a phone.

The camera above set me back $18, and weighs nearly nothing. I’m still having a hard time, on a gut level, accepting that the above is qualified to be called a camcorder. It records to SD cards that, depending on where you get them, may cost you more than the camera. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Troubles hooting

At work, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, the factory in China gets to mangle our manuals, requiring me to fix them. Word files of the manuals come to us with either no spaces whatsoever between words, or spaces in the wrong places. Every so often, there’s a paragraph that has spaces in some of the right places, just to lull you into a false sense of security. And thus was entire work day for me turned into combing through several manuals and occasionally finding gems of Engrish hilarity.

Troubles hootingRead more

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Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Well, there went MY plans for fun today

Had to start designing packaging for a garden hose adapter kit yesterday, and my instructions noted that product shots aren’t in from the factory yet, so “use placeholders“. Someone apparently felt the need to hand-write ‘don’t use porn to mock up the inlet nipple kit’ in the margin. Geez, do I look like I’m the biggest perv in the whole areola area? Oops. Sorry.Read more

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Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Dead air

This is not what you sign up for when you get your first or second job after landing your journalism degree, or learn how to run a camera or a live truck. This is not what you sign up for at all.

Roanoke, VA television reporter Alison Parker and photog Adam Ward, both of them in their 20s, were gunned down during a morning news live shot. The video is all over Youtube; just look up “WDBJ shooting” and you’ll find numerous copies of it. I watched it once and really don’t want to see it again.

Perhaps even more heartbreaking is the photo of the two in happier times. Keep in mind, I put in my 20+ years in broadcast quite a while back, enough that it now seems like it was another life. And I’m in Arkansas. I never met these people. But I can tell you that I look at this and see the faces of everyone I ever worked with. Young, determined, eager to make good on the unspoken (and, if you watch only national network news, unfulfilled) social contract between the fourth estate and the rest of society – to go out and get the story.

There aren’t words to describe how upsetting it is if I even momentarily transpose those two faces with any of the reporters or photogs I ever worked with. It’s like a punch in the gut. Word that the shooter has been identified as a disgruntled former employee of the station doesn’t make it any easier, and doesn’t make it make any more sense. I could think of numerous faces in that category as well. But none of them who did anything like this.

The broadcast business, at the local level, is difficult enough as it is. You’re already underpaid and overworked. You’re already thrust into a social media spotlight by station management that wants you to engage with the public to enhance their brand. (It used to be that you’d get total strangers talking to you at the grocery store when you’re really just trying to get your ramen noodles and go the hell home after putting in the latest in a solid string of 14-hour days. Now there’s internet-assisted stalking.)

If you’re a photog, you’re now not just a photog, you’re an engineer too – you have to know how to set up the entire live truck, a task for which, only a few years ago, a station engineer used to accompany you into the field; the station management doesn’t want to have to pay that engineer to stick around past five now, so it’s just you. And while you’re doing your live shot, minding your camera and hoping no one messed with the truck, you have to keep an eye out for oh-so-clever souls who are sure they’re the first ones to get behind your talent during a live shot and yell “f___ her right in the p____!”, because that’s so original and so clever.

None of that is in the same league as what happened in Virginia this morning. Reporters and photogs aren’t armed. There’s a reason for that; if you’re asked questions by someone with a camera, it’s journalism at best and perhaps a bit annoying at worst. If you’re asked questions by someone with a gun on their hip, it’s an interrogation. In a worst case scenario, the photog is responsible to some degree for that talent’s safety; in the old days, it was sort of an unspoken thing that the battery pack at the back of the camera, with the full weight of the camera behind it, is probably a more effective bludgeon than a rifle butt. That wouldn’t have worked here, however.

Both station employees were shot dead, and their on-camera guest, a member of the local chamber of commerce, was taken in for emergency surgery.

If this just seems like a weird, one-off incident, it isn’t. Ask my former co-worker Patrick Crawford, a Texas meteorologist who was shot as he walked from the station building to his car one morning. Patrick can tell you it’s not an isolated incident. He’s a solid pro and, honestly, from the time I spent working with him, about as inoffensive a person as you’re likely to meet. (Patrick worked with us at 40/29. I hope he’ll forgive me for dragging his name into this, but his ordeal came instantly to mind.)

And you can ask me. Nearly 20 years ago, at the first TV station I ever worked at, I was one of two people asked to stay on the premises as management fired a particularly volatile employee. They weren’t sure what he would do or how he would respond, given that he had walked out of the building earlier that day, slamming doors and yelling racial epithets about one of our reporters, all because she dared to take “his” truck (which…um…had the station logo on the doors, so I’m pretty sure it was the station’s truck) to go shoot a package. Aside from the station owner and the station manager, every one else was told to go home early…except for myself, and a guy named Danny in master control. Danny was an older gentleman, a great guy who – and I think everyone knew this – had a hip flask of something on his person at all times. (Hey, you try working an afternoon board shift heavy with strip syndicated reruns of Full House and see what it does to you.)

I was tempted to go take a swig of whatever Danny had on him that day before retreating to the production room (which happened to be right by the back door fire escape, considered a likely escape route in a worst case scenario), locking the door, and waiting, phone off the hook and in hand. A little bit of courage, liquid or otherwise, would’ve been welcome. (Spoiler alert: nothing happened, the employee in question left the premises uneventfully when he was dismissed, and filed groundless lawsuits later. On the downside, we were still showing a lot of Full House.)

And that was in the late ’90s, before the modern age of the internet whipping would-be-Unabomber tinfoil-hat shut-ins into a frenzy about “the [liberal/conservative/lizard illuminati overlord] media establishment” snowing everyone over.

Broadcasting is enough of a pressure cooker, for so many of the wrong reasons. Never enough time, never enough money, consultants from out of town insisting that every stinking story has to be a live shot (couldn’t the lady from the chamber of commerce be asked to come to the studio for a more controlled on-set interview?), tight-fisted management forcing increasing reliance on not-ready-for-prime-time wireless streaming tech, internet stalkers…

…all of that is bad enough without someone shooting at you and trying to kill you.

These people were not sent to cover hostilities in a war zone (generally speaking, there isn’t a representative of the local chamber of commerce in combat reporting). They shouldn’t be dead now. Whatever beef their former co-worker had with either of them, this wasn’t the way to settle it.

Stay safe, friends who are still in the biz. For those who aspire…there’s now one – no, two – more reasons to reconsider. The industry is not now what it once was. You used to aspire to Murrow and Cronkite; now it’s TMZ.

And now there’s this.

Edit: I also strongly advise you to read this blog post, which probably explains, far better than I do, how your co-workers in the news biz become your family, and why this is such a raw wound for those of us who have been in that business. EGRead more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Why don’t you just Kickstart it?

FEED ME!Two things have been occupying my brain of late: VWORP!1 didn’t do bad for itself in an ebook bundle a while back, and I had a job interview a couple of months ago that went considerably better than any such interview I’ve had over the past several years, and yet I didn’t get the job. In the course of discussing these two things with friends, the inevitable question came up: Why are you even looking for a job? Why don’t you just do a Kickstarter/Indiegogo/[insert crowdfunding platform here] so you can stay home and write books?

Here’s my answer to that question, specifically, why I don’t plan on doing it. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

It’s a great pity…

…that local TV station KHBS (my former employers, so it’s not as if they don’t know a thing about me!) couldn’t think of a way to localize this story by contacting, oh, I don’t know, a local author who’s written a giant book on the subject.

Doctor Who on Channel 40!?

The above Twitter link led to this story, which was almost certainly relayed straight from the wire service.

Still, I’m highly amused at the thought of channel 40, or even their Twitter account, running a story about Doctor Who. 😆

Now, about all this Doctor Who business… … Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The flyer that never flew

After pricing color printing locally, I prepared this one-sheet wonder handout for this year’s convention season to advertise current and upcoming products and projects at theLogBook.com. I was very pleased with it. The place I got my prices from hemmed and hawed and stared at me sternly and said “It’d use too much ink, we’d have to charge you extra.” Since this was a completely new unannounced wrinkle to their pricing structure, they didn’t get my business… but I also didn’t get my toner-murdering one-sheets. So here you go – one apparently unprintable sheet describing what the site and its stuff are about.


Click to see a quarter-sized JPG of the original file (2mb).

Admit it, you’ve always wanted to see a light cycle blasting out of the TARDIS, the Enterprise coming out of a Babylon 5 jumpgate, and Serenity flying in formation with a Space: 1999 Eagle too.

I’ve already worked up a different, entirely B&W design, to be printed up in time for this year’s conventions… and to be printed by a business that doesn’t make unannounced “alterations” to its rate card. But it’s just not as in-your-face colorful as this one was – it’s a bit tame by comparison.… Read more