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This post is just three words and one number long
Final page count: 396 … Read more
Category: Toiling In The Pixel Mines
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V(w)orpal sword
A quick bit of blawg, so I don’t break my non-stop blogging streak:
VWORP!1 is undergoing last-minute revisions after a brutal editorial once-over. I had someone look it over and, you know, when you have someone look things like this over, you expect them to be uncompromising. The good news: it’s a good book, it just needed lots of little persnickety grammatical and punctuation fixes. But the knock-on effect has been a little bit of a delay and an increased page count (I realized, very late in the game, that there was stuff I’d left out). This is why you have someone else look over your crap. Sort of like the little internet meme graphic making the rounds: proper punctuation is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit. That, and some minor formatting/layout fixes, have pushed the page count dangerously close to 400.
I printed out a copy, from beginning to end, on paper, just to look at it. I learned two things from doing this.
- That’s a good way to kill two ink cartridges.
- I’ve written a big-ass f@#$ing book.
I hope you like it. It should still be ready for OVGE.… Read more
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Uah uah
When we last left our heroes… well, there weren’t really any heroes, just a couple of college students who had two episodes of a show, barely half an hour each, in hand, and a cable access channel ready to show whatever we threw at them (within the bounds of decency, which admittedly JCC wasn’t likely to cross).
This is the even stranger story of how Jump Cut City went from being an inside joke to something that other people were watching, and would therefore have to understand (within reason, which admittedly was not an area where JCC tended to dwell). … Read more
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Bate
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Uah
Nobody got it! Nobody! Last week’s Bad Visual Pun of the Month (well, probably more like Bad Visual Pun Of The Indeterminate Time Period) went completely unsolved. Here, then, is the answer – although it required some slightly specialized knowledge about one of my stranger creative projects.
FIDDY CENT
There’s a pretty good chance you didn’t know how to arrive at that answer. There’s a pretty good chance you don’t know what a fiddygibber is. It’s time to change that. It’s time to tell you all about… Jump Cut City. … Read more
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You’re in black!
There are few incidents worse than a TV station over which you’re supposedly riding herd “going black” – i.e. something, somewhere, has stopped working, and you’re broadcasting an empty signal. In the control room, this is known as “oh shit time.”
So naturally, that’s when people who have no idea what does what in master control begin calling the master control trouble line. … Read more
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Meet Explorer Earl
Okay, I only thought this stuff was buried under a mile of soft peat somewhere.
Sometime in 1994, at the first TV station where I worked, I got shanghaied into being on-air talent during kids’ programming. Our kids’ club talent had just left, and there was a perfect storm brewing:
- The Humane Society did pet-of-the-week spots in our kids’ programming, which helped the station to fulfill its “local public service” quota. Those spots now had no host.
- The station had just gotten a pith helmet in a National Geographic promo kit.
- I was already on the payroll.
With no contract, no additional pay, and no perks, I was suddenly… Explorer Earl. … Read more
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Mixed Signals III: tonight’s gguuhhhhh will be… derp…
So where were we? Oh yeah – seeing off our former TV weather guy with a bang. He was leaving us anyway, so we gave him a memorable sendoff that no one watching at home would ever have known about.
Now the race was on to replace him. Our typically spendthrift manager and owner had a super spiffy idea: let’s not hire anyone new. Let’s just use the people who are already working here and not pay them any extra for suddenly being on-air talent.
That included me. … Read more
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Mixed Signals II: tonight’s forecast is…. gguuhhhhh.
Sit back for this one. I’m about to tell you how I became a teevee weatherman. And what happened to the teevee weatherman I replaced.
Weather in a broadcast venue has always completely fascinated me. How the hell do these guys know this stuff? Of course, now I know: the nice government-employed meteorologists at the National Weather Service do most of the legwork for them. The TV guys said it with personality. Or at least that’s what it says on the job description when you sign on the dotted line. … Read more
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Welcome to the Guilt By Assoc.
When I was going into high school, there were two shows that had my full and undivided attention: Max Headroom and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not necessarily in that order. Trek was more escapist, and I was more than happy to lose myself in it. Max Headroom, of course, was escapism of another kind, with a day-glo facade of more gritty down-to-Earth reality. Edison Carter always got the Big Story, and always Caught The Bad Guys In The Act. For a kid who was on the journalism track that everyone expected him to be, you couldn’t ask for a better hero. Little did I know that I’d later find myself identifying much more with Blank Reg. Played by the instantly-familiar-and-yet-nobody-remembers-his-name W. Morgan Sheppard, who has had a guest starring role in everything (seriously: check IMDb to see if there’s ever been a show called “Everything.” I bet he’s been in it…), Reg voluntarily lived on the outskirts of society, a kind of hi-tech gypsy running his own pirate TV station from an impossibly spacious VW minibus, refusing to buy into society – or to sell out to it. (Seriously, that minibus was bigger on the inside than the outside – it’s only fitting that he finally got a chance to guest star in Doctor Who not so long ago.) Now that I’m closer to 40 than to 20, I realize Blank Reg was the real hero of the show.
The thing about being in your 20s and finally moving out of your parents’ house is that you’ve got an opportunity, should you wish it, to replace your family with a whole different one, only this time your family’s not related to you by blood. I found that family, if a frequently dysfunctional one, at work. Working in broadcasting in any part of Arkansas that wasn’t Little Rock in the ’90s was an adventure, because you were already budget addled. You either fell into a tight-knit group determined to overcome that, or you found yourself in backstabbing bedlam. I served tours of duty in both situations before achieving escape velocity from the gloomy gravitational pull of the Fort Smith broadcast market and going to Wisconsin. … Read more
