TomMannino.com

I’ve been loosely following the whole Leno/Conan epic, so this made me lol. (Click to enlarge)

Subtle, small, but it’s got to be a nod.

[Also just found this in my drafts... not sure why this didn't get posted... it's over a month old I think...]

YouTube – Introduction.

Very , very cool stuff.  Simple, but effective.  My friend Del said that this spawned on the SA forums, it’s a series of videos.  The first one explains the situation, and they are putting up more what looks to be pretty frequently.  I love this stuff.

I know it may be cliche at this point, but the Blair Witch thing has always stuck with me.  I love the concept of the narrative of the story being seen through the eyes of the protagonist.  At this point it could probably be considered a genre in it’s own way.

They are like zombie movies; each zombie movie sets up ‘how’ the zombies came to be.  Some spend a good amount of time on it, others glaze over it.  These ’shakey camera movies’ have to justify why someone needs to film themselves or their surroundings.

[Note: I just found this in my Drafts section of my Wordpress... not sure why I didn't finish it and post it..]

I favorited a video the other day, and it told me CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT THIS COOL NEW FEATURE WHERE YOU CAN HAVE US AUTO TWEET STUFF OR W/E  (in fewer words).  I did it and it worked and it’s rad.  I set it up so that whenever I favorite a video it tweets it, which in turn then updates my facebook status.  Lucky for you all!  I tend to favorite most of the weird/rad videos I see, but lately I haven’t had the time or desire to regurgitate them all to you.  I don’t get to add my WITTY COMMENTARY, but you get to see the oddity.  This is a happy enough medium.

Then a bunch of people asked me how to make it do it, and I realized I didn’t know how to get to those settings ‘manually..’  I looked around in my personal settings and couldn’t find it.

Just now I randomly stumbled upon it, trying to walk down a different line of logic.

If you want to configure your YouTube account to auto-update status stuff on other sites or social networks or whatever, do this:

• Make sure you’re logged in
• Go to your own user page. i.e. http://www.youtube.com/user/evilzug
• On the left-hand column, find the section headed “Recent Activity”
• Click on “Privacy Settings”
• GET TO LINKIN’ YOUR ACCOUNTS!

Now here is where I see the info that I can update and edit.  Obviously I’m not sure what it looks like if you go here without having set it up, so let me know if it doesn’t work or you see something else.

FYI, this service is very much not instant.  It takes a while for it to get around to your Twitter or whatever, so don’t go refresh happy.  Just do it knowing it will be shared!

I have a theory why Dollhouse was cancelled, as well as why Fox cancels ‘good shows,’ possibly just Joss Wheadon shows.

The way TV works is actually very ugly but simple. The people who actually determine the fate of a show even getting made, as well as existing, are usually the advertisers that sponsor the shows. During pilot season, the networks parade their new show ideas to a panel of advertisers. The shows that get picked up are the ones that the advertisers think they can make some money off. I.e. “I think people who watch this show would probably like to buy the cars or toothpaste or fast food or music we sell, as they share the same demographic.” This reason alone was what helped me make my decision to never get involved with television. The brutal reality of the world is that no matter how awesome your idea actually is, it won’t ever make it into the commercial television world if people don’t think they can make any money off of selling commercials around it.

Now these ‘good shows’ are in my face a lot more then other shows that don” get cancelled are, I think that’s because my circle of friends/my monkeysphere/my internets are people who like these quirky shows.

I think these shows that get cancelled because the advertisers don’t know who the hell the show appeals to. The ‘good shows’ we look at, they look at with a different eye. How do you determine the demographic of a show that is about Space Cowboys, or re programmable people? The shows have underlying science fiction elements but are more about the drama and interpersonal relationships then the science. I admit I’ve only seen the pilot of Firefly but I think it’s REALLY GOOD. I get it, it’s good in a new and refreshing way, but it’s good in a way that takes more then one sentence to explain; for this reason, I think, oddly and sadly enough, is why these shows fail to stay on the air.

I just picture a boardroom of old guard advertisers going “Do people who like Space Cowboys even like toothpaste? Would they use space toothpaste or cowboy toothpaste? I don’t even understand. My kid plays Atari Wiibox, she’s usually pretty hip with these things, I’ll ask her.” And then they eat their Boiled Goose and dance to a boombox.

I’d known of this chick and of the countless people who love her, but never had a reason to until now.  This hits home in a lot of ways.  I consider myself an artist, even as a person who programs on computernets or makes games or both.  This all rings true to indy game developers,  as well.. in fact I don’t see any disparity.

listen.

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.

please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.

dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

via amanda fucking palmer » blog.

Random stream of consciousness:

So we are done.  We’re certified as PADI Open Water Divers.  I’m too exhausted to look at the moment but yay.

The boat we were on was the biggest non-cruise boat I’ve ever been on:

• Two bathrooms w/ showers w/ fresh hot water.
• Probably a dozen small but very sleep-able bunks to sleep in at the front and the back of the boat.  Very nice for napping on the 2.5 hour trip to the site because you had to get up at 4 million a clock in the morning,  and passing out on the 2.5 hour trip back from the site.
• A full kitchen.  There was food waiting for us every time we got out of the water, as well as them cookign breakfast and dinner.  Breakfast was pancakes, eggs, sausage and hashbrowns.  Then we had Chili. Then we had Teryaki and/or BBQ chicken on rice with corn.  Then we had Hotdogs/chilidogs.  Then we had spaghetti and salad for dinner on the way back.
• There was something like 30 people on the boat including crew.
• While we were getting ready to dive, I kept hearing a whistle and it was weirding me out.  We dove in a pool next to a high school and I kept hearing whistles then, but I knew it was from some high school sporting event happening next to the pool.   It took half the day for me to realize the whistles were coming from the football game they were watching, think it was the Steelers game.  They had a HD TV and satellite TV on the boat =P
• We saw sea lions on the way out of the LA Harbor.  They were following our boat and peeking at us.
• I think we saw Dolphins when we were about ten minutes away from Catalina.  They were just peeking.

Some of the stuff we had to do in the pool yesterday and in the ocean today:

• Had to swim 6 laps in the pool with just bathing suit, goggles, snorkle, fins, and booties.  No arms.  So cake.
• Learned how to actually skin dive, which was really fun.  So I guess, to oversimplify, your body wants to breathe not because you’re exercising, but because you have too much carbon dioxide in your body, and needs to get it out.  By hyperventilating a little, you can calm your body down a bit as far as needing to breathe goes.  You ‘hyperventilate’ 3 deep, fast breaths and then hold your 4th, do a somersault so you’re facing straight down, straighten your legs and then you sink into the water.  When your feet cut the waters surface, you start to paddle, and then you’re way deep.  Making sure you equalize when you go down, and exhale a tiny bit as you go up so you don’t pop your lungs.
• We had to do an exercise where you take your entire vest off with all your gear and then put it on, on the surface of the water and also at the bottom of the pool.  One of the guys we were doing it with got new gear this weekend and when he did it he skyrocketed to the surface because his new wet suit was super buoyant.

We dove with Nitrox for our last dive; Wtf is Nitrox? In short:

• Anyone can dive with normal breathing air.
• Normal breathing air is ~21% oxygen and the rest Nitrogen.  The longer you dive and the deeper you go, your body absorbs the Nitrogen from the air you breathe, and you get little Nitrogen bubbles in your body.  A little is fine, too much and you can get sick and need to decompress.
• That diving card/chart that I linked a bit ago and said that I learned to use, (this one) basically is used to determine how much Nitrogen is in your body and how long you have to stay out of the water if you do consecutive dives to get enough of it out of your system.
• You also can’t dive with pure Oxygen because you can actually get oxygen poisoning if you go down too deep with it.
• Nitrox is just a different mix of Nitrogen and Oxygen.  We dove with ~32% Oxygen.
• The benefits of diving with Nitrox: You can stay under longer because you absorb less Nitrogen.  You are breathing more Oxygen, so it’s more refreshing and you aren’t as tired when you are done.  It’s hard to describe and quantify but you can totally tell the difference when you’re done.
• As I said before, the only downside to Nitrox is that you can’t dive past a certain depth with it, because it contains more oxygen then normal.  The more Oxygen in the Nitrox mix, the less deep you’re allowed to go.  I.e. with ~32% you can only go 100 feet, which is fine because I don’t think we can dive deeper then 60 feet without another cert =P
• You need a cert to use Nitrox, unless you’re with someone cool like an instructor.

Other randomness:

• I had a bandaid on my had all day covering up a burn I got from cooking this weekend.  I now have a bandaid-shaped tan on the back of my hand.
• Lots more pictures forthcoming when McKenna, our instructor, uploads them!

Thank you very much to Victoria for the generous and awesome gift that I will be able to enjoy for my life! I really appreciate it and had a great time learning and testing myself, as well as having a fun time with my awesome girlfriend.

P.s. Our instructor McKenna was awesome!  I hope she reads this cuz then I know she’s a NOSEY FACEBOOK STALKER! :3

KK time for showers and relaxing and… freelance work. =P

• We saw whales! 2-3 big-ass blue whales, a hundred or so feet from the boat.
• We went down for two dives, two tanks of air.  Did a fraction of the exercises we did in the pool, I was mistaken and thought we were going to do a lot more.  We swam around for half of each tank, and just kinda looked around and were 20ish feet under the water.
• Two dives means we came up and switched our tanks, which means you have to put all your stuff on a new tank.
• When we were done, they treated us to burgers and chicken sammiches.  So yeah, while I did wear my swim trunks,  AND my flippy-floppies, I opted for a chicken sammich and chose to not flip a burger.  Gotta mix it up a bit. (Food was cooked on a grill on the boat!)
• Saw some bright orange fishes and lots of kelp.
• Salt water is eye-burny.
• Nothing will clear your sinuses faster then a nice salt water irrigation.  It’s like a neti pot, but the entire ocean.  Salt water is burny in your sinuses.
• I did not fornicate with any mermaids.
• It’s really wierd to just chill at the bottom of the ocean and just look around.
• I lost my flipper fin while I was swimming around, but a dude put it back on for me and that was rad.  Thanks dude.

Exhausted in the total sense, but the good kind, my entire soul is tired.  The kind of tired you get after really hard work.

More next week and if all goes well I has a certification.

• You have to be able to tread water for 10 minutes straight with no breaks or hanging on to anything.  They say it’s the hardest thing to do out of the whole certification and they are right, at least for me, being that I am the least physically fit person in the world.  Took me 3 tries.  We did the tread test first, and I could’nt finish so I had to do the rest of the routine first and then try to complete it at the end, two more times.  If I didn’t pass it then I wouldn’t have been able to do the second part tomorrow.  Would have been a really bad ego hit.
• You have to pee in your wetsuit.  I held it but wow.
• You have to some otherwise scary things like see what it feels like when you’re out of air underwater (instructor turns off your air supply and you watch your air pressure gague go down, down, down…) and you have to breathe through your regulator for 1 minute without goggles on (keeping in mind that goggles protect your nose, so it’s pretty crazy.)
• We’re getting certs for ‘deep water diving..’  scuba certs only allow for shallow, I guess we can go up to 130 feet eventually (with more dive hours)… after that you need to get technical certs which are like re-breathers and crazy science shit.

My game-designy head was enjoying the learning experience.  A lot of what you prepare to deal with in the education is both disaster and how to deal with panic.  I want to play with some ideas involving panic meters, air meters, etc…

At the end of it all, people have been scuba diving for 50 years.  What scuba divers do is very similar to astronauts, in many ways, especially deep sea diving.  It’s pretty marvelous how we can visit places we weren’t really meant to be, still be so comfortable.

Lots of endorphins, lots of adrenaline, lots of excitement.  Really exhausted and actually a bit concerned about my cardio, but glad to have been given a practical opportunity to see it not work out so I can get my lazy ass to do something about it.

Tired and hungry so going to award ourselves with In N Out and then relax.  Really swimming with the fishies tomorrow!

Well, I think my huge external drive just bit the dust.  It won’t spin up or get recognized.   There are (expensive) ways to save the data but at the moment a lot/most of it is just sentimental.  Just when I got my leg up in other areas of life, I get pushed back again.

Still a bit numb, still a bit dizzy.

I haven’t internetted much recently, other then some videos and whatnot, at the risk of being a bit of an oversharer.  Things have been a bit of a mess and I’m doing my best to keep it together.  It’s been chaotic, but not all bad by any means.  Some awesome things on the horizon so I can’t let this stuff get me down too far.

So, more haxoring about social-networky stuff.  I’m impressed with how well all of this stuff works together with minimal tweaking.  All of this synergy is pretty exciting to me, it’s a bit of a flickering light at the end of a dark-ish tunnel full of burrows of random internet socialization.  Here’s the crazy insanity that is currently possible/happening.

• My blogs are: TomMannino.com and ScatteredGenius.com (both WordPress) as well as a Livejournal.
• TomMannino.com is my personal/professional blog, and ScatteredGenius.com is my linkpost/random internet blog. For whatever reason, a large percentage of a general circle of friends uses Livejournal in whatever capacity.
• Any posts to either WordPress blog almost-invisibly cross-post to Livejournal automatically, with a tiny “Original Post” link at the bottom of each post.
• As of now, any tweets whatsoever automatically cross-post to my Facebook status via the Twitter Facebook app.
• Previously, my tweetorizing would automatically ‘cross-post’ once a day to my Livejournal using something called LoudTwitter, however it appears that this service is dead for good.  An Internet Friend has supplied me with some code I can set up myself using Ruby on Rails should I bring myself to want to try to get it to work, but probably won’t happen.
• Any scheduled posts to either Wordpress blog automatically cross-post to livejournal, cross-post to twitter, and thusly cross-post to my facebook status.

That’s a lot of cross-posting.  Someone who knows me personally and is well-connected to me online as far as social networking goes will see quite a bit of redundancy.  Example:

I embed a cat video on ScatteredGenius.com, which then also gets embedded on Livejournal.com; a tweet summary and link gets twitterated, which also gets cross-posted to my facebook status. That’s 4 cat videos for the price of one.

So, Due to the fact that I’m concerned that if the noise ratio of stuff is too high, you won’t pay attention to me anymore, I will preface the Tweet-side of things with a word like ‘Blog:’ or ‘Link:’ or ‘Vid:’ or ‘Image:’ something to that tune, to color it a bit, if/when I remember.

To get all this working, the only tweaking that I’ve had to do ‘under the hood’ to get to this point was edit some code in the Livejournal crossposter, simply removing some of the automatic formatting it was doing when it was posting.  By default, it adds a black-rectangle-outline to some pre-determined text to every single one of your posts and it was an eyesore.

As I’ve done with every time I’ve plugged more of my internet into other parts of my internet, I speak this ultimatum: I will not be changing my internetting habits, so if you think my content is spammy/stupid/not something you want to see, unsubscribe in whatever way/shape/form you need to, I will not be offended.  I have good friends who do not read my internets, I won’t take it personally.

I am way more excited about this then I should be.  Jeesh, what’s next… update my ZUGPOINT PICTURE after 6 years?!?