Home is Wherever I’m With You

1. Mumford & Sons – Little Lion Man
2. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes – Home
3. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins – Handle With Care
4. Matt Hires – A to B
5. The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
6. Zooey Deschanel – Sugar Town
7. Rilo Kiley – Ripchord
8. The Band – The Weight
9. Bright Eyes – Another Travelin’ Song
10. Ryan Bingham – The Weary Kind
11. Andrew Bird – Masterfade
12. M. Ward – Magic Trick

So, as of today, the Organization for the Quest for Long Beach Nachos has been formed.  We have a list of restaurants that provide excellent nachos, and we will be trying each of them, giving them ratings upon various factors, and eventually ranking them and choosing Long Beach’s best nachos.  The list so far of restaurants that we will be frequenting (at our own pace), is the following:

E.J. Malloy’s
Linda’s
Rock Bottom Brewery
Patricia’s
Bright Spot
Mi Lupita
Merced’s
Famous Dave’s
Acapulco
Island’s
Claim Jumper

Of course, there’s room for additions.  We also came up for a rubric for rating the nachos.  Nachos will be rated out of 10 for the following categories: presentation, spiciness, and overall flavor.

Tonight we decided to go with E.J. Malloy’s.  It was a very good first round.  The nachos were in, to say the least very healthy portions.  I myself got the chicken nachos, which cost an extra $2.50 on top of the $9.95 beginning price, certainly not cheap but well worth it.  The ingredients were somewhat isolated into their own areas, which isn’t really optimal in my opinion, because you’ve really got to work to make sure there’s multiple flavors on each chip, but at least the mix was well proportioned for each ingredient.  The cheese in particular was excellent, a mix of two cheeses with a lot of flavor.  Everything else was also very good, and it had all of the ingredients that I would want.  Overall I gave the nachos a 7 for presentation, a 3 for spiciness, and a 7 for overall taste.

E.J. Malloy’s Nachos:

More research must be done before this can be compared with other nachos, but needless to say this will be an ongoing quest, and we will keep you updated.

Okay that was a lie.  Now that I’ve broken that first resolution, maybe I’ll keep the ones I’m about to make in earnest.

First of all, as a last minute surge, and because I was so close anyway, I achieved a great pre-New Year’s goal.  Before the end of 2009 I officially completed the 100th page of the novel I’ve been working on.  Which sets up the first of my New Year’s resolutions.  Page 200.  By the end of 2010.  I’m hoping I’ll get more done than that, but in an attempt to actually achieve my goal, I’m going to leave it at that and see where it goes.

Second thing.  I’m really proud of what we achieved on Lock, Stock, and Two Film Geeks this year.  We’ve had an audience that has consistently grown, even if it’s a bit small, and we’ve pretty much completely kept to our original schedule of one review per week on Wednesday, and a podcast every other Saturday.  We’ve even managed to put up some extremely successful additional feature articles here and there.  So the resolution with regards to this is simply to keep it up.  Keep to the schedule, maybe throw up some more content this year (more features from me hopefully, but no set number), and what happens, happens.

This year I’ve also begun to run at least once or twice a weekend, which is an improvement over my college years.  But this isn’t good enough for me.  I want to run five times a week.  With regards to this, I’m not going to hit the ground running.  The goal for this resolution is to be exercising five times a week by the end of the year.  Not all year.  End of the year.

And that’s it.  Of course I have more personal goals, but nothing that I want to set in stone.  Hope you all have had a better 2009 than I did, because, If I’m being honest, this was a really rough year for me.  It won’t be hard to make 2010 better than this.  Have a nice New Year’s eve.

The big thing you should be aware of by now is also the primary reason for a lack of content on this site. I have been writing, and it’s available for you to see, it’s just not on this site at the moment. That’s because my friend Benn Hadland and I have created a new website, called Lock, Stock, and Two Film Geeks. It’s been going on for a good 3 months now, and we’ve got a ton of content up.  There’s podcasts, reviews, and feature articles.  We’re both really proud of the work we’ve been doing.  I’ve been pushing it pretty hard on my various social profiles, so you’re probably aware of it, but the fact that there was no mention of it here was bugging me.  Please check it out if you haven’t, read some of the reviews, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

So now that I’ve graduated there are some changes in what I’ve been doing in terms of work.  I was laid off from Ritz Camera around the week that I graduated.  In June, I started a part time job with a company called Internet Brands, simply to pay the bills.  Basically I research what search engine keywords are valuable to the company and come up with titles for articles based on these keywords.  Other people have to write and edit these articles.  It’s pretty mindless work but it doesn’t exhaust me from doing some writing on the weekends.  I have been writing a bit more, most of it for Two Film Geeks, but also a bit of work on my novel in progress.  I also left my internship so that I could take on more hours at work without sacrificing the opportunity to write.  I’m still looking for film related work but it’s a tough job market right now.

As always, I’m watching a lot of movies.  A lot of these are for our website but I try and catch up on what’s in theaters and knock off some “list of shame” items as well.  My queue of over 200 movies on Blockbuster never seems to get smaller though, as I’m always adding to it.

And that’s really it for now, it wasn’t really my practice to do these sort of “journal posts,” but I figured some explanation was appropriate.

Photo by violent jane

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put a “YES” or “NO” after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

Note: I feel this list is unfairly chick heavy, way too many entries from Jane Austen and Bronte, etc.

My list follows after the jump:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – No
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – Yes
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – Not Completely
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – No
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – Yes
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – Yes
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – No
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – No
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – no
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – No
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – No
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – No
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger- Yes
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger- No
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – no
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – No
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – no
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – no
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Yes
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – No
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – No
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – no
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – Yes
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – No
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – No
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – No
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – No
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – No
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – no
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – no
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – No
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – No
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – No
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons- No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – No
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens -No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon- No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – no
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – No
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – no
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – No
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding- No
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – No
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – Yes
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – No
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Inferno – Dante – Yes
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – no
80 Possession – AS Byatt – No
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – Yes
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – No
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – No
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – No
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – no
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – No
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – no
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo -No

I’m going to start out by defining a few terms you may see on Twitter.

RT: retweet.

Quite simply is the act of reposting a twitter post.  Basically you would do this if you thought someone else’s post was particularly entertaining or otherwise relevant and want to share it with your twitter followers.  I’ll show you several ways to do this.

RT @jamesgoux: Work is simply hell today.
retweet @jamesgoux: Work is simply hell today.
retweeting @jamesgoux: Work is simply hell today.

OH: overheard

This is when you tweet something that you heard in real life, usually (but not always) spoken by a complete stranger.  Usually I see people posting comments that just sound really strange and funny out of context.  Here’s a couple  examples

OH: I swear to god, if you don’t change your answer I’m kidnapping your monkey!

OH on the bus: You know who’s really cute, and just got out of jail?

#keywords

You may from time to time see tweets with phrases in them that have a pound sign in front of them.  These can be anywhere in the tweet.  Basically they’re purpose is to signify or sort of category or tag for the tweet.  This way a topic can be tracked across all of twitter, no matter who’s following who.  There are several ways to track this.  The simplest way is to just use http://search.twitter.com but there are other sites out there that organize #categorizes into visual mediums.

tinyurl links

Often you will see links that direct to some variation of tinyurl, bit.ly, or tr.im.  It ends up looking something like this: http://tinyurl.com/cnwuz8.  Rather than be confused by these mysterious links, just know that these sites can take long links and shorten them into more managable ones that take up less characters in the feed.  You can create these short links by going to any of these websites or using a twitter client that includes url shortening as a feature (digsby, tweetdeck, etc).

TwitPic

Another link that you’ll often find in tweets is to twitpic.com.  This is a really simple place where people can share photos with Twitter.  Once again, the easiest way to do this yourself is through various clients.

Clients

Since my last post I’ve found a few clients that I prefer to the ones I previously recommended, so I’m going to point them out to you.

The first is TwitterFon, which is now my primary twitter client on the iPhone.  I find it to be much better than Twinkle, which I was using before.  Mostly the interface is much cleaner and easier to read, and it also keeps track of which tweets you’ve read already, and skips straight to the next item on the list.  It also highlights new items to make them easier to keep track of.  I also like that it uses TwitPic instead of its own system for posting photos.  This is simply a more universal way of posting photos, and it allows comments too.  As for geotagging, you can do it from post to post, instead of generally.  Finally, it avoids the whole “twinkle community”, the one that doesn’t even use twitter, and at least in my area, incredibly inane, crude, and often perverted.  I highly reccomend using this if you use an iPhone.

The second client I want to point out is TweetDeck.  I’ve stopped using Digsby for Twitter, primarily because it’s interface is hard to use (it often closes accidentally since you have to hold the mouse over it directly for it to remain in view) and it also doesn’t provide many featres.  TweetDeck is great primarily becasue you can organize the people you follow into groups.  I seperate the people I actually know from the wealth of “celebrities” who I follow.  I don’t mind missing a celebrity tweet now and then, but I want to prioritze the tweets that my friends post.  Additionallly, it’s interface is fast and easy to use, and it provides all the standard features plus a few I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as the ability to auto-shorten your post (finds unneeded characters if your strapped for letters).  It also can do a lot with the #hashtags I mentioned earlier.  It’s even integrated facebook in a few ways recently.  Once you get really into Twitter, TweetDeck will become a must if you want to keep track of everything.

Facebook sync

Not everyone is on Twitter, but pretty much everyone is on facebook.  I like sharing my posts with as many people as possible, so I sync my tweets with my facebook “status”.  For those who wonder why I change my status so often, this is the reason.  Doing this is easy, just search Twitter on facebook and you’ll find an application called Twitter. Fill out your information and you’re done.  I get a lot more opinions on my posts this way, and on facebook people can add comments to my posts instead of @replying.

Comparing Twitter to Facebook

With the most recent updates to facebook, the home page feed has become very similar to twitter.  There’s something to be said for the fact that facebook has a system identical, and perhaps in some ways better than twitter.  But it’s not the system that makes twitter what it is.  For one, the simplicity of twitter makes you engage with it in a certain way, one far more active than any facebook feed.  Secondly, the facebook feed isn’t really consistant, sometimes certain posts show up and then upon refresh they don’t.  It’s easy to miss things your friends say.  Twitter’s feed is completely consistant, if you are thorough, you can see every post from the people you follow.  Thirdly, twitter’s mobile function, both in terms of applications and SMS compatability, is much more accessable than most.  And finally, there’s the community.  The way the people on twitter participate is much more active than the way people on facebook participate.  Obviously, twitter is what you and your friends make out of it, but I find it’s simplicity really allows for fun thoughts and discussion.

And that’s about it for now.  Let me know if you find these types of things at all helpful.  I plan to do an explanation of RSS sometime in the near future.

You may have seen my previous post about my new internship, listing five things that I really appreciated about my new internship.  Since that first day, I’ve gone back twice and it’s been going well.  The people there seem to appreciate my script coverage, and say I do a solid job on it as well.  Luckily, the way I’ve learned to do coverage in the past seems to be more thorough and better than what they usually require.  Rather than come down to that level, I’ve decided to stick with my better quality of coverage.  I’ve just realized that I’ve mentioned script coverage twice now, and some people may not actually be aware of what it is.  Since this particular task is what makes up about 99% of my time at any development internship, perhaps I should go into it a bit.

Script coverage is when you read a script and then create a short document in which you completely summarize the plot of the script and then write a commentary section saying what was done right, what was done wrong, and whether or not the script is worth considering for development.  This commentary will usually go over character, dialogue, plot, structure, and anything else that’s relevent to script analysis.  I’ve found that the best lengths for these two sections are to shoot for around a page and a half of summary and about 3/4 of a page of commentary.  This obviously depends greatly on the material you’re working with, especially since you might not be covering a script at all, but rather a comic book, novel, or any other medium that tells stories.  You’ll also give both the writer and the script itself a final judgment: PASS, CONSIDER, or RECOMMEND.

The whole point of this is to save the executives and their assisstants time.  You’re taking the time to read it so that they don’t have to.  Hopefully after reading your coverage, an executive will be able to discuss the project with the writer or someone else involved with the project and be constructive and sound like they know what they’re talking about.  It also helps them know whether or not a script is worth reading at all.  Most companies receive hundreds of submissions in a month, and the people who work their don’t have time to read everything.  It’s a reader’s job to help narrow things down.  If a reader does decide that something is really good, based on the coverage an executive may decide to take the time to read it themselves.  If the reader thinks it’s a load of crap, it probably will get buried or thrown away by the company.  And usually when a script is poor, there is still a follow-up meeting with the writer, the coverage helps whoever is meeting the writer to give constructive advice and still pass on the project in a way that is considerate and understanding.

I was also asked recently by a friend what the general breakdown of script quality is.  How many are worth filming, how many are torturously bad, etc.  This really depends on the company.  I imagine a more reputable company is also more likely to receive a stream of quality scripts.  One that’s just starting out might receive a range of scripts written by writers who are still unknown.  Different companies also have different policies for accepting submissions.  My last internship, Valhalla Motion Pictures wisely only accepted script submissions through agencies.  They always said it was for legal reasons, and it very likely was, but it also puts up a very important middle man between them and the sea of writers trying to get recognized.  Sadly though, what it comes down to is very few scripts that a given reader is handed are very good.  If something is coming from a fantastic writer, the executives usually jump on it themselves.  It’s our job as readers to find diamonds in the rough.  If I had to make an estimate though, I’d say about 75% of the scripts I read are bad, 24% of the scripts are passably okay, and only 1% of the scripts are truly good to great.  So when you see a script that really is good, it really feels like a fantastic and rare find.  A discerning filmmaker would probably only make films from this small percentile, but because these are so rare (and get snatched up quickly I imagine), most companies (and readers) have to at least consider some of the ones in the passable percentile.  This does seem like a depressing set of statistics, but the fact is there’s a lot of writers out there trying to hone their craft and get known, and therefore there’s a lot to be read that won’t ever be able to be filmed.  Finding those great scripts really feels good after trudging through the mud for so long.

I mention all this because I’m coming off of a work day in which the two scripts I read included one passably okay script, and one good script.  Overall a very good day for reading scripts and I’m quite happy about it.  So on that note, I’d like to add a few “things I like” to my previous list.

1. The chair I’ve been assigned is awesome.  It’s really comfortable, flexable to various needs, and simultaneously supportive.  I have a lot of back and neck problems, so this is a big deal for me.  I wish I could take it home with me sometimes.  It also really helps me understand why all the characters in the book Then We Came to the End always made such a big deal about “inheriting” the good office chairs from their coworkers who left.  A very funny passage from a funny book made all the more relatable by personal experience.

2. Good office spacing.  The office spacing is comfortable and roomy.  The desks and offices are spaced enough to where things are quiet enough to work.  At the same time there’s no stairs to go up and down and things are close enough to communicate easily, you could even talk without leaving your desk if you chose to, it would just be slightly disruptive.  A small thing overall, but it makes working just that much more comfortable.