AOL Journals: Pixel Pusher

7:17:17 PM EDT
Hearing Rain Dogs -- Tom Waits

As most of you know, I've moved away from this blog and over to Magic Smoke, occupying Joe's shoes. It makes sense: more people read that blog, there's more useful stuff to refer to in there, etc.

But I'd like to think the content here isn't totally useless. We had some good times together, didn't we? I'd like to consolidate the good bits from this blog into Magic Smoke -- and I need your help figuring out what they are.

So, please, take a look through my archives. Let me know in mail or comments which entries you found useful, helpful, or fun. I'll copy them over and dump them into Magic Smoke so they don' t get lost in the event that this blog is deleted.

And many thanks in advance for your help ...

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 8 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

1:58:46 PM EDT
As my post below indicates, I will be pulling away from this blog and blogging over at Magic Smoke.  I now answer to the JournalsEditor screenname.

So if you want to e-mail me, send all correspondence to journalseditor@aol.com. I'll be checking that account, reading, and responding from there. While I will be reading e-mail sent to editorjeff76 for a while, it is no longer the best or fastest way to reach me. Eventually, that account will be closed down.

See you over there ...


Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 3 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

9:49:23 AM EDT
Hey there, people -- Maybe I'm wrong in thinking this, but I have the sneaking suspicion that most of you that read this blog also read Journals Editor Joe's Magic Smoke.

If you do, you already saw that Magic Smoke isn't going to be Joe's anymore. He's leaving the Journals area to help program and develop AIM Pages Blogs -- leaving me to wrangle the lot of you by myself.

I'll be phasing this blog out and making Magic Smoke my own. It's been around a lot longer than this blog, and is much better known. It just makes better sense to have me drive a big ship already moving at full speed rather than keep on trucking in this little rowboat.

I'll still be me, writing what I write and doing what I do -- highlighting your work and trying to provide a sense of the larger blogosphere. And Joe will still be able to tell me what to do. So everything's going to be fine. See you over there...

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 3 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

4:40:14 PM EDT
Hearing Algebra of Need -- Rye Coalition
Hi everybody... as posted to the Message Boards and the AOL Journals main page, here are the Guest Editor's Picks for September 15th, 2006:

Guest Editor Lisa knows a thing or two about the preciousness of life on earth -- which is why she calls her blog Please Don't Take Life for Granted. Check out her weekend picks:

* Northern Trip

* My Life & Chaos!

* My Life

* Astra's Journal

* My Hugs Journal

* Lori's Laurels

Don't forget, if you want your own chance at being a Guest Editor, or if you have a blog you want us to see for a possible feature, send us an e-mail at JournalsEditor@aol.com and EditorJeff76@aol.com. Please don't forget to include a link to your blog.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Thanks -- Jeff

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 1 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

11:56:19 AM EDT
Hearing Come On My Selector -- Squarepusher
If you've made it to this blog, you've already endured and ignored a bunch of flashing ads you want nothing to do with. Guess what? This post is going to be another one!

I believe in the power of this book so much that I'm shilling it before I even read it. Yes, this is breathless hyperbole. This is a blog, not the news. With blogs AND the news, consider the author's biases and make your own decisions. 

"What," you must be thinking breathlessly, "what could possibly be so unbelievably cool that some guy wants to use his blog to endorse it? After all," you are continuing to think, "blogs aren't easy to write, and this guy could be telling about his lunch or what's on TV or some 'Web 2.0' thing that nobody with a real life really cares about."

That's just it. I could be telling you about my lunch. Or otherwise numbing you with some dry account of my boring life in a grey carpeted cubicle.

Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl has written a cure for the aforementioned malaise called 'Nobody Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog.'  If you buy a copy directly from her, she'll autograph it for you. Nice! Be forewarned that the previous link also advertises t-shirts with a naughty phrase on them.

I found out about her book from the constantly astounding Dooce, who uses one of Maggie's tips here.

 Anyone that wants to consistently hold the interest of a bunch of strangers needs a little help thinking of new material. If you're blogging for long enough, you're gonna run out of stuff to talk about.

Thank me in the comments, and have a great weekend ...

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 3 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

4:33:00 PM EDT
Hearing You Will, You Won't -- The Zutons
A couple of vigilant J-landers emailed Joe and I today to let us know that the Alerts feature in AOL Journals was not working. Members who tried to subscribe to 'New Entry' Alerts on AOL Journals were getting an error message. Thanks for that, guys.

I sent emails off to the relevant parties and then ducked into a two-hour meeting ... now that I am back, I'm pleased to report that the Alerts problem is fixed, and we're back to normal.

The Spell Check tool is still out, I'm sorry to say. I'll let you guys what I know as soon as I know something.

Thanks again for your help.

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 3 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

6:11:10 PM EDT
Hearing Statues -- Husker Du
This post is mostly to honor Mister Bacon-Taper's Monday Photo Shoot, but there's more:

Frank Benson and I go way back. In kindergarten he wore a vest at ALL times, largely because it was something that Han Solo would have done, which garnered my complete respect and envy. We got each other into Batman comics, 'The Lost Boys', punk rock and so much more all through middle school, high school and after college.

We fed each others' heads full of everything great we could possibly find every chance we got. We'd bomb around town in his battleship-sized Oldsmobile cranking Nirvana and the Lords of Acid, sneak out to see 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' and talk deeply about the one concept plaguing every creative teenage weirdo's thoughts: girls, and how to attract them.

We kinda lost touch somewhere after college, though. It happens. I caught up with Frank in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago, though, and it was like he;d just called me up last Tuesday. The great thing about great friends is that really, it takes no effort at all. You just pass each other like comets and comfortably reenter orbit with zero dramas at all.

Now Frank's a fulltime artist, living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He lives right across the street from an old college friend of mine, if you can believe that. He's making his way in the art world -- and I couldn't be happier for him.

Check out some of his work.

We went to his studio out in Bushwick, where he showed me his latest:

The work is meant to be a representation of those people that go around painting themselves silver and posing as living statues for tips. Appropriately, it's called 'Statue.'

He made this by taking a fiberglass casting of a model and painting the results. That description is a gross oversimplification -- the process was long, painful, difficult and toxic. Below you'll see an image of three of the works, ready to ship. Because AOL is 'family friendly', I have obscured the sculpture's unit(s) with small images of my own face.

This is Frank with his masterpiece:

What do you think?

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 9 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

10:20:15 PM EDT
Hearing Digital -- Joy Division
 

The mysterious videoblogger lonelygirl15 has been officially outed as an actress. BoingBoing, home base to the Internet's hive mind, brought the story to my attention. The case itself was cracked by 18-year-old Matt Foremski, who outs Rose here. Make sure you watch the video at the bottom of the page -- it's hilarious.

For those of you just catching up, Journals Editor Joe has a pretty succint roundup of the lonelygirl15 phenomenon over on his blog. Essentially, many people doubted that "Bree," as the character called herself, was a real 16-year-old creating a videoblog teeming with potentially eerie Satanic behavior without her parents' knowledge in her bedroom. 

Some people were convinced that her story was legit. However, I would not be surprised if these same people think 'Lost' is a documentary and the moon landings were faked.

Anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows that no sane teen's room is ever that clean. And anyone who's survived the seizure-inducing mass media attack that is a teenager's blog/MySpace page knows that kids don't go for minimalism when it comes to Web design.

So now the story's out -- "Bree" is the gorgeous Jessica Rose, a New Zealand-born actress who lives in L.A. Which means the story she's telling in her video diary is not true. But you know what? I don't care.

It's not like it's duplicitous to post short films on YouTube. People do it all the time. Anyone who goes to YouTube looking for inarguable, inflexible truth needs to have his entire brain washed and rebooted. It's not a news channel, people.

We live in an age where people consider 'The Daily Show' their main source of news, and they KNOW it's fake. Jayson Blair made it to the top at the New York Times, and we've only gotten news that doesn't upset the advertisers for decades. Stories are written by humans with normal biases who work for corporations with biases, and by the time we consume anything it's been processed and refined into a sleek little nugget that tells us nothing. We're just waking upto it now.

In a media-saturated world, truth is a laundry list scribbled on an Etch-A-Sketch and reality a flock of filthy pigeons crapping in the sun. We look at what we want and disbelieve what we don't like. It's easier that way. It's fun to get mad that we've been duped by a marketing scheme when we unearth one, but it happens to us all the time, every day.

The truth of Bree's message doesn't matter at all. It may be marketing for a movie, but I really hope it's a story in and of itself, using YouTube as a medium. It's going to be really fun following her story as it develops now that the plot and central conflicts have been laid out. If it was really some dumb video blog by a teenaged girl that snuck around with some boy, I wouldn't give it a second thought. Creepy evolving horror movie, though -- I can't get enough.

Nobody thinks those folks on 'Lost' are really on an island, and nobody thought Laura Palmer died for real. Lonelygirl15's story is a new form of storytelling, and the story shouldn't stop just because we know it's fiction.


Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 10 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

1:17:08 PM EDT
Hearing Funk #49 -- The James Gang

It has come to my attention that the AOL Journals' Spell-Check function is broken. Some of you thought maybe it was you or your machines, but as near as we can tell right now, it's not. Don't worry about clearing your cache and restarting for the time being.

Many thanks to the concerned J-landers who e-mailed Joe and me to let us know.

The tech team is trying to locate the problem and fix it as I type this. We don't have any more news than that just yet, but as soon as we do, we'll pass the word on.

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 5 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

12:47:29 PM EDT

I was working as a freelance writer and photographer in the fall of 2001. I use the term "working" pretty loosely -- they cut my phone off at dawn on 9/11. I had a bunch of potential clients to call, but had learned from experience what the drill was in this situation: Use my credit card to jimmy open my next-door neighbor's window, climb inside, call her at work to let her know what was happening and start planning the thank-you dinner I would cook for her that evening.

"Shut up, Jeff. We don't have any work for you yet. Just turn the TV on."

I caught the smoke pouring out of the first tower. The second plane hit minutes later. I couldn't believe what was happening. Nobody could. I saw the people jumping, the smoke pouring -- and then there was an interruption in the feed.

For a few moments, this stop-motion clip from a Frank Zappa film started playing -- cotton-wool smoke crept through a psychedelic plastic graveyard while guitars furiously noodled. Someone at the station must have hit the wrong button or crossed a wire. But for a little bit, I thought, "Thank God. This is all just a sick prank, or a weird accident." It wasn't.

I drove around to my clients' businesses. Everyone was glued to the TV. Editors and creative directors were glued to their TVs. "We got nothin'," they all said, never turning from the sets.

Cars were pulled over in the streets and people gathered around them, listening to the radios. Jets screamed through the sky, flying laps from air bases in Virginia up to New York and back, patrolling the East Coast. They were the only planes in the sky, and then that stopped, too. The sky went clear and silent, like Scalzi mentions.

Nobody could bring themselves to work, but nobody could go home either. Everyone I saw in Richmond that day was just wandering around, stunned.

I ended up at my friend Kathy's place. We didn't talk much at all. I don't remember a word either of us said -- all I remember is the two of us lying on her bed and holding each other, turning the TV on, turning it off, turning it back on again.

That night we gathered on my front porch -- my neighbors, roommate, Kathy, even the wino that hung out in our alley. We just sat there, talking. Someone said:

Things are never going to be the same. Big football games, big concerts, traveling by plane ... it all just got a lot scarier, man.

My dad told me over the phone that night:

Things are going to change. This country's going to get a lot more conservative. Foreigners are going to be treated suspiciously, and a lot of freedoms we think are normal are going to fade away.

He was right about that.

I can remember thinking that we all had to band together, put aside our political differences, and stay united. And that maybe, just maybe, if everyone kept the reality of these attacks and our love of home in our hearts, and ignored the temptation to spin this situation for political gain, we'd make it through. We'd be able to conquer our enemies, unify as a country, and be greater than we've ever been.

I was wrong about that.

Like Joe, what I remember the most is that everyone wanted to help.

Here are some links from around the Web, archives, tributes and memorials to the events that terrible day. If you have more, please leave them in my comments.

Many of these links will point to content that contains a lot of profanity. Be forewarned.

*Five Years After 9/11, Nation Pays Solemn Tribute
*Metafilter comment thread from 9/11, as it evolved.
*Choking on the Ashes of the Dead
*September 11th Archive
*Minerva: September 11th Archive
*9/11: the World Remembers -- CNN

This link is particularly incredible. Photographer Bil Biggart was killed by debris at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and took photos until he died. His camera was recovered, and the images are in a gallery at the link below:

*'Bill Biggart's Final Exposures'

Many J-landers, either in response to Scalzi's assignment or of their own volition, are posting their own memories and tributes:

*Oh, My Word!
*Our Beloved Angels
*Rachael Anne Rules the World
*Aurora Walking Vacation
*Adventures in Park Hopping

If there is a link you'd like to add, either to your own creations or something out on the Web, please leave it in the comments section ...

Written by editorjeff76 Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 8 comments: Show Recent | Add your own