MorrisonFilm

"My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in..."

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:22:23 -0400

“My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies. They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.”

- Steve Jobs, Good Management is Like The Beatles, Fast Company

Silly Girls and Zombies

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:50:20 -0400

I want to like the Walking Dead more than I actually do. I keep watching it in hopes it will eventually pay off. The final few episode were actually decent and I’m by no means giving up on the show. But one of my biggest gripes are the female characters and how much I hate them. There isn’t a single female character on the show I like and I finally realized it wasn’t my fault. They aren’t likable.

The problem is that all of the women characters can’t help but constantly screw things up and the macho men have to come and fix everything. What happens when Lori tries to go help her husband Rick? She flips the car over for no good reason. Silly girl should have just stayed home where she belonged with all the other women.

The entire first half of season 2 revolved around finding Sophia because the stupid girl got lost. She couldn’t just listen to what the man told her to do. Silly girl.

Then there’s the woman from the abusive relationship. She is the least interesting character in the history of drama. What did she do when her daughter was missing? Absolutely jack nothing. She just let all the men risk their lives while she practiced being boring back home.

After the season two first half finale, the big zombie slaughter was just too much for one female character so she just went into shock. Because she’s an hysterical silly girl. I don’t even remember her name because she hasn’t done a single thing of consequence otherwise. To be fair, Rick also went into shock for 3 episodes— oh wait, no he didn’t because that would have been totally absurd for a man.

The strongest female character is Andrea because she wants to learn how to shoot a gun. But this is the same character who was angry that Dale saved her life. She’d rather just check out of this world than deal with it. At least she actually did learn to shoot a gun and hasn’t yet accidentally shot herself. (Though she did accidentally shoot a man, because, you know, she’s just a silly girl with a gun).

Of course there’s also Maggie, the farmer’s daughter who is pretty strong except she’s also confusing and contradictory because she’s a silly girl. And she immediately wants to sleep with the nerdiest character because you know, that’s realistic.

I’m going to keep watching it because zombies, apocalypse, survival, guns. But I really am just waiting to finally root for one of these female characters and not just because she doesn’t totally screw something up and ruin it for all the men who are trying to save the world¹.

Don’t even get me started on the lone black guy and how the only thing of consequence he’s ever done was get his hand cut really bad. That’s an entire post on its own. ↩

I'm not going to blog about that

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:43:39 -0400

I’m not going to look it up, but it’s probably been about five years since I wrote a post about blogging. That’s because at some point I decided “I’m not going to blog about that.” Who wants to read about blogging? Just blog. I think it was a good choice. The problem is, over the last five years or so, I stopped writing anything online because I decided, for one reason or another “I’m not going to blog about that.” Oh, I took this cool photo, maybe I should share it. Eh, no one wants to see my Instagram retreads. Oh I know, I really have something to say about the Red Sox. Really? Who reads my blog and also cares about the Red Sox? I’m not going to blog about that. I’ve got about 10,000 words to share about— fuck it, that’s way too long for the Tumblr Dashboard¹. I’m not going to blog about that.

And what I was left with was nothing.

So I’m rebooting this bitch. And I only have one rule: Write whatever makes me happy². Also, at the suggestion of Garrett I purchased a Tumblr premium theme as a guilt device. This way when I stop blogging for a few weeks I can think, “Shit, I just dropped $50 on that damn theme, I better make it worth it.”

Actually, I think the Tumblr Dashboard, with it’s insistence on short, digestible content, likes and reblogs has a lot to do with killing my enthusiasm for writing online. At this point instead of leaving Tumblr I’m just going to try to ignore all those things and see what happens. ↩
Ideally this will not result in my blogging only about the Red Sox and my cats. ↩

"So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:03:20 -0400

“So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.””

- Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out — Daily Intel

Someone got a pasta maker for Christmas! (Me) (Taken with...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:23:23 -0500

Someone got a pasta maker for Christmas! (Me) (Taken with instagram)

Prometheus Trailer

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:19:51 -0500

God I hope this movie is great. Not just good. I want great. And I don’t think it’s asking too much. It can’t be overstated how Alien and Blade Runner are two of the best sci-fi movies of all time. No one has really ever come close.

Most exciting for me is that Scott’s two sci-fi movies were hard science fiction, not fluffy action sci-fi. No one makes hard sci-fi, not anymore. So if Prometheus is true to his previous genre efforts we’ll be very lucky.

The big question about Prometheus has been, how connected to the Alien universe will it be? And it seems that we’ve got an answer from the trailer: quite a lot. I see the “Pilot” and the U-shaped ship from Alien, which is a hell of a lot more than I expected to see in the trailer.

Also I really love how the letters of the title for “Prometheus” build on screen just like the title in Alien. Nice touch. Actually, the whole trailer is a callback to the the original Alien teaser trailer, including the music.

Have I mentioned how excited I am about this movie?

Panning for Gold

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:55:00 -0500

I got to thinking recently. Why pay $10 or whatever a month for Spotify or Rdio¹ when I’ve got 30GB of music on my hard drive that I never listen to? The problem is I open up iTunes, scan through the list of artists and think “I hate all this crap.” But here’s the trick: I don’t hate it all. I just forgot about all the good stuff.

So I started an insane project. I am rating every single song in my iTunes library. The short version of this story is that I’m having a blast and finding a ton of great music I had lost touch with.

There are a few things I’ve done to make this easier.

1) I made a smart playlist that singles out all the unrated music and excludes stuff I don’t care to rate like stand up comedy, movie scores and Christmas music.

2) I’m not rating songs based on good vs. bad, I’m rating them based on whether they belong in a radio-style playlist. In vs. out.

3) My cutoff for “In” is three stars. It’s too mentally challenging to rate every song on a scale of 1 to 5 so I’m really only rating songs “In” or “Out”. “In” songs are three stars and “Out” songs are 2 stars. Only if I have a particularly strong opinion do I bother with giving something 1, 4 or 5 stars.

4) I now have a playlist called “Shawn Radio” with all of my 3 stars and greater songs. It’s an easy go-to when I just want to listen to music but don’t want to decide on a particular album. I know everything in there is going to be pretty good.

Before I started I was curious what percentage of my library would be “Shawn Radio” worthy. So far I’ve rated 536 songs and it’s split almost exactly 50/50. I have 4,032 songs left to rate.

Once I’ve got them all rated I’ll have a good base with which to create other smart playlists. I can siphon off only the 90s alternative or only Hip Hop. Yes, it’s a lot of shit work but I think the payoff will be worth it. Plus, on the way there I get to rediscover a lot of great music.

¹ Obviously services like Rdio and Spotify provide value above and beyond what I can harvest from my existing iTunes library but the goal I’m trying to solve right now is finding good music to listen to casually.

No trombones

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:34:37 -0500

No trombones:

This is my favorite kind of rant. It’s something I’ve never thought about before but John’s totally right. The childhood band situation sucks. I would love to know how to play the piano right now. Instead there’s a rusty saxophone in my parents’ garage. We didn’t know better when I was a kid but hopefully I can change that for my kids.

Upgrade your low-bitrate music files using iTunes Match

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:47:25 -0500

Upgrade your low-bitrate music files using iTunes Match:

Works perfectly.

Trailer: Snow White and the Huntsman

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:20:16 -0500

Trailer: Snow White and the Huntsman:

Wow, this actually looks really good.

This morning

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:33:32 -0400

Sara: Oh no!!
Me: What?! What's wrong?
Sara: Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard are breaking up.
Me: ...
Sara: What? It's sad!

Steve Jobs

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:05:33 -0400

I felt silly sitting on my couch crying about a man I’ve never met. But he was a hero. And that’s what you do when heroes die. I’ve only been developing for iOS for two years but Steve Jobs has been an influence on me my entire life. Not just his products. His words always inspired me to want to do great things. He always reminded me the world was an amazing place.

I just keep thinking how sad it is that we’ll never again see him enter the stage at Moscone sipping a bottle of Smart Water saying “Good morning!” Then introduce something amazing that changes the world.

Thank you, Steve, for everything.

How to be a dick about the Red Sox collapse

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:26:56 -0400

If you’re a Yankees fan and feel the need to rub it in that the Sox engineered the worst collapse in baseball history (as if I were capable of feeling any worse about it) here are some pointers.

Don’t Straw Man Me

Yankees fans love to do this. LOVE. This is how it goes. They find some douche bag Sox sportswriter and quote him as if he speaks for Red Sox fans, then throw it in my face when he’s wrong.

Shaughnessy is the usual go-to guy for this because he writes such nonsense. I guess people who aren’t Sox fans don’t realize that he’s the biggest tool working in news today and yes I’ve heard of Fox news. Shaughnessy’s goal is to antagonize Sox fans. Whatever he writes is pretty much the opposite of what every Sox fan thinks and feels. Tony Massarotti is a close second, especially with this jackass article he wrote

The current one being thrown around is this NESN article from Jan 2, 2011. The first hint that something’s fishy is that this article was written by a TV station, but whatever. Also I’ve never heard of Eric Ortiz and the only reason we all now have is that he wrote a bullshit piece of link-bait.

The money quote from the article:

The 2011 Red Sox could accomplish a feat that has never been done. They could unseat the 1927 Yankees as the greatest major league team of all time.

Quoting this back to me now on September 30th doesn’t “get” me or “show me” anything. I didn’t write that shit. I never thought that shit. Had I read it at the time I’d have called it what it is, horse shit. Only someone desperate for click throughs would write that nonsense. And only an idiot would think showing me this article humiliates me in some way.

I suppose if your only goal is to make me angry it succeeds on some level but only because I get angry that I have to explain basic logical fallacies. You don’t think I could find some article from YES.com to throw in your face? I’m certain they must have produced a “Yankees Legend” piece on Joba Chamberlain back in 2007.

But I won’t. Because that shit’s too easy.

There’s a million legit things to throw in my face right now, but don’t straw man me.

Journal Entry

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:59:01 -0400

I’ve never written out my experiences from 9/11 so I thought I’d finally do that. I wasn’t in the towers or even downtown that day, so my story is not so crazy or anything. I don’t want to be dramatic about it, it was just my perspective on one day, but I felt like writing it out. My friends would probably find this the most interesting but here it is for everyone.

Anonymous Facebook Comment

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:00:06 -0400

Wow, what a fucking useless thing to say. Do these vapid gems just pop into your brain all the time or is today a special day?

This is a comment I want to post to Facebook about once a day that I am instead posting on my blog because if I posted it to Facebook that would make me mean and I don’t consider myself a mean person. So here we are.

(sorry Krysten Ritter, some images are permanent)

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:43:50 -0400

(sorry Krysten Ritter, some images are permanent)

LA Light by Colin Rich via spiegelman

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 11:13:46 -0400

LA Light by Colin Rich

via spiegelman

Hot lineup (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 23:23:42 -0400

Hot lineup (Taken with instagram)

Griffith / Downtown (Taken with Instagram at Griffith Park)

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:14:34 -0400

Griffith / Downtown (Taken with Instagram at Griffith Park)

Transformers 3 uses footage from The Island. Micahel Bay is...

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 21:26:10 -0400

Transformers 3 uses footage from The Island.

Micahel Bay is certainly allowed to do so. It doesn’t make him suck any more than he already does. But you know your movies are recycled drivel when you can just swap shots from action sequences and no one can tell the difference.

(Well, no one except YouTube user cinefilojermain23).

(via Go Into The Story)