Up at OSCON in Portland, in the conf hall, writing this from my iPhone. Could this be cooler? Could it be lamer?
At least I got a green Google moleskine out of the trip!
Improvisational Ponderings of Moderate Nefariousness
It’s been a sad state of affairs that someone who perpetrates to be in as many social media tools, toys, and sites as I do had no decent picture of myself, or “avatar” to use. Partly because most pictures of me look ridiculous (in my opinion), and partly because I never got around to correcting the situation, the end result was that on most sites I was represented by whatever silly default icon they used.
So when some cohorts in the Arizona Twitterverse started focusing on their avatars, I got curious. A local photographer, Tyson Crosbie, shot a session with Ms. Herr and posted the top 15 pictures online for people to view and vote which three they liked the best. I was curious, intrigued even, and set up my own scope shoot with Tyson.
The shoot was a blast, as was seeing the resulting pictures. It confirmed my belief that there is an innate screwball inside my skin that shows up crystal clear on film. We still found 15 good shots, which Tyson put on Flickr, and the voting began.
What a bizarre few days it was as people commented. I just do NOT like looking at pictures of myself, and here was a whole herd of them! I was like a ornithophobe at Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Not good. The comments ended up being insightful, supportive, and quite funny. Aside from a few pictures picking up nicknames like “the fart one”, it was far less painful than I feared.
End result – I have three good pictures of myself to use online, although they weren’t the ones I would have chosen for myself. To me, that was one of the best parts of the process because I had an image that appealed to others and not to my own view of myself.
It was a fun and educational process, and Tyson was great to work with. You may want to read Tyson’s thoughts on your avatar being part of your online brand, and you definitely should check out his other pictures on Flickr. Ms Herr also posted her final thoughts about the process.
Thanks to everyone who helped me select this pictures, because we’re both stuck looking at them for a long time to come!
I think I’ve finally started enough blogs to fill my drunken, insatiable need for the things.
This blog was morphing into a writing blog, but now I’ve spun up Writing Is Cake with some folks from my writing group, so all my writing nonsense is now over there.
I’m also in the process of kicking off Ignite Phoenix with Halfacat, and that’s coming along at a reasonable clip.
Between all that and work (and my actual writing for myself!) my fingers are wearing down to nubs.  That should cover me for a bit, so if either of those categories interest you, please check out the sites.  If you just want info on me being me, that should start up again here.
If anyone sees me starting another blog, please shoot me.
I just finished listening to an NPR Podcast narrated by Howard Dully. At the age of 12, Howard was the youngest person to receive an “icepick lobotomy”. He never spoke about his surgery with his father, or his step-mother who forced it onto him. Now, as an adult, he tries to understand what happened to him and why.
How could anyone ever think this is a good idea? How do you come to terms with knowing that part of you who you were was scrambled in your own skull?
It’s not easy to listen to, but riveting.
My Screenwriting III class starts tonight for me (I missed the REAL first class last week due to work related travel), and they want me to start a brand new screenplay for it.¬†¬† Let’s see… I have the “competition screenplay” that I worked on with two friends that I still want to rewrite, the screenplay I started for SW I, and the one I worked on for Script Frenzy last year and started refining in my SW II class.¬† Now with this new one I’ll have four active screenplays rattling around in my noggin.
Apparently each level of this SW curriculum¬† wants to start with a clean sheet of paper.¬† I get that from the standpoint of refining technique at script creation, which is a tricky process all by itself, but I think I’ve reached my brain limit.¬† I’ve taken the goal with my writing group to get Rev 2 of one of the screenplays done by end of March, which will be a nice feeling.¬† At least then the screenplays won’t all be at the same development stage.
Anyway, this is mostly idle grumbling as I do love writing and am getting much better at the screenplay style as these classes wind on.¬†¬† It’s all good.