This weekend, I be shootin’ cheerleaders for the Edinburg Landsharks semi-pro football team.

This weekend, I be shootin’ cheerleaders for the Edinburg Landsharks semi-pro football team.

I’m doing the “splash page” thing again. I might wind up redux-ing the whole site.

I thought this story was kinda sweet in a weird not-really-Christmasy kinda way.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

With electricity comes internet and today the Mac is hooked up (via Airport, of course) to the new DSL connection here in the apartment. So this is my first anythings online from the new digs. W00t! Now to walk around my new home with the iPhone and test the connection.

Workworkwork. I’m sitting here at work and I’d rather be 1. driving my new car as I, 2. move into my new apartment. I need furniture, though…

The Bench has been selected to screen at the Cinesol Film Festival this year. It will premiere Saturday, September 19 at 5pm at the Cine El Rey in McAllen, TX. A Q&A with myself and other members of the crew and cast will follow.

Here is a link to the schedule:
http://cinesol.bside.com/2009/films/thebench_cinesol2009

Also, local newspaper The Monitor wishes to review the film. I’m nervous!

It’s a landmark birthday for me today as I slip-slide straight into the medium size three-oh. I guess that means I’m gonna have to start paying taxes and get a drivers license and worry about insurance and utility bills and not mixing the black socks with the white shirts and….oh, wait: these are all things I do already. So I guess nothing’s changed. My back hurts kinda, though…

Happy Birthday, United States of America! Good for another 233, are we?

TMZ says Michael Jackson died! The King of Pop, man! He had a heart attack and died! He was 50! That’s messed up. You know what else is messed up? Farrah Fawcett also died today — of anal cancer — at 62. Wow. No one lives forever, huh?

Contains spoilers.

I saw Star Trek last night and although it was great fun it was certainly not the best of the franchise. However, the guy who does Lost and the guys who wrote Transformers did do something very intelligent. This Star Trek is not a reboot in a Batman Begins sense. It’s a reboot in a Back to the Future alternate timeline, Biff Tannen-in charge sense.

There were quite a few moments in the movie where I was completely ready to call “bullshit”, but the movie’s one saving grace appears: Leonard Nimoy as Spock. And he’s not J. J. Abrams’ Spock. This is Gene Roddenberry’s Spock from the future; the same future timeline as the original series, movies and The Next Generation era. In that timeline everything we know and love about the established Trek universe is still going on. But some shit goes down and the bad guy and Spock are thrust back in time where the bad guy kills Kirk’s dad, among many others: an event not supposed to happen, and thereby changes the Trek timeline at least 25 years before the events in the original series. That’s ample time for production design to change.

Once Leonard Nimoy’s Spock tells young Kirk that all the shit happening in this movie never actually happened in his timeline and it’s all a completely alternate universe where now anything can happen (including newly reimagined encounters with Khan, the Borg or a new Federation-Klingon war), Abrams and company have a fresh, clean slate to do ANYTHING they want and it’s ok to the die hard Trekkies and Trekkers who, like me, would have called this film an abomanation — Star Trek 90210, for instance — because it’s an alternate timeline. And if Tasha Yar can come back in an alternate timeline and give us Sela in the established timeline, then why not an alternate universe where Spock gets to flesh meld Uhura?

After that explanation, I could totally buy Abrams’ Star Trek, but I couldn’t get over how EVERY scene had to be filled with action. Not only are we about to be destroyed by an alien vessel but my wife’s gonna give birth. Not only do I have to walk through the snow for 18 miles to call for a taxi but I have to be chased by carnivorous alien creatures. And even a mellow exposition scene like like two dudes chatting in a bar has to be shot with nervous energy; like they handed the camera to a starving Ethiopian.

Still, even this grotesquely overly epic little movie pays homage to Roddenberry’s Trek like red shirts being inexplicably dispatched in the first two seconds of an away mission, Scotty being taken for granted and Sulu being a gay fencer. Because fencing is gay. Unless you’re Rob Roy.

Also, I really enjoyed the few moments where Kirk got his Shatner on: the head bobbing and casual, badass delivery. I think the movie tried too hard to be cute for teen audiences like Kirk eating an apple during the Kobiashi Maru test, the Scotty in the “why is this here?!” dangerous water chopping thing scene, Kirk being tongue-numbingly, hand-bloatingly sick scene and others. Felt like a loud teen comedy, J. J. But hey, they’re alternately young so of course they won’t act EXACTLY like the established and mature crew we all know and love…yet.

With a wisely manufactured alternate timeline, this “not really a reboot” reboot can deliver something fresh and exciting for today’s Michael Bay-loving audience while still not completely flipping off the original fans. A smart move from J. J. “I like Star Wars more” Abrams.

I was at a party last night and screwed up my toes a little bit getting into the hot tub. I was surrounded by hot bikini chicks so I couldn’t cry like a little girl like I probably wanted to. And then today I was on my way to shoot a commercial, but when I went to open the trunk of my car to load the gear I realized the hydraulics that make trunk doors so feather-light died over the weekend. I was literally holding the trunk door open with my head so I could put the camera gear in. What the hell is this gonna cost me!

But that’s alright, because on Sunday I was finally able to commit a song on the piano I had been humming for two years. I call it “Erick’s Blues”.

Sometime last Monday or Tuesday my Avid Workstation got infected by a virus. Today I finally got it tracked down: the Vundo virus, Spybot identified it as “Virtumonde”. After reading a Wikipedia article on it, it took the combined efforts of Spybot, Anti-Malware and CCleaner with a little bit of Hijack This to get rid of the infection. I also did some manual regedit and msconfig surgeries during the troubleshooting. Now my workstation is operating within normal parameters…for a Windoze. Stuff like this just helps me love my home 2005 Mac Mini even more. It’s funny how 1. right before this happened Ed was telling me to migrate from my Avid to a Final Cut system (yes, I have that option…but haven’t taken it because I’m afraid of change) and 2. right next to me is the DVD of Outbreak, that movie with Dustin Hoffman about a virus that kills a bunch of people in a small town and the government wants to nuke the place, much like I wanted to nuke my Windoze system for being a virus’ skanky ho-bitch playground o’fun for a week. At least now I can Google with certainty. And we delivered the bomb. But I’ll never put on a life jacket again. That shark’ll swallow ya whole…