If CNN thought Angie Tucker mattered…

…then you might expect to see a story like this:

But CNN doesn’t.

So you don’t.

(”CNN” text from actual Tulsa World article by Nicole Marshall. Thanks to Shark-fu for her post “Black and Missing…” at Shakesville.)

Cloverfield: From “what?” to “wev” in ten minutes flat

Yawn

In a cultural sense, I am almost always Late to the Party, whatever and wherever the Party might be. Example: Because I never saw Transformers, I never saw the trailers that accompanied the movie’s theatrical release. As a result, I was completely unaware of the mysterious teaser for some Untitled J.J. Abrams Project that launched a mighty (though completely unnoticed by me) blogospheric buzz. It wasn’t until this weekend, when I visited the Apple QuickTime movie trailer page on an unrelated matter that I ran across the ads for the movie that seems to be named Cloverfield, and so finally became aware of all the viral, cross-referenced hoopla. Guesswork abounds regarding the nature of the menace - Godzilla? Cthulhu? The Stay-Puft marshmellow man? - while Internet sleuths analyze cryptic photos (if you leave the browser open long enough at the site, you get a surprise; adjust your speaker volume) and chase down clues (some red herrings, some perhaps less fishy) across the Web.

This approach (what is it?) constitutes, to some folks, legitimate suspense. To others - all right then, to me - and in this context, it’s just a big tease. Teasing can pay off, though. I envision executives at Paramount Pictures high-fiving each other in hallways and toasting their viral conquest (with cups of Slusho, no doubt).

I should note here my raging indifference toward J.J. Abrams. Watched Alias until I became utterly bored with its narrative convolution. Same with Lost, except that the boredom set in much more quickly. Now comes Cloverfield, formerly designated as 1-18-08, and the standard Abrams byzantinity is well at work long before you even settle into your seat at the megaplex, now crafted to deprive you of even the initial comforting notion that you know what’s going on.

The upside to this approach, of course, is that you can make people spend days wondering just what’s going on. The viral campaign is indeed working; the rampant buzz surrounding this movie makes Snakes on a Plane look like a straight -to-video project. The downside, however, is that…well, people spend days wondering what’s going on. The resultant level of expectation is so high that the chances of actually satisfying those expectations will likely dwindle to nil by…what was that release date again?

This is probably where I whack my newspaper a couple of times and yell at kids to get off my lawn. It could simply be that the viral game is best left to the young, to people with the energy and enthusiasm to spend on it. You get a little older and you’re less intrigued than annoyed. May the participants find all their questions about Cloverfield answered to their satisfaction, as unlikely as that may be. Personally, I’ll probably wait for the movie to show up on the old Netflix queue.

Spartacus

I mean no slight to the storied career of Kirk Douglas when I say that Spartacus works best when he doesn’t talk…excepting, of course, the moment in which he tells Tony Curtis to go to sleep.

Friday, the black

Look familiar?

The last three years, I’ve delighted in posting some kind of anti-Black Friday screed in this space on the day following Thanksgiving. Actually, last year saw me repeat the post from the year before. After all, the story never changes, and it’s such a tempting target for ridicule. Traffic helicopters deployed on parking lot watch duty, local reporters braving the madding crowds before the sun rises, and the grave speculation on what it will mean for the national economy - which provides the rationalization for this shopping porn “coverage.” It all blurs together: so many dollars potentially spent, so many discounts made available by desperate retailers, so very few days before Christmas. Joyous Noel, Cyber Monday, hurry, hurry. The story is always the same.

And it’s here that I had planned to say that “one’s attitude toward that story, however, is another matter.” This was to be the thesis of this year’s Black Friday post, a relaxed, sanguine acceptance of this fetish we’ve built around consumption. The problem with that thesis is that it’s unfounded. In writing the initial paragraph, I found submerged antipathies welling up within me, antagonisms breaking the surface. The truth is, I am just as repulsed by the cult of Black Friday as I’ve ever been. Goddamn this mindless shopping zombieism, this worship of acquisition, and the soulless socioeconomic forces that drive us.

And here I was afraid that I had grown soft and accepting. How pleasant to find otherwise.

Wordless

And naturally, now that the blog is once more a going concern, I find myself with nothing to say. Some days are like this.

Your guide to fat bombs

You know who you are: the kind of person who rails at fast food establishments for not providing enough leafy, healthy fare, the kind of person who blithely ignores such options at the drive-thru window in favor of Ye Olde Fatburger (with cheese). Admit it to yourself, and then go forth armed with information. You can, at the very least, try to choose the least harmful fat bomb on the market.

Bon appétit, buddy.

The seven stages of upgrading

Easier to install than blogging software

Repeat visitors to this little weblog should note that Waveflux is indeed behaving much as you’d expect from a fully-functioning blog. Individual entries appear in full; archive lists are accessible and display the posts they should, and only the posts they should. Commenting…well, I’ll get back to you on that, but I expect readers to soon be able to weigh in on whatever strikes their fancy seems to be restored.

In short: all, or most, seems well. This was definitely not the case as recently as yesterday morning, and hadn’t been the case for the better part of a week. This site’s upgrade to Six Apart’s new and widely publicized 4.x version of Movable Type was not exactly the smooth experience I had hoped for - not remotely close, really. Hope soon gave way to less appealing states: confusion, frustration, anger, guilt, and then (in the words of Rachel Lucas) being not mad, just…disappointed.

Think of the process as the Seven Stages of Upgrading™. I know I’ve touched on only six. We’ll get to the seventh.

Prior to the upgrade, I’d been using dynamic publishing for archive files. This will mean nothing to many readers, which is fine. The goal of publishing dynamically - having pages served up on the fly rather than as static files sitting on my server - was speed and efficiency on my end as the user. Rebuilding pages under the static publishing arrangement, which I would have had to do whenever I made a change to the underpinnings of the site, took forever (that is, as long as ten minutes twenty minutes, which is a long time in the personal publishing biz). For reasons not understood by me, the head honcho at my web host, LivingDot, or the support staff at Six Apart, the upgrade rendered dynamic publishing impossible. Various combinations of publishing settings left the blog without visible entries or archive lists and broken incoming links.

My host tried to diagnose the problem without success. 6A support tried and…well, I don’t know precisely what 6A support found because I never heard back from them. From what I was told, 6A wasn’t very helpful to LivingDot in solving the mess.

As the hapless blogger, I was pretty much left to stumble through the various psychological stages of upgrading as the process and the kludged (a technical term) state of the blog dragged on for days. In limbo, I considered my own culpability. Had I somehow kludged the inner working of the blog myself without knowing? More likely, had I set myself up for disappointment by insisting that the weblog work the way I wanted it to, the way it had before?

Ultimately, LivingDot could offer only two paths: static publishing with file extension set to .php (which would preserve the validity of all those incoming links floating about in the aether) or a slate-cleaned fresh install of MT4. After days of things not working, I lacked the faith to commit to the latter option - I may have felt that any attempt at a re-install would result in the blog catching fire - and so chose static publishing. The result is the working weblog you see before you. Sluggish as a Missouri mule (a creature I’ve never seen, though I live in Missouri) on my end, but functional on your end. And when you get down to it, it’s all about you, isn’t it, friend?

Well, mostly about you, perhaps.

Grounds for indignation seem here, at first glance, fertile. I paid LivingDot expressly for the service of upgrading the blog - taking my clumsy self out of the equation - and wound up not being able to use a feature I’d found valuable. I paid Six Apart expressly for its legendary support in hopes of solving the matter, and got no material assistance in return. The problem with indignation, of course, is that it requires a pure medium in which to thrive. It’s hard to fault the effort that LivingDot put into trying to solve the publishing issue, especially as it was the managing director who was putting in the hours. Here’s the thing: this episode aside, my relationship with LivingDot has been pretty good, better than I’ve experienced with any previous web host. They’ve been consistently helpful to my checkered career as a blogger. It’s difficult for righteous irritation to take root in that kind of soil.

It’s somewhat easier to remain irritated with Six Apart, who seemed to check into the situation and check right back out again, and on my dime. In fairness, I must admit that I brought 6A into this affair on a Friday - not late, mind you, but still on a Friday - and 6A support states quite clearly that its working hours don’t include weekends. Here, too, I must recall that support there has previously been quite helpful to me.

It’s a poignant situation: You’d prefer to be really fucking furious, but lack the grounds to sustain it. Goddamn my rational nature.

Yes, we are talking now about the seventh stage of upgrading. Acceptance isn’t the term, exactly. More like provisional resignation, perhaps, and this informs the provision: Movable Type, a personal publishing technology in which I’ve invested a fair chunk of self and time, has gone from being merely tedious to install to downright hostile in its difficulty. Anticipating this, I took steps to make the situation smoother and watched in dismay as the process became rockier than I had imagined.

I do have plans for the weblog that involve not only a continued use of Movable Type, but a deeper exploration of its capabilities. Even after the events of the past few days, this prospect excites me. There’s a wariness at work, however, and a determination to not go through this again - even if it means I have to change platforms.

No matter how pretty Mena Trott is.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled weblog.

You’re not terminated, fucker

SKYnet never dies, and neither does the willingness of media producers to recycle reimagine old concepts. Oh, that third movie you paid good money to watch four years ago? Never happened, apparently. Fine by me, since I never did get around to seeing it.

(Courtesy of BuzzSugar and Entertainment Weekly.)

Another test page

One of my favorite post-system-upgrade pasttimes is the generation of test entries and comments. Oh, yeah. It’s fun, all right.

A test of the Emergency Blogcasting System

This is only a test.

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