What prompted me to dust it off (again) is FB’s idiotic reporting system. Any cowardly little bitch can get their friends together to gangbang your profile into oblivion when they can’t take the shit they dish out.

I try to keep FB PG. I couldn’t give less of a fuck about Twitter, so I don’t mind moving into “R” territory. Here, it’s open season.

So lately I’ve been responding (yes, that’s responding, not attacking out of the blue. Responding) to various assholes in the paranormal that have started shit with me or people I respect. There’s one ghetto-trash sow that keeps running her
c-sucker non stop, then acts appalled when I respond in kind. Then there’s a fake psychic who talks a lot of shit, then cries like an anally violated altar boy off hours in the local rectory when I bitch slap his ass with a response.

I don’t ignore; I respond. Maybe those of you out there have the tenacity to stay quiet as your name or people you respect are trashed. Good for you. Maybe you have inhuman restraint when these people begin email campaigns against you full of lies because they are caught being fraudulant assholes. Again, good for you.

I don’t believe in Karma. Karma needs a swift kick in the ass 99% percent of the time, and I’m wearing steel toe shoes.

Lately, paranormal event coordinators proclaimed to host the “final” event at the Stanley Hotel, saying their event would be the last one management would allow, so get your tickets ASAP! I smelled bullshit right away, as one of these event coordinators was the above used up, over the hill chola who loves to incite drama and tries to pass herself off as a paranormal celebrity.

All it took was one phone call to the Stanley to confirm that this was bullshit, which I did. However, Cowhound (this blog’s approved nickname for this person) insisted her information source was solid, and we were haters because we were so jealous about how well connected she is. Then she threw in her usual veiled threats when more people caught on to this scam. Eventually, Miss El Piggy had to back her enormous ass down, when the Stanley itself informed the public that she was a mis-informed dunce.

I’d also like to address something. Cowhound, and another asshole we’ll call the “Para-Bore from Fresno”, continue to insist that I wouldn’t say anything like this to their face.

Try me.

Meanwhile, more behind the scenes email campaigns stem from these two so they can look innocent in public on FB and repeat, “love and light” to everyone. Well, I have news for you. There’s a great many people who are on to your game, not just me. Most like to shut up about it, which is a shame. But again, that’s ok. I don’t need anyone’s encouragement to defend myself.

I worked the graveyard shift, and saw a lot of weird things and strange people. The local hooker would come in twice a week at about 12:30am and regale me with her tales of prostitution. Mostly tales about being beaten up. She was grateful I let her use the employee bathroom, and I suspected she was homeless.

Like clockwork, at 2am, when Luke’s cocktails closed every night, I had to fight with their clientele for over an hour by telling them I wasn’t allowed to sell them beer. It took nearly 20 minutes to explain to them that it was 2am at 7-11 as well.

The local cop would come in a couple times a week about 2:30am, drink coffee, and read magazines while telling me he’s allowed to use deadly force against anyone in a martial arts or boxing pose. He was a lot of fun to talk to, and not much older than I was.

Every night at 3am, these two women in their 40’s would come in, dressed alike. They had pasty white skin, with jet black hair and wore sunglasses. They never spoke to me once; they simply unloaded their nightly bounty of $10 dollars worth of candy bars each on the counter. This happened every night, the entire nine months I worked there.

The lesbians insisted that I keep cans of dog food on the counter to throw at people who ran out of the store with beer. A friend of theirs would camp out behind a stack of boxes near the coolers with a baseball bat on Friday nights. Also, I found out after my employment ended that one of the lesbians would be secretly camped out in the back office watching me for the first three weeks on the security camera. For my entire 8 hour shift…

I used to pore through the first Batman the Movie trading cards, carefully open them, and take the ones I didn’t have and replace them with the extra cards I accumulated.

Since I worked from 12am to 6am, I had to have all 5 pots of coffee going by 4:30am. At 5:30, the Coffee Brigade would come in. Since this was a franchise 7-11, the lesbians allowed people to bring in their own cups and pay something like a quarter for coffee. You wouldn’t believe how this privilege was abused. These truck drivers would come in with fire hydrant-sized containers and drain about two pots of coffee. I’d constantly have to run to the back and start new pots about every 7 minutes.

After I “retired” from the convenience store business, my regular customers would come up to me and regale me with tales about how they shoplifted right under my nose. The best one was one guy who kept his hands in his pockets, but unbeknown to me, was pushing a 12-pack toward the front door with his foot. He’d talk to me while I was behind the counter, and would always wait until I was mopping or something. I think he knew I was tuning him out anyway.

BLAM! is currently going through it’s fifth evolution since MethodofMac relaunched the website in November 2008.

BLAM! was never set up to have a community. It never strived to be an alternative to Youtube or any other social network. BLAM! is a rec room to hang out, joke around, and try stuff out that would never fly on more corporate social media outlets. Some question the “drama” videos, but these are more often than not expressions of protest, or “lulz for lulz sake” that again wouldn’t fly anywhere else. BLAM! fills that need.

Despite its intended puropose, I think BLAM! does indeed have a community. And of course like every community, there are people there that I could do without. But hey…even Mayberry had Otis.

People looking for E-fame, views subs, etc, would be better served on Youtube. BLAM! doesn’t require you to entertain, or vlog, or post a video. Your experience there is what you make it. But honestly…no one gives a crap if you walked to the local store today to buy AA batteries.
]]> http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2010/07/11/community-despite-itself/feed/ 0 http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2010/06/30/dusting-off-my-blog-staying-out-of-the-box/ http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2010/06/30/dusting-off-my-blog-staying-out-of-the-box/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:24:43 +0000 Administrator http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/?p=31 It’s been nearly a year since I used this blog. Time to dust it off.

On the morning of 02-01-10, I had an incredible insight into the way I do things. I had lost this way of thinking for a long time by listening to others tell me, “you’re doing it wrong.”

I thought I wasn’t talented enough to do things the “right” way. This has created great setbacks in a lot of areas of my life. I’d forgotten to congratulate myself in finding a unique way to do something. For example, in the mid-80’s I attended a horror convention with my friend Ray. He wanted to look like “The Terminator” for the convention, with his “human” eye torn out. So I said no problem, and began designing the makeup from scratch. Here’s what we came up with:

The main eye housing was a piece of cardboard, held on over Ray’s real eye with masking tape. The tape was lightly covered with flesh toned makeup. The eye itself was a lens from an indicator light off an editing machine I took from film school. Behind that lens was a red LED that actually lit up. The wires ran behind Ray’s ear and down his jacket arm to the 9 volt battery in his pocket. I got all the electronics from Radio Shack.

Lots of people loved the makeup, and thought it was a pro job. Then we saw Tom Savini walking around the convention floor. Savini is a horror makeup God, responsible for “Dawn of the Dead” and Jason makeups, and a whole host of other films. I got his attention, and he took a look at Ray and said, “Wow, that is great!” He was about 10 feet away from Ray. Then he moved closer to him, almost nose to nose. Then he said, “What is that? Tape? Aw man, that’s tape and cardboard!” He then left us like he was let down, or disappointed. But the “tape and cardboard” makeup impressed one of the top horror makeup artists from 10 feet away! I should have been proud of that, but I was actually embarrassed.

Even earlier than that, teachers would criticize my drawings and cartoons. I wouldn’t draw like I was “supposed” to, with darker lines on the outer edges, with thinner lines inside. Or, use shapes like boxes and cylinders to create a figure. I drew everything freehand. When I tried it the “right way”, I couldn’t do it. Still can’t. Yet many of my cartoons entertained my friends and co-workers. Later I’d see cartoons like “Beavis and Butthead” become famous, and those drawings were hardly conventional. But I listened to people in authority, couldn’t do what they asked, and just stopped drawing.

Lately, the same thing has continued. I make machinima movies, but I’m not a “modder”; I can’t figure out a 3D program to save my life. So I work around that problem. I often get high praise, like “innovative technique”, and, “I never would have thought of doing that.” The exact same thing has occurred with the “Moar Dummies” puppets. I joined a puppet making website for tips. While most laughed at the tons of duct tape I use, they also say I’ve found a “new approach” and “creative” way to make puppets. That’s not entirely true; most of what I’ve done was from a how-to video on Youtube. But I guess I introduced the use of duct tape!

I’m no longer going to feel guilty about doing things the “right” way. I’ve proven that the “right” way is very frustrating for me, and virtually shuts down my creativity. I get results when I do things I see in my head, and just know will work. The results may not be 100% professional, but they DO work.

Greg trolled Kevin Smith in April on Twitter to the point that Kevin responded with a hilarious forum post. I decided to troll Greg back, posing as Kevin Smith a few days later in Greg’s show. I kept it secret until this past Monday…

Trolling Greg Lions
]]> http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/17/trolling-greg-lions/feed/ 0 http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/13/update-on-the-gray-ghost/ http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/13/update-on-the-gray-ghost/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:27:55 +0000 Administrator http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/?p=22

Still hard at work on “Indiana Jones and the Gray Ghost”. This could take months! Actually, it’s been over a year in planning, with a lot of talented modders making props and costumes for me. I’m currently putting together the “cargo hold” scene, where we first see Indiana Jones.

I’ve also secured the voice of Indy, and it’s none other than Livevideo’s own Greg Lions! He did sa great job, adding just the right bit of biting sarcasm needed for the character. Below is what the cargo hold “set” looks like in the game:

There’s going to be a lot of chromakey work involved in this one; looks like just about as much as went into “The Last Bastion”. Actors in “The Movies” game can’t be “placed” where you want them to be, so using greenscreen to put them in the exact part of the set I want them to appear is a necessity.

Another big headache is trying to remember all these set-ups as I bring the clips into Sony Vegas to put them together. For some reason, I didn’t storyboard this one on paper like I did Bastion. Can you say, stooooopid?
]]> http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/13/update-on-the-gray-ghost/feed/ 0 http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/05/the-brad-greenspan-situation/ http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/05/the-brad-greenspan-situation/#comments Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:10:10 +0000 Administrator http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/?p=20 Brad Greenspan graced Live Video with his presence once again last night. And once again, he chose to speak to the community by going into the same random live show as before, brianwhatever.

Ostensibly, he claimed he was there to “talk to the community” (all 5 people that were in the room at the time) about the problems livevideo.com was going through. He wanted the 5 people in there to speak for the entire community, and create a “Top 100″ list of problems that need to be addressed.

MethodofMac and I threw several hard hitting questions at him, as the ENTIRE community has been waiting to address him for over a year now. The host of the room, in typical sycophant manner, admonished us for such behavior. “He’s not here to be attacked! Gawd!” MethodofMac was kicked from the room when another mod in the room and Greenspan adulator decided Mac wasn’t fawning enough.

No, Greenspan wasn’t “attacked”. He was asked very direct, precise questions that the community has been screaming to deaf ears for a year now. Reporters don’t attack Bush or Obama when they ask pointed questions. Please recognize your delusions. Gawd.

For the most part, Greenspan ducked and dodged every question I threw at him, which I found strange for someone allegedly wanting to create a list of fixes to implement on LV. He either answered a question with a question, replied with innocuous answers like “money! money! money!”. One member PMmed me and asked, “Is it just me, or has be ignored every question you threw at him?” I assured the member that they weren’t the only one that noticed that.

My main beef was the sometimes days long approval times on videos. When I asked this several times, Greenspan gave a dismissive answer to the effect of him having a few people in Bulgaria watching and approving videos. I tried several times to tell him approvals are done in minutes on more professional sites like Youtube, and even non professional sites like the Ning platform. I tried to tell him that once videos finally filter through approval hell, they are sometimes deleted by the admins for “copyright” or some other cut n paste excuse. So why the hell didd it go through an abnormally long approval waiting period in the FIRST PLACE then? No answer from Greenspan on this.

In fact, he began mocking the questions, rather than answering them. I reminded him livevideo.com was once thought of as a serious contender to Youtube a year ago, and that Shatnervision, Steve Nash, AP News, and Tommy Chong had all left the website when it beganfalling apart in August last year. His reply? A snarky “they’ll come back!” Of course, Iwas polite enough not to bring up the ACTUAL reason these people left, along with Bikini News and other paid content here. That reason was these people stopped receiving payments due them; something Greenspan, as airheaded as he was acting last night, should be more than aware of. The industry certainly is.

He seemed more concerned with the live show content and fascinated by Numzane’s Webcammax special effects. He kept bring up the fact that he just purchased two more websites, and wanted to implement the functinality of them into livevideo. I kept telling him livevideo needs to be fixed before OTHER features are added to it. He asked, “What’s wrong with the site?” I nearly gave up at that point.

One of the biggest questions I asked him was, why he didn’t have an official channel here, instead of using SaveStage6? Why doesn’t he open his own show so the archives would be there for the whole community to see, rather than a select few. Why have the community rely on word-of-mouth, like reading this blog? Why deny the community a public forum to air these concerns when they have been waiting so long to talk to you? I even suggested putting a video up on the What’s New section of LV, stating his intentions to improve the website and install new features. You know, the section that hasn’t been updated in a year?

He answered, “Why? What am I to these people?”

That’s the point where I gave up. I actually sat back from the keyboard in shock. I honestly began to wonder if we were being trolled. But I knew that we weren’t. This is Brad Greenspan in all his befuddled glory. I then noticed a pattern. He was completely Blonde when asked about anything OTHER than new stuff he’d be adding to livevideo, and the money it would take to do so. That was a subject he stuck to, He really wanted our opinions on that, and began floating ideas of having users “buy into” the site to help costs. My anonymous PMmer caught on to it too. He was doing nothing more than marketing research. He was testing the waters fors for what we believed to be a money making scam.

Greenspan came off so badly to everyone in the room that WASN’T a star-fucker, that CHAOSMASTER4.0 PMmed me, who was just as much in shock about Greenspan’s attitude as I was. Now keep in mind, I’ve had major, personal wars with this user here, and we were critiquing Greenspan’s performance and coming to the exact same conclusions. THAT will give you an idea of the atmosphere in the room last night.

That’s it, former livevideo.com users. This website is truly dead. It’s being run by a mad captain still trying obliviously to steer a ship that has already run aground on the rocks. People wonder why so many users have left. So many talented videomakers. Peopler ask me why I no longer use the MrPoe channel, and whyI have taken down all my old videos. Why should I, or any of us allow Greenspan to make money off our videos by embedding Google ads to the end of them? Why reward a slum lord?

As he reached the summit of the three foot molehill, Gerald gazed upon the old wise man. Long of hair and beard, Misplaced Chivalry smoked contentedly from the hookah near his feet. The long apron strings tied about his body stretched far back into the village, where they were still secured to the wise man’s mother as she toiled in the kitchen of his childhood home.

“Master,” Gerald began. I wish to seek the path of manly righteousness!”

“Ah, Grasshopper,” Misplaced Chivalry began. “You must first recognize the most important tenet of being a true man among men!

“And what is that, Master?” Gerald asked.

“You must never attack a woman! Women are the jewel of humanity, and are never wrong! They never ‘cry wolf’, and they never EVER, tell a lie!”

Gerald pondered these deep pronouncements. “Master, I understand physically assaulting a woman is wrong. But what if a woman accuses me of wrongdoing?”

“Then you MUST have done something wrong!” Misplaced Chivalry boomed from his mountaintop. “Never question a woman’s word! They are incapable of lying or twisting the truth to their own ends! That is only the purview of men!” Misplaced Chivalry spat on his balls in disgust as he finished speaking.

“But Master, how to I protect my reputation from someone of the female gender who would tell tales of me that aren’t true?”

Misplaced Chivalry struck Gerald with a wrapped sturgeon his mother prepared for his lunch. “You are not listening, Grasshopper! Women do not lie! There dwells not one bone or sinew of maliciousness in their bodies! Rest assured, if you are accused of wrongdoing by a woman, then you MUST have committed the atrocity you are accused of!

Gerald rubbed his face as he pondered the Wise Man’s words. “So, I should never respond to attacks upon my character that are indeed untrue? I should never point out that someone is batshit crazy, or accusing me of evils with absolutely no proof whatsoever?”

“Only if those attacks come from men!” Misplaced Chivalry took another long drag from his hookah. “Only we men are capable of such deceit and outright falsehoods!” The Wise Man spat into his lap once again. “If women ruled, there would be no war, no strife. Our farts would smell as the lemon fields in the early summertime.

But Master,” Gerald offered, “What of Catherine the Great or Queen ‘Bloody’ Mary?”

“OFF MY MOUNTAIN!” Misplaced Chivalry bellowed at Gerald. “You will never be a true man by questioning the integrity of women, no matter what they do!”

So ended Gerald the Gullible’s quest for true Manhood. For he could never see the untarnished essence of women.
]]> http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/07/02/the-tale-of-gerald-the-gullible/feed/ 0 http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/06/17/oval-office-scenes-complete/ http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/2009/06/17/oval-office-scenes-complete/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:55:25 +0000 Administrator http://mrpoesmorgue.com/blog/?p=15 Stayed home today due to a serious case of shitty food consumed at Hometown Buffet. I’ve said in the past I wouldn’t return there due to the troglodytes that frequent said establishment, but talked myself into going yesterday.

So anyway, after a few hundred trips to the bathroom, Hometown’s Revenge began to subside. I finally completed the “Oval Office” scene for my machinima Indiana Jones video, “Indiana Jones and the Gray Ghost” Below is a shot from Sony Vegas, the editing software that I use to assemble greenscreen scenes and just about every other video product I do.

The actors and greenscreen set were filmed in “The Movies”. The terrific Oval Office set was screencapped from Moviestorm. On the left you can see the many greenscreen layers in the timeline to make up the scene on the right. The whole Oval Office sequence was done like this, adding TM actors to the Moviestorm set. This could have been done in Moviestorm without any greenscreen whatsoever, but for me, the actors’ movements too robotic compared to TM actors. Also, I have a wider range of actors to choose from in TM. In this case, I tried to recreate President Harry S. Truman as best I could.

Now on to slightly harder scenes: Indiana Jones and Nazis! (I hate those guys!)

At least three other projects that I’ve neglected for too long are on the move again. The first is my website, the second is that Indiana Jones machinima that I’ve been messing with for about a year. The third? Not sure I want to divulge that yet. However, it will begin tonight.