Cleolinda everywhere

[Obligatory hatred of cleaning here.]

I am ridiculously pleased with myself over my meager efforts to update dailydigestnews, because, let's face it, three days in a row is a better record than I usually had at the old site anyway. I'm still going slowly, but I'm trying to put up just enough each day to get myself back into the habit. So far I've put up bits about the Karla Homolka movie with Laura Prepon getting pulled, that soccer hooligans movie of Elijah Wood's that has a new name every time I turn around, a Serenity interview with Joss Whedon, a hilarious pan of Alexander on DVD, and lots of Potter news. I think I actually like this format a lot better, because it's got 1) tags, for easy cross-referencing (look! All the Potter entries!) and 2) comments, so I can actually interact with people. Oh, and it doesn't involve me hand-coding shit on an amateurish Geocities page. WHEE.

( Excellent Potter memage )

ETA: Omg, you guys, I just found a handwritten journal I kept in a three-ring binder from February to July of 1997 (my last semester of high school through my first internship). On the very first page, after announcing that my hand-me-down borrowed laptop won't work and that "I must write or die," I immediately begin snarking on recent X-Files episode titles, which is somehow both pitiful and hilarious. It also reminds me why I think pop-culture writing is made for public discourse: it's fun when a bunch of people get together and talk about it. It's sad when your only audience is yourself.

This song is totally about heroin, isn't it?

Arggghhhh. Updated the Digest. Only took me five hours, but that's what I get for getting sick/busy with school and letting the news pile up for three weeks. I wouldn't be so hard on myself except that the name of the damn site is "The Daily Digest." Sigh.

Tired. I feel like an athlete training and resting up, regarding the Oscars. Yes, that's pitiful, but remember that I spent four hours typing nonstop for the Globes--watching both the show and trying to mod the tagboard. The day after the Globes, I mentioned that I wanted to move my computer for the Oscars, and my mother was like, "Shpfff, whatever." Now we've got 50 people in the pool and she's like, "Here's the card table from the cedar closet--do you need a TV tray?"

A bit concerned--this is now the second empty email I've gotten from the Oscar pool submission form. All it has is "subject = Oscar pool" and an IP number logged. I have no idea who it belongs to or how to say, "Hey, I don't think your entry went through." Maybe I'll put up a list on Saturday that says, basically, if your name isn't on it, try again.

Reading The Blithedale Romance again--might do my paper on it. Temple read us a letter that may have inspired the chapter "A Crisis," the part where "Hollingsworth basically asks Coverdale to be his spouse," as Temple put it. Apparently Hawthorne and Melville (who was about 15 years younger but rilly, rilly intense, as I understand it) had a very intense friendship that hit the skids after Melville wrote a letter to Hawthorne regarding Hawthorne's praise of Moby Dick:

"Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood's, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine maganimities are spontaneous and instantaneous -- catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then -- your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling -- no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content -- that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.

"Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips -- lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page. you did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book -- and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, -- the familiar, -- and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.

"My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning."

"So, uh, Hawthorne was a little freaked out by this," Temple said. Hello, Captain Understatement! I mean, keep in mind that "My dear Hawthorne" is a completely normal phrase for the period (early 1850s). But also remember that Hawthorne was an intensely private, reserved man who was absorbedly in love with his wife (and she with him). And this wasn't the culmination of a decades-long friendship--the whole thing was barely more than two years long. So the whole your lips are my lips and your heart is in my chest and... yeah.

I'm so tired that I'm not sure I can even sleep at the moment. Hmm. Maybe I'll try to read. Poor Melville.

So. Throat hurts, but in a really weird way only on the left side, so I actually called the dentist to make sure it wasn't a wisdom tooth complication. (It wasn't. Felt dumb. Oh well.) Am tired and achy and in the middle of trying to update the news for the first time in three years weeks, my computer flipped out on me. I knew I was in trouble when I was over at the Buena Vista publicity site trying to download Hidalgo publicity stills for the Digest--now, remember, these are huge. I'm talking 10 MB per still. I'm talking life-size pictures, here--and the first message popped up: "You do not have enough room on your computer to save this file. WHORE."

Then an alarm message popped up:

You only have 7.85 MB of space remaining on your computer. This is a critically low amount of space. Seriously, are you stupid? You need 200 MB just to run me, goddammit, how many times do I have to tell you? And seven megabytes? Are you kidding me? That's not even enough to rub two MP3s together! What do you have on here, anyway? One-of-a-kind Orlando Bloom goat porn? In bitmaps? In triplicate? GOD.

So I spent the night (and today) cleaning files off my computer and transferring them to CD-RWs. The problem is that I've had an extremely high corruption rate, and so I'm scared to have files exist only on CD. Also, I only have 10 GB of storage space to begin with. (Yes, my computer is getting on five years old. Hush, or she'll yell at me again.) But I realized that the latest "Error! Move all critical files to another disk" isn't a disk error--it's an ACDSee (image manager) error, and when I move things straight from the file folder, I don't get that. So if I do get that, I can ignore it. Or something like that.

So now I have 223 MB free on my computer.

That's still pathetic, you know.

Hush.

And that's not even why I actually procrastinate--that's why I ended up putting off the news update, but here's why I continually procrastinate: it pays off. jedi_funk found an error in the Oscar pool ballot I coded yesterday, which really was inevitable given my coding inexperience, and so now I have to email 20 people and ask them to resubmit their picks for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. Now, had I gone all out publicizing the pool and posting the announcement on the dailydigest feed and on the Yahoo Group newsletter, I would be super-screwed right now, instead of mildly screwed. (Seriously, we have more pool players than we've had the last two years combined, after the pool being up for 24 hours.) In fact, I like to think of procrastination as a bit Darwinist: that which is really not that important never gets done anyway, and that which is flawed won't make it too far before something better gets done in its place.

Which is also to say: the Oscar pool is ready and, as far as I can tell, bug-free. Get your ballots in early, because I'm not going to have a lot of time on Sunday to collate these things. :)

Hmm. Remember my "boys drool, girls rule" theory of webmaster working-together-ness? Yeah. We're gonna test it out today. I hope I didn't come off sounding sexist--I wouldn't choose one site over the other just because of the webmaster's gender; I choose the best site available to me. And my Trailer Park staff is currently all male, so I'm not saying I don't like to work with guys; in fact, they're the bestest guys ever. It's just that guys never seem to be very forthcoming. Anyway. Coming Soon had a link to some really great stills from "Kingdom in Twilight," the movie version of Wagner's Ring cycle (not to be confused with "Kingdom of Heaven," or "The Ring," or "Lord of the Rings"), and the pictures came from Kristanna.com. The webmaster is male. I wrote him my standard "come out and play with us" email, and even pointed out that adding a Kristanna Loken tag for "Kingdom in Twilight" to the Orlando Bloom tag I already have for "Kingdom of Heaven" will make it so much easier to distinguish the two movies at a glance. So. We will see what answer we get.

Meanwhile--I'm having a high rate of stupid mistakes/typos, but I think that's because I've put out a lot of content lately. That is, the proportion of error is normal--the total output is just higher. Still, it's distressing. Did you see Spellbound? Yeah. I was one of those kids. Willfully bad spelling gives me the jibblies. I'm surprised I'm not allergic to the internet.

Almost done reading the next section of The Quaker City for tomorrow's class. I persist in thinking that we're a day ahead of the day it actually is. Have done an amazing amount of work this week on the site. Well, amazing compared to the amount I was doing over the two months previous, which was zero.

Someone--Brassy?--suggested offhand that we try to do an Oscar play-by-play, only in shifts. I wonder how that would work. It might. I would take the last shift, of course--partly because we have NO IDEA when the last shift would end, but also because I'm in one of the earliest time zones. Hee. It could sort of be like a relay. Could be fun. Of course, the flip side of this is that there's really no need for a recap--the Oscars are broadcast in most countries, unlike the Globes, where the effect was something like having a seeing-eye dog. And I really do wonder if people can type as fast as I do. I was a little underwhelmed by CHUD's play-by-play, for example--you don't want to describe every damn twitch, but you have to set the scene well enough that you can read it the next day and have a clue what's going on. Compare how we each did the same segment of the show:

CHUD: 8:40pm, est - Ellen needs to marry Gabriel Taflames. Then she'd be Ellen Burstyn-Taflames.

8:41pm, est - Nicole Kidman's accent brought to you by Lucifer.


Digest: 7:38 CST. Commercial. People mill and people schmooze. Back to commercial.

Ellen Burstyn is here to present the Cold Mountain clip. Hey, I thought I put down a ban on use of the phrase "one of the greatest battle sequences ever filmed." Oh, and I am not particularly impressed with Nicole's Southern accent. Nor Jude's. Ooo! It's Cate! And I do so like her dress! She is pregnant, after all. It's a lovely ruby red. The hair . . . eh, it's almost there. She always has fab jewelry, though--love the chandelier earrings. Blah blah blah HFPA suit blah blah giving something back to the community. Twinkly music plays in the background. For a full minute, we're stranded in a Sally Struthers Feed the Children commercial.

Maybe CHUD is funnier. But the second example is the way we'd need to do the Oscars, unless we just want to stick up a tagboard or use the Digest Yahoo group chatroom and gab the whole time. Thoughts?

I would just like to take a moment to say, God bless female fansite webmasters. The funny thing is, they're almost all I run into these days. Guys are the ones who run movie fansites--Batman, Superman, Hulk, etc.--but it's the girls who run the actor fansites for the most part, male and female actors alike. Of course there are exceptions, but this has generally been my experience over the last two years. And you know what? God bless 'em. They just get it--a lot quicker than the guys, too. The guys always sit there and ask, No, really, that's all you want? What exactly do you get out of this?

Maybe it's something embedded deep in our social genetics, but women just seem to grasp the concept--and how it benefits both of us--a lot more quickly. And they're always excited to join up and what else can they do and let's keep in touch. Guys? Well, I rarely ever hear from them again. (I have to break in here to say that the guys at Keira Knightley Wavefront are absolute dolls.) Which is fine. But considering that guys are usually so concerned about how many hits a day they get--one webmaster was having a completely normal IM conversation with me, and then he suddenly blurted out, "I get 250,000 hits a day!" Uh, put your ePenis away, dear--you would think that they would see that helping people usually results in 1) tons of goodwill and 2) links back to your own site.

You know what the saddest thing is? If the major movie news sites--CHUD, Coming Soon, IGN, Dark Horizons, AICN, etc.--are all male. If there are female editors, I don't know about it. Well, Empire Online, I think. But that's the official website of a film magazine. None of the built-from-the-ground-up sites are run by women. Which is why you see all this coverage devoted to horror/action/scifi/comic books--many of which do appeal to women, not that they realize it--and a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean sneaks up and stuns everyone with its popularity.

That's what always cracks me up--people are astonished when this or that movie is unexpectedly huge, when it's a no-brainer from a female perspective. Lord of the Rings? I can't tell you how many articles were written about how it wouldn't appeal to women, never mind that there are 65 flavors of hot in the cast. X2? Ditto. The Hulk? Well... a movie that pushes shirtless Eric Bana out of the way in favor of the Angry Green Giant, well, it's not gonna do too well. Duh.

Anyway. I don't know why I've gone on such a ramble today. But that's always the perspective I've tried to run my site with--what do I find interesting, and what do my friends find interesting? And the answers surprise me sometimes (if you'd told me I'd end up looking forward to Hellboy, I wouldn't have believed you). But what I consistently find is that male-run sites miss a lot of things that women are interested in. Here's hoping we fix that. :)

Well, I feel a bit better now, and was actually having quite a chipper little productive day... and then my computer went all smacktarded and got slooooow and it took me five hours to do the dailydigest update when it should have taken two--three, tops. I ended up having to stop 3/4 of the way through, go through my files, dump 80 mb, and pick back up where I'd left off. In the middle of this, I started coming down with a tension headache--you know, the kind that you feel in your jaws and your temples and your teeth, like everything's gone all rusty? Ow.

Nevertheless, was rather productive, answering two months' backlog of reader email, adding some links, cleaning out old/dead pages, talking to a few webmasters... and I did try to read The Quaker City: The Monks of Monk-hall. etc., et al., honest. I'll have to cram tomorrow (500 pages!), but I just couldn't keep from falling asleep today. Although it was amusing how all these 1830s gentlemen are seducing fresh-faced young girls left and right, invariably gushing over said maidens' "noble busts," "neat ankles," and "provocative bonnets." I shit you not, man.

Meanwhile, Vladimir's leaving for Gothenburg in the morning--well, actually, I think it is morning his time right now. He'll leave when it's noon his time and way too damn early my time. He is a Very Important Person at the film festival--he is, in fact, a juror. He'll be emailing reports from the fest and, with any luck, will send me back some autographs. Last time he was at a festival--Venice, I think? My head hurts--he sent me a postcard with a completely illegible scrawl on the side. It took me days to realize that the signature belonged to Jonathan Demme, who made what was for many years my favoritest movie ever omg*squee*!. He said he tried to get me Johnny Depp's, but--and I am not making this up, stereotypical as it sounds--the teenage fangirls mauled Johnny so rabidly that Vladimir couldn't even get close, and he was attending as a journalist.

Damn you, teenies! The twentysomethings were here first!

Well, I've posted on add_me, so I'd better write something worth adding, hadn't I?

We had Olive Garden catering/takeout for my grandmother's 80th birthday lunch today--just finished having leftovers for dinner. In the middle of this, Sister Girl gets an hysterical phone call from her best friend, and... well, let's just say it involves best friend's sister, $450 worth of meth, and death threats. Unfortunately, it also looks like Sister Girl may be getting her own LJ, so I'm going to have to go back and friends-lock (or maybe just lock) any previous entries I mentioned her in. All the more reason to friend me! Oh dear.

I was riding this crest of productivity, but now I'm sort of tired again. I didn't update dailydigest last night, and I really should update before Monday so as to be caught up. But tiiiiired...

Oh, and snowking and I have a nice little iconning thread going on in my previous Van Helsing-oriented entry. I have a feeling that the icon addiction is upon me, yea verily. God help me if I ever get hold of an actual copy of Photoshop.



The caps are in my Photo Bucket gallery, if anyone wants to join in. :D

Tired, but good mood. The problem with updating the Digest on class nights is that half these movie sites don't update until dinnerish, so I can't go ahead and write the whole update before I go. I've tried to before, and usually I just have more work correcting or adding to it when I get back--I can get the gossip/"Other News" section done, but that's about it. Class went well, despite the hellishly hot room. Temple is so cute that you just want to pet him. I finally figured out who he reminds me of--not just a young Treat Williams, but even more so: Scott Foley. He's reeeally laidback about the reading, and more of my classmate-type friends showed up, so it looks like it'll be a good class.

I really want to see the Van Helsing trailer, but streaming media is ass. That's the one my second cousin Cindy--my mother's cousin--did the sets for. We are all v. proud. We are not so v. proud of Hugh Jackman's accent and the lack of David Wenham in the trailer, but what're you gonna do.

Thanks again for everyone's fansite suggestions; I'm taking tomorrow to go through what y'all have sent me and send out some invitations.

So. The Digest has been updated three days running. I have a class tomorrow night, but I'm going to get the bulk of the writing done before I leave. However, like the Best Supporting Actress said, I can't do it alone [insert images of Cleo flailing around on stage here]. Well, I can, but we want to minimize the suckage, right?

Movie reviews: I need movie reviews. You can send in one, or many, or you can get into the habit of sending something every week. Most of y'all review the movies you see in your LJs, whether you realize that's what you're doing or not. I don't need anything rhetorically fancy--Did you like it? What was good? What was bad? There you go.

Affiliates: Half my affiliates went under without telling me. Grrrr. Affiliates aren't just link swaps on the Digest--I actually put links by each pertinent news story. (See the news page; go to bottom to see a list of all affiliates.) KeiraKnightley.org, for example, tells me that they get surges in traffic from the Digest when there's news about her movies. What I need from y'all are recommendations, places you like to visit--I'll go talk to them; I just can't find an Angelina Jolie site with anything more than pictures and porn ads. That, or I write sites and they never reply. What I really want is a site that updates its news frequently. Here's who/what I'm particularly looking for right now:

Alan Cumming (wow, he’s in a lot of movies)
Angelina Jolie
Batman
Brad Pitt
Charlize Theron
Claire Danes
Clive Owen
Colin Farrell
David Thewlis
David Wenham (site never replied to query)
Ewan McGregor
Halle Berry
Jake Gyllenhaal
Joaquin Phoenix
Jude Law
Julia Stiles
Keanu Reeves
Kirsten Dunst (affiliate hasn’t updated in a year)
Lemony Snicket (affiliate hasn’t updated in months)
Matt Damon
Naomi Watts
Parker Posey
Sarah Polley
Queen Latifah
Rachel Weisz
Reese Witherspoon (URL is for sale—I take it they’re down)
Spider-Man
Star Wars
Thandie Newton
Uma Thurman (site never replied to query)
Viggo Mortensen (affiliate went under)
X-Men

If you have suggestions for someone/something not listed, hit me with a comment. (In case you're wondering, the list above is based on folks who have either lots of projects or projects coming out soon.) I'm also okay with multiple sites for one person, although the linking logistics would get a little scary. If you run a fansite, let me know!

( Much whinging about the perils of updating a website )

The bottom line is, if you'd like to have the daily movie news update on your friends page, go friend dailydigest. Each section (Top Stories, New Images, Trailers, Reviews, etc.) is behind its own LJ cut so you can skip to one if you want. The premise of the Daily Digest, if you are not familiar with it from reading this journal, is that I go round and visit a million jillion movie news websites and compile links to the day's news, and put little fansite/affiliate tags next to the appropriate news items. In fact, if you really liked Dark Horizons' old layout, this is the site for you, because that was what I used as my model when I started the Digest up in 2001.

Anyway, that's that. Of course, I managed to embarrass myself in a JournalFen comment thread not five minutes ago because I was a month behind on my movie news. Sigh.

( Rest of day )