thebitterguy

So, Friday night Cynra & I took in Zombie Girl at the Hot Docs FF. The film documents a young film-maker's first efforts at making a feature length zombie film.

No, a seriously young filmmaker. She's 12.

The film is about Emily Hagins, a young filmmaker from Texas. Emily was a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings films, and a fan letter to Peter Jackson gets her in touch with internet nerdmaster Harry Knowles (masterfully played by Ethan Supplee... Wait, no, wrong movie). After one of Knowles' patented film marathons where she saw cult horror film Undead, she begins to make shorts, and eventually decides to create her own zombie film, Pathogen.

Independent film-making is a fascinating beast to watch. Doubly so when it's by someone who had to get taken to see her inspirations by her mom. Her mom Megan is one of the anchors of the film. While Megan is always supportive of her daughters The back and forth during filming is an interesting examination of the maturation process. Emily is the director, surely, but eventually mom has to put her foot down and say that filming is done for tonight.

Watching kids play at adult roles is always a strange thing. There's a lack of knowledge of both themselves and the world that makes you dread to see how things can go wrong. Pathogen gets derailed early in the film-making process, but Emily soldiers on, with the shooting time stretching into two years (after school and during vacations, with months long breaks where things just get disrupted).

The film is finally finished, and exhibited (with help from an independant filmmaker's grant that Emily shows no interest in, but which her mom is quite enthusiastic to get) at the Alamo Drafthouse. An amusing fact is that you never see a single frame of finished film from Pathogen. You do get to hear lots of people talking about how difficult it was to do the final production work, and how bad the sound was, so that may be for the best.

So I'm doing a word search puzzle here at work, and it's for Razzie Award winning actresses. And suddenly, I get this huge rush of "Whatever happened to Leave Brittney Alone guy?"*

Seriously, that was a hella potent piece of viral. Parodies (and parodies of parodies) and all the silly strange things. And didn't he get a tv gig out of it?

I wonder if he'll (yes, I don't remember his name, folks) do a fundraising video for something with the Tron guy, the sweater lady and the Peter Pan guy.

Or, you know, not.

*Because she won one, you see.

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I think it was either a link posted by shara or eyebeams. Possibly on RPG.net.

This is ONLY a test.

Got this from MGK.com.



As well, I got a Dreamwidth membership. Remember how I mentioned that you could get an account with an OpenID? it turns out everyone who did that got an invite to the beta.

So, who else is giving Dreamwidth a try?

• 20:30 We're turning into unruly Ork NPCs. Suddenly we've gone from #dnd to Orkworld. #
• 11:02 I'm actually conflicted about seeing Wolverine. Maybe just ambivalent. At least there's Liev. #
• 14:37 Anyone out there read Level Up magazine? Is it good? #

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• 19:21 Today is the tenth anniversary of my proposing to Cindy. That is all. #
• 12:56 RT @ClapboardJunkie: New blog post: 10 Movies to Look Forward to This Summer tinyurl.com/ch4k4e #
• 14:48 Just watched Return of the Ghostbusters. Not the worst fan film I've ever seen. Not even the worst Ghostbusters fan film I've ever seen. #

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Over on his LJ, robin_d_laws has posted his variant Skill Challenge rules.

I think some of the wilder variants would come up when the group was in a really, really bad situation and started to get desperate. "Can we spend an action point and discard one of their cards?" "If I roll for a 40 target number, can I pick a card from the deck?" "If I take your trash out for the next six months, can I use Stealth again?"

And how Canadian a group are we, with a Tim Horton's cup on the table?

• 15:44 RT @mattfraction: OMFG SOMEBODY ON THE BUS JUST TOLD ME SWINE FLU SPREADS VIA TWITTER #
• 18:17 Today, in boot camp class, I did not vomit. I consider this a victory on the scale of Waterloo. #
• 22:55 Hey, @MaxGeiger, what do we have to do to get Ninjas vs Pirates? #
• 00:09 It's a cute coincidence that on Friday night I was looking at a copy of Pandemic with buying on my mind. #
• 15:02 Maternity leave co-worker came by with baby. I think I'm gonna need a stiff drink. #

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There's a department run by the RCMP, OPP and the Competition Bureau Canada (I do think there's supposed to be an "of" in there, but I will not disagree with the feds) called Phonebusters.

Its mandate is such:

PhoneBusters is the central agency in Canada that collects information on telemarketing, advanced fee fraud letters (Nigerian letters) and identity theft complaints.

So, basically they're the scam cops. Man, I'd KILL to be working with this department. They don't appear to do any investigating or arresting, but it just sounds like it would be neat. Plus, I can only imagine being able to run off the various mutations of 419 letters would be more interesting than my current job.

Oh, hey. There are Puppy scams. That's just wrong.