THINGS THAT ZACH ROSE HAS SEEN LATELY AND THINKS ARE COOL OR WEIRD OR SOMETHING

Man, nothing beats a good tautology for ending a conversation without actually saying anything.

I mean, we’ll get there when we get there but it is what it is.

Monosyllabic Film Criticism

Cinéorama was a French film/ride in 1900.

It was made by taking ten 70mm film cameras and arranging them in a circle on the bottom of a hot air balloon basket. It was then shown by swapping out the cameras for projectors but keeping the basket.

Tonight at Sweet Tomatoes some guy named MJ came over to our table to make sure we weren’t sucking helium out of a balloon because it would put holes in our brains. No it can’t, I said.

We bet a brownie and he went back to the office to go check the internet but apparently they don’t have internet in that office. He’s gonna email me when he finds the article he read.

Here's something I got:

Here’s something I got:

Make a spreadsheet for all that data on Google Docs. (Thanks d.) Maybe a form, too! Either create some password for it, or just keep the URL secret. With just a little bit of hacking CSV into XML alone, revised content can be updated in a minute or two and can be proofread separately from the final page.

This alone should save like 70% of the errors that happen when trying to format all that repetitive data into paragraph styles in InDesign. My guess is that something like this might be helpful to a lot of people in the same boat. I’ll write decent instructions if I get this all working.

After that who knows, maybe a PHP script that calls file_get_contents() on the spreadsheet, parses it into XML, and somehow saves it on my computer where InDesign is importing from?

I want so badly to be Turing’d out of anything tedious.

Here's something I want:

Here’s something I want:

A way for my office to make changes to a common document or database that can also give me XML. I’d use this when I’m putting together the bimonthly film schedule and 10 different people are each submitting 10 tiny changes a day, even after we go to press.

A simple text file doesn’t have strict enough organization. A MySQL database is too hard for people to use (even with something like phpMyAdmin). A wiki is markup-based rather than form-based and can’t give me XML (or can it?). I could build the thing from scratch but it would take me a few days and the whole point is to free up time for other stuff. If there was something for sale, I’d get it purchased.

I can’t think of the easiest way to do this. Probably because my brain is fried from putting together the schedule when 10 different people have each been submitting 10 small changes a day for the last two weeks.

If you have an idea, let me know and you’ll get something rad.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, a spreadsheet. Or a FileMaker database. You don’t get anything rad now. Sorry.

Catching up

skylerelizabeth:

on Weeds and cleaning my room. Man, I love Weeds.

I don’t know what I was waiting for. Episode 1 was great.

Things I hope are coming to tumblr

spytap:

I really don’t follow that many people, but many of them are tumbling (Word? Yes? No? Moving on…) a couple times a day.  Now unless I’ve constantly got tumblr open and am refreshing twice an hour, this creates quite the backlog of entries for me to sort through whenever I get around to checking it out.

Now I know this isn’t an issue unique to Tumblr, I have the same thing now with Twitter, and my personal experience with it goes all the way back to my Livejournal days.  What I would love to see though is an easier way to sort through that amount of information.  I follow a lot of really smart people, and sometimes I actually am interested in everything they have to say.

Sometimes not, but I digress.

So it’s the basic problem of any feed based or information based tool, how to filter and sort through that barrage of info.  Perhaps it’s more filter settings, or customizable filters (sometimes I want everyone, sometimes just my clients, sometimes just things that have been reblogged, etc.) I don’t know what the answer is, I’m just hoping that someone who’s making Tumblr can help me sort it out.

Because let’s face it, there’s no use in having such interesting tools with which to share specific information, if it all becomes static and noise.

Tumblr is the shiv in a world of swiss army knives. I hope it stays that way.

When I was in school and just starting to make posters for people and deal with graphic design client bullshit, I used to wonder, “Will this ever get better? Will I ever learn to work with these people?”

The answers are yes and yes.

Hang in there little 19-year-old parallel universe Zach Rose.