Kronokora

After picking up first place in the teen category at the 2007 Endless Mountains Digital Film Festival, the new video fresh out of Hugosmith Productions, "Orange Passions, Glutamate Dreams", crash-landed onto YouTube, where it will ride out the rest of its days on a sea of pixels and lolcat videos. Witness the magic, the mayhem, and the MSG at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0ftGHH2nE4.

I just had a startling revelation: the chances of me becoming an overnight Internet rock superstar with an MIDI sequencer and a five-dollar microphone are really, really small.

To the students who rushed the stage at the Minutemen founder's speech yesterday: did you really think that getting up there would somehow convince Jim Gilchrist that his organization is wrong? Watch the video, and notice that he's smiling as the crowd gets unruly. People like Gilchrist feed off of hatred from those who oppose them, and you're just giving him what he wants.

There's a right way to protest, and there's a wrong way to protest. Don't be stupid.

This shows how completely college has taken control of my mind: I just read the caption for the October picture of my wall calendar, and when I came across an interesting bit of trivia, I had the urge to underline it.

I got my first dorm phone bill today. It was for $0.55.

I began to count down the time until college in eighth grade because I thought going to college would be infinitely cooler than being in high school. Now I'm leaving in four days. Counting down was only fun when it didn't seem real.

AP English students will appreciate/loathe this - Grendel is now an opera.

So you know, the Hugosmith Productions -slash- Double M Productions film Ugly People Anonymous is now on YouTube. Watch it, 'kay?

Yeah, I'm back from France now. The trip was fun, although the six-hour time difference and massive sleep loss have left me unable to remember anything specific about it. I do have pictures, though (562, in fact), and I will post some to Flickr whenever I get around to it. The hardest part of living with a French family for a week was the conversation, which basically consisted of four parts: (1) one of the family members saying something to me in French, (2) me staring at them wordlessly for a few seconds, (3) that person repeating the sentence painfully slowly, and (4) me nodding my head vigorously and repeatedly mumbling "oui."

Yesterday was the first day that I was able to use my new laptop. The original laptop that I bought arrived a month and a half ago, but it was unusable due to the small fact that it didn't work. At all. A month of haggling with countless Dell representatives went by, and a replacement laptop was finally delivered to my house a few hours after I left for France. Meh. This new one works fine, however. The best part about having a computer in my room is that if I moved a toilet and a refrigerator in here, I would never have to go to any of the other rooms of the house again.

I also started "jogging" again today after giving it up last August. You could say I "jogged" for twenty minutes: I ran for ten minutes and spent the other ten minutes painfully limping back to the house and trying to get my lungs to work again. I don't think this whole exercise thing is going to work out for me.

Graduating was nice... I didn't really know what the ceremony would feel like until I entered the auditorium packed full of family members staring and taking pictures. Until then, I didn't really "get" what it meant to graduate. All of the congratulatory remarks and speeches enforced the knowledge in the back of my mind that this was final and irreversible. The biggest change will obviously come when I step on the college campus on August 28th, but I know that, even now, I don't feel like a high school student anymore.

Today, the two legendary forces known to the mortals of this planet by the names of Hugosmith Productions and Double M Productions combined their awesome powers to create a film so epic, so earth-shattering, that the gods of Mount Olympus themselves rose out of their ancient crypts to gaze up it with terrified awe! Or Derek, Matt, Kyle, Kyle, Kevin, and I shot most of a video that we had been talking about for a while. I just saw This Is Spinal Tap this evening, however, and I like the Hard Rock explanation more.

I won't be updating this (not that I would anyway) until the 26th because of my trip to France. I will be sure to take many pictures before then.

My revised website is up at http://kronokora.sitesled.com. It's got some new stuff.

I’ve spent a lot of the last week or so trying to build a new website to replace the one I still have from a year or two ago. There’s got to be some unspoken rule that requires me to spend about 90 percent of my time on design work and only 10 percent of my time creating actual content on any project I undertake. I do want to make things look nice, I guess…

One thing that irks me is the inclusion of patriotic songs in hymnals. “God Bless America” may be almost forgivable, because it contains “God” in the title, but songs like “America the Beautiful” have no place in a religious songbook. If hymnal compilers associate patriotism with Christianity, people will think that the two are, well, somehow associated. Anyway, most of the Founding Fathers of the United States were not really Christian but Deist, and one cannot argue that they weren’t patriotic. I fear that this association may give people a slight “God likes Americans more than those screwball Canadians” type of complex.

I’ve finished purple-izing my new LiveJournal page. It’s about time a straight man had a purple website. Anyway, my old username and page reeked of outdated high schooliness, and I figured it was time for an overhaul.

Unless there is a final exam, seniors don’t have to go to school again until Wednesday. I leave with the French Club for Paris next Tuesday. I haven’t even been thinking about the trip, partially because I still have to do that whole High School Graduation thing first.

One random thing I’m wondering about: why does Volvo put the male symbol on its vehicles? Some Austin Powers-esque attempt at masculinity? You’d think that associating your product with a specific gender would have negative consequences; just think what the reaction would be if Swiffer put the female symbol on its mops with the slogan “Just for Housewives” or something. 

(Edit: I leave for Paris on Tuesday, not Monday as I originally posted.)

This is the first post. It's quite simple, really. I figure that the interest level of my posts can only go up from here.

My old journal is at http://chocoholnine.livejournal.com.