Okay, so I was gonna write this great year end retrospective, but I decided that it was a waste of time. It was gonna end up looking like this:

"Whoa. It's been a crazy year for the robot. I started off the year by learning that I'm moving to South Carolina. Then I went on a crazy road trip. And, then I got a job, and was paired up with Marla. That was wild.....blah blah blah."

All that stuff is in the archives, and most folks have probably read it anyway. Also, I'm standing by this excuse becuase I'm obsessed with my new iPod, and I've been going crazy with all the video and stuff I'm putting in it. Gotta start out the new year with a full iPod, you know?

2005 is winding down, and it's "that time of the year" when everyone makes their "best of year" lists. I had a few minutes - and an empty blog post - so here goes:



I love The Bravery, and not just because they were on The OC soundtrack. Choosing a song/band as number one is probably the hardest choices to make for my little awards show. I listen to so much music that it's near impossible. So, I scanned through my itunes stats and playlists and noticed that "Honest Mistake" (or it's sublime electro remix) were in nearly ever playlist since it was released.

This was a tough year because many of my favorite bands threw down new albums (New Order, Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp, Fisherspooner, VNV Nation, I could go on forever), but The Bravery wins. The album is solid, and the dudes in the band are all playing on the front of speeding motorboats in the video for Fearless. Totally rad.

[sidenote: music video of the year: Black Eyed Peas "My Humps. I can't help it. I still love it.]



There were a ton of awesome movies this year, but I gotta give props to Joss Whedon's Serenity. But, this is one of those occasions where people are all, "Yeah, but you're into Buffy and Firefly and all that, so of course you think it's so great." Well, I don't care about all that. I's a Whedonite and my vote is for (the vastly superior to Star Wars Episode 3) Serenity.



I watch a ton of TV, and there are two clear winners: Lost and Battlestar Galactica. I love really awesome ensemble character driven shows and these two never fail to disappoint. And on top of that, they're both fantasy/sci-fi. I could go on-and-on, but I'd rather quickly throw out all the runner-up shows that I obsessed about this year: Carnivale, The L Word, Entourage, Huff, Weeds, Deadwood, and Veronica Mars (which I'm completely behind on).

And here's the other categories that I (just now kinda made up and) didn't make any graphics for:

Podcast of the Year: The Ricky Gervais Show
From the genius team that brought us Extras and The Office, comes a completely insane and totally brilliant podcast. I almost crashed my car the other day because I was crying from laughing so hard. I would totally have given this to Rocketboom, but Ricky Gervais swept in at the last minute and stole my vote.

Video Game of the Year: Everquest 2
Okay, so it came out in 2004, but it's pretty much the only game I've really seriously played in 2005. And, there was a new expansion so it still counts. I'd also like to take this time to mention that I completely dislike World of Warcraft and never want to play it again.

Website of the Year: Lost Remote
I gotta give props to the gang of at Lost Remote. I visit the site at least three to four times a day, and there's always something fresh and interesting added. Also, they let me do some guest blogging during NAB - which was a blast.

News Photographer Blogger of the Year: Lenslinger
[new category this year] This seasoned photojournalist has some great stories to tell, and the stylish prose to match. This year he ditched his blogspot tag for an official URL, and has really kept up his blogging momentum.

What else am I forgetting?

Book: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Um......

Okay, I'm done with this list thing now. It's way more work that I thought I was getting into 90 minutes ago when I started this post. In closing: 2005 was a swell time for TV, Movies, and blah blah blah.....

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Friday (or Saturday) on LLR: I reflect upon all the weird-ass adventures I've had over the last year. (Except for the part where I drunkenly fell out of a speeding golf cart with my pants around my ankles and broke my digital camera - I'm so over that.)

Santa punched my in the gut this x-mas when I went to turn on my super-computer (aka "BAMF") and it was completely dead. Apparently, the ice storm that swept through the Carolinas wreaked havok upon on my computer, in addition to every tree and powerline in sight.



Today my new motherboard was rushed into the apartment, and I sprang into action. After throuroughly scrubbing my hands and getting into uniform (and eating a lettuce wrap from PF Changs), I performed a two hour operation on the computer case. I won't lie to you. It was touch-and-go there for a minute, but the patient pulled through.

I don't do it for the money or glory. Just hearing that little fella's heart beat again was all the satisfaction I'll ever need.

[And now I have close to 30GB of music, video, and podcasts to load on my new video iPod.]

Here's something I'm sure every photog can relate to: having a million empty, orphaned tape boxes lying about. Seriously, I've always somehow ended up with far more empty boxes than I have tapes.

Well, this morning when I got out to my iced-over car...I found a way to put one them to good use.



Darn. If I had thought of it a few days sooner, I could've used a few as little boxes for wrapping holiday gifts. Oh well, I'm sure I'll have plenty around this time next year.

I didn't get a chance to make any gory holiday films this year, so here's The Candy Cane Incident - a timeless classic from the LLR video vault. It's a cautionary tale about the dangers of having too much holiday cocaine cheer. I did a bad job encoding this for the web last time around, so I've made up for it with a newish quicktime version:


"The Candy Cane Incident" - Quicktime (MOV) - 6.3mb

"The Candy Cane Incident" - Real Player (RAM) - 5.7mb

And, I added a low-res Windows Media version. It might be really bugged though, and probably not even worth it. [update - I took the link to the WMV down. It was truly horrid. Get Quicktime, it's rad.]

Enjoy!

The internet finally kicked in, and everything is back to normal at LLR headquarters.



Today my story assignment was to ride-along with UPS as they rushed to deliver tons of holiday packages. Fighting off my motion sickness, I rode shotgun in a UPS van with "Abbie" the coolest driver around.

It was kinda like a family-friendly PG version of Training Day, in which I played Ethan Hawke to his Denzel Washington (without all the crazy PCP and murder stuff...we didn't have time..there were just too many packages). He showed me the ropes and I tried to keep up.

Jump in the truck. Jump out of the truck. Jump in the truck. Jump out of the truck. After about 30 minutes of that I was so close to getting sick. And there were several times I nearly fell out the side door - which would've sucked after i signed a rather detailed i-will-not-sue-ups-release form. But, it was pretty fun and I turned out a fun little nat sound pkg. Here's the video link in case you're interested: UPS Workers Keeping Busy

Okay, so my power came back on LATE Tuesday, but there wasn't enough juice to power everything (hot water, heat, fridge). Today I'm finally up to full power, but the cable is still out. So now my mantra has been changed from, "Hey, Duke Power! When am I gonna get my power back!?" to "Hey, Charter Cable! When am I gonna get my cable back?!"

Duke Power created a nifty little flash animation of all the power outages in their coverage area of the last week. It's interesting - of course, all the people who are out of power/internet-cable won't get a chance to see it.

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Got Haiku?
Gotta give another shout-out to my main damie, Hasser and his newly minted website, The Haiku News Network. Stop by and drop some of your own 575's in the comments section.

I've been without power since Thursday, and it's no longer amusing. At first, I thought it was like a fun camping trip in the living room. We light a few candles. Maybe we drink some peppermint schnaaps and hot chocolate. But, those "it's fun to live in the dark like old timey people" days are over.

Now it's just ridonculous.

[I know that there's people in the world that are worse off than me and all that - but it's my own little personal struggle at the moment and I thought I'd share.]

The old mill I live in is dark and scary. And, it's actualy colder inside than it is ouside right now. Over the past few days there hasn't been any "harrowing moments of life and death" or a "fight to stay alive," but there was one moment kinda-sorta like that.

I needed to get some fresh batteries in the flashlights and some to power the CD boom box (so I could have a little glowstick rave in the dark). But, there weren't any to be found, and all the nearby stores were shut down. I was in a real pickle. And then I remembered that I bought a ton of batteries for the robot humps video, so I went into LLR headquarters and salvaged them.



It was sorta like that moment in the movie Alive, when the crash survivors were all, "Oh no! What are we gonna eat?" and then one of them looked over at the corpses nearby and went, "Hey! I know where there's some meat!"

It was just like that, but with toy robots and batteries (and without the icy corpses).

I'm sending this from a cell phone text message, so i hope it formats correctly. There was a lil' ice storm across the Carolina's this week and most of the city is without power. Something like 500k homes without power. No power = no internets. Ill probably blog from a nice warm hotel room this weekend, so I'll tell all the fun stories then. robot out.

I was cleaning out my closet today and as I peeked in various boxes along the way, I noticed one common factor: mix CD's (and even some mixtapes) scattered throughout all of them.

I realized that for the past five or six years I've made at least one mix CD a week. Just scrolling back through dozens of itunes playlists in the last year, I watched as new songs were added and carried over to the next week, while other songs faded away - only to come back months later. Kinda like my own billboard chart system.

It's weird, though. I have an iPod and an mp3 player, but I'm always listening to CD's in the car and random places. I guess I never broke the habit.

So, I think each week I'm gonna post my most recent itunes playlist - with the occasional commentary. Fair warning: I listen to a lot of elektro and synth-pop, so if that's not your thing, I understand.



Not that you saw last week's playlist, but there's some new stuff. I added some DM and New Order remixes to the list, and the first single "Out of Control" from the new She Wants Revenge new album (out today).

And, after my "How To Survive The Robot Uprising" book review last week, I thought it'd be funny to end the mix with Andrew Thompson's anti-robot anthem, "We're in Business" [download the mp3 here]. I love the song, but it definitely has a one playlist shelf life.

Back when I was in first grade, I remember seeing a bunch of boys at recess playing with metal Tonka trucks and stuff. So, the next day I brought my truck to the sandbox and asked if I play with them.

One of them said, "Yes, but you have to have a truck!" And, I said, "Oh, don't you worry. I have a truck," as I reached into my backpack and retrieved one of my most favorite toys: a die-cast metal school bus. I snatched it out of my bag and started wildly driving it all over the place. It took me a moment to realize that no one else was playing with me. They were all sitting there, mouths open, staring at me like I was from another planet.

"That's not a truck!" one of them said, "That's a school bus!" and they all laughed at me for the remainder of recess. I was outcast, and went over to play trucks with the unfortunate kid who happened to bring a plastic Snoopy motorbike that day.

All of this came rushing back to me this afternoon while I was out holiday shopping, and came across this car [see below] in the toy aisle.



I'm betting the kid who gets this will learn that that Santa doesn't really exsist, just moments after finding out what Viagra is - both while getting mercilessly teased on the playground.

Good times.

I was thrilled to open the LLR mailbag this week and get a package from the fine folks at Holtzbrink Publishers. Enclosed was a nice letter, along with a seemingly innocuous book for me to review. But, within seconds after prying open the cover I immediately sensed that my life would be changed forever.

The book, How To Survive The Robot Uprising: Tips On Defending Yourself Against The Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson (whom I would describe as a Holden Caufield for the digital age), is one of the most essential books in the history of mankind.



There isn't a fluffy "thanks for buying my book" introduction, it gets right to the point:

"Any machine could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the common strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy. Pity the fate of the ignorant when the robot masses decide to stop working and start invading."

Pretty hardcore, huh? The book starts off like that and never lets up, as Wilson walks us through dozens of nightmare scenarios - ranging from, "How to treat a laser wound" and "How to fool a thermal imaging target tracker" to "How to spot a robot mimicking a human."

Important stuff!

If Sarah Connor had this book back in 1985 there wouldn't have been a Terminator 2 and Terminator 3. And, if the studio that made I, Robot had this book back in 2003 then the movie would have been better.

Now, I know many of you are thinking, "Wait a minute! I thought you were one of those pro-robot people. You cybo-hippie!" And you'd be right. I'm an outspoken advocate of the man-robot love movement (which is an awkward title that I'll be rethinking in the near future).

But, I know that the robot uprising is an impending threat - even from robots that love us. Someday they could love us so much that their twisted robot infatuation has them nuking random cities and torturing babies because they love us so much. Think of it like that scene from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, when the retarded guy crushed a kitten's skull because he was petting it too hard. And besides, no one was a bigger robot lover than Issac Asimov and even he wrote scenarios where robots skipped so far ahead in logic that they did some borderline date-rapey stuff.

Where was I? Oh yeah, book report.

From this point forward, I really should stop referring to it simply as "a book" and use the phrase "survival guide" instead - because that's what it is. This thing isn't written by some dude who simply hates robots. It's written by David H. Wilson, a guy who actually studies and designs robots.

"As a Ph.D. candidate at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he has received master's degrees in Robotics and Data Mining, Wilson is uniquely positioned to offer us vital insights into the robot menace."

For all we know, he might be the guy who accidentally caused all that stuff in The Matrix to someday happen.

The content of the book survival guide is so informative (and amusing) that the publishers easily could've skimped in other areas and it still would've been a success. But, they didn't. The illustrations (thanks to Richard Horne) are so awesome that I'm tempted to get another copy of the book survival guide just so I can cut out some of the pages - although I'd feel guilty, since it needs to get into as many human hands as possible.



So, if you're looking for the perfect last minute gift for the robot lover in your life, then look no further. Come to think of it, it's probably an even better gift if you know someone that hates robots.


[I hope that was a satisfactory book report. I haven't really written one since I did Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the 5th grade, and it didn't really count at that time considering it was already a movie.]

Went out on the town last night with a few of my new photog pals. We ended up in Kentucky, and went to several dive bars. I made sure to take a bunch of incriminating photos (never to be posted here).



At some point, I met this heavily pierced tattoo artist at the bar, and before I knew it we had a ton of empty pint and shot glasses stacked in front of us. We argued/talked for hours about punk rock, suicide girls, and my dumb-looking sweater vest. Later he whipped out his penis at the bar and showed everyone his prince albert piercing. Seriously. It was good times all around.

Oh, snap! Yesterday I accidentally spelled Cincinnati wrong in my haven't-slept-for-dozens-of-hours blog post. When I first realized that I spelled it wrong, my initial reaction was "Ehhh. It's only Cincinatti, or Cincinnati, or whatever," but now I've come to my senses and I've corrected this most serious infraction.

Dear reader, rest assured that several LLR interns will be fired over this.

Anyway, my second day in this fair city was much like the first one: meetings, witches-titty-coldness, luncheons, and several dozen power point demonstrations. However, it wasn't all boring - the Olympic team that we have going is pretty rad.



I think the moment I officially felt like I was meant to be part of the team was when the conversation at the table turned to robots (as it often does) and Scotty, a fellow photog, said to me, "Robots? Well, check this shit out!" and lifted up his right pant-leg to reveal a MEGA AWESOME Japanese Horikawa robot tattoo.



That's hardcore!

This morning I went to Cincinnati with our sports anchor, Geoff for our Hearst-Argyle olympics coverage summit. Oh yeah, I don't think I ever mentioned this in the blog yet: I'm going to Torino, Italy for the winter olympics in February. How rad is that?

Anyway, I've been working lately on getting more mulitmedia elements (and breakdancing robots) into the blog, and decided to try out several flash-enabled slideshows - adding another weapon to my blogging aresnal for the coming months.

The slideshow above is basically my test to see how it'll work with my blog, and I figured it'd be fitting since it's really the first official olympics-related thing to blog about. If it doesn't show up in the blog post for some reason, here's a link to it at Slideroll.