SuperSatellite ||

So uh…I bit off more than I can chew…yeah.  I went ahead and registered my own domain (fienen.net) yesterday and set it up for DNS (Domain Name Service) with No-IP.com.  Turns out, I’ve got my work cut out for me.  I can’t just have it work, mostly because Cox is a bitch and blocks port 80 (the port the internet works over).  So I have been fighting, quite fruitlessly to make things play out how I want.  Oh yes, the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) works fine, but the address bar in the browser replaces it with the site’s IP address instead, which is tacky, and I want to use subdomains (like blog.fienen.net) which apparently results in all sorts of weird things with my settings.  Damn it all to hell.  Needless to say I wasted a lot of sleep time getting nowhere last night.  And trying to figure out which problems are Apache and which are DNS is a bitch.  I will make it work though.

On that note, I do have a plan for switching to a new blogging system once I get the technical stuff worked out, and don’t worry, my MySpace readers won’t be left cold.  I think in the end it will be a good transition.

Enough technical bullshiat.  I neglected to mention that I have started in with The Music Man rehearsals now.  Boy I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.  But that’s okay, out of the house, with good people, too bad they don’t have wireless internet in that building, heh.  I’ve been taking picture that you’re welcome to look at.  Naturally those galleries will eventually migrate to my server once I get that DNS crap nailed down.  I think after this I am taking an extended break from theatre all together.  I don’t know what it is, but the enjoyment I lost for acting is creeping into everything else.  I can accept not acting anymore, but I don’t want to ruin it all for myself.  I keep hoping I’ll see tryouts for some play that just makes me say “Wow!  I have to be in that!”  I don’t know what it would be, or what it would take, but I’d like that feeling back.

Is everyone ready for the weekend?  1…2…3…GO!

So I am nearing a crossroads I believe.  I want to toss some stuff out, and have you all hit it back at me.  This is all about getting feedback from you, because that will ultimately shape the decision I make.

I’ve been using MySpace for what is quickly approaching a year.  It’s been an okay time.  But I’m becoming a little restless with its blogging feature.  Mostly I just get paranoid.  What happens if they crash?  If they start charging?  If some unforeseen nuclear disaster takes out my blog?  I am pretty protective of my writing, so far to the point that I have actually begun printing off hard copies “just in case.”  Plus, who hasn’t gotten fed up with the constant down times, errors, and server problems MySpace experiences?  The big draw of MySpace to me is the blogging, which I rather enjoy, and now that I am far more comfortable with it, and my readership has grown, I feel like I owe it to you and myself to produce the best product I can.

So, in answer to this problem I am considering hosting my own blog, with my own domain and all.  It would allow me to also combine some other stuff I have scattered around, like my photo gallery.  I have been trying to weigh pros and cons, look at alternatives, etc etc.  A big concern though is whether or not you, my steady readers, would follow me.  If I went off-site, would I still be able to maintain (and possibly increase) my readership.  Odds are I would step the quality of my writing up to try and offset things, but naturally MySpace provides a very nice connection to you all.  And since they lack support for subscribing to RSS feeds, you couldn’t just point to my feed to keep up to date (I think LiveJournal and Xanga does though, can anyone confirm that?) if I moved.

The other alternative is to move to a truly hosted solution, like Blogger or Wordpress.  They host it, sorta like MySpace, but since they specialize in blogging, it’s more powerful, reliable, and feature rich.  But it doesn’t leave the data in my hands, and I like the idea of knowing that if something happened to my stuff, if would be my fault, rather than theirs.  On the other hand, I’m linked right to their community, similar to here.

Naturally I would keep my MySpace page, and probably mirror the blog content for at least a short transition phase, all the while trying to drive traffic to the new place.  It comes down to the three S’s:  selfhost, stay, or switch?  It’s a damn hard question to answer really.  I am inclined to start doing things myself.  I installed WordPress on my server at home to play with, that will probably shape my choice too depending on how much I like it.  I hate tossing around buzz words like Web 2.0, but I guess that’s what I’m reaching for.

So let me know what you think, it’s important to me!

Well, the current buzz now is all about the new Superman movie.  Probably rightfully so.  Thanks to the juxtaposition that Brett Ratner provided, we know Brian Singer is pretty well the man when it comes to making a successful comic book movie, although I give a lot of credit to Christopher Nolan too.  Robert Ebert, however, appears to disagree, at least a little.  By the way, Mr. Ratner (a.k.a. Mr. Shithead), fuck you very much for X-Men 3.

Let me be fair in saying that I don’t think I’ve seen any of the first four Superman movies ever, and given my knowledge of the matter, missing III and IV doesn’t exactly hurt my feelings.  And having seen (and loved) Batman Begins, I have faith in the ability to sort of “re-invent” a franchise, without being unfaithful to source material.  My problem is not so much with that, as it is with Superman himself.

Let’s face it, as far as Superman goes, he’s pretty damned generic.  Sure, he was one of the first (1938 was the first printing I believe), but at the same time, they went a little overboard.  He flies, he’s bulletproof, he’s super fast, super strong, has freezing breath.  It’s like as time went on, it started to be like playground battles:  “Oh yeah?  Well I’m fireproof and I burn you to a crisp!”  “Nuh-uh, because I’m EVERYTHING proof, and everything flies off me and blows you up!”  His one weakness?  Kryptonite, from his home planet, Krypton.  Come on guys, can we try a tad harder here?  I’m fucking begging you.  I guess maybe it was clever and awesome back around World War II, but nowadays we appreciate somewhat more developed ideas.

Which brings me to my single largest problem.  He’s not human.  And we casually brush the fact aside like bad guacamole.  I want my heroes to be, you know, something I can relate to.  Even The Thing started out as human.  That’s all Batman is, and Spiderman and the X-Men are human enough.  And if the hero isn’t human, at least they usually originated on this planet.  But Superman is pure alien.  He just conveniently looks like us.  That makes forget that he isn’t so much a super “man,” as he is an average alien (thanks Lindsey!) who arrived here on a space ship.  For Christ’s sake, he doesn’t even need to breathe oxygen, he just does it to look fashionable.  What would happen if the Kryptonians decided to use Earth as a penal colony for their undesirables (assuming they hadn’t been destroyed of course)?  We’d all be fucked, that’s what.  The convict Kryptonian serial killers and rapists would have bent Clark Kent over and crammed that fancy cape and prancy spandex right up his super asshole, and I guaruntee the Man of Steel henceforth would just be known as “that guy with the perdy mouth.”

So I’ll go see it.  Not because I have any warm spot for Superman, but because I trust Brian Singer and I trust Kevin Spacey and I trust some nobody named Brandon Routh.  If they were smart enough to tell Nicholas Cage that he couldn’t be Superman, then I guess they got something right…I never really read any comic books as a kid (but hey, where’s my Iron Man movie?), but I find a lot of enjoyment in their cinematic adaptations.  Why this is I can’t really explain.  I guess just catching up on some lost youth.

So I watched a documentary yesterday.  This courtesy of my lovely friend Shannon.  Let me just say that I’m not really a conspiracy theorist.  Though I am a little wacky, I’m not exactly nuts.  Not like Mel Gibson nuts anyway…that fucking wacko.  But no, I like a good information spin all the same.  So I thought it neat when this film on 9/11 was pointed out to me (warning: it is long).  It reminded me of this short flash film a little (no warning: it’s just a few minutes long).  And however nutty they may sound from time to time, they bring up good points.  Naturally it’s all mostly stuff that we’ll never get answers to, but that’s why we have imaginations, right?

So good lord this was a long weekend.  I’ve not been so happy to get back into the work-week in a long while.  Of course, I start work on The Music Man this week, so free time is a commodity I won’t have to worry about having for the next month.  At least I will remain quite occupied.  Sometimes I find it to be a bad idea to leave me to my own devices.  Things end up skinned or painted.  I did buy two new guitars last week.  Awesome, huh?  One of them will replace my current one.  So…need to buy a guitar?  Hehe.  I still want to sell my Telocoustic and pick up a full dreadnought style acoustic in its place too.  Giving me disposable income is a worse idea than giving George W. a microphone.

I have learned that I have a fetish for eating my own words.  One really good example is that I said I would never start one of these bedamned MySpace pages, yet here I am, blogging, like a giddy, thirteen year old, emo schoolgirl…okay, bad example, since I’m twenty-four.  But I found myself caught in the net again with my cellphone.  When I got it, I was going to get text messages turned off.  Why use text when I can hit the “talk” button or get online?  Sadly, I shelled out the extra $4.99 a month for 200 messages.  It was a tide that I could no longer fight.  And frankly, I have discovered a certain usefullness with them.  God I hate technology.  If my phone starts looking for Sarah Conner I’m really gonna go live in a cave.

My office plant has officially been stricken with my black thumb.  It took far longer than expected, but I have prevailed.  Maybe fake plants are in order.  I should probably never have kids, because you know I’d just end up taking off for the weekend and forget to water them or something.  Besides, if I ever had kids, they’d end up with hooves.  Maybe I’ll adopt a monkey.

deficiency    ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (d-fshn-s)
n. pl. deficiencies

1. The quality or condition of being deficient; incompleteness or inadequacy.
2. A lack or shortage, especially of something essential to health; an insufficiency: a nutritional deficiency.

For today’s musing, I have a treat for you, my constant readers.  I want to share with you a story from my fabled past.  It’s not something secret, no, just something that remains undiscussed, much like the genetically deformed and oft homicidal child you keep locked in the basement.  Oh yes…I know.

When I moved to Atlanta back in 2000, I was able to survive for a shockingly long period of time without a job.  Looking back, I’m not entirely sure how I managed it.  I like to think magic, but I would imagine it was mostly good planning on my part.  Eventually I broke down though and required a better source of income besides trying to pull it out of the air.  It was a sheerly comical, yet cruel and meanspirited twist of fate that I got a job at The Gap.  As soon as you have finished laughing, you may continue with the blog.

I lasted all of three months before something better came along.  In my time there, I learned a few things.  One, straight men do not work at the Gap.  Granted, that left me with no competition, however number two is that girls over 18 do not work at the Gap.  And that probably has a lot to do with why number one is true.  Three, male (and consequently gay) managers at the Gap have a fearful, almost contradictingly Naziesque approach to that place.  A paradox that in and of itself is almost strong enough to destroy the universe.  It’s creepy.  When your idea of a good time entails bossing kids around a store for a redress at 2AM, you might consider decaf and changing political affiliations.  I’m not saying Gap managers were Nazis, just that they could be known to be as Nazis sometimes were.  Four, one does not have to work hard to be appear valuable.  In three months I was able to secure a promotion and a dollar an hour raise.  However…come to think of it I think the woman manager that was giving me the raise might have been a porn star on the side…no, really.  Five, female (and apparently straight) managers live in the most amazing and reality disproving bubble I have ever seen.  I think one woman really believed that everyone in the world shopped at the Gap, and I am not the least bit kidding.  She practically deserved to be committed for such an utter lack of grip on reality.

With all that said, the biggest thing that I can say is that my fashion sense is some what…underdeveloped.  How the hell I lasted three months there really is beyond me.  The whole point in relating this story is that I went out shopping last night.  See, I still wear clothes I bought after getting back from Atlanta.  It’s not an activity that thrills me, but my closet is really needing some updating now.  But my sheer inability to comprehend the combining of clothing articles is almost comical in nature.  I’m trying to grow past the novelty T phase of my life, and into something more…grown up?  I dunno.  I will always love my binary 4 hand gesture shirt (00100, think about it).  But I can’t wear stuff like that to work now.  Anyway, watching me muddle through racks of far too big clothing like a blind man is certainly not my idea of a good time.

I did manage to get a pair of shorts I like, but the shirt I got to go with it was too small.  So I’m gonna exchange that tonight.  One thing the Gap never had though was this:  $79 wrinkled white shirts.  I don’t think I can ever buy clothing in The Buckle after seeing that.  Who the hell buys that?  I can buy a $10 shirt and wrinkle it myself just the same, and you know what?  It’ll look like crap the same too.  I think something in my brain popped and broke when I saw that.

So, anyone wanna help me out?