Category Archives: Miscellaneous Bloggery

Just your run-of-the-mill blog posts.

Vlog: November 2012 General Life Update

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(Blip/YouTube)

Just where *have* I been, anyway? And where am I now?

Watch Some Jerk With A Camera’s Epcot video here!

Also, to help hold you off until the next Dave Does Disney…here’s something that happened at the Magic Kingdom shortly before Halloween.

EDIT 11/10/12:

It looks like I found a job! And more importantly, my employment status helped launch an epic, bizarre, hilarious Twitter conversation, which I’ve storified!

State of the Quarter Centenarian

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Oh, I have a website, don’t I? I should talk to it!

Yes, folks, yesterday was my 25th birthday, and like all birthdays, it made me reflect on things. Last year, I listed a few goals I had for the month of July, and now, one year later, I completed one and three-fourths of them. That would be discouraging if I hadn’t been accomplishing so many other things, things I hadn’t even dreamed of at the time.

Sure, Dave Does Disney still isn’t QUITE finished, but despite being busy with a lot of other things, I’m almost done editing the Resorts episode and the Beauty and the Beast bonusode. The Fantasmic bonusode has been pushed back a bit, but it’s going to be awesome.

I was also invited to join GeekVision, a new site that showcases a lot of fun and talented reviewers and videomakers. The site now features Dave Does Disney, as well as some of my other reviews, sketches, and convention videos right here. I have tremendous respect and admiration for the other GeekVisionaries, so I’m quite excited to be part of the team.

I’m also in YET ANOTHER standup comedy showcase coming up at the Orlando Improv on Wednesday, July 11. These classes have been tremendous fun to take, and I really enjoy these performances.

I’m also nearing the end of preproduction on a short film, and I’m in a long-distance relationship that I’m very happy about. (The relationship part, not the distance part. The distance part sucks, but we make do.)

Sure, on a day to day basis I don’t feel very productive, partly due to focusing so much energy on my low-paying job. My move to Los Angeles will be postponed for a while due to financial reasons. I’m not crazy about the state of Florida as a whole, and I’d rather live somewhere closer to my girlfriend. But despite all these setbacks, I’m pretty happy with my life’s direction right now.

But I’m also aware there’s room for improvement. I’m trying a few different techniques to help myself focus on my projects. I’m trying to make myself write every day, even if most days said writing only produces unusable garbage. I want to get Dave Does Disney all completed and released. As happy as I am with the series and as much as I’ve enjoyed working on it, it HAS been taking up my creative energy (and my hard drive space) for over two years now. I’m sure I’ll do videos about Universal and SeaWorld/Busch Gardens before I leave this state, but I don’t ONLY want to be “The Theme Park Guy”. (Certainly not when I’m not even the best or the funniest theme park reviewer on Geekvision!) I’ve got other webseries ideas I want to pursue, some of which I’ve toyed around with for years but still haven’t so much as formally outlined. I want to stop just dreaming about projects and actually take action to get them done. But hey, one step at a time, and I’m not going to launch headfirst into another ambitious internet release without wrapping things up for the Dave Does Disney fans.

What a surprise, this post got a little rambly. Short version: I’m halfway to fifty and I’m surprisingly okay with it, but I’m not complacent.

I should blog more often so I don’t have to cover so many emotions in a single post.

General Post-2011 Life Update

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While I generally scoff at the emphasis society places on arbitrarily-defined breaks between periods of planetary revolution, I can’t help but feel a bit reflective as 2012 begins.

I didn’t accomplish most of the specific goals I had in 2011. Dave Does Disney is STILL incomplete (which isn’t ENTIRELY my fault), and I haven’t finished most of the scripts I wanted to have done by now. And yet, I still had a fun and productive year. I raised the money I needed to continue working with Broken Phonebooth. I was a line producer on one short, and a first AC on another. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones.

And so far, this year is shaping up to be something interesting. I started taking a standup comedy class at the Orlando Improv. Broken Phonebooth’s sending me and a few other people to Kenya for a week at the end of the month. After that? The next phase in my life will begin.

My internship at Phonebooth officially ends this next month. I’ll probably do a little bit of freelance work for them afterward, but I will no longer have a regular salaried position. And it’s the first time in my life that I’m not waiting for something specific to happen–when I graduated high school, I was waiting for college. When I graduated college, I was waiting for the job at Phonebooth. And now that I’m done with that, the next step hasn’t been clearly and specifically laid out before me.

So that’s why I’m planning on officially moving to Los Angeles in August or September.

LA has always been in the back of my mind as an “in the future” thing, but like so many other “in the future” things, I didn’t know when it would actually happen. Well, why not this year?

Right now, my plan is to finish up my time here, stick around for one or two more months to wrap up my life (and maaaaaaybe find work here), head home for a little bit to scrounge up some savings and spend time with friends, and then make my way out west. Now, like all my plans, this one COULD change in an event such as famine or disease or California breaking off of the rest of the country and floating away aimlessly until it runs over Hawaii. But for now, this seems like a reasonable goal.

In the meantime, I’ll be begging people to help me pay off my student loans.

Review: The Muppets (2011)

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On Thursday night, I attended an advance screening of “The Muppets”, which is the Stallone-esque title of the new film starring The Muppets and their infinitely-growing list of celebrity friends.

I’ve been anticipating this film for a long time. I’m an almost-lifelong fan of the Muppets, and yet I’ve never seen one of their movies in a theater (though I have rewatched their classic films MANY times, loving each one more each time I watch it). I also greatly enjoy Flight of the Conchords and most of the works of Jason Segel. I tried to be cautious with my optimism, but every new bit of information just made me more and more excited for the film until I had it built up in my head as not only the greatest movie ever made, but also the cure to twelve known diseases and six unknown.

So I went into this film attempting to suppress my excitement, but not so much that I would have a bad attitude that would taint my perception of the movie, so I wanted to leave just enough optimism that I noticed the goodness of the film, but not so much that I ignored any room for improvement. And I wanted to have fun.

Man, watching movies is stressful.

In the end? The film was quite good. Not perfect by any means, but easily the best Muppets flick since “The Muppet Christmas Carol”, which until now went unchallenged as the best of the post-Henson era. Continue reading →