You COULD go out to some nightclub, or you COULD go to the Fillmore and see some legendary San Francisco punk bands! My stepfather's band, THE MUTANTS, are playing with Flipper and the Avengers -- doors open at 7!



I'll be working at the show, say hi to me if you come!

I am awake even though I do not want to be. This is due to the fact that a pretty much full grown tomcat weighing about 20 pounds attacked my head by jumping on it because he thinks he's still a tiny kitten.

I wish there was some way to impress upon the cat our proximity to Chinatown and the number of unscrupulous restaurant owners that reside there, just to warn him.

So, if you are a complete nut about horror movies then you probably know about the infamous LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. Most of my readers will think I'm talking about a particularly overwrought band from Los Angeles, but in reality this is the title of perhaps one of the more infamous "lost" films in movie history. When you start talking about lost silent films, the two that always come up are the 10 hour version of GREED (based on Frank Norris' MCTEAGUE, another of my dear San Francisco novels) and LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT starring the infamous Lon Chaney.



Filmed in 1927 as a silent film, this film was assumed to have been lost in a fire at a film vault in 1967. You see, these old movies are shot on silver nitrate film. Films from this era are literally explosive -- a lit cigarette can make them burst into flame. This film was also a victim of the changover from silent to "talkies" -- the first talking pictures were starting to come out, and while LAM was a huge financial success for the film studio, it quickly went into storage because the number of silent theatres quickly dropped to zero by 1935. Lon Chaney was in talks to be the main character of a new Tod Browning talking picture called DRACULA when he died in 1930, and the role went to a foreigner named Bela Lugosi.

MGM took the film completely out of circulation and then 40 years later the last copy was supposedly destroyed in that fateful fire. Or was it?

A blogger with a horror blog website has stated that he actually HELD a print of LAM in his hands in 1998. I've been sitting on this story for a few days to see if anything shakes out, and in the meantime I've been asking film professionals on my own about it. I know an awful lot of film buffs and Folks Who Would Know. While they all say that it's possible a print survives in some really wretched collector's hands, this story is more than likely a complete fabrication. The suspicious traits are there -- the blogger references a "Ted Newsom" in the post that turns out to be another poster on the same website with over 8500 posts to his name -- seems really suspicious. Add to this the fact that the people running this website have some kind of imaginary competition going on with RUE MORGUE magazine, and the entire thing just screams LET'S GET HITS TO OUR WEBSITE. In that respect they have succeeded, because this story made the pages of Aint It Cool news -- plus it's coming out during Comic Con so I am sure they will be the talk of that convention.

I really want to believe this story. Unfortunately, I also understand that human beings are greedy, selfish, lying bastards as a whole. I apologize if you are fans of the Horror Drunx website, but they've purposefully spread a story that can only be proven correct when the film is found and can't be disproved at all and is quite unbelieveable. I can tell you one thing -- if I had found a copy of LAM in a film vault in 1998, I would have probably tried to take it with me or at least NOT LET IT OUT OF MY HANDS until I could find someone who knew the importance of the film. This part of the story just doesn't ring true. Any film buff would tell you the same thing. Harry Knowles (of AICN.com) has stated that he would pay $10,000 plus airfare to whereever it was being shown just to see it. If this guy had his wits about him, he could have stolen the print and been set for life -- a collector would pay millions for it.

If this is true that's awesome, but more than likely it's an opportunistic lie. The refrain everyone is hearing from the Horror Drunx folks is "Prove us wrong!" when in reality the burden of proof is on them. In a perfect world, these people would be run out of town on a rail for being such idiots, but sadly it's probably just going to get them more traffic.

Tags: assholes, movies

This week I have been inflicting every Clive Barker movie ever made upon myself. I started with the completely awful RAWHEAD REX and I am finishing up with LORD OF ILLUSIONS. The movies I have watched this week include the following:

Gods and Monsters (1998)
Lord of Illusions (1995)
Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
Candyman (1992)
Nightbreed (1990)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
Hellraiser (1987)
Rawhead Rex (1986)

I had the caveat that I would only watch Clive Barker movies that had been released theatrically. This automatically excused me of having to watch Hellraiser 4 through whatever number they are up to now.

As far as listening goes -- I have been listening to a lot of the new Nine Inch Nails album. Some of the more minimalistic pieces have caught my ear. I adore "Lights in the Sky", because it's just a solo piano and sounds like it'd be very easy to play. I have a last.fm account, and all the media players in the house feed to that account -- it's turned into a pretty good reflection of my musical taste.



Books I've been reading are all about boring crap like agile web development. The writers on my list will be glad to know that computer programming has been reduced to a metaphor of telling stories about objects, in a very rigid and controlled type of grammar and lexicon. That's the best way I can describe the boring books on my nightstand to a layperson...

I am about to inflict Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long blog on myself and arachnidbite.

Edited to add: I have to admit, I don't "get" Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long blog. I mean, it has a couple of moments but overall is kind of "eh".

Edited to add: I think I hate it. It's just stupid. I have friends that could do better than that, and he's obviously shooting it on a Fox backlot. Ugh.

Tags: clive barker

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/san-francisco-a.html
Here's an article about that San Francisco Sysadmin that took over the City's network:

San Francisco Admin Coughs Up Passcodes in Secret Jailhouse Meeting With Mayor
By David Kravets July 22, 2008

San Francisco network admin Terry Childs, in orange, coughed up the passwords to the city's backbone network he's accused of hijacking. A city official said Tuesday he gave the codes to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a secret jailhouse meeting.
File Illustration by Joan Lynch.

The city of San Francisco has regained control of its network after a "rogue" city employee hijacked the system and then coughed up the passwords nine days later to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a secret jailhouse interview, a city official told Threat Level late Tuesday.

...

The last paragraph is my favorite:

"Mr. Childs obviously had a misinterpretation of actually who owns the network. It is the taxpayers of the city and county of San Francisco, not him," Vinson said.

Remember, sysadmins -- unless you own the hardware, having root is not really "owning". Gavin pwned you, dude.

Tags: pwned by gavin newsom

If you are following along in the home version, I have been planning a trip to Guam/Iwo Jima for July of 2009. I found a tour company with a plane going to Iwo Jima, and I realized that I would be able to guarantee good graces with the tour operator if I brought some friends along. Affirming their interest were angelcityblues and octal. I only invited about 30 people on my first pass, limited to people who I knew had the money or the wherewithal to plan 12 months in advance for a trip if I organized it. I invited some CEOs and celebrity profiles too. Harry Knowles declined, as did my old boss at Dimension X. Karl just had a kid so I don't blame him.

Today I log in to see who might have shown interest, and much to my surprise I found George Kaskanlian in the YES column. George was a slight surprise but I guess that he liked the sound of that.

What's even more unnerving is the though was the addition of Tom Savini in the "maybe" column. The idea is cool enough that Tom Savini would want to get himself to Guam to participate! Tom Savini is a really freakish person to imagine spending a total solar eclipse with. I could totally see us being attacked by vampires, and him defending us all with a double cylinder gun popping up from under his codpiece.

Tags: eclipse 2009 vacation

I can't wait to see the reaction of some folks I know who live in the neighborhood of the ballpark to the news that they are moving the official City Halloween Party to their neighborhood. I can see the neighborhood around the Glas Kat on Halloween now... good news for the Kat, I guess.

This ought to be fun though!

Whenever I get heavily involved in a project, I tend to get a bit crotchety. Cranky might be a better word, and downright irritable might be even better. The reason for this is because I am all about getting things done and I focus on that like a laser. At the moment, I'm involved in one of the biggest projects I've ever done in my life, a complete rewrite and re-architecting of http://www.tribe.net from the ground up. It's huge and I have very little money to do it with. Because of this project, I've had a LOT less tolerance for people's bullshit lately.

Since this project started, I've told many people to fuck off. These are all people who I have known a while, and while I considered them friends in the past, they marginalized my friendship so badly that I just got fed up with them. I'm sick of the abusive nature of these people, and I just want them out of my life. Wish granted, and all it took was just standing up to them.

One person I went to court for earlier this year. As long as I was needed in court, I was invited to her house, I was emailed every once in a while, and my calls were returned. As soon as I was not needed, there I went into the trash bin. I wish I could say I was floored by this, but not really. It's a typical modus operendi for this person, as long as I have known her. Of course, the usual protestations were there -- "Don't you know what I have been going through?" Well, yes. I read about all the fun stuff you've been doing on your blogs and twitter and your photos. That's the thanks I get for going out of my way for someone. Thank you, drive through.

Another was someone I hired to do some work for me. See, when I hire someone to do work for me, it's because I know they know more than I and I expect a bit of something for that. I went to the mat to get the funds to hire this person, and none of that was appreciated. The last straw came when I made an announcement with this person's name in it and got an abusive text message about it. I gave up on this person's friendship a couple of months ago when I realized that I was uninvited to lunch because someone he wanted to brown-nose who didn't like me would be there. I should have given up longer ago than that, but I can take an awful lot of slaps in the face before I finally have had enough. The kicker is that as soon as I did this, four (FOUR) people with far more experience in production environments than this person came forth on tribe.net and VOLUNTEERED to do the same work I was going to PAY this person $85 an hour to do. We are a week away from our Alpha release now, and it's seriously going to be the most kick ass site ever.

Yet another person was someone who I really tried to be a good friend to. I listened to all her complaining, whining, and moaning for a few years without much complaint. Finally when I was upset over a few things, I wanted someone to talk to and basically got the whole one-up-manship of "Oh, you think YOUR life is shitty, listen to mine" deal. That's when I realized that this person was so self-absorbed that it wasn't even worth my time. Of course, that got this person to complain bitterly to everyone around her. Here's a clue to you -- go get some fucking therapy.

This entire month has me re-thinking my friendships. I have a lot of awfully good friends here in town who have no problems calling me or coming to my place for dinner. I have a lot of folks who invite me to BBQs and out to movies. While I thoroughly acknowledge that I'm fairly cranky, I am an incredibly loyal friend to people who return the favor. The flip side of this is that once you are on my shit list, you are there for an extremely long time and there are people out there that can attest to this fact. I may be accused of overreaction but I don't think getting these social vampires out of my life is an overreaction in the least.

Since I hadn't had anything like this happen in a while, I thought it might be a good thing to announce it to you folks that I have a piece forthcoming in print. The project was announced in the trades:

From the Publishers Weekly of 7/7/08:

Morbid Auction
Anna de Vries at Scribner won an auction for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, the best writings from the 10-year-run of the now-defunct cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. Hannah Brown Gordon at Foundry sold North American rights in her first deal for the agency. Edited by the magazine's publisher, Loren Rhoads, the collection will tell readers everything they always wanted to know (or didn't) about death, disease, and the just plain weird. A late 2009 publication is tentative.

Loren Rhoads is morbidmom04, of course. As editor of Morbid Curiosity, Loren published my story about the path of a poor carjacker intersecting that of a rabid Zodiac killer fanatic (namely me). That actually makes it sound like I wasn't scared shitless, but you'll have to buy the book just to see how scared shitless I was. I guess you could buy that back issue of Morbid Curiosity, but as I recall it was getting close to being sold out. I'm starting to amass quite a collection of dead goth magazine publication credits. First there was Carpe Noctem, now Morbid Curiosity...

You're probably going to have to wait until the book comes out, unless you hear it from me in person. This all means I'm going to have to tell this story a lot more, I guess.

Tags: publication