FlexRex: Fictional Blogger

Rest in peace, Carmen. We all loved you very much.

In this video, our work-from-home hero is losing sleep over rumors of an IBM takeover. Ok, the setup is better than the punchline.

With the passing of one of my old colleagues, today I am grateful for the wonderful people I used to work with at Cray.

Yesterday was a long day, so today I am grateful for Monster energy drinks for my brain and Pandora music playlists for my laptop.

Today I am grateful for the early morning hug from my son. This is how every day should start.

I am very grateful for Zipcar today. Seven bucks an hour is a friggin deal.

Last night I was grateful for the Heimlich maneuver and doctors who drink. Today I am grateful for Indian buffets, IPA, and friends that pay you back.

With all the turmoil going on in this world, it seems to me that 2009 is going to be the year of forced change. Sorry, but the comfort zone needs to go.

Where to begin? Yesterday's OddTodd video shows how bogus New Year's resolutions can be. So I decided to look for another way.

Then I came upon this article with a simple prescription-- write down the things you're grateful for and be happier as a result.

Ok, I can handle that.

A couple years back, I tried a blogging experiment called the 101-Day Book Report. I found it very therapeutic and, if nothing else, good for the writing muscles.

I'm calling this experiment Gratitude 365 and it starts today. And if I manage to follow through with it, I promise to let you know if it worked.

I'll start with the moment and the small stuff. Today I'm grateful for:

* The playoffs on my awesome 1080p HDTV
* My comfy deerskin slippers
* Down time while the boy goes off on his play date.
* That school starts back up tomorrow
* The chance to go out and see some great music tonight and bring winter break to a close

I lost some of my heros this year. In 2008, the world lost even more.

This was the first episode of FlexRex, never release outside the walls until now.

In this mashup of OddTodd.com, our work-from-home hero makes it through a typical work day.

Since I did this spoof some seven years ago, I learned how to draw (kind of) and changed him into my own character for a bunch of sequels and even his own fictional blog.

Then I started working from home and he turned into me. Or something.

Only AFTER the election does Fox News decide to spill the beans about Palin.

How did her brain ever even master human speech?

It was amazing to see all the election celebrations on the tube last night. And as I was watching, I saw something in people’s eyes–maybe it was just renewed hope for the future, but I think there was something more.

Blame it on HDTV, but you couldn’t miss the glint in those eyes. Mark your calendars, folks: there is going to be one hell of baby boom nine months from now. August 5, 2009 is the going to be the birthday of a whole new Yes, I can generation!

In my little video here, we celebrate Carmen's life. As you can see from the event photos, the turnout at her party was just amazing. We should all be so lucky to be so loved by so many.

I know, I know-- I'm not worthy...

We held a Celebration of Life party for my girlfriend this weekend. Carmen has been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and she starts chemo this week.

At the party, I introduced this video with a story about our trip to Horsetail Falls. Her Buddhist teacher met with her and told her to take yellow flowers to a spiritual place. Yellow has a healing power, he said.

On the path, we came across this caterpiller. Carmen stopped, placed a flower by the little critter and waited for him to pass. Then she stood by the falls and cast the flowers in, one by one.

As she did this, people on the path just stopped and watched. Soon there were like 30 of them and no one kept going. It was really a moving experience.

And on the way back home, I remember Carmen saying something about Free Tibet. I was kind of half-listening, doing my geeky iPhone thing and then this news story came up about how the Tibetans put up a protest banner on Mount Everest where the Chinese couldn't get at it.

This seemed so odd to me at the time--that these two moments came together like that. Both are stories of great suffering and great hope. What I wanted to show in the video was that they are really one story.

We are one world.

My son is goes to Third Grade at Chapman school, so it was with great excitement that we went and saw the On the Wing documentary this weekend at Cinema21. While we have seen the spectacle of the Vaux Swifts on many occasions, it was a real pleasure to learn more about the birds and the folks who come to see them in this entertaining film.

The Portland Audobon Society site describes the film this way:

• On The Wing tells the story of Vaux 's swifts that have taken up residence in the chimney of Northwest Portland’s Chapman Elementary School. Since the early 1990’s, the event has become a cult phenomenon in Portland, drawing hundreds and thousands of people nightly to watch the amazing display. On The Wing captures the community, energy and excitement of the entire Swifts phenomenon.

The Vaux Swifts are part of who we are and their story illustrates how we can indeed co-exist with Nature. One of the quotes from the film brings it home;

"New York is a city with a park in it; Portland is a park with a city in it."

I don't know about you, but that is something that makes me proud to live here.

Cinema21 has extended the run for On the Wing. After today's 1:00 pm matinee, you can catch it nightly at 7:00pm starting Friday, October 10, for one week only.

This is a strange place to say this, but about a month ago, someone threatened to kill me.

What led up to this is perhaps a stranger story, but in short, the threat resulted from a relationship that just didn't work out. In fact, we never even got together.

And all this drama made me think about my mortality. Oddly enough, I have never really feared death. This doesn't mean I tempt fate much anymore, (thank you, B.S. Oregon Helmet Law) but I just don't tend to dwell on this topic in any way.

But as a father, I could only think about the what if thing; What if this woman is just crazy enough carry out her threat and have me killed? Then who would be there for my son?

And then last night, after a month of self-imposed exile, I went back to the bar where I knew I would run into this woman. I saw an old friend first and told her the story. After a while, she asked me to come sit outside. She knew what would happen next.

Some 20 minutes later, crazy woman came and sat down with us. She had her new boyfriend with her. We said nothing to each other and just chatted with our mutual friends. And then whole strange gathering just kind of dissipated after about 20 minutes.

So this morning I got my daily Buddha message in my inbox. Here is what it said:

Responsible Grown-up

We are not innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if our world is big and bad, we made it that way. This is what the Buddha taught. The “other” is the child's boogeyman, the projection of our own fears onto a terrifying object of our imagination, which in turn terrorizes us. Our ignorance is not seeing that we are the other. We cannot afford to confuse innocence with this ignorance. Violence is not a permanent, immutable, fixed object. It is a state of mind, an expression of ignorance, with no more solid substance than a cloud. We cannot make a frontal attack on violence. Even protecting ourselves from it fuels its boogeyman existence. But the Buddha taught that we can change. This was his good news: that there is a way to alleviate suffering by freeing our minds from greed, anger, and ignorance. Yet until we apprehend the ways in which we are Oklahoma City, the bombs and the baby bears, the victims and the violators, we will continue to blame “them,” all the while proclaiming our innocence and evading our responsibilities.

--Helen Tworkov, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

I was in New York last week and I noticed how the homeless there just shake their change cups and never speak until spoken to. Very different than Portland.

And then when I got back, someone sent me this wonderful film called Historia de un letrero. Watch how, with a stroke of the pen, a stranger transforms the afternoon for another man in this emotionally stirring short film by Alonso Alvarez.

Dont read this until you see the film:

This film won the Cannes short film award. And I thought a while about just why this film strikes such a chord.
Here is my take:

For most of our lives, we are all the blind man who cannot see the beautiful day.

Now through my Twitter feed, you can follow FlexRex through the eternal samsara that is life. Or something.

So, I think I'm starting to get this, umm, social networking stuff.

I figure that doing is the only way to learn, so I set up a twitter feed for my momentary lapses of reason. So, some of it might be a little colorful for this space. So what? I'm a cartoon character--why not let the info flow like a river?

And if this whole twitter thing has you scratching your head as to what it all means, try reading this thought-provoking NY Times article.

The folks at BackfencePDX published one of my stories for their event theme of "Just Can't Get Enough."

So, I called it Seven Meals from Chaos, which is kind of a take-off on a newspaper story I read called "Nine Meals from Anarchy." I think it turned out well and I got some good comments already. Enjoy!

http://backfencepdx.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/just-cant-get-enough/

In this parody of the You Suck at Photoshop videos, our favorite work-from-home hero shows us how to do those fancy html emails.

Our work-from-home hero stars in a new cartoon in support of the Sun HPC Community Portal. Watch as his four friends use the Portal to bolster Homeland Security. Full Story

Lately I've found that contests are an effective means of combatting Writer's Block. The folks over at NYC Midnight were hosting a scriptwriting contest recently, so I decided to enter.

They give you a genre and a topic to work with and one week to complete a script of up to 15 pages. My assignment was to write a suspense film with a magnet in it. The magnet part is what they call in the industry a "Macguffin," which is incidental to the real story.

So I entered "Jigsaw Falling into Place" with this tagline:

"Angie Davis has vanished. As Caleb tries to find her, the lodestone is the only clue to her fate."

And that was so much fun that I decided to adapt the story for the Radiohead video contest I blogged about the other day.

Ed note: I took fifth place in my heat. Not enough to win money, but considering how many I was up against, I'll take it as encouragement ;-)

Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at aniBoom

The folks over at Aniboom are hosting a contest where you can submit storyboards set to songs from Radiohead's new album In Rainbows. The band will judge the contest and the winner gets $10K to produce a music video.

Here is my entry. For some reason the default volume is over-modulated. So if you turn it down using their volume control, it sounds a lot better.

Wish me luck ;-)

I entered a screenwriting contest. The folks at NYC Midnight gave us a genre, subject, and seven days to write a script of up to 15 pages.

Title: Bardo
Genre: Horror
Subject: Prison

Tagline:
All the inhabitants of Huxley prison have vanished overnight. BARDO is the only clue to where they've gone and the hungry ghosts that have come to take their place.

The script is in PDF format. Check it our and let me know what you think.
Bardo script

My son was asking me why anyone would want to jump out of an airplane. Then I found this wonderful video of a man skydiving with his pug. While the pug is cute and all, the look of wonder on this guy's face is something to behold.

This film is probably better than anything coming out of Hollywood this summer. And the boy? Now he wants to know when we're going skydiving.

"When you see it, then you'll understand."

It seems that my 15 minutes of fame have fallen upon me. PDX Magazine interviewed me a while back about one of my other blog projects, Overheard in PDX. The articles just came out in their April issue.

There's actually two articles here and here but the magazine site might require registration. Full text below:

An Internet Revolution
Local blogs to bookmark and how to start your own.

An Internet Revolution
Hop on the Blog Bandwagon

by Kristen Thiel
photos by Amaren Colosi

Do you recall when human-to-human conversations outnumbered human-computer interfaces? People are still debating, but with the continuing growth and accessibility of the Internet, weblogs have become living rooms and cafés—stretched a little—so that a Portlander lounging over a local brew could just as easily be swapping ideas with their next door neighbor as with someone in Pretoria, Pamplona, or well, that other Portland.

Though bloggers like Zukin note with distaste that online conversations can too often include “anonymous sniping,” “rumor-mongering,” and “ad hominem” speech, in the end, as Brueckner offers, “Bloggers are fostering dialogue and questioning ideas, which leads to compassion. That’s the next level our civilization needs to reach if we are to survive as a people.”

I was sitting outside a coffee house today when I looked at the time on my laptop screen. It said 3:38. But wait, the time remaining on my battery said 3:38 as well.

Not being all that superstitious, I looked around to see if I was missing something, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. A car went by. A harley pulled up.

I looked back at the clock and it said 3:50. I swear twelve minutes past in the blink of an eye.

Maybe Nature is getting even for Daylight Savings time.