Is Bigger Better?

Good morning all you blog readers! Today's blog will be one made of pure awesomeness...

Well, no it won't. It'll be like all the others, it'll have bits that make you laugh (hopefully) and bits that make you think "You're not as intelligent as you think you are Brawny..."

But seriously. Over the weekend, which I spent once again with the wonderful Neety, we ended up having a conversation as to whether her new blog entry "MEN: Your Best Feature (Part 1/5)" was too long. Now just to clarify, we weren't wondering whether the 5 parts would be too long, this discussion was about part one (although, how impressive is it that she PLANS blogs in 5 parts? I barely plan mine at all before I start rambling!)

And it got me to thinking. As a fast reader (And I'm not kidding, when I was about 10 I did the whole of the Chronicles of Narnia in a day, when the last Harry Potter book came out I read it in two and a half hours), I'm a big fan of long blogs. Because if they're interesting (or at least semi-interesting at least) then I read them and they occupy a few minutes of my time, as opposed to a few seconds.

And I'm the same for other forms of entertainment. Put two DVDs in front of me, both films I want to watch equally, both priced the same, and tell me to choose one, it'll be whichever is longer / has the most special features. Anything that adds value for money to it. I originally balked at the idea of buying the Family Guy: Blue Harvest DVD when it was originally announced it'd be selling as an individual DVD - Pay for a DVD with only 43 minutes of episode?? What a rip-off! But of course it's not. If you want to see it. Which I did. Now they did bulk it up with special features so that I didn't feel quite so ripped off, but it seems to be an in-built part of me, that things generally can't be too long.

Many people moaned in reviews about Funny People, which I saw in the cinema a couple of months ago, that it was too long. Not a problem for me at all, it held my attention and I laughed throughout it. Which underlines my point. What is too long? Is Bigger always Better?

Well no. Not always. On Thursday night I had the wonderful (mis-)fortune to have to see a film that had been shot by a "professional" with some of the students from one of the courses at work. (Apologies for being quite so vague, but with recent stories about people getting sacked for posting innapropriate tweets/blogs about sensitive workplaces, I am not taking any chances!). The original brief for this film was that it should be a promotional film to highlight what the students do on the course. What we ended up with was a half hour documentary, which, frankly, could easily have had 10 minutes cut from it, and not been any worse, in fact, it probably would have been better.

Going back to my opening story, my response to Neety was that I thought that it was a good length and that she shouldn't worry about it. Because I enjoy reading long, well-written blogs, just as I enjoy reading books, magazine articles, graphic novels etc...

So do I think everything should be longer? Bigger? Well no. If the film last Thursday had been bigger I might have gone on a mad rampage and torn up the screen, if the extended film of "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" was any longer, I'd have fallen asleep in it more times than I already have, and if all Books had to be at least 1000 pages or more, a lot of books would be full of filler and bad writing. (A bit like this blog, I apologise for that, my defence is it's a Monday morning).

In my eyes, things have an ideal length. And that length should be obvious. For example, if I had an album of music which I enjoyed casually in a background noise kind of way, but was only 30 minutes long, I'd probably think was too short. However, the Wildhearts album "The Wildhearts must be Destroyed" (which is excellent) is only about 30 minutes, but it feels complete when you listen to it.

I myself fell victim to this trend when making "Norwich and Saggers: Smarter than the Average Bear" (to watch it on Youtube - CLICK HERE) I had written the script, and it felt the right length, and when I edited it, it mostly felt the right length, except for the improvised "Gruntfuttock" sequences, which seem to me now to be obvious padding....

So all of you writers / creators of artistic events/items/recordings/etc... my suggestion? Be aware of how long your final product FEELS like it should be. And make it that length. Don't try to pad out a 60 minute film to 90 minutes just because that's how long you think a film should be. Don't write a 10 chapter story and then add another 6 of extraneous rubbish just because you want it to look more impressive. When you've reached the end, it's the end.

And I promise, on my part, that I'll stop worrying so much about how long things are, and just enjoy the ride.

(Oh, and be impressed, I made it all the way through a blog entitled "Is Bigger Better?" without making ANY innuendos. :D )

People are idiots... FACT.

Have you ever noticed how people have a tendancy to assume that things they don't understand are easy to do and don't take any time? Isn't it annoying?

I'm currently sitting in my office, furious, because there are various things I need to be doing, but the idiocy of people is precluding me from doing any of them...

For example - the most pressing thing I have to do today is do multiple copies of a DVD. This is an essential thing that needs to be done by Thursday. Before I can run the copies, however, my boss needs to sit down and watch it, and before I can give her a copy to do that with, I have to have the original disc.

Which, so far, I don't have.

Oh and also, if my boss doesn't like any of it, or deems anything to be inappropriate, I will then be asked to re-edit the DVD...with no source materials, and no time...

So I ring the person who's supposed be giving me the original disc, and speak to the administrator, who tells me she'll be in by half nine and she'll ring me back. So she doesn't. So I ring her again at about ten, and get the administrator again, who says that she is currently teaching but will ring me when she's on a break.

OK... but this is the woman who was panicking about getting the copies done not three days ago... she couldn't spare 30 seconds to ring me? Or indeed, to drop the disc off early this morning as she had previously agreed to do?

Because of this, I have to sit in my office, waiting for the phone to ring. So I can't, for example, head downstairs and sort out a room that I need to clear, which I am getting hassled over, and I can't start any of the multiple-copy DVD runs I have in the queue to do in my office, because I will have to cancel them as soon as the urgent disc turns up.

Is it just me, or is this course of action about as productive as a fish attempting to crap out a diamond so that it can pay for it's adopted monkey baby's university tuition?

And I know this isnt funny or exciting. But I had to say something somewhere or I would explode.

Apologies for this rubbish blog, go back about your business.

Bleeding Apples!

OK, just so we are clear. This post is somewhat of a rant. And I don't expect many of you to agree with me. But if one more person tells me how brilliant Macs are....

The person in question is referring to them specifically as replacements for the PC's that the Music department have here at work. Now admittedly, these PC's (whilst they have the nice E-MU404 Soundcards in) are old, and slow, and starting to fall to bits. Since they were factory built education machines and are at LEAST six years old, this is not amazingly surprising.

The argument starts with the statement "Well, Macs are industry Standard nowadays" which for Music is probably true, and if this was the crux of the argument, then I would have no objection to attempting to replace these PCs with Macs. However, the cost of replacing all the PCs with Macs is (approx) £17,000.

That's a lot of cash for 15 machines (& Software licenses)

All I suggested was that it might be worthwhile looking at the cost of upgrading the machines, and keeping the best bits (like the soundcards) whilst replacing motherboards/processors/RAM to make the machines go faster and work better.

I might have well suggested we all go out and shoot babies for the shocked look I got.

"But Macs are better" came the response. To which my answer was, "Why?"

"Because they're better for Audio"

"Why?"

"Because they do all the audio stuff we need"

"So can PC's"

"Those ones can't"

"They're six years old. A six year old Mac would have trouble doing what you want"

"Well Macs are better"

"They're harder to fix though"

"But they don't break"

"Yes they do."

"No they don't"

"And you can't upgrade them"

"So?"

etc. etc.

I'm not typing out the rest of this conversation, because it would take all day, and I have better things to do like eat my lunch. However, my point is this. I never said that Macs were a bad idea, I just said that you might be able to get reliable machines cheaper if we used PC's. I was then bombarded with statements like "Well I've had my Mac for over two years and it never goes wrong"

So what? I've had my Audio/Video PC for 7 years (and bits of it for longer than that) and it doesn't go wrong. Because I set it up right.

Don't get me wrong. If you like Macs, get a Mac (like my ranting would have stopped you anyway). But don't tell me they can magically do things that PC's cant. Because that's rubbish.

Oh, and never buy a Mac just because it looks nice, or I will have to hurt you.

My last statement on this, is that I swear this is all Microsoft's fault. By progressively creating versions of windows which eat up more and more processing power and RAM, they make all PC's (as bought by normal people) seem slow and sluggish. If the Mac continues to rise and the PC continues to fall, I shall blame Microsoft.

To clarify - I am not against Macs. Personally I'm not a huge fan of them, but I don't think they're bad for any specific reason. However, this culture has now sprung up where people maintain that if you are doing anything with any Media, video, audio or graphic, you should do it on a Mac. And that, my friends, is pure and utter bollocks.

End of rant.

ARRRRRRRGH!!!

Arrrrrrrrrrrrghhhh!!!

Headache!!

Although, I have finished songwriting for the day :) Only one Wonderland song left to write....

Grr my head hurts.

Oh well.

Tomorrow I get to teach year 9s... oh the joy (SARCASM)

Monday

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is all

:(

Haha, I just discovered I can log into here at work...

I can log in from work, so there might be more updates coming your way now ... :P

Although interestingly, I can't get to Fox and Az's blog, as it is "blocked in accordance with school policy". Probably down to the rude words I'm guessing!!

So, why am I blogging? No real reason...

I'm hungry. And the only thing I have to eat are warm cheese sandwiches :S and nothing to drink. Oh well. That's the problem with having no money!!

Also, I'm trying to work out what I should make my next writing project...

In the works, in various stages, I have My First Alien Invasion Movie (which does exactly what it says on the tin), 37, My As-Yet-Untitled Novel, First Night (A Musical), and various other ideas.

Which should I do next?

Answers on a postcard... or failing that, in the comments section below :P

Long Day at Work...

So I missed blogging yesterday. To be fair, I have a great excuse. I got wrapped up in playing Super Paper Mario on my Wii :)

And it brought up the thing I always think of with games... how hard do you want it to be?

I mean that seriously, you don't want a game to be too easy, cos you feel ripped off, but you don't want it to be so hard you get stuck, frustrated, and never try and finish it. So what is the ideal game difficulty?

I don't know, does anyone?

Anyway, moving on to... well nothing really. My brain is fairly well dead since I've been at work since 8am and I got home at 9pm. Stupid Year 7 Parents Curriculum evening!

*Tries to think of something interesting to write*

.... do be doo bee dooo.....

Here's a list of my random favourite things at the moment:

Super Paper Mario - Woohoo! It's Mario! And he's really thin!
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - Seriously, watch this. Its great. I've watched the whole series at least 4 times.
Dilbert - He's funny
MSN - For talking to my peeps.... and being a black woman :P (Kai will understand)
Reel Big Fish "Monkeys for nothing and the Chimps for Free" album - It's greeeeat!! (Although it isn't frosties!)
Toasties - Bread, Cheese, Ham, Onion, what else do you need? :)

Hows that! :P

Blog tomorrow may be more interesting, if something interesting happens. If Not, I may not Blog. We shall see :)