Welcome to BlogDogIt Tuesday, March 19 2024 @ 04:12 AM EDT

"Out Of My Mind" reviewing the film

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masodo's musings

Slip Into MadnessA brand new vehicle has been added to the Carriage House Productions stable of creative independent cinema (in association with Koldwind Productions.) Director Cindy Maples gets her creative juices flowing to the point of "dripping" in this, her latest film project.

"Out of my Mind" is a mysterious little thriller based on the story "Drip Drip" written by John Cosper. The screenplay/adaptation was a collaboration between Cindy Maples and Neil Kellen and found it's way into my consciousness through the predictably masterful camera work of Joe Atkinson. Credit Al Ponton and Lewis Chaney with expertly lighting this artistic offering. Successfully edited by Neil Kellen, this fifteen minute short packs all the entertainment value of any film two times thrice its run-time.

Lady In BlueHearkening to the film noir genre, this pseudo-narrative added color and complexity and presented a film that was as much horror as mystery. "Out of my Mind" was exactly how I felt as I tried to predict the outcomes of the actions in view. Once I surrendered to the fact this film was not playing back some tired, old formulaic devices but was instead telling me a story in a most unique way, I was rewarded with a tasty, tricky tale.

Rusty James is atop his game in his portrayal of best-selling mystery author "Carter"; haunted by rejection and a desire to redirect those negative emotions into something better suited to pay the bar tab. Mina Fedora brings her assets to bear in a mighty performance as the Woman in Blue. Though her eyes plead for rescue, Carter is limited in his available options to relieve her misery.

I find this to be a deep deep drama that develops fully in the mind only upon reflection. It must be a great feeling for everyone involved to know their efforts have resulted in such an outstanding film. Keep 'em coming Cindy!

#SupportIndieFilm


  

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FilmFest Redux

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masodo's musings

"Let's Make Some Movie Magic Happen"
Tylor Higgs, Fair Creek Films

Englwood Neighborhood Film Festival
Click To Enlarge

Looking back on my junior high school days, the creative efforts I recall include a table lamp made from a coffee can (in electric shop) and a little round wooden step-stool (a product of wood shop.) I can even trace my "A/V Geek"ness to my running of the tape recorder for the Harshman (IPS 101) Home Room #206 production of the radio play "Inside a Kids Head."  Of course that was back in the olden days; in a world before "The Simpsons."

Springfield Film FestivalIn a more recent past, another  junior high school student, by the name of Jennifer Delgadillo, viewed The Simpsons (S06E18) "A Star Is Burns" and was inspired to dream of one day bringing an honest-to-goodness film festival into this world. Finally (after 21 more seasons of The Simpsons) her youthful aspirations came to fruition on July 16, 2016, under the banner of Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival (a banner that Tylor Higgs hand painted for the event.)

The first annual Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival. Organized and hosted by Jennifer Delgadillo (Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival) with the help of Tylor Higgs  (Fair Creek Films,) Amber Lanman (Englewood Summer Concert Series), Toran Farrow, Tracy Aldrich and Brent Aldrich and many more individuals, in association with an Englewood Neighborhood Partnership:

Festival Poster

 

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) and Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC), and Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) are partnering to bring the inaugural Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival, one in a series of creative placemaking projects within the Near Eastside Great Places 2020. The festival is part of an initiative to turn strategic Indianapolis spaces into town centers of culture, commerce and community. 

The festival is an invitation to celebrate movie making and storytelling in the Near Eastside, while transforming the ¼ mile radius around East Washington Street and North Oxford Street into a welcoming space for neighbors and visitors alike.  

~

Even though my youth was spent in a largely pre-digital world, my High School days saw me in possession of a rather modest Super-8 movie film camera and a seemingly natural desire to create movies. Some of my greatest friendships in those days were forged in pursuit of that diversion. The projecting of my 7 minute cinematic creation ("The Computer") on the big screen, before a large audience, as part of the "Scholastic Arts Film Festival" in the late 1970's is a memory that I cherish to this day and I trust participants of the Englewood event will continue to benefit from their involvement far into the future as well. It is with this background that those words of Tylor Higgs truly do ring clear; "everyone can (and should) make a movie..."

Englwood Neighborhood Film Festival
 The Stage and Screen

The combining of The Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival with the Englewood Summer Concert Series Open Mic served to pack a lot of entertainment into the gathering. All performances, both live and on-screen, were met with a high degree of enthusiasm from the attendees which - by my estimate - must have numbered nearly one-hundred (if not more.) The facility was well suited to the event; offering ample room and plenty of padded folding chair seating (although the request for "scootching-in" was given early on so as to take advantage of every available seat.) While it is true that the hall might have benefited from improved airflow (or certainly air conditioning,) these diehard fans of independent cinema were not deterred in the least. Organizers should be well pleased with the inaugural event and find ample encouragement to continue building upon their success.

City of Indianapolis FlagThis event demonstrated the best sort of community spirit. We all know that people consistently come together during times of adversity; how refreshing to see a neighborhood join together - in all their diversity - to publicly support local artist with this forum for creative expression both on screen and on stage. By all indications The Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival is slated to return again in 2017 with a promise to be even bigger and better.

Englewood Neighborhood Film Festival Facebook PageIt was thanks to those mystical Facebook algorithms that I was made aware of this event in the form of a post in my news feed one day. Since I pretty much grew up on the Near East Side of Indianapolis, this film festival hit home with me on so many different levels. I immediately clicked "Interested" on the event's page and set about determining how to order my life in such a way that I could attend. The fates allowed that I should be there and my inner A/V-geek prompted me to take along my rinky-dink digital camcorder (which fortunately  featured audio-only recording.)

Early on I got the idea that by using audio recorded from my position in the front row (again thanking lucky stars for that open seat) and with the likelihood of finding these films "in the wild" on the internet, it should be entirely possible to recreate this event as a virtual film festival in the form of a blog post. Thanks in large measure to the efforts of Derrick Combs, Rachel 'Sun Rai' Sims, Jennifer Delgadillo and Tylor Higgs (with many other names to follow) I am extremely happy to have the privilege and honor to...

Welcome, One and All to the

First Annual Englewood Neighborhood
Film Festival
-
Virtual Edition

Please explore the following media files in the order presented
to re-live the Movie Magic originally experienced July 16, 2016
at 3005 E Washington St, Indianapolis, Indiana

 

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Make It Stop!!

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masodo's musings

"And whosoever should be snaring one of these little ones who are believing in Me, ideal is it for him rather if a millstone requiring an ass to turn it were lying about his neck and he were cast into the sea." (Jesus according to Mark 9:42 Concordant Literal Version)

Evil Perpetrations
As a Cyber Explorer of the Web Less TraveledI will often come across aspects of the internet that have me scratching my head with concern for my fellow humans. Things that "once seen, cannot be unseen" are one of the hazards of this job. I find that after these awful encounters it is best to just move along; spurred-on to ever more diligently seek-out the goodness that also awaits discovery out on the ragged-edge of the World Wide Web.

Oftentimes though, evil lurks in the shadows of even the more mainstream of internet destinations. It was in the course of a purely innocent search for a particular user account on Vimeo that I found myself witness to some most appalling human behavior. I immediately "flagged" the video and - to Vimeo's credit - it was removed from the system within the hour. I will certainly spare any details but suffice it to say the mere removal of that atrocity does little (to nothing) in reversing the evil perpetrated upon the innocent creature featured in that untitled film. Something however, MUST be done...

Later on in the day I decided to "bleach my eyes" by viewing the latest from SkyWatch TV. It can be no coincidence that the guest that day was Opal Singleton, president and CEO of MillionKids.org and the topic was "Predators, Social Media, and Your Children."

I urge everyone to explore the good works spearheaded by Opal Singleton and visit ExploitedCrimes.com - something CAN be done...

EXPLOITED - Crimes Against Humanity

http://www.exploitedcrimes.com/

Episode 1: Welcome to Exploited - Crimes Against Humanity

(Original air date 05/26/16)

Episode Description

Welcome to Exploited Crimes Against Humanity, a global interactive internet community dedicated to educating against exploitation. This week we will analyze real cases of sex trafficking, sextortion, and how child pornographers use online gaming and the dark web to exploit and violate young people. There are always three sides to the story. The Predator, the Victim and Law Enforcement., Opal Singleton is your host and she has trained tens of thousands of government agencies, law enforcement, civic leaders, school administrators and faith based leaders on how to recognize human exploitation. Most important, learn what YOU can do about it. NEVER AGAIN should another child be violated., NEVER again should a parent anguish over a run away child. This show is designed to equip YOU and your friends to educate yourself, engage and get involved. It is powerful. It is Real. It is urgent.

http://www.millionkids.org/
https://www.facebook.com/MillionKids
https://twitter.com/iemillionkids


"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
- Edmund Burke


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Oh, The Horror...

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masodo's musings

The Birds Movie Poster Snow White with Birdies

Thanks to Alfred Hitchcock we can no longer look at The Birds as those sweet docile creatures Disney would lead us to believe. With this in mind, BlogDogIt (somewhat embarrassingly) presents this real life "close calls caught on camera."
 

This video was made possible in part by unwitting donations from the following YouTube Videos:
"The Birds Title Sequence" video and The Birds Final Attack Sequence with Full Symphonic Score

Starring: Ma and Pa Gooses, the Young'uns and ME!

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Globally "Not" Understood

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masodo's musings
The "not" face.

not face

It's A Global Phenomenon.

According to a recent study published in Journal Cognition and reported by QUARTZ there has been identified a universal facial expression of negative moral judgment and this look has been dubbed the "not face".

BlogDogit.com wishes to offer the world the "not" text emogee. Featured in the above image the expression for negative moral judgement may now be expressed with the following keystrokes: exclaimation → minus → left square bracket. This produces:  !-[

Thanks to this brand new emoticon we should soon be seeing those judgemental looks of disapproval in every corner of the inter-webs... and it's about damn time !-[

 

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Embed Archive.org iFrames in SMF Forum Hack

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masodo's musings

At Archive.orgIn order to embed video in a Simple Machines Forum (SMF) installation I added the Embed BBCode v.2.0 plugin to my site and was happy enough until the time came where I wanted to embed a PDF hosted by Archive.org.

These PDFs are delivered via "<iframe>" and are not compatible with the plugin. I was able to hack my install to allow safe and effective inclusion of Archive.org hosted PDFs to my site.

Here is how I did it...

First, save a back-up of /Sources/Subs.php

Then Modify ==>  /Sources/Subs.php  

after line 1226,  before:

1227                     else
1228                              $tag['content'] = '$1';

insert the following code (watch the word-wrap - this is two lines between the comments):

// begin masodos MOD to embed Archive.org iFrames
elseif (preg_match('~iframe.+src=(?:&quot;|[\'"])(?:https?:)?//archive.org/stream/(.*?)(?:&quot;|[\'"])~i'.($context['utf8'] ? 'u' : ''), $data[0], $matches))
$tag['content'] = '<iframe src=https://archive.org/stream/' . $matches[1] . ' width=$2 height=$3 frameborder=0 allowfullscreen></iframe>';

// end masodos MOD to embed Archive.org iFrames

 

Of course you will make this modification at your own peril and will not hold me responsible for any ills that may befall you as a result of utilizing this hack but I wish this was available sooner, I would have tried it.

 

I'm using it with much success - See it in action here:
http://www.mtzionindy.org/vestibule/index.php?topic=93.0
Read the popular "Earth's Earliest Ages" by George H. Pember  free online

 

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Smart Tass Commuter

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masodo's musings

Persistence pays (but sometimes only the minimum.) Be that as it may... today I captured on film - (well, actually that's not right) we need to come up with another term to replace "Caught On Film" because it will soon be a phrase that will make no sense to folks... - anyway, I finally took some pictures of this car I have been seeing occasionally on my daily commute for the last year or so.

I have told people about this and have actually attempted to get some snaps a couple of times before (without success.) This zippy little "smart" car is about as easy to get in frame as a hummingbird or butterfly. So although the pictures I have are of basic "Bigfoot evidence" quality, I am sure you will see here that this creature does indeed exist. [Indiana Plates]
 


Click the picture for a larger version.

 

As a side note (or foot note) to this: I made an interesting discovery in my dissemination of this little presentation... Since the pictures I took were basically crap I did what any red-blooded photographer would do; Use Them Anyway. The creation of an animated GIF pretty much precluded me from sharing this on facebook so I resigned myself to sharing on Twitter and BlogDogIt. But, lo and behold, I found when I went to save the image from twitter (to use to illustrate this article) it offered for me to save as an MP4 video file. (Free GIF to MP4 converter, people!) Facebook readily accepted this video file and so this goofy little project has infiltrated that corner of cyberspace.

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Turn Your (Internet Streaming) Radio On...

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masodo's musings

Don't you just hate it when bloggers feel the need to apologize for not posting in a while - as if the absence of a single blog would have any noticeable impact on anyone's day-to-day life? It is usually a waste of words and if anyone really cared what they had to say then that sort of "Welcome me back everyone!" language only gets in the way of what it is they really have to say. So I will spare you all the apology and go right for the excuse: I have been busy building a Streaming Internet Radio Station.

Through the years I have toyed with streaming internet radio so I was somewhat familiar with the technologies when the Church asked if I thought it possible to broadcast the Sunday Morning Services live via the internet. I've heard it said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing but through the last few weeks the knowledge has increased and the danger is subsiding. I wanted to share a little bit about what it took to get this station on the air in case anyone else gets the "calling" to go to work on "The Master's Radio."

Mt. Zion General Baptist Church on the South Side of Indianapolis is a quaint chapel and education center with a diverse congregation and very much in touch with the world outside of their doors. From their active Facebook presence to a preacher who has forsaken the classic pulpit for a freestanding, lightweight iPad on a floor stand, it might be safe to say you are likely to find the Luddites squirming in their seats even more-so than the sinners when 10:30 Sunday morning rolls around.

Microphones have long been a staple of those whose labor has them taking the stage and as a result a sound control booth has been installed in the rear of the sanctuary. The hymnals have all but been replaced by the projector that shines the sing-along song lyrics on the large screen in the front of the hall. And while the booth was equipped with a computer what it lacked was a connection to the internet. So the plan was simple: 1.) Connect the computer to the internet. 2.) Connect the mixer board to the computer. 3.) Stream the output of the sound system to the world.

In addition to broadcasting the Sunday show live each week we decided it would be a good idea to record the show for rebroadcasts throughout the week. Rather than having a Radio station that featured dead-air a large percentage of the time it was also decided that we should be streaming something 24 hours a day / 7 days a week.

I will spare you all the step-by-steps it took to get this thing going but I would like to discuss some of the bigger hurdles that had to be crossed in the realization of our goal to get this broadcast "on the air." First of all, to everyone who ever snickered at me for still working in the world of the Windows XP Operating System I say "he who laughs last, laughs best" -HaHa!

"Back in the day" it was no problem to record or broadcast the very sound coming from the speakers of your computer, but were you aware that computer manufacturers along with Windows 7 have removed that ability from the modern system? Neither was I. This meant that although I could record the broadcast as it was coming in through the input on the computer I was unable to play the file back out for later rebroadcasts. There were several workarounds for this however, from using a cable to take the output from the headphone jack and feed it back into the "Line-In" jack,  to a $500 DJ Software package. Neither of these approaches appealed to me especially in light of my knowledge that this was a built in feature of a Windows XP - Pentium 4 machine.

The Church's technology director donated a newer Dell machine which was running XP to the project but as its integrated audio was already a victim of the "Thou Shalt Not Stream" edict I was forced to dust off an old SoundBlaster PCI expansion card and install it into the server to add "Wave Out" to the software mixers. We were therefor ready to rock-it old school!

The most popular server software for Streaming Internet Audio is - without a doubt - "Shoutcast" which I installed and configured but after a brief trial run soon learned that the features provided by the second most popular streaming server "Icecast" would be better suited for our situation. While Shoutcast worked just fine for general broadcasting I encountered a problem where listeners were getting dropped when making the transition from prerecorded to live audio. Icecast is designed to seamlessly transition listeners from one source to another and as such has become our choice. Both of these software packages are open-source and freely available.

In my previous forays into Streaming Internet Radio I had only ever used a rather questionable bit of software known as Winamp since it had a plug-in that would turn it into a streaming audio source, connectable to the server software. I had come to know Winamp as being a bit intrusive into the host system so decided I would scour the internet for another option from the world of open-source and came across a gem of a program known as "butt" (ha ha, I know, right?) B.U.T.T. actually stands for Broadcast Using This Tool. Not only is this software aptly named, it is probably the only sourcing software you would ever need (provided you could get your sound card to deliver it the noise it needs.)

Although butt has the built-in ability to record the stream as it goes out, I was only interested in recording the Sunday Morning Service for later broadcast so I turned to MPlayer to piggyback and dump the stream to a file at the required time. Once the pieces were in place it was time to automate things. If you ever use a computer for repeated tasks and are not automating these tasks (at least to some degree) then you are missing out on one of the best things about personal computing. This custom project "cried-out" to be automated and before too long I found myself in the middle of a fun little logic puzzle / programming challenge.

Since I am no stranger to the DOS command line I knew I could get this thing running with batch files. What I was not quite aware of was how troublesome it is to get the Scheduled Tasks feature of Windows to play along and run batch files without fail. When it was all said and done however, I learned many valuable lessons and ultimately delivered on my promise to bring Streaming Internet Radio to MtZionIndy.org.

Tune-in, won't you?

If this sounds like something you are into and need help working through some of the "finer points" feel free to leave any questions you might have in comments or email me for more information.

 

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