by JL on January 7, 2008
My previous two shooting assignments weren’t anything to write home (nor blog) about, so I’m skipping right to the most recent one. If I were to give it a succinct title, it’d be “murder in a small town”. And that’s the best description you’re gonna get from me at this point, since I just got home from a lovely fifteen-hour shift. The part of the day that I wanted to make mention of was when we rushed back to the area bureau office to chop the video for one of the newscasts, and I found myself surrounded by a cardboard menagerie of space crusaders.
Trading in the rats and homeless urinators from the previous bureau office, the newer location is now oddly inhabited by a half-dozen characters from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. At first it was rather odd getting used to editing video while under the scornful gaze of Boy George Queen Amidala and young Obi Wan Kenobi (who looks ready to strike down anyone that comes near the beta deck). But now as I’ve gotten used to them (with the exception of Jar Jar), I no longer see them as scary, date-rapey cardboard sentinels, but rather constant reminders of wasted potential and boundless disappointment. I imagine these stand-ups in a convenience store nine years ago, surrounding a potato chip display, as thousands of people passed by them intrigued, anticipating the day they finally get to see how they merge into the exciting Star Wars universe. Months later, a sullen clerk collected and carried them to the back of the store - a walk of shame repeated at thousands of 7-11 stores across the country. And now decades later, they’ve somehow found their way into the lives of the photographers and reporters in the Spartanburg bureau office to teach us an important lesson - that we have thousands of people tuning into our show every night after seeing our news teases, and we should do our best to live up to the hype. “Do or do not, there is no try.”
by JL on January 1, 2008
I was kicking back on New Years Day, and sure…I might’ve decided to play a little World of Warcraft. Actually, I was looking up random game junk online when I came across several bulletins about supporters of republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul campaigning in the land of Azeroth on that very same day.
For the record: I’m no fan of Ron Paul, but I was intrigued at how a virtual political march would go down in Warcraft. I figured that once the gamers got wind of what was going to happen there would be the expected griefing and mayhem, but I noticed the organizers were at least smart enough to not to hold their march on a player-vs-player server (where it would turn into a virtual bloodbath). I made a human rogue character named RonPaule and went onto the server to check out the pseudo-political action.
The folks from the “RP Revolution” guild were all pretty nice, and apart from their politics, I wouldn’t have minded actually going on a real dungeon raid with this bunch. Sure, it started off with everyone gathered around dancing, not knowing what to do. I joined up with their guild temporarily (I did not march, nor interfere in their event) so I could check out the guild chat. When I first logged on there was a discussion on whether or not the virtual marchers should carry weapons, which nicely segued into a second amendment issue. The officers swiftly booted any troublemakers, as one fellow kept pointing out, “Ron Paul has seen over 4,000 vaginas” - which was technically accurate I guess, but certainly not allowed. I snapped a few random screenshots of both good and bad chatter, below is just a random sampling (I took too many to bother going through).
Throughout the evening, I was playing Nintendo and occasionally kept going back to my laptop to check out the progress of the event. Much like a regular raid, it takes forever to get everyone into place. Eventually the organizers rounded everyone up and put them into a long line for the march, which brought out the hecklers in full force. Ron Paul guildies were instructed to not engage the enemy in combat or shout arguments in the main chat channel. I gotta be honest, there was clever hecklers running around in the crowd, shouting out URLS to Paul’s congressional voting record and spouting off smart remarks.
That’s about the point where I realized this was just a big, virtual abortion rally and I logged off to play Wii bowling.
[update: The ECA Game Politics blog had a much more eloquent write-up of the event [here].
