I finally found what my short movie’s message will be. What justifies its existence, what makes it worth shooting. It was easy, but I needed the Six Feet Under season 1’s finale to realize it: life is short. No, I didn’t just realize that life is too short, but that this is precisely my movie’s message. What? It’s not original? No, it’s not, so what? It’s not original, yet it makes you cry when it’s in Six Feet Under, so why wouldn’t it when I’m writing?

(I fixed it because it would have made the thing unreadable, but I made an interesting slip: I wrote what justifies my existence. A twenty-minute short, that will take years not to be made because it’ll be too complicated, that’s what will justify my existence. Ain’t life great. But short. That’s the idea I need to focus on, because I’ve got lyrics to write. Gee how hard it is. I have no idea how I’m supposed to do. But I already said that, didn’t I?)

By the way: what a season finale. Sniff. If I had known that episode 2.01 would be so depressing, I’d have stopped there, on the nice feelings and the life is short, but life goes on stuff.

And I couldn’t help it: as I was in the process of adding some PHP to my site, I also implemented trackbacks. I haven’t got a MovableType setup at hand, so I can’t test it really, but it might just work. Since I never managed to get the courage to read the official specification, I vampirized b2’s code (thanks open source — well, thanks if it works), because I’ve always found it that much easier to understand source code rather than a technical documentation. Now we only have to see if it works. What I do know already is that the manual trackback form (which allows anyone to ping one of my articles, even without MovableType or another intelligent CMS, i.e. even with Blogger) works. In the meantime, I have yet to look up the auto-discovery specs, and I’ll have a real pro’s blog. As if it was gonna help me write my movie’s script…

Oh, I forgot: I also made a script to ping weblogs.com automatically every time I add an article. I don’t know what the point really would be, but… hey, why not? (You might not be noticing the efforts I’m making here to refrain from saying I only did it so that my blog would be taken into account by BlogShares…)

P.S. Auto-discovery is done; it was easy. Now I have to write the script to allow me to ping other blogs, and use it to test my own trackback ping URL. Cool, something else to do!

What’s your totem?

I want a husband I could call Little Bear depending on his moods. Grumpy Little Bear in the morning, Hungry Little Bear at noon, Sassy Little Bear in the evening, Hungry Little Bear at night, Avenging Little Bear after I have wet his book in bath, Faithless Little Bear after ten years of marriage, etc., you get the idea. Of course, for full dramatic effect, he’ll have to be 6’0. Trouble is, I’ve already met Ideal Little Bear last year, and unfortunately Nasty Little Bear doesn’t want to be Garoo’s Little Bear. Now I only have to find another animal, but what could be better than a little bear?

I had planned to have a finished script by April 30th, but I’ve got a feeling I’m not gonna make it. And yet all I have left to write are the lyrics for the two original songs (only two? doesn’t sound like much to me, but that’s the way it came to me—and at least the movie won’t last 40 minutes then, it’s just as well). All that’s left. Yeah. And I know what they’re supposed to tell, and I’m sure I’m able to write something with rhymes and rhythm. But I’m just stuck on a little detail: I have no idea how one writes a song without having the music first. How do you do that? I’ve never enjoyed poetry, why have I come up with this idea? Characters: check. Dialogue: check. Cinematography overview: check. (Although I might want to cut back on travelings, considering nobody’s offered to sponsor me with a Steadicam yet.) But the lyrics… uh… I don’t know how to, and the story cannot quite work without them. (I know that, in theory, the fact that the story doesn’t exist without the songs isn’t telling much of its quality, but then, everybody loves Moulin-Wouge.) Five days to write two short songs? Yeah, I guess it could be done. What’s nice is, by writing that, I’m almost getting some kind of motivation back. Too bad it’s only happening now that I have to go to bed.

The pictures from yesterday’s session aren’t quite good, I’m demotivated, I feel incredibly stupid for having thought just a second of directing a movie, and I want to close down this blog and replace it with a blank page saying contagion in bold black on white. There. That was just in case you’d have wondered why I wasn’t blogging. Or why I have disappeared from ICQ as well.

Either I’m being lied to, or SMS sent to me get lost. I’m not sure which is more probable, but I think odds favor the latter. I haven’t got many people to call when I’m in Paris and don’t know what to do, so at least I’d like not to lose the answers from those few people in my phone’s directory.

It’s not a rocket launching, but just the reflection of my room’s fluorescent lighting.

I hope the idea of making a French version of the Penis Blog Project will vanish before it’s too late. If I let it linger long enough, would someone else do it? And in that case, would I dare participate? And if I made the project myself, would I dare participate? And who would dare? Should I forget that idea or not?

I suppose I’d just let go of the idea if I had some kind of a sex life right now. But short-term forecasts are not announcing much of an improvement on that level, so I guess I’m screwed…

It would seem not completely impossible that some messages, that were sent via this site’s contact form, may never have reached me. Well, I’m not sure of anything, but it’s possible. Since half the visitors who write me don’t specify their address so I can answer, and there’s no way I can tell whether that was intentional, I’m going to remove the form and let you handle the task of understanding my e-mail address.

I could tell you that, if you’ve never received an answer to a message, you should send it back, but I’m not sure I want to drown in messages. But then, it would keep me busy. And it would be flattering. Hmm, yeah, flatter. So I guess you can write.

Oh, right, here’s why I have so few English-speaking readers: since comments are disabled, American surfers can’t come and insult me. Shall I reopen the commenting system, and write articles about past and upcoming wars in the Middle-East, in order to possibly get some referrer action?

Nah.

I had good reasons to remove comments, and one of those reasons was that some readers already were quite stupid enough at the time.

Steven Spielberg directed Duel when he was 24, and it was a TV movie. True, I’m a little bit late, but at least my career plans are valid. And anyway I don’t dream of becoming Spielberg in particular: he works too much for my taste.

It’s fortunate that signs are multiplying to push me into keeping this short movie thing going, because I really have trouble gathering enough self-confidence to work for more than two hours in a row. Except that I’m pretty sure I recently promised myself not to believe in signs anymore…

Gee, it’s today already, which means I should somewhat, maybe, write something. Well, it would be nice if I did. I hate how short days are. Ok, it’s not that bad anyway, because I had something to tell. I realized that (well, I already knew it, and people had already commented it) this afternoon: I’m unable to write an e-mail without smileys. In the aforementioned mail (actually, aforenotmentioned, but you get the idea, or maybe you don’t, but it’s too late anyway), there wasn’t a single paragraph not ending with a smiley. And that’s the way it is every time. (Not to mention chatting, it’s horrible.) It’s a good thing I have this blog to witness my ability to write without any smiley; otherwise I’d be desperate right now, and I’d have looked for a comfort in a jar of ice cream with chocolate topping, and my trousers would explode. Fortunately I have neither ice cream nor chocolate in store.

Now I’m discouraged. No particular reason, it just happens. I’m bipolar, and I don’t have Rachel Griffiths to take care of me. Not a coincidence that Billy’s a photographer, by the way. Guess I’d better go to sleep, hoping my anti-social phase won’t survive a good night, because right now I feel a lot like sending one-line answers to my pending mails and throwing the mobile’s battery through the window to get ready for another two-year retreat in my cell. Maybe this time I should also get rid of the modem and the tv set?

I should make a page somewhere to list all the freeware and various Windows accessories I can’t live without, so that I know what I have to reinstall every time I reset my system (which doesn’t happen often, I must say). But it’s too late now, there it is, everything’s set back up, I downloaded all I had to and I didn’t save the URLs. Too bad, I’ll think of it next time (not).

I’d like to watch again the Six Feet Under episodes I taped last week, before I overwrite them tonight, but I’m disturbed by the feeling there’s something else I should be doing. But what?

Oh, right, now I remember. Earn some money. But it’s Sunday. I’m not gonna make any money tomorrow or the other days, so I should think about it even less on a Sunday.

Great, now it’s even better, I only have ten euros left on my account, because there was nothing left to eat in the house, and I didn’t want to eat pasta all week-end. Maybe I should have, incidentally, because this time I’ve bought enough candy for a whole month. I have to work, and I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t worked for money in the last year and half, I have absolutely no clue as to how and where to find a job to do.

And the two lottery tickets I bought weren’t winning. Now there wouldn’t be, among my readers, a movie producer in desperate need for an emergency script-doctor, would there?

There. Fantastic. This is (was) April 3rd, and I have sixty euros (equivalent to rougly sixty dollars, a bit more I think) on my bank account. For the whole month. Won’t even be enough for the monthly bills. That means I’m gonna have to win the lottery work. Or maybe I meant, work win the lottery. Either way, it doesn’t cut it. But I need to be free of material worries if I’m gonna make something of my current project (which has gained some solidity today, so it seems that, as amazing as it may sound, I may really be going to do it). I need something like 500 € per month, it’s really not much. I must be able to make a small site buy a winning ticket and be safe for three months. Or be safe for two months and buy a Firewire card (I’m sure I’ll always manage, for the cameras). Or maybe I could make a huge website for a lot of money and buy myself a DV steadicam. Right. Like, I believe it myself. Well, anyway, the point is, I need to work so that I can devote my time entirely to my silly idea. Is there a rich blogger around, to pay me a thousand euros for a brand new layout?

— Ah bon, tu prononces OS X comme ça, toi ?

— Bah… oui, tu le prononces comment, toi, OS Ten ?

— Ben, non, OS dix, avant je disais OS neuf, alors maintenant je dis OS dix.

— Ah, ouais, bien sûr, mais bon, si tu vas par là et que tout doit être logique, hein, et puis, je sais pas, je m’étais jamais posé la question, c’est la première fois que je le prononce en fait, et puis, bah, je sais pas comment c’est censé se dire.

Oh, right, I haven’t posted today, busy as I was. I spent the whole day migrating from my old Pentium III to an Athlon XP, even though I’m not that confident about using an AMD, because the performance improvement is too pleasant to ignore. My ObjectDock doesn’t lag at all, Photoshop is faster, what more could I ask for?

I took advantage of the opportunity to move to Windows XP (a real one, with a license and everything), even though it’s an XP Home, yuk (with stupid limitations, such as not being able to set true file permissions, making the system unusable outside of the administrator mode, it’s bad, but I’ll have to live with it), and boy how nice it is! I finally have ClearType, and I can’t get tired of discovering websites with anti-aliased type. As a bonus, I have semi-transparent icons (which will be interesting when I reinstall IconPackager, so I can get true OS X icons), good management of my digital camera, the ability to change network parameters without rebooting (it’s magical! ok, it’s not, I had used Linux before, so I’m not that impressed, but hey, it happens in Windows!), and… did I mention ClearType? It’s so nice. I thought that Mozilla, being Mozilla, wouldn’t benefit, but it does. Yummy. Nice. Well, doesn’t look so great in Georgia, so I might change the default font on my blog. But it’s so good. Oh, right, I forgot one last drawback: it’s a French XP, and I hate using a system in French. But it’s too nice, I have to use it.

What else? Thanks to Patterson for a cute card from Morocco (a typical moroccan street with two cats, how kawai can you get?), and thanks to Hiyami for a nice Buffy CDROM I haven’t had time to have fun with but will very soon.

Oh, and I have 30 GB free on my new hard drive! I’m ready for DV editing now! (Just gotta buy a Firewire card. Oh. And find a camera.)

Now the hot water is back, but I have no subway pass for April, and no money to buy one today. And the weather won’t be nice tomorrow. I could write the short movie’s script to keep myself busy, but first I’d need to convince myself it’s feasible, on a material level. I mean, the movie, not the script. The script I know I can do.