Fire on a Boat

I had an acquaintance over last night for a short private lesson on how to use Flash. She's another actor/director/producer that I worked on a short film with last year. The film will never see the light of day, sadly. I had written the script and performed in it, and was supposed to get the footage from the director for editing, but haven't heard from her in months. I found out last night that the footage was, apparently, total crap and the director was not happy *at all* with it. Ah well. That explains that, and so much for the short film "Code of silence". Fortunately, it would be an easy script to put on stage, so I can use it for über-short script competitions.

I showed her the old version of this site and she was bummed that I was no longer doing the Flash thing, as she loved the cartoon Dans. I think that part of this is coming from a general desire to streamline and simplify my life, and maintaining and adding to that Flash interface was just too much of a pain. At least that's why I think the compulsion hit me to go for something simple and clean. It may just be a form of procrastination to keep me from all the things I'm *supposed* to be doing, though.

On a totally different note, I saw the news articles about the fire on a cruise ship. Big headline. A quick glance makes it look like an inferno on the high seas. Reading the article I see that it looks like some git lit a fire in his cabin, a couple of people had a lot of smoke inhalation, and someone had a heart attack from the alarms and exit procedures on the ship. How many fires are there that we never hear about? Millions. But this one was on a boat! Titanic II! It's a disaster film in the making! Get Samuel L. Jackson!

This is a common thing with the news media, but it still irks me. Important news stories seem to get lost, while sensationalistic minor things like this get pushed into major importance. I could rant about how all this simply distracts us from what's important and keeps us from focusing our energy on really doing something important... but that's rather the point, isn't it?