Ryan’s Vox Account

1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post your top ten results.

1.	Director of Photography
2.	Set Designer
3.	Costume Designer
4.	Website Designer
5.	Special Effects Technician
6.	Humanitarian Aid Worker
7.	Psychologist
8.	Sport Psychology Consultant
9.	Rehabilitation Counselor
10.	Actor

So, that's...well. That's interesting. I'm not going to put too much stock in this, though. The world has use for a lot fewer DoP's and Designers than Tech Support Peons. I guess there's always Humanitarian Aid. Not much cash in that, though.

tmwk.com is back up, so ryanr.tmwk.com is your continued one-stop-shop for all things Ryan.

Since tmwk.com is down, my blog [the one that is updated most] has changed to ryanr.tumblr.com

That is all.

Following Fred's post on the same topic, I have decided to answer the question: "So if they made a 3-hour biopic about your life, what records would HAVE to be included... either for nostalgia, influence, enjoyment, importance, or setting?"

Chronologically:
James Taylor - Sweet Baby James
New Kids on the Block - The Right Stuff
Led Zeppelin IV
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Newsboys - Take Me To Your Leader
DC Talk - Jesus Freak
MxPx - Teenage Politics
Five Iron Frenzy - Quantity is Job #1
Joy Electric - Robot Rock
Zao - Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest
Massivivid - Brightblur
Plastiq Musiq New Musiq vol. 1
The Juliana Theory - Understand This is a Dream
Starflyer 59 - Everybody Makes Mistakes
The Avalanches - Since I Left You
Prefuse 73 - One Word Extinguisher
Daft Punk - Discovery
The Postal Service - Give Up
Viva Voce - Lovers, Lead the Way
Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans
LCD Soundsystem - Sounds of Silver

Comics are an amazing art form. They've been maligned and insulted, relegated to children and treated as nothing more than cultural detritus--the evidence of our all-encompassing descent into idiocy. But, one could say, with flecks of hype-saliva spraying out of your mouth, "comics are back!" I make no such claim. Comics never really left. I just started buying them again.

Admittedly, comics have gained a recent surge of popularity. I remember last summer seeing a 'graphic novel' being sold as a hardcover NYT blockbuster in Borders or B&N. (DC's Identity Crisis) More so than that, there's the amount of "big" movies based on comic books or comic book characters. It seems that comic book movies have replaced disaster movies as the summer blockbuster choice of studios. A hastily thought-up list:

• Spider-man (2, 3)
  
• Fantastic Four (2)
  
• X-Men (2, 3)
  
• Superman Returns
• Batman Begins
• Daredevil
• Elektra
• Hulk
• Blade (trilogy)
  
• Ghost Rider
• Catwoman
• The Punisher
  

And let's not forget my favorite burgeoning film genre: movies based on relatively obscure graphic novels. These are movies which aren't based on the general mythos and intellectual property of bankable characters, but are based on the typically easy-to-translate-to-the-screen graphic novel format. Comics books that producers and directors can look at as pre-made storyboards. Most people don't even realize that some of these movies were once comic books before they were (good/horrible) movies:

• Sin City
• 300
• The Road to Perdition
• A History of Violence
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• Constantine
• V for Vendetta
• Art School Confidential

Part of the blame can be placed on movie studios being incredibly unwilling to risk any money on an untested piece of intellectual property, and I'm sure DC and Marvel comics can be partially to blame by trying to expand beyond color-printed funnybooks.

This surge of comic book-based means something besides a vague discussion of cultural economics for us geeks. We get to see new, different, and sometimes amazingly [un]inspired interpretations of our favorite characters and themes. This hasn't stayed on just the silver screen either. The CRT (or LCD, DLP, Plasma) screen has had a fairly recent infusion of superheroics as well. Smallville started several years ago as a teen drama ostensibly about the mythos behind Clark Kent/Superman. It progressed as a teen drama with supernatural elements (see: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc) until recently, when (from what I have read on wikipedia) it seems there was a surge of other DC characters and villains. Cool. There were other shows launched based on the strength of Smallville (Birds of Prey, Aquaman) that never made it off the ground, so to speak.

Then there was Lost. The first (in a while, anyway) unqualified, non-cult hit television show that was also a sequential story with a (theoretical at this point) ending. Lost's success and it's tangential tie to comic books gave birth to my newest addiction: HEROES.

If you haven't heard of Heroes, wikipedia sums it up pretty well. The show is awesome, and combines the character-focus and cinema quality of Heroes with the X-Men-esque mythos of people somehow gaining amazing abilities. Awesome.

Watch it here. Or, you know, bittorrent. There are only 18 episodes right now, but the show starts up (to finish season 1) on April 23. Watch 'em all to be ready for the madness!!!

And what's more, they have downloadable (pdf) comics that give you extra information about the characters, etc. Sweet.

And now that we're on the topic of comics on the web, allow me to link you to several favorites; comics that my gtalk status message borrows from daily.

• Scary Go Round - My number one favorite online comic. Excellent writing, excellent art, excellent stories.
• Dinosaur Comics - Verbose Dinosaurs in the exact same poses each day of the week. Only the words change. But oh, those words!
• Diesel Sweeties - Pixels, Irony & Sarcasm, my old friends. Now in actual newspapers!

Please enjoy those comics. I know I do. Helps me make it through the day.

This most recent weekend, the last in January 2007, was a particularly enjoyable one. A recap:

Saturday
We decided to have a garage sale. So, Friday night Rossy and I stayed up until around 2am putting neon green and yellow arrows on streetsigns around her brother Fred's house. We awoke at 5am and were setting up for the garage sale by six. Some people were there at six (the time we had put on the neon arrows) and were unhappy that we were setting up late. Don't mess with hardcore, it's-still-dark-outside-but-yours-is-the-fourth-garage-sale-I've-been-to-this-morning garage salers. The garage sale was mostly uneventful. We didn't sell much or make much money. Fred's set of rims (+ tires!) that I was interested in turned out to be four-lug (which wouldn't fit on my five-lug car), and a particularly socially inept neighbor boy hung around us most of the time, telling us about the rats in his garage and riding his rusted purple bike.

While the garage sale trickled to a halt, we fired up (my brother-in-law) Will's PS2 and continued our deadly obsession with Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero, for the uninitiated, is basically Dance Dance Revolution with a small plastic guitar rather than a foot pad with arrows. You play songs by hitting the right buttons at the right time, and if you miss, the guitar line of the song misses too, often very obviously. Rossy and I had previously unlocked all 40 standard-play songs on the game, and we were shown up spectacularly by Will, who owns the game(pun intended). (How much were we shown up? Will and I played the Guns-n-Roses song, Sweet Child of Mine on medium difficulty against each other. He put down the guitar and left the room a minute or two before the song ended, and he still won.)

We then napped and ate soup and had a generally lazy Saturday until our digestive systems began to grumble about our lack of dinner. So, in an amazing amount of convergence, 14 of us (Rossy and I, her mom, her brother Fred, his wife, daughter and son, Rossy's brother Will, his wife and daughter, and Rossy's sister Wendy and her two sons and daughter) piled into to large SUVs and headed to San Diego to hit legendary hole-in-the-wall 24 hour Mexican food mecca, El Cotixan.

An hour and most of Nacho Libre later (May I be forgiven for ever hating in-car DVD players. Amen.), we indulged in completely unhealthy but delicious Bean-and-Cheese burritos and Carne Asada fries with Horchata and Diet Coke to drink. Fred's mother-in-law and brother-in-law ended up arriving with their significant others, too, so we had 18 people in the tiny restaurant. We took over at least half of the seating.

Rossy and I were asleep before 11pm.

Sunday
After sleeping in and arriving late to church, we went to eat Pei Wei with Will, Melissa and Gabby and Mike, Roberta, Isaiah and Noah. Pei Wei was good for an 'Asian Cuisine' place, but it was no hand-made, straight from the continent cookin' like Thai Boat. Afterwards, we went to exercise our option for a free boba drink from Tapioca Express (TapEx's stamp card has paid off twice!) and we exposed Mike's family to the wonders of Tapioca Snow bubbles. The verdict ranged from "surprisingly good" to "those balls are gross, but the drink is good" but I don't think we created any more addicts. Good. More for us.

We were by the mall and thus visited some stores, purchasing the occasional good, before deciding to see Dreamgirls. The movie was very entertaining, and I can understand the nominations it has garnered. The music was mostly very Motown-inspired, with a slight amount of that Broadway-musical edge (read: cheese). But it was a good movie, well filmed with sparkling design, enjoyable acting and great music (though none of the music stuck in my head like real Motown does). Also worth noting are the clever nods to the real people behind Motown (the movie itself is a retelling of the story of Motown, Barry Gordy, Diana Ross, and the Supremes): in an early studio scene, the bass players bass looks like the same exact bass that James Jamerson one-fingered as he laid down the foundation for every electric bass player ever. Also in that scene was a harmonica atop a piano, a reference to the otherwise unreferenced early Motown star, Stevie Wonder.

Following the film, we headed to my parents' house, thus making the full familial rounds in 48 hours. We ate Dungeoness Crabs while my sister Emily and her friend (and practically sister) Annie looked on in disgust. From there, we fired up the Guitar Hero (we still had not given it back to Will). Emily and Annie took a little time to get used to the controls, but they were rocking and loving it after a few songs. My mom had a thoroughly surreal experience as I played Jessica by the Allman Brothers, a song she had heard live multiple times. My dad though.

My dad was the highlight of the weekend. We invited him to play Guitar Hero and he said no. But his eyes said yes. So after a small amount of cajoling, we suckered him into it.

And my dad loved it.

He may not agree to that statement right now. Watching him, clutching the guitar-controller, tapping his foot to the beat and rocking like I had seen him do thousands of times with an air guitar, I could tell he was having a great time. He only played one song, but his thirst for more was evident. We plan on playing Guitar Hero with my dad again. Probably with pictures this time.

We also played Solitaire Frenzy. The game is impossible to explain to the uninitiated (like combining solitaire with the card game speed). But it is a lot of chaotic fun. And my mom cheats.

That's right. Blog is a verb. (ha! there's a DC Talk reference in there for some of you.)

Anyway, lookit. I'm bloggin'.
I've begun to use vox for what I consider an evaluatory period.
So far: the look is nice, though some of the web 2.0-ness of the site is kindof obtrusive, especially when it jumps you to the top of the page. Javascript, i'm lookin' at you. Also, I don't so much like how I have to import my pictures from flickr and find my recently listened music from amazon. Can't vox just look at RSS feeds like wordpress and grab my flickr, del.icio.us and last.fm data? C'mon!

But it looks nice. And it's all social network-y.

So, a blog life update?
Well, married life is the most amazing thing ever. When Rossy and I were getting ready for marriage and different people told us that married life was a million times different than un-married life and that they couldn't even describe how different it was because it was impossible to comprehend and even more impossible to verbalize, they were right.

Marriage is an intimate relationship. And I don't mean just in the eww-oh-my-gosh-Ryan-you-did-not-have-to-go-there kind of way. I mean intimate like I'm spending every hour that I am not at work or doing other stuff with this one person. I've never had a relationship like that with anyone or anything, besides God. And being married is analogous to a relationship with God. It makes total sense, too, as there is nothing to emotionally and spiritually intimate as spending the vast majority of your [waking AND sleeping] hours with one entity. Pretty amazing. (I would say 'pretty effing amazing', but I don't want you to draw any innuendos out of that, so we'll keep the 'effing' out of it, thank you.)

Check ryanandrossy.com for more updates about our life together.

Go download I Heart Christmas for some good free free jazz Christmas sounds. Highly Enjoyable.

All my vox posts will also be reflected in my wordpress blog until i decide which one i like better.