We did several skits related to Apple:

• BananaTech
• iTape
• iMac Commercial
• More iMac Commercials

The original script for iTape was a bit different. I had written it as an anti-DRM thing. I still like the final result better (Cunties! Cool!), but here’s the original, for posterity:

Closeup of guy with white earbuds, rockin out. Rock music is playing.

VO – “Watch out RIAA! There’s a new kid on the block, and it’s gonna revolutionize the way people listen to and share music!”

Pan down. He’s holding an ancient portable tape recorder.

VO – “That’s right! It’s the iTape!”

Cut to iPod-style silhouette of guy dancing with iTape.

VO – “With the iTape you can ‘time-shift’ your favorite songs from the radio…”

Cut to guy holding an iTape to a crappy-looking radio.

VO – “… Records…”

Cut to guy holding an iTape up to a turntable.

VO – “… Even from the television!”

Cut to guy holding up an iTape to a television. An Ashley Simpson video is on.

Closeup of finger pressing record. Cut to medium shot, guy gives a thumbs-up to the camera.

VO – “But that’s not all! You can share your collection with friends!”

Two guys with iTapes, standing close, pressing them next to each other. One is playing, the other recording.

VO – “The iTape is revolutionary technology, with state of the art audio quality!”

Closeup of an iTape on a table. A finger presses play. All other sound stops as a horribly dubbed version of “Hungry Like The Wolf” starts playing. It’s warbly and distorted, with lots of hiss, and you can hear people talking in the background.

Music lowers in volume; VO – “The iTape has new random-access ‘counter’ technology that allows you to keep track of your favorite songs! Just write down the number of the position where the song starts, and you can find the song in 5 minutes or less!”

Cut to guy fast forwarding, rewinding, checking paper with numbers on it, fast forwarding, rewinding.

Cut to spinning iTape silhouette. “nu ni nu ni nu ni nu ni”

VO – “The new iTape! Stick it to the man!”

Quiet VO, spoken quickly – “iTape requires 4 C batteries for 20 minutes of use. Required audio cassettes sold separately.”

I forget what “nu ni nu ni nu ni” means. I think it was a momentary inside joke.

The last few months have been fairly trying. Two friends of mine have killed themselves since July. One was a partner in Flapping Crane, and the other was a childhood friend I haven’t talked to for a very long time. I went to Eric’s funeral. Couldn’t bring myself to go to Nick’s.

My dad sometimes tells stories about friends who killed themselves. It always seemed so alien to me before. I guess as you get older and meet more people, the chances of someone you know killing themselves goes up. Those are just the odds. That doesn’t make it easier to deal with. But it does help explain it, sort of.

There’s been some other crap that’s made life a bit stressful, but I won’t talk about it here, because I like being mysterious, like a squirrel with a cape. Why does he have that cape? Does he realize how badass it makes him look? Squirrels are nuts, yo.

I’m currently mulling wiring my house with Cat 6. Probably going to do it through air ducts, with a wiring closet in the basement. Seems like a nice way to avoid some of the more confusing pitfalls of wireless.

This Thursday, the wife and I are going to a live(ish) Riff Trax show, which should be a blast. Friday night, my dad and I are going to enter a poker tournament. I fully expect to last at least 15 minutes, though I’m possibly being overly optimistic.

It’s raining outside now. Dig that sound.

Today’s is Toofies 3 (yes, I know it says “toofies4″ in the URL — don’t ask). This was actually the first thing we had shot in a very long time. Probably 2 years. So yes, the new skits are fairly short and sweet. We’re getting back in the swing of it.

But this one really makes me laugh. It took some serious concentration for me not to crack up while shooting it.

The outtakes are kind of funny too. I might put them up after we launch the new site. Whenever that will be.

Anyway, I’m using it on a new version of flappingcrane.com to get around the downside to a recent security fix in Safari.  I wanted to have the icons for skits that have already been watched by the user to be translucent.  That’s normally a very easy thing to do using CSS:


.skitIcon a:visited {
opacity: 0.5;
-moz-opacity: 0.5;
}


However, there’s kind of a clever security problem with this.  In a nutshell, I can list a bunch of links on a page and give some CSS property to visited links.  Then if you visit the page, a script can examine those links and see which ones have those properties, thus telling me which of those sites you have visited.

A recent version of Safari disabled styling on the :visited pseudo-element for this very reason.

Anyway, this is less of a concern on something like Flapping Crane.  We can track what skits you watch, how much of them you watch, how often you pause them, etc.  While that might creep some people out (we only track hits or plays, but I’m sure many, many video sites track a lot more), there’s no serious security issue with that.  I can tell that you’ve watched “Bugles” 145 times (weirdo), but I can’t tell what other creepy web sites you visit.

So, while we can keep track of what client IP has watched what, there are a variety of reasons why I really don’t want to do that in order to style a few links.  One, I like to keep DB interactions to a minimum (hah).  Two, it makes for some clunky, ugly interactions that seem like overkill for a little opacity effect.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

When you watch a skit (again, on the new site I’m working on), if your browser supports localStorage, it’ll record that you’ve watched it.  Since it’s stored in your browser, there’s no need for querying the database.  Then, when listing out the skit icons, ones that have been viewed get a “watched” class.  Any CSS I want can be applied to that.

This is nothing that couldn’t be accomplished by a variety of other means, but it is nice to have such a remarkably simple way of doing it.  I haven’t decided if I’m going to put in a way to do it with cookies, which have more limitations.

Eric Page Jacobson passed away July 15, 2010.

Anyone reading this blog or seeing this on Facebook probably knows that Eric was part of Flapping Crane.  He was far and away the funniest and most talented of us.  I’m not saying that to be nice (and not to denigrate the other guys) — it’s demonstrably true.  He had been doing comedy for 2 decades.  Do yourself a favor and watch some of his standup.  His death is a tremendous loss.

Kelly and I went to his funeral today and the visitation yesterday.  We met his family, who are wonderful people and who showed remarkable strength in the face of this horrible event.  I know I could barely hold myself together.  I can only imagine how they are feeling.

I wish I or anyone could have helped him.  We were supposed to meet up this month to work on a skit we shot with him 2 years ago.  I had to cancel meeting with him a few weeks ago, and I feel terrible that I didn’t get to see him.  I’ve got notes from him about what to do with the footage.  Eric was always an easy-going guy when it came to edits, so I’m confident that what we end up putting together probably would have been approved by him.

Now, to lighten the mood a little, let me describe the skit in basic terms.  It’s called “X-Lax 2000″.  It’s a commercial for a souped-up laxative.  That’s right — Eric’s last skit with us will be a poop joke, and a pretty funny one at that.  We have footage of him sitting on a toilet and holding on for dear life.  At one point he straps on a safety belt to hold himself down.

He and I exchanged email about this recently and I know he was very excited to get it done.  I’ll be working with the other guys in the coming months to finish it.

Yeah, it’s a poop joke.  The thought of that almost cheers me up.  It’s damn silly.  So silly that it somehow feels like a fitting tribute to one aspect of the guy.

I don’t know when it will be ready, but I will let people know when it is.

I’ve been doing Johnny Two-Blades and Rory McGillicuddy impressions all weekend.

It still doesn’t feel real.  I will miss him, and so will a whole lot of other people.

You’ll notice that Pete mentions a new web site and says “2008″. Yup, been working on it for that long. Longer, even.

The site had stayed unchanged design-wise since at least December 2005. I was kicking ideas around for a new version at least since 2006.

In early 2008, I had a conversation with Shawn, who came up with this mock:

It’s had a lot of changes since then (Alex had some ideas for simplifying the interface), but that’s basically the same as what is live now.

Part of what took so long was that early on I tried to do way too much. I later decided to drop “buy” and “pics”. They may come back later; I haven’t decided. We also drop a lot of the video categories. There were just way too many.

I’ve changed the way that “Most Popular” is determined — the top six skits were listed as the most popular for about 3 years. So now it displays the most popular from the last 2 weeks. It’s kind of interesting that way. It changes up a lot.

Anyway, for anyone interested in the nitty-gritty, the site uses YUI 2.6.0. I considered updating it for 2.8.0 or even 3.0, but I’d already Duke Nukem’ Forever’d this thing long enough. It also makes minor use of Modernizr, mostly to detect whether the browser supports h264. Eventually the site will support ogg theora too. That’s a lot of skits to convert. At the moment, Safari and Chrome will display the videos natively, while all other browsers will use flash (JW Player).

I’ve only done minimal fixes for Internet Explorer. It works in IE 6-8, though it doesn’t look as pretty. I’ll mop that up later. Maybe. See the FAQ on the new site for my attitude towards IE in general (IE 6 in particular).

Also note that the videos are much larger, screen-wise. They are 640×360 for wide and 640×480 for standard. I re-encoded almost every single Flapping Crane video, not counting outtakes, which aren’t on the new site anyway (at least not yet).

Finally, if you were bored enough to make it this long: Yes, there will be new skits. I bought a house, got married, got a dog, etc. Haven’t had a lot of time to edit videos and get this new site up, so it may be a while before any truly new skits show up. There are, however, some skits that haven’t been put up yet that I may sneak in *COUGH*toofies*COUGH*.

And yes, there will be actual new, recently shot skits up soon. Well, eventually.

I had hoped to have the DVD set ready by now, but wrist pain prevented that. Instead, I’ve put up something about a squirrel.

Anyway, I guess I’ll just say what I’ve been up to.

I picked up a turntable about a month ago. I went through my parents’ basement and found some good records (including some that were mine), so I figured I’d pick one up. It’s got a USB output, which is handy.

So I’ve been picking up vinyl here and there. I pre-ordered the vinyl remaster & cd of Nirvana’s Bleach (that should be here mid-November). I’ve grabbed a few John Lennon records, a Marvin Gaye and some 45s from Half Price Books in Apple Valley.

Vinyl doesn’t sound particularly better to me than CDs — a lot of them sound worse due to wear, in fact. They are fun, though. Keep in mind that I’ve got a fairly large iTunes library. I’ve ripped/digitized nearly all media under our roof. DVDs, VHS, CDs, cassette tapes, photos, you name it (except books — I’m not completely insane). I’m in the process of re-ripping my CDs in a lossless format (though I’m looking for a seamless way to transcode it when syncing to my iPhone or streaming to my Apple TV). I appreciate the convenience once this media is in my library. Still, it’s fun every now and then to put a record on. And I’m planning on digitizing at least some of them (my George Carlin records in particular).

We also finished mounting our plasma and installing speakers in the ceiling. My receiver can do 7.1, but the room was wired for 5.1. I may run some more wire eventually. But it’s otherwise great for now. Great, except when Kelly is trying to sleep upstairs in our room, conveniently located directly above the living room. So it’s loud as hell up there.

Not much news on the Flapping Crane front. I was furiously working on a DVD set, but it turned out to be too hard on my right wrist. I’ve had to do a wrist brace, painkillers, wrist exercises, all that. I wanted to have something ready for November 22nd, which is five years since we launched flappingcrane.com. That’s probably not going to happen though. We’ll see.

The new website is pretty much ready to launch, though. I’m just delaying it because I know that I’ll have to spend about 3 days fixing previously-missed bugs, and my aforementioned wrist is holding it up in committee.

Finally, I’ve been itching to do something. Not sure what. Some music, some Flapping Crane stuff, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just build some shelves.

It really only should be a two DVD set. So if you know anyone, let me know. Soon.

Anyway, I’m kind of inspired to do this because late November will mark 5 years since flappingcrane.com went live. To put that in perspective, Youtube did not exist then. I was still in my mid-twenties, and people still referred to me as “El Conquistador” (not true at all).

Granted, we’ve slowed down our pace in the past couple years, but we’ve still got skits in the works. Eventually I’ll edit X-Lax 2000, Lazy Time Traveller, etc. There’s talk of a new Reicher. And, to top it off, we plan to relaunch flappingcrane.com this year. A big-ass new design that will probably piss people off, much higher-quality (near DVD-quality) versions of every skit and even some new skits (secret hint: one involves a squirrel).

So it’s kind of a fun time. We’re doing the disc 1 commentaries this Friday.

I’ll probably start putting up unreleased material in the coming months. Some of it is pretty good. Two songs of note which I may link to: “Professor Willoughby” and “Half-Jew in Love”.

Dog vs. Kitty.

Shot with my new Kodak Zi6. Probably not the best showcase of the camera. I was pretty sloppy with it. I was really just going for the joke.

That said, this is technically the first FC skit shot in HD. Or at least in HD resolution. The vid on the site, of course, is not HD. Subscribe to the feed in iTunes or whatever to get it in HD.