Vlog 05.23.2011 – Close to Home

The video above was shot in the wee a.m. hours this past Monday, after I spent the entire evening jumping between Facebook, KOAM TV 7′s website, and a news aggregating website to try and get a sense of what exactly had happened to the city of Joplin, Missouri, a place I visited quite often in the twenty-seven years before I moved up to Wisconsin. If you follow me on YouTube you’ve already seen it; I posted it up immediately after shooting it that night/morning. This was my way of working through the raw emotions of seeing a place that had been such a large part of my life for so long torn apart by the forces of nature. I’m still shaken up by it; it doesn’t help that A) this came on the heels of another ridiculous shake-up at my crappy little job which finally settled down yesterday, and B) a week from now I’ll be getting on an airplane and flying INTO Joplin, Missouri, on my way back home to Pittsburg for the first time in almost three years. I’ll be seeing the devastation from above, and if we linger at all I’ll be seeing it firsthand. If I think I’m an emotional wreck NOW … *sigh*

While some of my parents’ coworkers lost their homes and even a few lost relatives, I don’t know that I personally know anyone affected in a life-changing way by the destruction of a large swath of Joplin, beyond the tumultuous emotions I’ve been feeling myself. It is interesting to me how the footage and photos hit me like a sucker punch. I can ultimately deal with gradual change. A fire takes out a few buildings. A family decides it’s time to close down their business after soever many years. A big chain decides that such-and-such-a-location isn’t profitable anymore. Times change and make an old business model obsolete. Old houses are razed to build new apartments. In the grand scheme of things, this sort of change makes sense; it’s all part of the endless cycle of interlocking deaths and births that we call history. This, on the other hand … this was the planet itself deciding to unleash a quarter-mile-wide salvo of death and ruin — both physical and economic — on an average midwestern American city. It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me. Yes, tragedies like this bring people together. Yes, they will rebuild. Yes, people will find a way to make some good out of this nightmare. But that part of me that demands order and sense from the world is, in my mind’s eye, shaking its fists in the air and screaming, “BUT THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO!” Yes, even after all these years, there’s still a part of me deep down inside that demands a childish sense of fairness from the world.

That said, yeah, for those already caught up, there’s no new video this weekend. Because of my upcoming vacation I’m trying to power through a bunch of Robotech episodes in the spare time I’ve got. I did even have a few topics in mind for this weekend’s video, but every one kind of slipped through my fingers mere moments after it came to me — clearly I’ve been having a hard time thinking straight. I do have something coming in the mail next week I’m going to want to talk about, though, so barring any further distracting news to make me a wreck again, we’ve got a topic for next weekend.

Upcoming posts for this week include tomorrow’s second half of Matthew Graham’s very old school Doctor Who two-parter, which I find I’m quite looking forward to, and the first full week of the second generation of Robotech, the centerpiece of which is the downing and exploration of one of the Robotech Masters’ flagships. After a half-baked first week of Robotech Masters, this is where the second generation really comes into its own.

Vlog 04.23.2011 – Tears for Strangers

Earlier this week marked the one year anniversary of the death of Robotech architect and visionary Carl Macek, and this past Tuesday Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures star Elisabeth Sladen died from cancer. These two facts put me in a melancholy mood, and I decided to reflect on the passing of these two major figures from two of my favorite entertainment franchises and the nature of the way fans mourn. A lot of thinking out loud here, and I’d be curious what your thoughts are on the subject.

The sixth series of modern Doctor Who begins today in the U.K. and North America. I’ll have some thoughts up on that tomorrow, and then it’s on to another week of Robotech, as a defiant Khyron and Miriya needle the battle fortress, we spend a day in Rick Hunter’s head, and our heroes are defeated not by Zentraedi, but by orders from headquarters.

Vlog: On the Death of my Robotech Blog and Starting a New Series.

On the off chance you don’t want to watch the video above, here’s what you need to know going forward:

1) I’m going to be doing these little videos once a week for the foreseeable future. The idea is that I’m going to try and chronicle where I’m going and what I’m doing for the next year, maybe longer. Hopefully where I’m going and what I’m doing is going to be interesting. I know I have plans, some of which I spilled on Twitter months ago, and some of which I’m spilling now.

2) In the immediate future, starting next week, I’m going to be writing about Robotech again. God knows I’ve written enough about Robotech that everyone should be SICK of me writing about Robotech. I’m tackling the TV series again from the start, with the intent that THIS time I’ll actually make it through the whole thing. In order to facilitate that, I’m going to try and be brief, maybe one or two paragraphs. Let’s see how long I hold myself to that. (It’s not going to be the “ten bullet points of several paragraphs apiece” monster “365 Days of Robotech” was laid out to be, at least, that’s for sure.) No interruptions to talk about old, crummy comic books, no getting side-tracked. Five days a week, so with the same rhythm that you’d have with the show in daily syndication back in the mid-to-late 1980′s. I will set aside some time to talk about Robotech II: The Sentinels and Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles some weekend, too.

I’ll probably start watching the show and writing these this weekend after work, get a few under my belt. If I can keep watching a couple of episodes a day, this shouldn’t take very much time at all. As I always say, though, fingers crossed on that.