4 in the queue

This new feature in my blog is called 4 in the queue, in which you are privvy to my embarrassing media habits.



At #1 is Toy Story 2. I have seen every Toy Story movie but this one, as the first one was released in my childhood when I was able to freely enjoy cartoons, and the third one was released recently, but the 2nd one was released when I was a teenager, and felt too embarrassed to watch cartoons in the theater.


At #3 is Ponyo.

I saw this movie in a comfortable empty theater, in contrast to my experience with Toy Story 3, which had crying kids and grown ups who should know better on cell phones. The only other people in the theater were two old women, who I got the feeling were the ones who really wanted to see the movie, and a small child, who was too young[maybe about 2? 3?] to really grasp the idea of a movie, but ate her snacks and occasionally watched the screen. I want to see it again, therefore the queuing.

At #9 is Frontline: The Vaccine Wars. I heard it was interesting, and also, I don't like watching films on my computer as much as I like watching them on TV. It's harder to multitask using the computer.

At #10 is This Film is Not Yet Rated. I put this on my queue years ago, and it has finally surfaced to the top. I have hundreds of movies like this in my queue.

I'm still rolling this over

This post on etsy as a business incubator. I've meant to blog about this for a long time, but now I think I might take a stab at it. I wanted to say something about how I'm not seeing etsy as a little incubator for lots of little businesses, and then some businesses break out of their eggs into the bright sky of success. Instead, I see it as a growing part of the way that instead of passively watching tv in our free time, we actively seek out community- crafting, selling, and passing advice back and forth.

Maybe we won't get big. Maybe our ideal is to stay small, a hobby, to craft and sleep and eat and work all in balance. But every minute we spent crafting to a higher standard since we want to sell it or reading about how to run a business so we can keep crafting, the world improves just a little.

I also suck as a radical homemaker

OK, I'm not a homemaker, radical or otherwise I'm just a childless slacker. I attempt to get by with a minimum of expenses, but I just realized that I don't know how to cook purple hull peas. Or anything in fact. Right now I'm paring down- trying to give away, sell or reluctantly- trash everything I don't want. This will take forever, as I unearth layers of my life- old photo albums with pictures of teenage pals with flowers in their hair, a whole notebook full of professional materials, old comics I haven't read in years.

Of course, as I try to pare down, I find twenty new things I want. I went into a bookstore to buy a gift for a relative, and found four or five new things for my wishlist.

Paring down will probably take me months, and that brings me to my point. Simplicity is hard work. A lot of this stuff requires you to be full of energy, and knowledge, and a community of people who can give you zucchini from their garden when yours fails to grow anything.[the only real success I've had with my garden is basil.

I think we can all be a little kinder to each other when our experiments fail. When we take a road, and look at the road not taken, and wonder. Because what comes around goes around.

Viz looks for Interns

Viz has slashed its workforce and is now looking for interns. I have to wonder if the value of the internship has lessened. After these folks are done working for free, will they really be able to parlay this into anything paid? Even the success story is a freelancer- no security! If say, 10 people work as interns, and only one gets to be a freelance editor, would they have spent their time better if they had waited tables and gained money to pay off their giant student loan debt?

At least these internships aren't full time- unpaid full time internships are problematic since they make paid work all but impossible to do for the majority of people.