Mixes
I still make mixtapes from time to time. I've been doing it for a while now and think I've gotten to the point where practically every favorite song from childhood has now found its way into one mix or another.
Movie Journal
I keep a website cataloguing every movie I see. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I used to see a lot more movies than I do now so it made more sense at the time. Nonetheless, it's the only form of journal that I've managed to keep up with for longer than a week.
Book Journal
All that stuff I just said about movies? Well I figured I might as well do the same thing with books.
Dream Journal
I bought one of those easy digital recorders and kept it by my bed for a while. Any time I woke up from a dream I tried to hit record and tell it so I'd remember it better. It worked well for a while until my brain started tricking itself by including the part where I wake up and record the dream in the dream itself. Just like how writing an email again because you forgot to save your progress and your computer crashed before you could hit send, talking out your dreams is never as good the second time as it was the first so this site died pretty quickly.
DVD Collection
The thing that prompted this whole journaling phase: an online database of all the DVDs I own. I don't really think this is of much use to anyone other than me or anyone looking to borrow something from me. Robbers please don't look at this. I still like my DVDs and don't want them stolen. Thanks for being considerate.
Filmtease
All through college buddies and I kept a website project going on the side, usually dealing with movies or DVDs since that's what we were into. Team DVD got shut down because someone bullied us out of our domain name and we were too naive to say no, The Credits went for a summer or so then everyone lost interest because it was too broad a spectrum and the design kind of sucked. Filmtease is by far the longest-lasting of all my college-buddy sites and the one I had the most fun with. It's archived here forever.
Filmtease Book!
Remember how I said Filmtease was the longest-running site I ran? Well it ran long enough that I put together a book of the site content! Of course I should've known that would be the death of the site and I was too burnt out to go back and add the handful of site reviews not included in the book just for completionist' sake, but whatever. We still got a book out of it which is pretty cool to have on my bookshelf (and my bookshelf alone)
Check it out or Buy it or something!
Austin Air Guitar
At South by Southwest one year they screened a doc called Air Guitar Nation. The fun and creativity on display there inspired me to check it out locally. Since I'm too much of an introvert to actually get up on stage and shake my belly for people, I decided to follow it for an entire season much like I imagine sports writers do (Note: I've never actually read anything having to do with sports) and publish it as a book. It was a real fun time, especially in the beginning, but I got more burned out than ever before writing up notes for the regional finals. There's only so many ways to describe people pretending to play guitar!
QT Fest
Back in the heyday of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, one of the best events they hosted was a semi-annual film festival hosted by Quentin Tarantino. It represented a major turning point in my cinematic tastes and I couldn't really find an official complete list. So I made my own. Even the wiki really doesn't have a complete account since the Austin Film Society page listed the trailers shown indistinguishable from the films shown. To my knowledge, this is the most complete list that exists, culled from personal experience, archival schedule sheets, and old articles on Aint it Cool. These are pretty much over since he more or less bought the New Beverly, but for us Austinites, these fests represent a golden time.
Uncertain Paths
Around the year 2000, an old college buddy and I made up our own RPG worldset and managed to run a few campaigns. It evolved for a short while into a series of interactive fiction and I have yet to give up the dream of revisiting it someday. Here are the current archives.
Cheese and Whine
Yet another film side project, this one with my old high school buddy. He had a short-lived forum called Persistence of Vision and some of the heavy contributors to that wound up helping us with this. The idea was to have it be a monthly magazine where our fictional cartoon character hung out on his Parisian alley and discussed fine cinema with his friends. We used the film-as-wine metaphor to death. It was really fun and I think we wrote up some good stuff but it imploded because it was a lot of work and I was never fully happy with the art style (mainly because I did the art).
