the visible problem with invisible children
EDIT ON MARCH 7, 2012: This post was originally written in 2006. As you read and comment, please consider that it has been over 5 years since I wrote my thoughts here. I personally still have the same concerns about IC that I did when I posted this and have chosen not to contribute to their cause. However, Uganda continues to hold a very special place in my heart.
Apologies for my stunned silence in the face of the Kony 2012 movement and the internet’s explosion of power. I’ve never felt like the whole internet has simultaneously pushed down the same keys at the same time. Not even the response to SOPA made me feel this level of solidarity. The LRA has been around, being evil, and making the world suck more since I was in college, and that’s when I first tried to raise awareness for stopping them…more than ten years ago. Sometimes it feels like there are so many terrible things in the world, it’s impossible to figure out what to focus on. But the LRA is getting that focus now. And I hope we can maintain it. (source)I too believe that there is a large possibility of #Kony2012 failing within 3 months as the attention span of the population wains. That being said, I'm still choosing to donate.
Makes Me Think of My Grandfather
My grandfather recently passed last year, and seeing this video made me think of what he must of been like when we came to visit. I was too young to realize how much us grandkids mean to our grandparents – but it’s video’s like this that really make you all warm in fuzzy.
RIP Gigi.
The End (of Summer) is Here!
So I guess it’s about time I stopped whining about writing this and actually got down to writing this.
It’s here. In the last waking hours of the last day of my summer, here I am, on my computer writing this blog in between games of Modern Warfare 2 on PS3, which is something I bought this summer. After playing it lots in my second year, and then finally getting a PS3 for Christmas last year, I’ve actually been able to play again! Still working on my first nuke on my own. I’ve only done it once before and come close multiple times, but no dice as of yet. For those of you who don’t know what MW2 or nukes are, don’t worry this whole blog won’t be about that.
Aside from that, I’ve stayed in Victoria most of the summer, with one short jaunt to Calgary for my Dad’s birthday. I surprised my Mom at her doorstep, and then my Dad downtown for lunch later. My mom cried twice that one day. Thanks to all my friends who made that one happen.
I also applied and didn’t get on a TV show this summer. It was called “Operation Unplugged” and it was basically taking techno-addicted people away from their addiction and seeing how they fared in the wilderness. I had the most viewed video on YouTube (for the audition videos) for a rap I wrote but didn’t get on the show. In the process of trying to show that I was techno-addicted, I started using Twitter a lot more. I went from about 30 followers of mostly friends and random spams to 90+ as of right now. I’m slowly learning how useful it is for networking, especially in my industry. Most producers and a lot of studios are on Twitter. I’ve met one guy who would be willing to give me an internship when I finish my degree and everything. So that’s really cool.
Operation Unplugged Video
I spent all the summer working. With my side job at the Gap and then doing all the recordings that came in through the school. I was basically the go-to guy for recordings this summer. Which led to my promotion as the Interim Audio Manager at the school right now, replacing my current boss for the semester as he takes his parental leave. This summer I worked on; ESL audio tapes, the soundtrack for a play, a guitar quartet, my own covers, and this audition tape. I also did live sound for 2 separate Indian concerts and recorded piano and sax, a piano feature and dual pianos. All in all it was a great summer for me and furthering my experience as a recording engineer.
With that being said, I designed and established http://jstasiuk.wordpress.com which is my website featuring all my work and my portfolio. It links directly with http://jstasiuk.bandcamp.com which is strictly my music portfolio. Both sites are currently under construction as I work to improve them and make it one seamless site – hopefully.
So I’m working hard to get my “brand” out there and promote myself. I’ve contacted a few other recording people and through volunteering at festivals like Rifflandia this fall, I hope to network myself more into this industry.
As most of all of you know, Harry Potter came out this summer! As most of you who actually read my blog probably know, I don’t actually like Harry Potter. I never got into the books and thus I was not interested in the movies. Well Girlfriend enjoyed the series and thus we commenced the HP movie marathon of the ages. We eventually watched all of them in preparation for the final installment. I think I enjoyed maybe 2 or 3 of them out of the entire 8. To me, it’ll never match up to Star Wars in terms of an epic saga. I guess it’s up there, but it’s definitely behind LOTR and Star Wars for me. HP7.2 was a satisfactory end to the series and I didn’t care enough to complain or dislike it.
Also in this summer, I bought myself a new computer! It had kind of been a long time coming as my laptop was slowly but surely living out it’s last legs. I bought myself a new 21.5″ iMac and now have quite the Apple collection. I still use my laptop for mobile recordings and Photoshop, but other than that, I’m officially a desktop guy. I think the set-up is pretty sweet. It definitely makes editing a lot easier with my two screens. 
Girlfriend went away for the entire month of May, so I didn’t do a whole lot except bum around and work. I actually just went through my facebook page to see if there was anything else worth mentioning.
Some highlights:
- Shotgunning a beer on the 16th hole of a private golf course
- The Oak Bay Tea Party with Girlfriend and Kath
- The Hunger Hush show in Calgary
- Naniamo with Jordo and Girlfriend
- Freaks and Geeks Cover –
I think that’s all for now. Not much else that really comes to mind. School starts tomorrow. First day of fourth year. I have the potential to finish this year, it’ll take me 11 classes. 5 first semester, and then 6 the second. And I’ll be taking a Ukrainian elective which will be pretty cool. Got rep’ for my heritage.
Hope you enjoyed this quick wrap up of the summer! Looking forward to much of the same in the fall!
If this gets 3 likes on any social media platforms I will write a post by the end of this week of my top 5 albums/songs/artists of the summer and what I’m looking forward to in the fall in terms of music!
- J
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- Ode to the Summer Cottage (daleymuse.wordpress.com)
- ALBUM PREMIERE: L.A. Up-and-Comers Grouplove (spin.com)
- The summer winds… (daisyfae.wordpress.com)
- Calgary mayor makes history as Pride Parade marshal (canada.com)
Fabio will be the ruin of Old Spice
So we all remember Isaiah Mustafa, just Google “Old Spice Guy” if you need to refresh your memory, and the ads he did for Old Spice. They were funny, original, and made men want to buy their product. Even though the ads pandered to the ladies as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“, most of us guys wanted to be that guy.
Even if it meant just smelling like him. Some people rank him next to the Dos Equis as the Two Most Interesting Men In The World.
The YouTube campaign was unprecedented in it’s use of social media like YouTube and Twitter. and resulted in an increase of sales by 107% for Old Spice (see here). The video has almost 34 million views on YouTube. I’m sure at least a few of us out there edited together the phone message video to have the Old Spice Guy on our answering machine.
Things were going great for Old Spice. Until now.
The new Old Spice Guy is now Fabio. Fabio? Are you kidding me?! Practically no one from my generation even knows who he is! We were all babies when he was gracing the covers of adult “romance” novels throughout the 80′s & 90′s.
One of my friends has a Tumblr dedicated to appreciating Fabio in his once great glory (ironic hipster appreciation of course – http://fabioisawesome.tumblr.com/) So why Old Spice wanted to pull him out of nowhere and start using him for their ads is beyond me.
This is the first Fabio Old Spice ad that I saw. This is definitely not the kind of guy I want to be buying deodorant from. Rolling around on a piano like that? Rubbing his face against the stick of deodorant? No. This is not cool. I tuned out as soon as he started rolling back over to the second girl.
Here’s the second one:
Great, Fabio has long hair. And again with the rubbing on his face?! What is this?!?!?!
What happened to the great single shot ads? Ones that knew they were being ridiculous and fantastic. These new ones were trying so hard that they just end up looking silly.
Hopefully the community explodes with hate for Fabio and brings back the man we all loved.
Look at your new man, now back to me, now back at your new man, now back to me.
Sadly, he isn’t me.
Related articles
- Meet Your Newest Old Spice Guy: Fabio (Yes, That Fabio) (adweek.com)
- Fabio: The NEW Old Spice Guy? (celebs.icanhascheezburger.com)
- The New Old Spice Guy Is an Old, Familiar Face: Fabio [VIDEOS] (mashable.com)
My Internet Life
Well hello there, how are you doing today? Good? Then good.
Hopefully you have seen my video for Operation Unplugged and enjoyed my song. If you’re super duper interested – it can be bought off my bandcamp for $1 CDN. I’m not looking to make a lot of money but I think that’d be cool if SOMEONE out there bought it. Anyways, it’s that video that brings me to writing this blog. Maybe it was that video that brought you here – doubtful, but it’s a possibility. If you want to download the track and help me out – you can go here!
Image via Wikipedia
Image via CrunchBase
Looking back on that video – I wish I had made two versions, one with the intro and end bits, and one without. The one without would have just been my rap and that was that. I could show this video to my family and coworkers and stuff that I don’t really want involved in my online presence. Now that I’ve sent out that video to my parents, they’ve sent it to all my family, who are undoubtedly going to stumble upon this. I try quite hard to keep myself anonymous on the internet. I try not to connect my name to any of my accounts – twitter, this blog, etc. I have quite high privacy settings on my Facebook, I am unsearchable to anyone who isn’t a friend. All in all, I just don’t like having my name out there.
But now with this video, I can’t do that anymore. My parents know now I have this blog and a Twitter amongst other things, and not that that’s a bad thing, but these are places I go to write about without having to censor myself or what have you. I try to censor myself on Facebook and Twitter as is – just for professional reasons – you never know who might stumble across that. But this blog in particular is something I like to leave for ranting and raving about my life and what’s going on and what not. Where am I going to go to complain about stuff if I know the people I’m complaining about can read it? Isn’t that defeating the purpose? Do I have to set up another blog or something where I can go to post stuff and neglect this one (more so than I already do)?
In short, no. I am not going to set up anything else to have to censor myself here. Parents, if you’re reading this and don’t like what you read? Tough – don’t come to me about it, if I didn’t bring it up with you to deal with it, then I don’t want to deal with it. That’s that. So I’m going to try and keep this as a safe-haven for me. Seeing as not that many people come here anyways – it shouldn’t be a big deal.
I’m actually really starting to come around to using Twitter a lot more. Since I’ve upped my usage lately, I’ve been in contact with people all over that you wouldn’t normally come in contact with. I asked Matt Good a question one morning, I got a shout out from the host of Operation Unplugged about my video, I’ve contacted two studios in Vancouver, one would give me an internship once I’m done my degree, and the other would give me a tour of their space if I was ever in town. So that’s been really cool.
Anywho, in other news, Girlfriend got home from Europe on Saturday. It’s been quite nice having her around again. Living alone is definitely not something I enjoy too much. Her schedule is still really wonky – this is the first day she hasn’t slept for about 14 hours – so we’re still kind of adjusting. She went to bed at 8 tonight and I’ve been up playing video games and watching YouTube videos and writing this blog. We did have a long day out and about today just hanging out – so that was really nice. I’m gonna be cracking the whip on her a little harder too now that she’s home. Things need to be cleaned and put away in a more timely fashion and I’m just not going to let as much stuff slide as I usually do when she’s got school and stress and what have you. No more Mr.NiceGuy.
I suppose I need to take a photo of myself with my new glasses for here – since I still haven’t done that. I’m actually getting a new new pair sometime this week since the guy who cut my lenses did a terrible job, and the technician at the glasses store said they’d just re-do them entirely for me. So that’s really great, it just takes a while because I have such shitty eyes. I’d like to try my old ones on for a day and actually see if the new ones make a huge difference. Sometimes I wonder if they actually did anything or not. Except my new ones are cut in such a way that switching really gives me a bad headache.
Album art for Little Hell
I was streaming the new City and Colour album Little Hell today from some stream they sent out on a tweet, and I was actually really impressed with what D
allas has put out. I’ve kind of drifted away from C&C since I met him at the AOF meet and greet, but this new album is quite good. I’ve actually pre-ordered it twice – once in a hard-copy and once digitally (with 4 extra tracks) - I would have preferred just to do the digital, but I ordered the hard copy first. Oh well. I also just started listening to the new Matthew Good album – the few tracks I’ve heard so far are really good! The new Moby has yet to grow on me though…
So with June 1st starting as of right now – the day literally just turned over as I write this – I am going to be starting a 30 day challenge. I got this idea from Phillip Defranco – one of the most famous YouTubers, who I’m subscribed to. The idea is that you set a goal and focus on it for one month. At the end of that month you assess and move on from there. My Project30 is going to be packing a lunch for work. And I know it’s not a big goal or whatever, but I’m really starting to notice a dip in my spending money from buying stuff from the food court every time I go in to work. It’s at least $10 maybe $15 a day. I usually justify it by saying “it’s only one more hour of work” – but really, that’s $50 a week (at least) that I could be saving. I’m going to be trying some new recipe ideas and keep it more interesting than just ham and cheese sandwiches all day. I somehow managed to survive on that everyday in junior/high school, so I think I can do it again. At the beginning of each week – or whenever I have a day off, I’m going to make a whole bunch of sandwiches and have them in the freezer so I can just pull one or two out and bring them to work. I think I might do pasta’s and salads that I can microwave or keep cold too. I’m going to try and keep my progress updated here and do my best to stick to it!
I think that’s enough for one night, if you stuck through til the end of this, here’s that photo I promised! Hurray.
Related articles
- Iran Plans to Unplug Internet, Create Its Own (newser.com)
- Matt Good’s bittersweet symphony (canada.com)
- Social media case study: How ” nobodies ” become famous on the Internet by standing out using their outgoing personalities and their communicational skills: the Philip DeFranco case (ajmstudents.wordpress.com)
Go Get Your Face Fixed
YouTube – New Era Commercial – The Trash Talking Begins.
“There’s like 20 grand here!”
It Might Not Be Such a Great Idea to Start Off Your Day…
With some Matthew Good Band.
Man that guy is depressing.
This Karma Machine only takes quarters,
New Age Solider, New Age Solider
New Star Wars Kid
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
So! In case you missed it – this ad:
was played during the Super Bowl, at the time of publishing it had over 15 000 000 views.
AND THE KID HASN’T EVEN SEEN STAR WARS! WHAT THE FUCK. I was watching Star Wars when I was eight. Six can’t be a stretch. Especially if he was playing him in a commercial. Talk about a lousy research actor.
Light Love
I thought I had already posted this video.
But I guess not.
It’s cute. The end.
This guys has a lot of other great videos. If you’re bored, watch!
CD Review – Sunday Buckets – In Case You Hear This
Victoria has already heard a lot of Sunday Buckets. They were the October Band of The Month for the Zone 91.3 radio station, and they played on Boxing Day down at Sugar. These six guys have jumped on the scene trying to get their name out. You can find them on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. “In Case You Hear This” is their first album that was dropped in early July of this year.
The first track, “Aftermathematics” is a catchy pop-like tune that immediately draws your mind to Death Cab for Cutie. Sunday Buckets has a unique make-up as five out of the six members contribute vocally. In the bridge section of Aftermathematics there seems to be a small spoken word/rap vocal line, which provides a good contrast to the rest of the song.
Most of the songs on “In Case You Hear This” are very mellow and easy to listen to. The third track, “Garfunkel” incorporates the classic Mr.Rogers phrase “It’s a wonderful day in the neighbourhood/Won’t you be my neighbour?” With unique elements like that, each song gives you something new to listen to and enjoy in its own right.
Sunday Buckets does the mellow relaxing song very well, almost too well. “In Case You Hear This” needs something heavier. “Kenny the Kid” is close with a great buildup into the first chorus, but as soon as it hits, the song falls flat and all that energy is gone. I’m left here groaning wanting that huge heavy chorus!
Overall the CD sounds great and is produced very well. Sunday Buckets has definitely found their niche in the soundscape of today and are definitely a band to keep an eye on. Pick up this CD or see them live to experience one of Victoria’s newest indie hits featuring a lot of local talent.
*P.S. My roommate just showed me this, but when you plug this CD into iTunes, it incorrectly labels the title of the album, “In Case You Here This”.
Internet Infamy
Salutations Internet,
I hope you’re having a good Tuesday and that all is right in your world.
Just an update for you, my computer is still in limbo, I was informed yesterday that when buying electronics with Mastercard or Visa, they will automatically double your warranty! So technically my computer is still under warranty and thus can be repaired for free! This is good news. Now we just have to wait for the paperwork to go through and then the repairs can begin. In the meantime, I am still relying on my girlfriend and computer labs to get my internet fix.
I was talking to my brother last night about YouTube and stupid videos and people gaining fame. I showed him a few videos of people from YouTube that I know about, sxephil (http://www.youtube.com/user/sxephil) and Boxxy (http://www.youtube.com/user/boxxybabee) and Fred Figglehornhttp://www.youtube.com/user/fred?blend=1&ob=4). The last two are teenage kids who have become famous for making videos on YouTube. “Fred” has to be about 14 or 15, pretending to be a 6 year old kid, is the most subscribed all time, most viewed all time (comedians) and even appeared and won a Teen Choice Award. I never really understood this guy’s appeal, but I will give him credit for his determination. He’s got t-shirts and hats and has bascially become a phenom in the internet world. And all this for just acting stupid and then speeding it up on a movie editor. Sigh. I don’t understand why people love this stuff. It has no substance to it and adds nothing to your life. If your attention span has dwindled down to that of a 15 year old screaming at a camera for 3 minutes about his imaginary friends, then I think it’s time you changed your lifestyle a little.
It makes me wonder about my own internet infamy. I’ve got a blog and I write about nothing of any importance to anyone, and yet I’m happy when I’m over 200 total views. Everyone is wanting the world to look upon them and show themselves off. I know that I am dropping my URL to all my friends and being like, “Hey, check out my blog.” Some of them I sincerely want to read what I post here, because I don’t get to talk to them often and they have a way to know what’s going on in my life, but others, I just want to click and bump up my view count. And why? I don’t really know, I don’t think I’m going to become any international success with my great blogs about nothing. The time for that has past. Maybe if I had started a blog in 1999, when I was nine and still playing Pokemon and stuff, then my blog may have been successful, but jumping on the bandwagon now means no success will come of this.
And why is it that we’re always looking for success from everything we do? I should just be happy if the 10 people that read this whenever I update it actually enjoy it. And I hope that you do enjoy it! 
I’ve seen this picture before, and I think it’s a really good representation of what the internet, and thus blogging has become. I’ve never been a fan of twitter or tumblr or whatever, I feel like that’s just a quick way to get your two cents out and for everyone to see, “Oh hey look, So-and-so is doing this. I don’t care.” I appreciate blogs because it means the author and subsequentially the reader have to take time to read the blog.
Also. Frick. There is some stupid girl in the lab who is on ICQ, (an instant messenger for those of you who don’t know) and the stupid little “Uh-oh” sound that goes off anytime she gets a message is really friggen annoying. I just want to go over there and hit the stupid mute button on her keyboard. There it is again. Frick.
Anyways, sorry for the tangent. I find this really weird this whole blogging thing I’ve started. I found myself lying in bed last night, thinking of things to write in my blog tomorrow. Great amazing interesting antecdotes about my life that people will like. But, alas I can hardly remember any of them. (Although, Brother, what about “Engineering Ingenuity” for your blog name?)
Also! Here’s another webcomic for your enjoyment! My girlfriend and I found this a long time ago and couldn’t remember what it was called! But now we found it again. So I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do! http://eqcomics.com/ I’ve attached the first comic of the series for your viewing pleasure.
I think that’s all for today, I’ve ranted and raved enough. I hope you enjoyed. I’m off to break that stupid ICQ girls keyboard.
Later days,
- J
