I’m not sure how I feel about this.

By now, I’m assuming that you’ve all heard about the flap over SOPA, a fun, flirty bit of potential legislation that’s attempting to curb internet piracy.

While censorship is, of course, a horrible thing, stealing is also horrible. When you download or stream pirated movies, you’re stealing. From me.

Let me explain.

Below-the-line crew don’t get residuals paid directly as do actors, writers, producers, etc..

Instead, we get what would be residuals paid into our health and pension fund. When people illegally download a movie, that’s lost money that should be going into a fund to keep me from having to eat road kill when I’m old*

Right now, because of piracy, our health and pension fund is under-funded to the tune of some number with a fuckload of zeros at the end.

The criminals, as usual, are way, way ahead of the law.

SOPA is an attempt to give law enforcement a bit more of an advantage.

Except that it’s incredibly badly written. Imagine trying to explain “that interweb thing” to your grandpa and then having him try to fix it.

That’s SOPA.

So. Do I support the legislation as currently written? No.

Do I agree that there’s a huge problem with piracy that needs to be dealt with? Yes.

Since the internet is currently behaving like an octogenarian confronted with a wireless printer setup, do I think everyone needs to calm the fuck down? Yes.

Will I be joining the internet boycott thingy? No.

Unless WordPress does it for me.

*If it’s that bad, I’ll just go skydiving and forget to deploy my parachute. Hey, it’s okay. I’ll be senile. No one will get in trouble.

Filed under: Non-Work, Off-Topic, boycott, congress, dinner, geezer, health insurance, internet, old age, pension, PIPA, residuals, roadkill, SOPA, Wordpress

Know your limits

Normally, I don’t like to turn down work under any circumstances barring extreme weather, rabid bears, or Michael Bay.

Most of the time not even then.

But sometimes I get offered something that I know damn good and well is going to suck so much that it’s just better to stay on unemployment and carefully count my pennies, which means my fantasy of spending New Years riding through the streets in a limo spraying passersby with champagne is now on hold. Again.

This particular  job on offer was an internet series thing paying not very much (of course), but that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the hours. The show had a 12 hour guarantee (which means we’d be working 14 hour days at the minimum) for a six-day week.

My problem centered around the six-day week. I’m not going to haul out the “I’m too old for this” cliché, but six-day weeks really hurt me, both physically and mentally.

Hell, I have enough trouble with five-day weeks. By day three, my feet hurt, by day four my shins ache before lunch. After lunch my knees join in and complain.  At the end of day five just walking is excruciating.

Day six? I can’t even get off the truck without the help of painkillers.

Once it’s all over, it takes two days to recover well enough to be able to do it all again the next week.

Six day weeks are beyond painful. That one day off  involves getting up, doing laundry, and then going back to sleep. No chance to clean the house, run any errands, get anything done. Bank? Forget it. Gym? Forget it. Friends? Pffft.

Oh, and since I won’t have any time to shop or cook (and we’ll get off work every night well after all my good take-out places have closed) there will be no food in the house, not even that really old jar of pickles that migrated to the back of the fridge.

I’ll eat that the second week when I wake up after a 19 hour day, ravenous because I didn’t want to eat the dubious looking second ‘meal’ that was set out at 4 am.

Not that I’ve been there a million times before or anything.

It was difficult for me to decline, since the job offer came from a very good friend, but sometimes I have to know my limits.

I’ll probably regret the decision once I’m scrounging for whatever loose change I can find in order to buy groceries, but for now it’s well worth it.

Filed under: Work, doing laundry, extreme weather, internet, internet series, job, michael bay, movie, Work

Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat….

Observe…

Nothing up my sleeve. Nothing up my other sleeve. Now, with one stroke of a pen I’ll make a day of work disappear!

Poof!

Tada!

I was supposed to work Tueday and Wednesday, but the second day cancelled – so I’ve only gotten one day this week (so far, but it’s slow so I’m not expecting anything else).

As of late, this seems to be happening to a lot of my days – I get called to work, get excited about the possibility of paying some bills, and then because of whatever’s passing for logic in the production office, the promised work gets pulled out from underneath me.  

This sucks, but all I can do is shrug and make a mental note to start using pencil on the calendar.

At least I’m getting a little bit of work – I know a few folks who haven’t worked at all this year.

And my internet’s down. Again.

The bright side is that instead of sitting at home while I’m unemployed, obsessively reading crap online (speaking of a fucked-up excuse for logic), I have to actually do something to occupy my time. Like work in the garden, go to the gym or do my taxes.

What I need to not do again, though, is make Chicken Vindaloo  at home – not only did I burn off most of my taste buds (too many chili peppers), but the Indian place down the road does a much better version and I don’t have to clean the kitchen.

Filed under: Non-Work, Work, curry, internet, spicy, unemployed, Work