Wednesday

cycling / IU / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on The seasonal wind down
15
Dec 21

The seasonal wind down

It’s funny how things sink in. The how and the when and then, just, the act of sinking in. It’s great imagery, you take a photograph of a memory or a great big block of text sliding into the brain matter. Finally! That thing sunk in!

Or, for some, it could come another way. That polaroid or life video on a short, endless loop, or that great big block of text, could collide with a domicile. I imagine it’s flying in from the left, with squiggles denoting speed, slamming into the side of a cartoon house. Hey! That really hit home!

Anyway, it just now hit home that I’ve been writing in this space for 18-plus years. I had to scroll through all of those Decembers in my FTP program to get to *checks notes* 2021, so I could upload this graphic.

That’s my ride this evening, a quick 20 miles over a fictional place in Zwift. And with this ride 2021 moved into the second place in the last 11 years for miles pedaled. Last year has, and will likely hold with ease, the top spot. All of this is pretty remarkable because, these last few years, I seem to be riding slower. It takes longer to go farther.

It takes dedication to go farther when it takes longer, he said, thinking it meant something more than it did.

This is the last production of the fall semester for IUSTV. It’s Behind The Curtain, one of the many new shows the students rolled out this term. They show a student video or, as in this case, an actual film project, and then talk to the creators.

This term they garnered well more than 80,000 impressions and almost 13,000 views of 81 new episodes of original, scripted, entirely student-produced programming. This does not count the many podcasts or social media hits of all different sorts on at least four different platforms.

Oh, and this is something of a rebuilding year, so we’re just getting started.

How do you feel about documentaries about comedians? The producer of this project is an IU professor. I’ve watched a long trailer, which was good enough to make me want to watch the full thing. (Which I will get around to in the next week or so.) And if you like comedians, you might like this, too.

I’ve lined up an interview with the producer of this project for after the first of the year. She’s got a book chapter in a new book that’s considering comedians as public intellectuals. Should we go for thoughtful, then, or punchlines? And why can’t I do both, simultaneously?

I also have three other shows in the can that I simply need to edit. Good shows, but not about comedians. That’ll be part of a day after the first of the year.

But that’s after the holidays, which I am officially on starting … a few hours ago.

So you know what that means. Two weeks of fun!

adventures / IU / memories / photo / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on The persistence of chlorophyll
8
Dec 21

The persistence of chlorophyll

Just a bit of the nature from Savannah. A lovely Southern Red Oak (Quercus falcata) was near our place. I love how the green of chlorophyll is fighting it out with the red of inevitability here.

Such spirit! Whereas this fruit tree looks like a cheap Renoir knockoff. But the joy

Some of them, I think, don’t even turn there. But this little bit of color right here made me realize: I should be in a place where the leaf turn takes place in December.

It’d be nice to be around these Maidenhairs (Ginkgo biloba), too.

It’s just fun watching their leaves fall.

And back to work today, hence my cool campus banner, there. This evening marked a turning of the page for these two guys.

I had them in a class in their freshman year, and I’ve had the good fortune to work with Will and Jackson for IUSTV sports ever since. My favorite thing — I mean the absolute best part of my job — is watching the freshmen grow and mature into leaders and, ultimately, the people they’re going to be. It’s a great time of change, those three or four years, and it’s a unique thing to be a very small part of.

Will is setting out to be a play-by-play guy, Jackson is going to be working for some big sports franchise before long. I’ll miss them here. We all will.

At the end of their sportscast, the producers put in a sneaky little package all about these guys. And as that rolled everyone in the control room came out to be with them for the final shot. I’m not sure if that’s ever happened before.

It speaks, I think, to the place they have helped build over all of that time. Which means they’re leaving us something stronger than they started with, that we’re better for the experience.

I don’t know how many 21-year-olds get that, I doubt I did, but it sinks in eventually.

The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats.

It was new tie Wednesday. And an almost new pocket square. It was one of those clearance purchases that help get you over the line for free shipping. You know the ones, there’s a carefully calculated formula that always puts you three bucks under that line, so now you have to spend another 25 minutes looking for something that costs four bucks that you actually like. But it saves you 34 bucks! Or whatever the shipping would cost. So you click, click, click until you find something and then you think “Ha! I spent more! I showed you! I win!”

They know exactly where they’ve got us with that carefully calculated formula. (But I would like to understand how that pricing structure so often almost works … )

Well, sneaky actuarial type person, I did win. I like this one a good deal.

photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off on A gray day
1
Dec 21

A gray day

Welcome to December, and the encroaching color of the season! It is … dunh da dunh dunh da daaaaaaa!

It was just everywhere today. Couldn’t be helped. Whoever was painting today only had one color in their palette. Whoever was lighting the day only had reflecting screens. Whoever wrote this day spent four or five solid hours debating between “gray” and “grey.”

Today, it was gray. As we move on, we’ll go to the more conventional spelling.

It doesn’t look grey yet. But it will.

But don’t let that weather fool you. It was a lovely day, otherwise. Spirits were high! Good times were in the air! We had a lovely night in the studio and a full day around the building before that. And when I went home, sometime after 8 p.m., I got to head into a long, long weekend. The skies were low, morale is actually very high!

You just couldn’t see it because of my mask.

The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats. And isn’t this an interesting coincidence …

Gray!

television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Thanksgiving Eve
24
Nov 21

Thanksgiving Eve

I slept in until 9 a.m. this morning, which was lovely. I could get used to not having an alarm. I’ve spent the day puttering around the house, which would get old before too long, I’m sure. But I haven’t gotten anything accomplished today, which will be old by Friday.

I did record a podcast last night. Talked to a former student for a new show I’m rolling out after the first of the year. So that takes care of two days of productivity, I suppose.

OK, the lack of accomplishing thing kicked in just now. So I’ve beaten my tolerance prediction by two days. That, in a way, is an achievement, right?

No wonder I’m a bit tired.

One last thing from my Monday visit to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center. Have you ever heard a lion roar? I had not. They say the sound can be heard up to five miles away. That seems unrealistic, until you hear it. We heard two lions and some lionesses. And now I believe it. You’d absolutely hear this miles away. And if you heard it in the wild it would definitely hold your attention. Anyway, they’re showing off here.

There’s a little clip of a lion, a bit of a lioness, and the third clip is just a silent bit of watching the lion walk around. This was a unique experience. Turn on your audio and press play.

These are all rescued animals. They’ve never been in the wild. And they have a good life here. The only part I don’t like is hearing about how the animals came to them. Some of them have terribly sad backstories. But they are well looked after, and it’s obvious and apparent the passion the staff have for the animals in their charge.

If you didn’t see them, I shared some high quality photos of the tigers and lions on Monday and again yesterday.

I started my winter indoor cycling season on Saturday. It was an easy 20 mile ride, averaging 19 miles per hour, with 535 feet of ascent. Pedestrian numbers, but it felt great considering how long I’ve been off my bike — for no reason whatsoever. The ride was in the Makuri Islands, which is a fictional Zwift locale. The part at the end looks something like this.

I finished in eighth in one of the sprints, which is weird. I am not a sprinter.

On Tuesday we rode in Watopia, one of the classic Zwift routes. It was a quick 16 mile ride and I set two Strava PRs. No one cares, but the route looks like this.

And today we did a few loops around London. Clearly that’s the Thames. I was looping Westminster and Belgravia and maxed out at 37.3 miles per hour.

But, if I say 60 kilometers an hour, it sounds like something serious. All the metrics say I maxed out at 1,276 watts and averaged 20.9 miles per hour. I’m slow.

Oh, here’s a sports thing. It’s Thanksgiving, of course, and the students have the whole week off, but my friend Ta Lao is still producing good stuff.

Ta talks to IU’s goalkeeper about his amazing year and, at 3:20, that save. That sequence was number one on Sportscenter’s Top 10 that evening, and I’m still in awe of it. And you can see it, right there in that video.

Ta is an IUSTV beat reporter for men’s soccer, which is in the national championship tournament yet again. He also published today an interview with the team’s head coach and one of the young players. He also covers soccer in his native Thailand and runs podcasts and a video channel and who knows what else. Oh, and he’s also a student. The guy is tireless.

It helps to be tireless in student media. It’s almost a prerequisite.

After which I re-read the first three paragraphs on this post and laughed.

IU / photo / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Pushing right on through
10
Nov 21

Pushing right on through

I showed off the famous fall foliage parking deck shot last Tuesday. So it seems only fitting to revisit that for a close-up shot. Here is our close-up.

That’s not too bad, is it?

Here’s the view from inside the building. I like to tell prospective students and their parents about our brand new 114-year-old building. Some of the things in it are original. And they added some things in the renovation before we opened it up again as the Media School in 2016. This skylight, I tell them, is original.

It is not. And that’s my first laugh of a mini-tour. Hahah! Modern skylight fits right in with the older design! And also the elevator beneath it, too!

Those panes of glass are about two-and-a-half inches thick. And we can control their tint, though we seldom take it off the auto settings. That’s fun, sometimes, too, when the clouds are really blowing by. You can be standing there under all of that glass and sudden the whole room changes. You wonder if it’s neurological or technological, every time.

All of that glass weighs the same as about nine Volkswagen Beetles. So I don’t stand under it for too long, I tell visitors. Hahah! Another joke! This is going to be a great tour!

And that’s about where I stop telling jokes.

There might be another joke in there somewhere, I’m not sure. I haven’t given a tour in ages. Not that I miss them. I was never quite sure why I got asked to do them from time-to-time. I only had the two jokes.

Today’s look, an old Thomas Pink shirt, an old V&C tie and a new pocket square.

All of that under my 2009 Canadian poppy, for Remembrance Day and Veteran’s Day.

Back int he studio tonight, with the sports gang. We’ll have some of their shows to enjoy later this week. For now, we can take in the news shows, which were produced last night. See the pattern?

This is the news show, and that’s another freshman on the desk. They’re building for the future and the future is now. Pretty cool to see that happening.

Here’s the pop culture show. They shoot these two shows back-to-back. To their credit, they’ve turned that into a smooth operation lately.

And here’s a sports show that got posted online today. It’s produced in another studio, and out in the field. This show is full of underclassmen, just taking the ball and running with it, so to speak.

That’s part of the tour, too, when I give it. Enroll here, show up, get involved right away. It’s amazing what you can do right away. Right away is the only way.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →