Some friends of ours recently made a short film (they're officially in IMDb) that got into the Sarasota Film Festival, so Kelly and I had to check it out. It screened with eight other short family-friendly films on a Saturday morning, and there was good turnout for the two locally-made titles in the set. I enjoyed our friends' comedy and laughed along with everyone else, and I was impressed by several of the other movies too. Short films don't get much respect, but there's often so much more originality and experimentation in them. We ran into some other old friends in the audience and shared a long lunch afterwards catching up about old times and mutual friends. What a great start to the weekend. I need to get out to this annual film festival more often.


Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

Signs of Summer

The recent Florida wildfires have been a nasty reminder (I drove through one burned-down forest and it was a terrible sight), but if you need any more indication that summer is here, just step outside: It's scorching. Apparently one local still didn't think it was hot enough to take precautions, as evidenced by the recent explosion in the parking lot when we pulled into a strip mall for lunch. An entire trailer had burned into ash with only a skeletal frame and two melted tires remaining. Go »

Pigeon Panic

Since Adrianne doesn't permit replies to her posts, I'll link it here: Poisoned pigeons fall from sky in Texarkana. The chain of events is too bizarre not to reiterate: A pigeon flew into a bank and defecated on a customer, so the bank put poisoned grain on the roof hoping to drive away the pigeons. Instead, dozens of birds flopped dead on the ground downtown – right during the city's annual festival. Go »

Gothic Conclusion

Gothic Earth was played for the last time on April 14, finally completing a long campaign that I was worried at times would wind up abandoned before we could finish it. You can read the entire storyline now. I'll leave the website online through August 31. Go »

Rethinking Forrest Gump

Inspired by a conversation this past weekend, I've been thinking about the once-popular movie Forrest Gump. It has fallen out of favor with people who prefer its contemporaries Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption and believe it robbed them of Oscars, but to me all three films are good. Gump succeeds because of a lot of factors, but consider its acting and its visual effects. Go »

Eschew Obfuscation

For any FIN players wondering where in the hell the game is: I used my little free time over last weekend writing a mini-post – three whopping paragraphs – and at the end of the weekend I just couldn't bear to publish it so short. (The title of this post was the planned title of that post.) I have now rearranged my social so that weekends are more free, and one thing I plan to do with the time is resume writing FIN, starting this weekend by expanding my three paragraphs into more like three pages. Go »

Happiness, That's My Livelihood

Somehow I've agreed to teach HTML & PHP classes on Friday mornings. Two down, at least two to go. I enjoy teaching, and you know I enjoy making websites, but the getting-up-before-dawn-at-the-end-of-a-long-week part is agony. Go »