My Blog

Vegas!

tjcrowley — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:42:29 GMT

I am in Vegas. Today I won a bunch of money on slots, and I am going to shoot guns tomorrow. My sideburns make me look like Elvis.

Vegas Baby!

tjcrowley — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:52:56 GMT

I am going to be in Las Vegas from August 17th through August 22nd. If you think you might be as well, hit me up!

TONIGHT at the Fillmore

tjcrowley — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:49:14 GMT

I'll be working for my stepfather's band, THE MUTANTS, in their show with Flipper and the Avengers. Doors open at 7, get there early!

London After Midnight?

tjcrowley — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:38:14 GMT

So, if you are a complete nut about horror movies then you probably know about the infamous LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. Most of my readers will think I'm talking about a particularly overwrought band from Los Angeles, but in reality this is the title of perhaps one of the more infamous "lost" films in movie history. When you start talking about lost silent films, the two that always come up are the 10 hour version of GREED (based on Frank Norris' MCTEAGUE, another of my dear San Francisco novels) and LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT starring the infamous Lon Chaney. Filmed in 1927 as a silent film, this film was assumed to have been lost in a fire at a film vault in 1967. You see, these old movies are shot on silver nitrate film. Films from this era are literally explosive -- a lit cigarette can make them burst into flame. This film was also a victim of the changover from silent to "talkies" -- the first talking pictures were starting to come out, and while LAM was a huge financial success for the film studio, it quickly went into storage because the number of silent theatres quickly dropped to zero by 1935. Lon Chaney was in talks to be the main character of a new Tod Browning talking picture called DRACULA when he died in 1930, and the role went to a foreigner named Bela Lugosi. MGM took the film completely out of circulation and then 40 years later the last copy was supposedly destroyed in that fateful fire. Or was it? A blogger with a horror blog website has stated that he actually HELD a print of LAM in his hands in 1998 (see http://thehorrordrunx.yuku.com/topic/753 for details and backstory) . I've been sitting on this story for a few days to see if anything shakes out, and in the meantime I've been asking film professionals on my own about it. I know an awful lot of film buffs and Folks Who Would Know. While they all say that it's possible a print survives in some really wretched collector's hands, this story is more than likely a complete fabrication. The suspicious traits are there -- the blogger references a "Ted Newsom" in the post that turns out to be another poster on the same website with over 8500 posts to his name -- seems really suspicious. Add to this the fact that the people running this website have some kind of imaginary competition going on with RUE MORGUE magazine, and the entire thing just screams LET'S GET HITS TO OUR WEBSITE. In that respect they have succeeded, because this story made the pages of Aint It Cool news -- plus it's coming out during Comic Con so I am sure they will be the talk of that convention. I really want to believe this story. Unfortunately, I also understand that human beings are greedy, selfish, lying bastards as a whole. I apologize if you are fans of the Horror Drunx website, but they've purposefully spread a story that can only be proven correct when the film is found and can't be disproved at all and is quite unbelieveable. I can tell you one thing -- if I had found a copy of LAM in a film vault in 1998, I would have probably tried to take it with me or at least NOT LET IT OUT OF MY HANDS until I could find someone who knew the importance of the film. This part of the story just doesn't ring true. Any film buff would tell you the same thing. Harry Knowles (of AICN.com) has stated that he would pay $10,000 plus airfare to whereever it was being shown just to see it. If this guy had his wits about him, he could have stolen the print and been set for life -- a collector would pay millions for it. If this is true that's awesome, but more than likely it's an opportunistic lie. The refrain everyone is hearing from the Horror Drunx folks is "Prove us wrong!" when in reality the burden of proof is on them. In a perfect world, these people would be run out of town on a rail for being such idiots, but sadly it's probably just going to get them more traffic.

Do a favor for this tired tribe.net employee!

tjcrowley — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:55:14 GMT

To all my friends: Please go VOTE for Siobhan O'Neill for the open spot on the interim board of the Social Media Club</A>. She's a great pick for this spot and will do a great job! Click on this URL to vote: http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2008/07/14/vote-for-the-42nd-interim-board-member

Just saying.

tjcrowley — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:25:13 GMT

If MySQL had a head, I would shoot it.

My summer vacation, July 2009

tjcrowley — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:20:41 GMT

I have decided that I need a vacation. In the spirit of that, I have decided to start taking regular vacations. Next year, I have decided that I am going to go to Guam during July of 2009. I have a place to stay on Guam. I believe I'll stay there the whole month. The interesting bit about this is that I can work from there if I really have to. I will try not to, though. Since I have flight priveleges on Delta, I am going to fly from San Francisco to Tokyo, and take another plane that is a Delta partner from Tokyo to Guam. This is sure to be a surreal experience, as I don't expect to disembark at Tokyo but I've started trying to get my passport and a visa to at least look around Tokyo for a few days. The main reason I want to go is closer to Guam though. There is a total eclipse of the sun on July 22nd, 2009. I want to see it. So far, the expense for this trip has been minimal. This makes me happy, it seems to be all coming together rather handily! This is the way everything has been happening to me lately. I doubt it will happen, but I have my feelers out for a trip to Iwo Jima. It is right in the middle of totality. Barring that, I will charter a boat to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I want to charter a boat to take me to latitude 24.2199N, longitude 144.1182E from 1pm to 3:30pm on July 22nd. This is an interesting thing to plan, too.

The Sun shines on Tribe.net

tjcrowley — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:20:56 GMT

So, today I basically got the go-ahead to go full speed ahead with the rewrite project. I have convinced management that I know how to scale Ruby on Rails. I think you folks should get not only the most stable but the shiniest and the coolest toys to play with, since SOME of you are paying for it. Because of this, I've entered into talks with Sun and MySQL to run the next version of tribe.net on nothing but Sun Microsystems equipment with Enterprise level database support. We're also going to be using some bleeding edge technologies like computing clouds to make this as cost efficient as possible. I know this is probably wacky moon talk to more than a few of my friends and people reading it, but these are all good things. Because of Sun's support for this project, I feel a lot more comfortable pushing the bleeding edge of what can be done. I'm also having fun looking at machines with four processors in them and 256 GB of RAM. That Sun product catalog is a lot like porn to me, except you can't get a PDF sticky. One of the things that I am particularly proud of is throwing tribe's gauntlet into the ring of making Ruby on Rails scalable. I'm not the brightest person on the planet, but it seems like this shouldn't be rocket science. We also have two interns working on Ruby on Rails and AJAX/UI code for us, and you'll probably be thanking them more than me for the minor tweaks that tribe.net has needed for a year or so now. The new timeline goes a little like this: Proof of concept (July 9th) Beta test roll out (August 1st) Tribe.net 3.0 rollout (September 1st) Due to certain efficiencies in coding in Ruby on Rails, we may have the beta-test sooner rather than later. Paid subscribers will have the first whack at the new Tribe.net servers, as we're setting up the cluster specifically for them first. Once we have the bugs shaken out, we'll launch the site for all members. In other words... ask Mark Pincus if you see him at Burning Man!

Friend from Atlanta!

tjcrowley — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:54:21 GMT

One of my old friends from Atlanta is here. She's leaving tomorrow. If you have been wondering why I've been so quiet, that's why. I haven't seen her in 20 years! SO WEIRD TO SAY THAT.

My Birthday -- May 15th, National Perverts Day

tjcrowley — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:26:03 GMT

So, evidently because of my FABULOUSLY WONDERFUL BIRTHDAY PRESENT OF JERRY FALWELL CROAKING ( see tjcrowley.livejournal.com/448814.html ) last year, May 15th has been officially dubbed NATIONAL PERVERTS DAY. I first found out about this early this morning from Twitter, and a quick search of the web confirmed that yes, some people were celebrating it. Of course, I heartily endorse this holiday. I'm going to one step further and suggest that folks celebrating National Perverts Day wear purple. This is the same thing they do in England for National Fetish Day (March sometime?) and it'd be neat to have some kind of tradition on May 15th. So wear purple on May 15th for National Perverts Day, my birthday. I've only found two supporting links on the net for documentation, and most of them are posts to bulletin boards -- but from some very prominent folks in the sex-positive blogosphere. It seems to be very grassroots, so I'll throw my own support behind it.

How Weirde

tjcrowley — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:26:38 GMT

Today I am taking a short break from tribe stuff to go to the How Weirde Street Faire ( http://www.howweird.org ). If you're down there, I'll be in a fez that says "HILLBILLIES" in rhinestones across the front.

Hitler died today.

tjcrowley — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:02:47 GMT

And I made a new tribe. It's http://tribes.tribe.net/hitlerchannel -- devoted to slightly offbeat fans of the History Channel. Feel free to join. Please note that although I moderate this tribe, it does not in any way, shape or form represent tribe.net or anyone else that works for tribe.net. I just have to say that in case the bosses lose their sense of humor.

The Big Announcement -- tribe.net 3.0

tjcrowley — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:25:16 GMT

The big news is basically that we are completely rewriting tribe.net. We'll have it relaunched in July. I have a deployment schedule that is fairly ambitious, and we are nailing that down right now. It's going to basically look the same, but there will be a lot of improvements that will make the site faster and far more stable. It will also have all of the old data that isn't complete cruft, such as your friends that have been active in the past two years, your blogs, your tribes and tribe posts... everything. I will probably release a press release in the near future (say this week?) about this. This will detail the Roadmap towards the release date, and then you'll see when you'll be able to try out the beta of the new site. We have already picked people to be the alpha testers. There are some pretty big names associated with this press release, and it's been about 4 months in the making. In the meantime, make sure everyone that wants to keep their tribe.net account logs in! Tell your friends about this, please.

I have a stalker!

tjcrowley — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:11:05 GMT

Read my livejournal! -- http://tjcrowley.livejournal.com/tag/pacione

The George W. Bush Memorial Sewage Plant

tjcrowley — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:49:05 GMT

"The Presidential Memorial Commission (http://www.presidentialmemorial.org) is proposing a ballot initiative for November 2008 to rename the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Plant the George W Bush Sewage Plant." They are meeting at Zeit(geist!) next Wed at 6p to recruit ppl to help get signatures for a ballot initiative. They need I think 8000 sigs. I think this is quite a worthy project... Darren's Note: This is five flavors of awesome sauce! I support this.

You guys saved tribe.net

tjcrowley — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:32:57 GMT

So, I went to lunch today at Zynga (http://www.zynga.com), Mark Pincus' new venture that makes poker widgets for Facebook and MySpace. Eating lunch with A.T. (tribe's CEO) in the conference room, I talked with him about the overhead for tribe.net and gave him my impressions of how much money we're making off Google ads and premium subscriptions. Since we launched premium subscriptions, they've expanded to fill 20% of total tribe revenues per month, which is pretty nice! What's even better news, though, is that tribe.net is breaking even for the first time in MONTHS (maybe years! maybe ever!) If things stay exactly the way they are, tribe will be around as long as we want it to be. Of course, the other good news is that people are slowly coming back to tribe.net -- traffic is up from December and the horrible unsolicited email I sent out last month actually made some folks remember that they had a tribe account -- we've gained an average of 5000 people per day since then and the number is slowly going up. I'm implementing some additional code later this week that will hopefully drive more traffic to tribe (and increase our google revenue!) -- I am adding the "AddThis" ( http://www.addthis.com) widgets that you see on MySpace and similar sites now, so you can crosspost individual tribe.net photos, threads, and other content to DiGG, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Tribe is doing a lot better, but the big problem now is to make tribe.net relevant again. I thin k it's totally doable, but once again I'm going to need your help with this. I just have to thank all of you folks who subscribed -- it's because of you folks that tribe.net is still around and is starting to actually thrive. I'm more than a little burned out after being on call 24/7 for a full year, but today's news has really lifted my spirits.

Los Angeles bound -- April 25th-27th

tjcrowley — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:30:22 GMT

I am going to Los Angeles for the FANGORIA WEEKEND OF HORRORS later on in April. Is anyone else on my friends list going? http://www.creationent.com/cal/dod.htm I will probably have a room at the hotel, we may have to have some kind of party!

Family Relations

tjcrowley — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 04:39:51 GMT

I just got an account on Ancestry.com. I know pretty much my entire family tree back to the 1500s, so it was good to have some verification. However, things took a decidedly abnormal bent when I decided to start creating family trees for serial killers. Richard Ramirez, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy. You knwo, those guys. I stopped right after I figured out I am distantly related to Ted Bundy. This explains more than I want it to.

April Newletter

tjcrowley — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:13:05 GMT

It's about that time of the month where I start to write the April Newsletter. I haven't thought about it all month. I need some content. I'm going to be searching tribe.net for things to point people at. Crafty Vixens comes to mind, as if they need the traffic. As far as everything else goes, I have to think about it a lot. I used to like writing. These days I am not sure I'm angsty enough for it. I gave a copy of my novel to Jan last night for her birthday, since I know she's a reader. We'll see how she likes it -- it was written at a time when I shared a 7 bedroom, 7 bathroom victorian with a bunch of other dysfunctional weirdos, and it includes a lot of people we both know but aren't named. She'll like how some of them die. These days it's a chore. It almost makes me wish I was a depressed mess again.

A day of rest

tjcrowley — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:10:45 GMT

In celebration of the day Jesus rose from the dead to eat your brains, I am going to go to Zeitgeist and celebrate the birthday of my friend Jan. I'll be there from 12:30pm onward. I loves me some Jan, she's one of the few true friends that'll come to my dinner parties every week. She's a hermit like me most of the rest of the time -- when I asked her if she was going out on Friday night, she wrote me back saying "Why the fuck would I want to do that?" Well, I just want to see her outside. This only happens once a year. I need some sun myself, keeping this website running is making me a bit weird.

Real White Trash Gumbo

tjcrowley — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:10:47 GMT

This recipe is modified from a recipezaar recipe, but it confuses their recipe keeping system so I am posting it here for posterity. 1 cup rice 1 teaspoon butter 1/4 lb whatever we have in the fridge sausage (hot dogs count), cut lengthwise and thinly sliced 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 bell pepper, chopped 8 ounces fresh okra or 8 ounces frozen okra, sliced 1 (14 ounce) can stewed tomatoes other leftover tomatoes in the fridge any other leftovers in the fridge, onions, cucumbers, jalapeno peppers 1/2 lb medium shrimp, whole with the heads and everything because that's the last thing in the fridge. The day before you go to the grocery store, clean out the fridge. Cook rice according to package directions omitting salt. Melt butter in 4 quart pot over medium high heat. Add sausage; saute until it's browned, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Let frozen okra thaw, pieces separated, for about 5 to 10 minutes before slicing it. Stir in bell pepper,okra,tomatoes,cayenne and shrimp and whatever else you have added to the gumbo. Cover pot, and bring gumbo to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer gumbo until shrimp is pink and cooked through, about 10 minutes. Serve over rice.

Part of the problem... and how to fix it.

tjcrowley — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:03:19 GMT

I think part of the problem with tribe.net is that it can do so many cool things without much explanation. For example, if you take a look at my profile, I've added my last.fm XSPF feed, my Flickr account RSS feed, my Recipezaar RSS feed (although this one needs some work) and my Livejournal feed. You can add some of these to the home page, but it's not obvious to the end user (anyone who isn't me, I guess) exactly how to do any of these things. In the upcoming months, I want to learn how to write these drop-in modules for tribe and extend its functionality for the end user. I am working on my first one, a livejournal plugin for the home page. I can add one for just about any service (MySpace, etc) this way, and if I do this sort of easy hack then maybe folks can see the real potential and help me develop the site further into a full-fledged hub for keeping track of your social networking sites. Here is a list of the sites I'm on, tribe.net first and then the rest in the order that I joined them on. I know enough about each of these to write a basic plugin for each. 1) Tribe.net http://people.tribe.net/tjcrowley 2) Friendster http://profiles.friendster.com/40141 3) RecipeZaar http://www.recipezaar.com/member/48416 4) LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=1239005 5) Livejournal http://tjcrowley.livejournal.com 6) MySpace http://www.myspace.com/tjcrowley 7) YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/tjcrowley 7) Orkut http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=13149267762811006230 8) Twitter http://twitter.com/tjcrowley 9) Bebo http://www.bebo.com/DarrenM1904

Hooray for UPS Man!

tjcrowley — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:18:27 GMT

I finally have copies of my novel in my hands. I have three copies, one of which will be loaned out to people and two which are going on my shelf. I have the unfortunate problem of people borrowing my copies of it and never giving it back to me. ALSO: If you buy a copy now, it's 'second edition'. The first edition had a gross and icky cover, because way back when lulu.com had only gross and icky covers. The second edition has a nice white on black cover, and I am going to have my friend Andy draw a new cover for it as soon as he reads the book. If you want a copy of my novel (and I'll even sign it if you bring it to me!) then go to http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=138768 and buy one! City Of Apocrypha (book) Print: $14.98 Download: $5.91 A group of roommates in San Francisco try to make sense of supernatural weirdness that happens near the end of the world as we know it. Originally published as a serial on the SF Goth ERRATA webzine. Recommendations from other writers: "City of Apocrypha is one of my favorite novels of all time, a tale with as strong a sense of place as any I've read." -- Poppy Z. Brite

Zombie Strippers!

tjcrowley — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:32:56 GMT

I just won a contest to see this movie on April 19th at the Lumiere in SF (walking distance from my place!) I had to name 3 GOOD movies made in 1977. It's not hard. Can you do it? STAR WARS is a gimme... (for the record, I picked... Annie Hall, Star Wars, and Suspiria)

St. Patrick's Day

tjcrowley — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:32:01 GMT

I am going to spend all St. Patrick's Day drinking Dr. Pepper. Tonight I am going out to Death Guild ( http://deathguild.tribe.net ) so be forewarned. I am trying to get a special celebrity guest appearance to come to the club with me. Come say hi!