ChasingLilly.net

I just got back from a family trip to the beach and Busch Gardens. I wish I had pictures to share, but sadly I was just caught up with enjoying myself. Having a hotel room facing the beach was awesome, and Busch Gardens was much better than I remember it being. Did you know Busch Gardens was sold to the Sea World company? I had no idea! Anyways it was great, even with the predicted 104 degree heat index.

For the past few months I’ve felt rather devoid of good film ideas. We’ve talked over ideas for different web video series and such, but haven’t come up with anything solid. Even the Samuel Michaels mini-unfinished-story I worked on last semester was a stretch for me. And so we’ve just been filming more McGrimmy episodes. I guess Meet the McGrimmy’s has kinda become our semi-permanent fallback idea. My official excuse: after Will and I worked on the terribleness that “is” Island Wars for so long, I felt imaginarily drained. Not to mention how bad Island Wars as a whole was, which was discouraging.

Moping aside, I’ve been reinvigorated! Last week I ran across an old edition of “The Rebellion,” which was a book in an unfinished fantasy series I was writing as a 6-7 grader named “The Union of the Chosen”. I had forgotten how many great ideas I had, and how amazingly cool the story was. I had a whole history worked out, I had drawn maps and researched fantasy creatures, I had even written poems and songs for different groups in the fantasy world. And thus the light bulb was turned back on in my head. No, not in terms of fantasy writing, just ideas in general.

So I was hoping a trip to the beach would help clear my mind and start the creative process again. And whaddayaknow? As soon as I got home tonight I wrote down the five best ideas. I don’t want to say too much right now, but I definitely want to base a separate project off each of them eventually. Surprisingly, only two of them are sci-fi based, while the others deal with topics from suicide to neo-morals, even religion. Meh, I probably sound like a snob talking as if my projects are making an impact on the morals of our time. Don’t worry, I’m not a snob in that regard. However, I have already talked to Will about one of the projects and he loves it, so we’ll most likely start working on that one first. That is, unless we really do re-film Island Wars (which is currently being discussed). Yes, it was that bad.

So basically I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide, with only the information that more information is to come!!



Happy Trails,
Sam.

I mentioned a few posts ago that I was going to make a new homepage for chasinglilly.net, mainly because the one right now sucks. I want to make a simple yet elegant single page with large links to the blog, the band page, my twitter, and my facebook. I also want the page to include a feed of my latest tweets as well as a listing/summary of the few latest blog posts. Oh yeah, and I also want the background picture to either change every few seconds, or else change every time the page loads.

For a beginner in web design, a CSS template like that is pretty tricky. So far I’m working on the basic page look in Photoshop. It’s not finished yet, but in the screen shots below you can see the sort of look and feel I’m going for. The multiple shots show examples of different backgrounds the site would have. Obviously I want the backgrounds to look epic, and I’m going to make them all pictures I’ve taken (or else taken of me). (click pics to enlarge)

At the same time, I don’t want to look all cocky and have huge pictures of me show up every time someone loads the page, so I’m really trying to mix them up. Except for the third one, which was too cool-looking to leave out. So that’s it so far, I haven’t even gotten to the coding yet. Any thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? I’m trying to learn on the fly, and this is really a great way to figure this stuff out. Mo’ stuff ta come.



Happy Trails,

Sam.



P.S. – Keyboard Cat is awesome

Things are finally back to normal here at the Chasing Lilly organization (AKA my head). It took me way longer than it should have, but everything is now moved over to the new web host and working properly… at least as far as I can tell. I was having trouble with links to posts and the RSS feed, mainly that they apparently didn’t exist. That’s also the reason you haven’t been seeing any new LOST Podcasts the last three weeks. The RSS feed disappeared for it, so I figured posting a dead link on the blog here would be pretty useless. Don’t worry, though, I’ll upload the ones we missed and continue on until the series premiere in two weeks, Sunday, May 23rd.

I’m currently writing a big LOST note to the entire fan community and everyone who has helped make the show over the years. You can consider it my early LOST farewell letter.

I have many other posts in the mix to put up as well. But I figured I’d give you all a quick update as to what’s going on and that I do indeed still exist in the land of the living!

Happy Trails,
Sam.