A couple of days ago, we were graciously added to the Life section of Alltop. It feels great to be listed alongside of some of the “big fish” blogs, especially since we never thought we’d ever have this kind of opportunity.

We also have another exciting announcement! We will have our first guest blogger August 12th thru the 18th while Lindsay and I are away. Our guest blogger is Brent Weichsel from The Underdevelopment Podcast. We actually aggregate his content in our sidebar, so if you want to check his work out visit “From The UDP” in our sidebar. Also, be nice when he arrives please.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts from students about college and how hard or easy it has been for them. Reading so much about college has made me worried about even applying. I still have a summer or two until I start applying, so I know I have long enough to work things out in my head. The performing arts colleges and universities I want to attend are very hard to get into though. Carnegie Mellon University is my first pick, my second is the New York City Tisch School of the Arts, and my third is Marymount Manhattan College. I’ve always known that I wanted to attend a performing arts college or university and major in theatre or drama. Being a professional actor, this would be natural, but I also know that I want to minor in a subject that has to do with online advertising. I’ve become more interested in online advertising in the past year, and I believe that type of job would be a great back up against an acting career.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten the facts out, back to why I’m worried about even applying. I’ve always known that I have wanted to attend college in New York City or the Philadelphia region, but now I’m not quite sure if I want to leave the state I currently live in. I’m not sure if I want to live on my own in a different state right away. The problem with that is the colleges and universities in Delaware aren’t that great, and don’t focus on the arts as much as I would like. I guess a lot of students run into this problem at some point, well, maybe. I know at this point in time I don’t think I could live in a different state attending a college, and feel comfortable with it. I like living in my own house. I’m hoping that this is just a “short term fear,” and that I over come it come the actual applying time.

I’ve thought about solving this living out of state fear by maybe attending an online college for advertising and than attending a graduate performing arts school like The New School, because I know after finishing two or three years of attending an online college that I would definitely be comfortable with moving to a different state and attend a college or university.

There are a few other smaller things I’m worried about, but I know they could be fixed easily.

But ya’ know, in a year or two I could feel completely different than I do now, and I probably will. Just gonna’ sit back and hope for the best.

If you are currently entering college and have had the same thoughts as mine (or close), than I’d love to hear your opinion or advice, whether it be good or bad.

Last night I was given a screener of The Dark Knight, because I’m not able to get out and see it right now and I wanted to see the movie and review it desperately. I have been excited about The Dark Knight since it was announced that they would be recreating batman again.

Can Christopher Nolan make it any clearer that The Dark Knight, sequel to Batman Begins, is about Batman’s free fall from stratospheric heights to subterranean depths?

The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind numbing thirty two minute epilogue.

It’s a broody mix of urban chaos that catches and runs with a throwaway comment once made by actor Michael Caine (who reprises his role as Alfred, Batman’s servant). As he put it, Superman is how America sees itself, and Batman is how the rest of the world sees America.

If so, and it has that clang of truth, then the world sees the States as a place where:

1. Gangsters and terrorists hold cities in a grip of fear;

2. Mayors and district attorneys are overwhelmed by the rising crime wave;

3. Heroes and villains wear masks;

4. And the public isn’t told the truth.

A grim snapshot of America in the wake of 9/11?

In the middle of the film between reluctant hero and arch-villain, the Joker has the edge, in both meanings of the word. His face a smear of Kabuki-white, his eyes circled in black to suggest bottomless sockets, and his mouth has a slash of bloody red, the Joker is unnervingly creepy, but brilliant.

Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates creepy. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter creepy. Ledger bobs his head, bares discolored fangs, and flicks his tongue to intimidate and snare his prey. Initially a muscleman for mobsters (led by Eric Roberts), the Joker by his chaos freestylings becomes the undisputed king of Gotham City’s underworld.

Is it sad to see the late Ledger on screen? Surprisingly, it is not. While the prospect of his last complete performance gave me anticipatory melancholy, thirty seconds in I responded not to Ledger as the Joker but to the Joker himself. Believe the buzz: This unsettling, mesmerizing performance is indeed Oscar worthy. Heath Ledger entirely blew me away with his performance.

The Dark Knight contemplates good and evil as if they were forces illustrating Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Batman’s crime busting incites the Joker’s equal and opposite criminal reactions. The screenplay written by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, is compulsively symmetrical that way. It also results in a movie that is sadistic and unrelentingly grim, much more R than its PG-13 rating would suggest.

As the caped crusader behind the neoprene mask and beneath the molded muscle suit, the self-contained Bale speaks in a voice modulated rasp perilously close to Darth Vader’s timbre. I found his modulated voice some what annoying throughout the film. He moves like black lightning. His performance was at par I believe. I did not enjoy him as much as I thought I would.

Batman believes in rules and that there are no limits to his powers. The Joker disabuses him both conceits. To misdirect the diabolical mischief-maker, Batman and the police chief (Gary Oldman) conspire to make him believe that Batman is square jawed district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who is keeping company with Batman’s former girlfriend, Rachel Dawes (poorly portrayed by Maggie Gyllenhall, in the role originated by Katie Holmes). Which puts Batman in the position of making a political alliance with his romantic rival.

I believe that Nolan’s The Dark Knight emphasizes character not through personal style but through ideology, which doesn’t so readily lend itself to visual cues. Order is expressed by the cold, hard surfaces of modern architecture, social vulnerability by breaking glass (the windows in skyscrapers are perpetually shattering), anarchy by the smudge and smear of the Joker’s war paint and his unpredictable strikes.

I highly suggest that you see this film and I’d give the movie five out of five stars. This is also the time where I’d tell you where you can see the film online for free, but I’m not going to. This film deserves more than that.

On friday we decided to take a short trip up to Rehoboth, Delaware to see my Aunt Carr and our beach house that we are going to in August. The stay at my aunt Carr’s was interesting and innapropriate, but I don’t feel like getting into details, only because I don’t want to rethink it or have to see it again. The first night we went up we went over to the boardwalk at Rehoboth beach, which was okay I guess, it’s not one of my favorite board walks. There isn’t much to do there. We spent some time walking on the beach, than went back to my aunt Carr’s.

I didn’t get the chance to sleep that night, especially after the “it” I mentioned before. So instead of sleeping I spent some time writing and registered a .ME domain. I was going to try to register kyle.me the minute they became available, but I didn’t, and kyle.me is now gone. I registered classique.me, had a little talk with Lindsay, and now I don’t want the domain anymore. Haha. So, I’ve listed it on a couple domain seller websites. I than registered brash.me, since it’s one of the commonly used words when people have described me. I’m only going to use the domain for my email though. I’ve gotten tired of having a long email address. When I tell people it in person or over the phone I have to take the time to really spell everything, because no one can seem to spell dylan right, and because most people spell Conner as Connor.

Has anyone else registered a .ME domain?

Morning after Friday we were going to go on David’s boat, but it ended up that he decided to go fishing, and I really wasn’t in the mood to go fishing all day. We ended up going to the outlets and than going up to Fenwick Island, Delaware to see the beach house that we’ve reserved for August. We dropped my sister and her boyfriend off at the outlets, than I went to Old Navy to get a couple shirts. There wasn’t that much there.

After I left Old Navy my mother and I made the thirty minute drive to Fenwick Island. The area the beach house we reserved is in Bayside. Our Tom Tom took us to our address, and the place is great. The owners gave my mom the number combination to get in so that we could check it out. The layout of the house is very nice. There isn’t an internet connection in the house though >_<. What million dollar plus community doesn’t have internet in their homes? I’m hoping there’s some type of wifi sent out through the entire community though. If not than I’ll have to resort to Sprint’s internet on the HTC Touch that I just bought. I’m gonna’ be able to do mobile live streams through LiveCast as well now because of the new phone, which excites me for some reason.

Back on subject. Right before we were going to leave the bayside community my mom got a call from my sister. She and her boyfriend had committed theft and the outlet or store called the police. They were both arrested and took to the near Rehoboth police station. I had to sit in the van for about an hour and a half waiting for my mom to finish speaking with my sister and her boyfriend and officers inside, which wasn’t fun. At all. My sister and her boyfriend have to participate in community service now, I’m not sure if there’s anything else they were assigned to. Lindsay and I are skeptical about going back to Fenwick Island with my family in August now.

We’ll see what happens.

The second month we were paid late again. I brought up in our private forums that this is a breach of contract. Most of the other bloggers got pissed that I said this, but it is a breach of our contract. There is a reason we have a contract. If I worked at let’s say, Best Buy, I would expect to be paid on time from what my signed contract said as well, and if I wasn’t I would be mad. I would especially be mad if this was an ongoing problem. So I received my pay late again the second month. The blog network owner apologized again and said that he had set up an automatic system so that we would always be paid on the first of every month. I was very happy after hearing that news and hoped that we wouldn’t be paid late again because of this system.

A month moved by and my blog started going down quite often. I sent in support tickets to have it fixed and it normally would be fixed soon. The problem started getting worse though, and soon enough almost half of the blogs on the network were down. All of the bloggers who’s blogs were down were sending in support tickets, that’s including me. At this time the blog network owners assistant was going to give birth soon, so as you can expect she stopped working. We all wished her the best of luck and that we hoped to hear from her in the near future. After the blog networks assistant left our support tickets pretty much weren’t answered anymore. The blog network owner posted a post on our private forums saying that he had to switch all of our blogs to a different server and to hang in there. We did hang in there. He put our blogs on a different server and things were okay for a couple days and all of our blogs were up. A few days later half of our blogs went down again. Half of the bloggers, including me, started sending in support tickets again. The blog network owner than again posted a new post in our private forums. He said that since his assistant had left he had hired some new help and was busy training them and that our support tickets would be answered soon by them. He said he was going to look at why half of our blogs weren’t working, again. Our pay was also due by the end of this month, which we knew wouldn’t be a problem, because of the knew automatic pay system he set up. We wound up being paid late, again. At this point I was incredibly pissed. I had just joined this blog network and I was already paid late three times, which is bad. At this point I knew he had not set up a automatic pay system and there wasn’t any knew help that he hired.

The next month the blog network owner ended up having to order brand new servers, etc. He had told us that it would take two full weeks for all of the equipment to arrive. Half our our blogs were down for a full month. We did have lucky days where miraculously they were up, and we started blogging our hearts out. Yesterday, July 14th, my Philadelphia, PA blog was finally able to load and is fully up.

You can probably tell why I’m incredibly pissed already, but I’m going to outline the main reasons why I’m pissed.

- Our contract isn’t followed.
- We’re hardly paid on time.
- We’re lied to.
- We have no support.
- There’s hardly ever someone to answer our questions.

I understand that these server issues may not be controllable and that is why I’m not going to blame anyone for that. The server issues have just been very misfortunate.

I just expect certain standards out of a company. I shouldn’t even have to hope and expect that my contract should be followed. It should just be followed.

Why do I bother staying with a company that causes this much stress? I love the community of bloggers. They’re smart people, whether they like me or not. I speak my mind in the forums and don’t hold anything back and sometimes that pisses some of them off, but if I’m upset about something or have a question they usually come back with a great response. I believe that being in a blog network with a great community is better than being in a blog network that pays you high bucks and doesn’t have any of their bloggers interacting.

To view my contract click here (PDF).

Here is the contract I signed. I have taken off the blog networks name.

On July 5th Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reveled in a blog post about getting half of his Twitter followers subscribing to him on FriendFeed in half the time.

Of course they started to follow him on FriendFeed so much faster. When you have any number of people following you, at least half of them are going to check out something you recommend to them, especially people following you on Twitter. I mean, I click on every single link that someone that I’m following Twitters.

<sarcasm>Surprisingly</sarcasm> after Arrington published this post everyone started talking about which service is better and which service sucks. They’re trying to figure out which service is going to go mainstream first. Loren Feldman from 1938 Media even went as far to declare that Twitter is dead. So just because he “declares” Twitter “dead” and that since he likes FriendFeed better we should all switch to FriendFeed? Now I believe that he is completely wrong about Twitter being “dead.” Have you noticed that we haven’t seen the fail whale that much lately?

Here’s an example: a couple years ago when…ummm…Myspace?…Yah, Myspace, when Myspace came out it was brand new and we were all in complete awe. I bet you will never see a little Myspace obsessed kid using a service like Twitter or FriendFeed. Twitter and/or FriendFeed will probably never go mainstream, because tech isn’t mainstream, well, unless you start talking about an iPod. Yes, my sister uses an iMac and uses YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but she will never in her right mind watch Tekzilla (one of the best shows in the world!) If I were to ask her who Chris Crocker was she’d know though.

I think you get the gist of what I’m talking about. Reaching a mainstream audience will never be easy. I have two questions though, if you were shown Twitter and FriendFeed at the same time, which one would you join first? Would your non-tech siblings, parents, grandparents (ehh? ehh?), etc. join either of these websites and keep them up to date?

Ok, now that I’m done getting that out, time to move on. Lindsay and I will be going away on a little vacation with the rest of my family starting August 13th thru the 17th. We’ll be going down to Fenwick Beach in Delaware and we’ll be staying at a bayside beach house, which is amazing, and I’m surprised that we were able to get such a great place this late in the season. I really can’t wait to get away from this area. Ah, and we will probably be introducing live.omigod.net one of the nights while we’re on our short vacation, and you can be sure they’ll be a few live streams while we’re there as well.

Ugh! It’s 4:31 a.m., and I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, which means I’m going to bed.

Along with EVP and ITC there is the survival hypothesis. The survival hypothesis holds that we are nonphysical entities who are able to exist in the physical aspect of reality because of our physical body, but that when our physical body dies, we as Self, change our point of view to nonphysical reality. In effect, we exist before and after our current lifetime. 

Now I know there are several people who can’t even rap their minds around something like this and that they won’t even consider trying to believe it, but I do believe in EVP and/or ITC and that the survival hypothesis may possibly be true. I would love to know your opinion about EVPs and/or ITCs and the survival hypothesis. I would like to try and keep god, heaven, and hell out of the conversation if possible, which I know may be hard.

The picture above in the right hand corner was taken in Les Vegas, Nevada and was originally published in October 1995’s National Spiritualist Summit magazine. You can see a little boy taking his first steps. The picture was taken by the boy’s mother who is also the sister of the woman whose upper portion of her face is visible on the turned off television screen. A confirming point to this is that it is reasonable for the deceased sister to “show up” for the boy’s first step. The face was not visible when the picture was taken. I also know that this picture has been used in a preview for the movie, White Noise (while I said White Noise, check out SimplyNoise.com). Universal received permission to do so.

Here is an actual EVP. The EVP comes from Debra Ann who is a prolific EVP experimenter who has attempted to contact longtime ITC researcher, Erland Babcock, who has recently made his transition to the other side. Erland has contacted several AA-EVP members. 

Please see the image below to further understand the EVP.

Download audio file ((c)2006debra_caruso-were_among_the_living.mp3)

If you would like to hear more EVPs and/or ITCs visit the AA-EVP. I’m also sorry if I freaked you out, haha.

I loved that cat to death. This past year we really had grown more attached, he would normally never let me out of his sight. Since I started online school he became the only living thing that I could tolerate throughout the day. 

No, I’m not going to substitute him with another cat or any other animal. I don’t even want to deal with another animal. I know there are a lot of people that would recommend to get another cat, but cats aren’t like automobiles. When one dies you can’t just get another. I don’t think I’d ever have the same connection with another cat as I had with pookie. 

I do have another cat and two dogs, but truthfully, I don’t like them as much as I liked pookie. Buck, our other cat was like pookie’s brother. He’s been walking around the house looking for him. I don’t know what we’re going to do.

I regret not having enough pictures of him.

RIP, I love you.

Download audio file (04.%20The%20Promise.mp3)