Pete Austin’s Blog

Let me start by saying I love movies. I love raving about the standouts, ranting about the bombs, and debating the in-between. That said, anyone interested in movies also reads movie reviews. They’re the easiest way for us consumers to avoid spending $9 for the garbage that Hollywood likes to pawn off on us as entertainment. But of course, movies are very subjective. Even if you and another person like the same movie, chances are, you like it for different reasons. Movie reviewers are the same way. Sadly most movie reviewers mistake their job title for movie “critic” and do everything in their power to poke holes and generally complain about every movie they see. When I started college, the internet was just starting to boom and one of the sites that I discovered was movie-list.com (which is still around). On the site they featured the reviews of Canadian amatuer movie reviewer named Dean Kish (pen name: The Soothsayer). To this day I know almost nothing about Mr. Kish and it’s never been clear about how exactly someone in Canada got access to so many Hollywood screenings (most of them advance screenings). Nevertheless, Mr. Kish’s movie reviews were exceptional in that they were almost exactly in line with my own thoughts on the film. In fact I can say that in any given year’s worth of movie reviews I may have disagreed with 3-4. I can’t even recall how much money he saved me in potential movie tickets to movies that got a lot of hype but were actually horrible. His reviews were so dead-on that I just stopped reading any other movie reviewer’s commentary and relied solely on his.

Sadly, in early 2007 Mr. Kish reluctantly withdrew from his movie reviewing as a change in jobs prevented him from attending screenings. Later Mr. Kish changed jobs again into a role that involved him writing scripts for television and his contract further prohibited him from publishing movie reviews. So, in honor of Mr. Kish’s departure from movie reviewing I’ve decided to post reviews of the movies that I’m seeing using his four-star + comments system. These will not be extensive reviews or critiques in which I compare and contrast the stylist exposition of the director’s lighting or any other tedious bullshit. Just a simple star rating, summarizing comments, and whether the movie is worth buying, renting, or ignoring. I also will not be retroactively reviewing movies. I’m starting with what I see as of today.

Well, yesterday was my birthday. It’s really part of the reason why I haven’t been updating the blog much for the past couple weeks. I had final construction on my new kitchen, with my parents visiting Seattle, while trying to plan birthday festivities. Somewhere in there the blog got pushed to the side. But, all’s well that ends well and the kitchen is finally complete (and looks fucking awesome), my parents’ trip out here has been jam packed with good times, and I had a great birthday. The first game of this year’s Stanley Cup Finals also happened to be on my birthday so I got to watch Detroit rout Pittsburgh 4-0 (in HD of course).

I’m still trying to put together the image gallery for the blog but it’s taking a lot longer than expected to implement the design I want. At this point it’ll be done when it’s done. I’m preparing further content to post. Upcoming posts will include a two-part essay about where I think the digital media industry is heading. Interesting stuff coming.

Actually getting some content up on to my blog has taken so much longer than expected when it went live. This is almost exclusively due to the fact that Leah and I have been completely renovating our kitchen. Yes, completely. Cabinetry, floors, appliances, paint, and floors. The works. As of today we are officially done with the structural components and are just waiting on the countertop installation. We took lots of photos throughout the renovation and as soon as I can get the photo gallery section of the blog up, I’ll post them all. The before and after is pretty amazing and for the record, with help from Leah’s dad and sister Sarah, we did all of the cabinetry installation ourselves.

So did we learn anything from our almost two weeks of manual labor? Definitely.

1. Create a defined staging area to assemble materials and work out of. Unfortunately with our condo being a 1/1, we didn’t have this luxury and because of it our entire home has been in a state of chaos since work began. Seriously, just mounds of crap filling our once pristine abode.
2. A level is the single most important tool in cabinet installations. Usually a larger level that runs the length of the board is better, but we installed our entire kitchen using the only level we had, a tiny 6” one, and it turned out great. That’s how important it is.
3. If you can afford it, get a contractor to do the installation. We couldn’t – so we screwed ourselves, but it would have been really nice.
4. You will be without a kitchen sink for a month. Contractor or not, with a two week lead time between countertop templating (cabinetry finished) and installation it’s bound to stretch out to a month. Get ready to do your dishes in the bathroom sink, which leads me to my last point…
5. Make a resolution to get active once the kitchen is completed. Why? Because during the last month without a place to cook at home, you’ve subsided on a diet of Pizza, fast food, bar food, generally eating out, and then repeated the next week. Between the food and the stress you’ve probably put on a few. What did Leah and choose? Summer softball league!

So perhaps if you ventured into my little corner of the Internet (and you actually know me) you’re wondering why I would go and do something as vain and cliché as create a website for myself (with my name as the url no less). To which I would say that it’s no more vain and cliché than buying anything produced by Apple and parading it around with a sense of entitlement and superiority – but I digress. Truth be told, this website is my attempt at reestablishing my presence on the Internet. While I was in college one of my CIS classes required that you create a website for yourself which was then hosted on the school’s webserver dedicated to student pages. The great thing about this was that for some reason Google indexed these student pages the way an ivy-league grad student is recruited – highly. So, with almost no effort or cost my school webpage became the #1 search result for Pete Austin which of course made me “the most important Pete Austin in the world”. This was great because apparently there’s a video game developer in Britain named Pete Austin who gets a fair amount of industry press coverage and usually ranks higher than me. So ranking higher than someone who is actually recognized in the media for his work gave me a strange sense of accomplishment and self-importance.

Before you judge me for that, Google yourself and then tell me that it isn’t infuriating to see Google claim that all the other people with your exact same name are somehow more relevant to the world than you yourself. Yeah, I thought so. Which brings me back to my own motives. Upon graduating from college I was surprised to find that my student webpage was not automatically removed from their servers, but rather it remained online and ranked just as highly in most search engines. Unfortunately, in 2007 and after five years of free web-hosting on my alma-mater’s dime they completely overhauled the student pages webserver and simultaneously purged all non-current students’ pages.

The other thing that a blog grants me is time saved from trying to manage my profile and communications accross the different social networking sites, (Facebook, MySpace, & LinkedIn) thus the tagline. It’s sort of fun to try and track down old high school or college friends to try and digitally renew your friendship. But let’s face it you never really talk to them and about two weeks later the novelty has worn off. I’m done with social networking sites.

So here I am, back online again on my own terms. I guess maturity has stripped me of my desire to be “the most important Pete Austin in the world” but if you’re curious to read about what’s going on in my head and life – here you go.