Helios released an album of, well... unreleased material. I got it yesterday and have already incorporated a track into my junior film.
I love him.

White Blur from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This is something I created for my experimental video class a few months ago.
The assignment was to create an alternative way of seeing.

In this video, I started with an audio track, "White Blur" by Aphex Twin. I split the audio into two tracks, one with boosted treble and one with boosted bass. I then extrapolated key frames that reacted to each track's dominant frequencies. I attached a null object to those key frames so that the bass null would move forward on the z-axis and the treble null would move away on the z-axis. I parented a separate video clip to each null object, the bass being represented by a plant and the treble being represented by a lake.
After that, I just panned the camera back and forth to the rhythm of the audio because it wasn't as interesting when they were just moving on one axis.

Shot on: Canon HG10
Edited using After Effects
Music: White Blur by Aphex Twin

Window Sill from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This was an assignment for my Film Forum: Dance and Media class. We shot raw footage of a dancer and were given the task of editing it in any way we saw fit.
I unfortunately missed the day we filmed the dancer, but made do with the footage I received.

Dancer: Cassie Eckerman
Camera Operators: Joanna Revelle and Emre Ozdemir
Music: Window Sill by Aphex Twin

Shot on: Panasonic DVC30
Edited in After Effects

"Hi, leadfill (leadfill)

bjork (bjork) has requested to follow your updates on Twitter!"

pr x op from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This was an assignment in which we had to utilize text or speech.
The words have a correlation among them.

Should I add some sort of audio? Any ideas?

Echoes and Coral v.1 from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

This is something I was messing around with for one of my classes. Nothing too extreme going on. It stops kind of suddenly because it was late and I was tired. I might finish it out. Maybe not.

Shot on Canon HG-1
Music: Echoes and Coral by Colleen

2001: My journal will be created two weeks from this day.

2002: No posts on this day, but the following day my mom sent me out to the store in the snow and the store was closed. I was annoyed.

2003: Cody and I made a spur of the moment trip to Wildwood which was apparently a lot of fun. I remember that stinky ass motel room, ha.

2004: I discussed my disapproval with Charlize Theron being cast as Aeon Flux.

2005: I discussed my disapproval of being unfriended on here.

2006: Month long lapse of posting then a post about my DS friend codes.

2007: Months long lapse of posting then a post about my grades from my first semester at UArts. 4 As and 3 Bs.

2008: The obligatory "I haven't posted in a while" post.

Man. These history posts are a real drag. I need to jazz up my life.

These are all work related. I'm a bartender at a restaurant so a lot of my business comes from guests who are waiting for their tables. Here's what bugs me:

6a) I will always try to cash guests out as soon as possible even though we do have the ability to send bar tabs to get added onto dinner tabs. I try to cash the guests out myself because when I do transfer their check, 90% of the time the guest will not tip me. I don't know how people can feel comfortable walking away from the person who just served them without taking care of them back.

6b) Related to that, if a large bar tab has been transferred that I don't receive a tip from, we have a policy that we can ask the server who gets said transfer for 10% of the tab (so that we're essentially splitting the tip that should technically be mine) and a lot of the time, servers will complain about this, pointing out that we get tipped out at the end of the night for a reason. We get tipped out 1.5% from the servers at the end of the night. So that $85 check that your guests just left me out to dry from? I'm getting $1.28 for that in tip-out.

6c) Speaking of guests leaving the bar for their table, the stunt that really grinds my gears is when I don't cash them out right away and the next time I turn around, the guests are gone. No tip, no request to transfer, no thank you, no clue as to where they went, nothing. Who does this? It's just plain rude. When this is the case, I will print out a check and bring it to the table and make them pay me personally. You can't go into old navy to try on a shirt and then wear it over to the gap without paying for it. You can't take drinks from my bar and then vanish into thin air with them. So rude.

A lot of people say 'oh, that's pet peeve number such and such'. Well, usually it's all baloney.
Today, I'm officially starting my list of pet peeves so that I can say with confidence what my pet peeves are and bring them up to people by number, haha.
So without further ado, in random order, here's my list of pet peeves, to be built upon as I think of them.

Pet peeve number:

1) When someone uses up the last of the toilet paper, is civil enough to get a new roll, but doesn't take the old cardboard tube off of the dispenser and leaves the new roll on to counter, on top of the toilet tank, etc.

2) When someone leaves the sponge in the bottom of the kitchen sink without wringing it out so it becomes gross and smelly.

3) When someone leaves dirty dishes in the sink (which I'm not COMPLETELY opposed to), but doesn't put water in them so that by the time I get around to cleaning them, the food is fossilized onto them.

4) When someone uses my soap, shampoo, toothpaste, etc (which again, I'm not opposed to sharing) but uses the last of it and doesn't replace it so that when I go to use it, I don't have any.

5) When someone removes/relocates something that they have no reason to remove/relocate. For example, I have a pepper grinder that I need for work. One time, it went missing for weeks. I eventually found it in the hostess closet. Wtf?

To be continued.

Last night, I went over Dom's house. I played Twilight Princess while he ate dinner and watched me play. After that, we took a shower, made hot chocolate, and played old school card games, like spit and egyptian rat screw. When we were finished with that, we watched Monsters Inc. until we fell asleep. This morning, he made me homemade oatmeal with apples, walnuts, and maple syrup before I left for home.

This is why I'm so in love with him.

Ability/Disability from Christopher Galasso on Vimeo.

My school hosted a drawing marathon in which all students in the college of art and design participated in various workshops in place of their usual studio classes.
Those not interested in the 'drawing' aspect of the marathon were invited to document by way of film, video, or photography.

I opted to document and went to a workshop entitled 'Ability/Disability' in which the artists were required to draw in nontraditional ways.

In order of appearance in my video are drawing with appendages other than your hands, drawing while seeing in nontraditional ways, and using tools in nontraditional ways.

Shot on: Canon HG10
Music: Handlebars by Flobots

Please to be clicking here to watch it in full HD at Vimeo.

Where have I heard Jóhann Jóhannsson before?

Dom and I are obsessed with Superjail.

My brother got me an Apple gift card thinking that I could use it on iTunes. I found out today that you can't use Apple gift cards at the iTunes store. You can, however, use an Apple gift card to buy an iTunes gift card.

What kind of logic is that?

So now I'm waiting 2 - 7 business days so that I can get the iTunes gift card that I just bought for myself using the Apple gift card.

I upgraded to Leopard a couple weeks ago and forgot to backup my iTunes playlists and stuff, so now I have to start all over making playlists and rating stuff.

Son of a-

The rules are as follows:
1. Put your mp3 player or computer music player on random.
2. Post the first four lines from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song (Skip repeat artists and any instrumentals.).
3. Post, and let your friends guess which song and artist the lines come from.
4. No Googling! Don’t cheat!

( Check it. )

Here's a couple things because a little more procrastination never hurt anyone.

I've been test driving the BlackBerry Storm since Sunday. Dom is a manager at VZW and can get company phones whenever he wants, so he gave me this one for a few days to see if I like it. So far, I like it a lot. The touch screen is really easy to use. In comparison to the LG Dare, which I currently have, I very rarely have trouble clicking things that I want to click because of the Storm's clickable screen thing. There's also a function where if your thumbs are just plain too thick to hit a link properly, you can activate a cursor that you you can move around with your thumb to more accurately click things. I've never been good at using qwerty keyboards with my thumbs, but I'm getting pretty good at this one. Some people have asked if typing is slow because of the clickable screen, but the only thing I've noticed with that so far is that you should only really have only one thumb actually touching the screen at a time when you click, otherwise you often trigger the wrong letter. I've never used a BlackBerry before, but I like how it's in constant connection with your email and all. In fact, it saved my tail from failing a class yesterday. I didn't know I had a crit yesterday until my prof wrote me 40 minutes before my assigned slot. If I didn't have the BlackBerry on me, I wouldn't have gotten that email until late last night and would have probably failed my class.
I also like how you can have multiple programs running at once, like a browser window, AIM, and VZ Navigator, for example. This way, you can look up a local restaurant on Navi, open google and get reviews, then IM the results to someone without quitting out of each program. Like I said, I'm new to BlackBerrydom so I don't know if this has always been standard on BlackBerries, but I like it.
Some complaints: It's impossible to text and drive using qwerty and I'm not really good at typing in T9 on it yet. Sometimes while typing a message, I'll accidentally click above the keyboard, which hides it causing me to have to open it again manually. There's just a few dumb things like that. Overall, I'd say that I like it a lot and I'll probably end up getting it.
I guess that is all.

Since teebag37 is LATE, here's a ( survey )

I took this photo at Philadelphia's protest against Proposition 8 on Saturday.

It gives me so much hope for the future to see children being not only taught, but exposed to the values of human rights.

Remember pictures like this?

Children don't understand God, politics, and America. Children aren't born homophobic. But children do understand love.

Who would you rather have running the country when we're old and gray?

List the Top 25 from your Last 3 Months list
1 Björk

2 Goldmund

3 Benoit Pioulard

4 Helios

5 Aphex Twin

6 The Microphones

7 Sigur Rós

8 Colleen

9 The Smashing Pumpkins

10 Ice Cream Creatures

11 Bloc Party

12 Faure Gabriel

13 The Presets

14 Nine Inch Nails

15 Black Kids

16 Thrice

17 GirlJoy

18 múm

19 Magnet

20 The Notwist

21 Our Broken Garden

22 Part Timer

23 Kings of Convenience

24 Tool

25 A Perfect Circle

What was the first song you ever heard by 6? "The Moon", but the first I heard was a cover of it done by my friend Karen.

What is your favorite album by 2? Two Point Discrimination. So many different emotions coming from solo piano with no voice.

What is your favorite lyric that 1 has sung? "O ad vid hefdum aldrei sest, elsku vinurin godi."

How many times have you seen 11 live? Once, in Atlantic City.

What is your favorite song by 7? I think track one from ( ).

What is a good memory you have involving 20? The video Karen made of our trip to MD and NY that used the track 'Boneless'.

Is there a song by 3 that makes you sad? "The Loom Pedal" is pretty sad, but doesn't make me sad, per se.

What is your favorite lyric that 14 has sung? I've honestly never really cared for any of NIN's lyrics. They're always so angsty and trite.

What is your favorite song by 19? "On Your Side"

How did you first get into 22? I think from the group folktronica, but I've found a lot of stuff by them that I like.

What was the first song you heard by 21? "Ashes", which is still my favorite song by them.

What is your favorite song by 4? Depends on my mood really, but I really love "Land Father" which was an unreleased track of his.

What is a good memory you have involving 13? Listening to them in car with Virginia the day we became friends again.

Is there a song by 23 that makes you sad? Are you kidding me? Most of their songs make me sad. "Manhattan Skylines" for example. Lyrics: You know I don't want to cry again / I'll never see your face again / I don't want to cry again.

What is your favorite album of 15? Partie Traumatic is the only album of theirs that I have.

What is your favorite lyric that 9 has sung? "So let the sadness come again / On that you can depend on me, yeah / Until the bitter, bitter end of the world, yeah / When god sleeps in bliss "

What is your favorite song by 8? "Everyone Alive Wants Answers" has the most plays on my iTunes. Colleen is more atmospheric music though, not really for listening track for track.

How many times have you seen 5 live? None. I've never heard of him coming around.

What is your favorite album by 12? I'm not sure if this question is applicable for a classical composer.

What is a good memory you have involving 25? The band reminds me of spending time with my brother.

What was the first song you heard by 18? Jeez, I have no idea. It's been so long since I've been a fan of theirs.

What is your favorite song by 17? "It Was Sunny Once" is a good one.

What is your favorite album by 24? Aenima because it reminds me of high school.

How many of your top 25 have you seen live? 13. I'm disappointed at myself, but a lot of these bands don't travel much.