Tahoe Update

The Orphans Forum crew are having their annual leadership retreat in Tahoe.
Former Forum regular Makoto Agnoli was kind enough to host us in the Alpine Cabin.

Makoto's also been documenting the weekend, but now that he's no longer a contributor I've been forced to shamelessly leverage his content.

So instead of 75 photos and 2 incoherent sentences, you get the following, pulled from the Agnoli Posterous:

Girl Problems vs Lack of Girl Problems

"Girl problems?" or "Lack of girl problems?" To this day, I'm not sure which is worse.

Apparently, J Simpson has a new "fuller figure",... dont worry Makato, she falls outside of your desired range because of her height as well.

Fort Pointless

Having long ago figured out that wide-angle lenses make every wave look the same, I dragged myself out to Fort Point yesterday to shoot a different background.

One of the old-time dick locals paddled up to me and said, "I just figured out that you're one of the most hated people in Surfing!"

"Yup," I replied. "They don't just hate me in San Francisco now."



more on flickr

Hollow Victory?

Hey Y'all.
For those of you who don't know, corporate drone Makoto has conceded in our battle for supremacy. He left this note in the comments last night:

"huh, since when did this become lewis' blog?
its kind of fucked, i've lost control of my content.
I've decided to stop contributing, you guys can catch me on the one and only, original, not to be duplicated, not to be copied.
http://agnoli.posterous.com
later"

This brings up some good points. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Was I doomed to become a megalomaniacal despot from the moment I registered this blog, therefore seizing sole admin privileges? Or did I create this blog with Ryan and Avery standing by because I am a megalomaniac?

The Orphans Forum is all about community. I think of myself as that creepy guy who runs the AA meeting, not some tyrant. (Speaking of which: New members have to share eventually. Todd, we haven't heard from you yet. Dave - ditto. The group is here to support you.)

Anyway, I'm feeling a little bit guilty about casting brother Makoto out. Was I too harsh on him? Did the power go to my head? Who is going to provide us with irrelevant techno information now? Who is going to be our unfiltered, socially inappropriate, Moth Collector? Who will regale us with stories about what the 80s were like?

I feel a void already. If Makoto won't come back to us, we must nominate a replacement. Will this guy do?

Orphans forum makes the cut

The forum has made the cut! I am a creature of habit, and nothing so reflects this as in my initial web browsing when I start up my computer. Regardless of time or day, or whether I checked 10 hours or 10 minutes before, I follow a strict regiment. Check email, do a cursory surf check/surf news on Surfline, check the wind forecast (surprisingly, regular checking does clue you into unexpected sessions), browse the news and now check the Orphans Forum. What does this mean? Well, generally emails are blase or business, Surfline is never updated, the news is depressing and the wind has been pretty sour, so Orphans Forum can save my web session. Course that fails when the last post is the one I wrote or one Lewis wrote about getting barreled. Let's hear it!

War Escalates; Makoto Barred

Things have turned violent in the fight for supremacy between Corporate Drones and Surf Orphans.

After much internal debate amongst high-ranking Orphans Forum officials, Giovanni Makoto Agnoli has had his account temporarily suspended. Simply put, the only unforgivable sin is to be boring. Makoto's post below crossed the line in terms of humorless office nonsense. If he'd at least used some six-sigma terminology;phrases like "value-add" "low-hanging fruit" or "synergize our efforts" I might have let it slide as ironic.

To detail the reasons for this barring more completely, Makoto has his own Blog at http://agnoli.posterous.com/

Makoto has never actually written or posted anything specifically for Orphans Forum - instead he simply checked a box and all his Posterous posts are forwarded to Orphans Forum. We don't mind the pictures of old people. What sucks is that everyone else is embracing the concept of a group blog - we're writing our posts with our Orphan audience in mind, and in response to what everyone else is posting on the blog. That's what we envisioned for this site - a reply-all vibe amongst friends.

I've placed another poll in the sidebar. It's up to you to strive for peace and vote Corporate Drone Makoto back in... or not.

on the web nobody knows you are living your life in HD

hd video doesn't look so good on youtube, partly because its hard to get to the HQ version of movies. need to figure out how to get posterous to embed the hq url.
here are the settings I'm using to export from 1920x1080 iMovie to youtube. there's go to be a better way.

Posted via email from agnoli