Fact: You Are Amazing

I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who contributed to the classroom projects at donorschoose.org over the past week. Together, with me matching your donations, we raised $190 for several classrooms - three of which completed their funding at your hands! Two of those were looking for video cameras to allow students to learn film production and help them on writing assignments. Another classroom got a document projector to assist students in visual learning!

THANK YOU LETTERS FROM THE TEACHERS:

"A huge thanks to all of you for donating to this project. Because of your generosity my students will continue to grow into better and more excited writers. Seeing and hearing their excitement when I let them know the great news was amazing. They are already thinking of their next great idea to write about. Again, please know how much I appreciate your support of my students and their writing success."

"Thank you for your generous support and contributions to our student-produced television project! The camera and media that your donations provide will be used by a group of students who have shown tremendous initiative and creativity-- they've already produced several short videos using low-resolution cameras, and I'm very excited to see the work they'll do with this upgraded equipment.

These students took it upon themselves to form an extracurricular group, meeting after school to shoot, edit and assemble their videos. In a low-income, urban setting like ours, the importance of extra-curricular activities cannot be stressed enough. With your support, these students will be able to take a project they love, which they created, to the next level.

With gratitude,
Mr. K."

"Thank you all so much for your donations. Because of your generosity, my classroom will now be equipped with a document camera. My students will greatly benefit from this. Having a document camera in our classroom will allow me to project anything from worksheets, to 3-D objects, to a computer screen. This will allow me to turn anything into a large visual aid. Since most of my students are visual learners, a document camera is a necessary tool for their learning.

My students and I are extremely grateful and excited! I appreciate the support that you have all shown in my students' learning and in their futures. Great things are being done through Donors Choose, and this is just one of them.

With gratitude,
Ms. L."

Again, thank you to those who donated or passed on the link or emailed people. You can still donate at Donors Choose but my finances are tapped out for the foreseeable future, so I can't match donations anymore (they're tax-deductible, by the way, in case that motivates you!). I've been sleeping on the floor for five months, and am going to buy a bed with my next paycheck, because my back is finally starting to complain.

These guys need $140 more to realize their goals. If you can give even a dollar, I would adore you forever.

Most Important Thing I've Ever Written

MORE UPDATES!
UPDATE: You guys cleared out this entire charity's needs in less than four hours. I was going to match and donate after dinner, but the donations are now closed for this particular charity. Here's what we're going to do: At the time I made the offer to match donations, they needed $190. If we were going to fill that together, you needed to donate $95, and I would match $95. Since I didn't get my opportunity to donate, BECAUSE YOU GUYS ARE WAY TOO AMAZING, I'll be matching donations until I hit the $95 dollar limit for ANY classroom project you choose on the donorschoose website. I'll be posting updates on here, Facebook and Twitter (username: thoughtmecca) as to each classroom I donate to, and a countdown of what's left to donate.

Here's the list of classrooms you can choose from: You can search by amount needed to complete, region, subject, or grade level. Once you make your donation, forward me your receipt at: donations@matthartwell.com.

If you were to choose something media-based, as my original donation was, I'd be thrilled, and you can read my reasons for that below, but I will match any donation in any subject until I hit that $95 mark. If you guys keep donating after that, keep forwarding me your email addresses and the reason you chose the classroom you did, and I will post it here, to spread awareness of the project's you've chosen.

Donate $5 instead of eating out tonight! - Dave Metzger: Donation to Students "FLIP" For Writing!
This way you can't spend that money on beer. - Carly Bales: Donation to Student-Made Televison!
Joanne Hartwell: Projected Success!

Amount remaining for me to donate: $38

Taking a cue from John Rogers: If you like what you read here and on Elephant Words, donate to support a cause I believe in, and if you loathe it and everything I stand for, donations are a great way to bankrupt this kid out of $95.

ORIGINAL POST AS FOLLOWS:

Hey everybody,

I'm a recent college graduate just starting to work in Hollywood, and it's pretty awesome. I wouldn't be here, however, if I hadn't had an early exposure to film and television production. Most of this I received at the hands of truly dedicated teachers, as well as a slew of opportunities from my parents. The children at William Perry Elementary don't have these same opportunities. They attend school in a High Poverty area, and almost all of the students are dependent on the free lunch program just to ensure they receive adequate nutrition. While some people may scoff at the idea of donating video cameras as charity, I implore you not to pass up this chance to help shape a child's future. They will never be able to afford SR1 cameras or Final Cut Pro editing software, much less the computers to run it on, but a pair of FLIP camcorders, in addition to being perfectly rugged for their age group, allows anybody to learn the art of filmmaking. If even ONE child has a spark of creativity ignited because of the projects they use these cameras for, then it will be worth it. Because I believe so much in this, I am going to ask you to forward your receipt to me, and I will match any donations you make, dollar for dollar until their goal is met.

Click this link to donate and for further information!

Thank you for your time,
Matthew Hartwell
donations@matthartwell.com

Separate Galaxies, Same Universe

Albums of 2008 - Hartwell Edition

While I am not extremely musically inclined myself, aside from my aspirations to be the world's greatest/least prolific hip-hop MC, I do enjoy music from every genre, as long as it fulfills my requirement of being amazing.

As such, I often wait for Elliott Sussman and Kieron Gillen to post their tops of the year, and then I promptly buy them and enjoy letting them do the hard work of sifting through the noise. This ties into my philosophy of media curation, and the need to not experience everything. This year, however, I discovered a lot of music on my own that I particularly enjoyed, so without further ado, here's my top ten albums of 2008.

10. 808s and Heartbreak by Kanye West - Really, what can I say about Kanye that hasn't been said better elsewhere by people with an ear for it? Let's try: Kanye West reminds me of my favorite brewery, Dogfish Head Brewing. While my favorite beers are not necessarily Dogfish beers, and I don't absolutely adore everything Dogfish puts out (in fact, some things, Midas Touch or the song Drunk and Hot Girls, I deplore), I relish the fact that they're consistently trying new things. Whereas Dogfish has scientists analyze pottery shards to reverse engineer a 3,000 year old recipe for a drink, Kanye turns into an auto-tuned electronic-soul crooner. Dogfish puts out a 90 minute IPA and then tops it with a 120, and Kanye releases Graduation to crown his Late Registration success. This willingness to perpetually redefine and reinvent adds a level of freshness that the rest of the hip-hop/craft brewing world needs to pay attention to.

9. Vampire Weekend – This self-titled debut has a unique steel drum fun sound, and unabashed pop frivolity mixed with strangely high-brow topics, though it never approaches them on the level they deserve. This disc is great for popping in the car player when you’re feeling a bit down, as its bouncy aura will have you tapping your foot on the gas pedal.

8. The Devil, You + Me by The Notwist – I’ve been in love with The Notwist for a number of years now, and this disc is their best effort since Neon Golden. Simple and sad, this album creates an atmosphere for you to visit.

7. Canopy Glow by Anathallo – This is just gorgeous.

6. Partie Traumatic by Black Kids – Another great party-pop album, this one has so much upbeat, you can’t feel depressed listening to it, even if the subject matter itself seems kind of melancholy at times. Definitely worth a listen, this came to my attention through the single which was featured on iTunes as a free download a few months back.

5. Funplex by The B-52s – A seventeen year silence can be viewed as more of an incubation period, as the B-52s return to treat your party to a hurricane of classic B-52 mentality fused with a blend of everything they’ve encountered over the years. Electronica influences meet kitsch pop in a fusion of ridiculous joy.

4. Dear Science by TV On The Radio – Pop meets soul meets rock in this absolutely fantastic follow-up to Return To Cookie Mountain. There are several songs on here I would have paid the full album price for, and the entire thing flows so effortlessly even if songs don’t sound anything alike from one track to the next. This is a stunning effort, and TV On The Radio’s best to date.

3. Alopecia by Why? – One of my favorite artists, Why? has finally topped Oaklandazulasylum with this record. Having reinvented himself from hip-hop to indie rock a few albums back, this is a breathtaking merger of the two selves. Fatalist Palmistry is the most overly poppy song on here, until you listen to the words. The whole album seems to be a focused meditation on death, but without all the baggage that would normally imply. I listened to this album exclusively throughout March.

2. Ruth by Elliott Sussman – Elliott’s first full-length release from Blackberry Studios, Ruth is a celebration of and farewell letter to Mount Washington and the years he lived there on Ruth Street. The whole thing has a sort of infectious pride for where you’re from, even if it doesn’t happen to be Pittsburgh. Between singing of his love for springtime or his disdain for sad, self-pitying singer/songwriters, Elliott has crafted a 1920s, smalltown folk gem that feels as modern as anything else on this list. My number one song of the year is the hidden track off of this spectacular release.

1. TV Loves You Back by The Restiform Bodies – I was really worried I was going to hate this album, Restiform Bodies Anticon debut, since I’ve been waiting almost 8 years for it, and my expectations had grown steadily with every nugget they let trickle out in the meantime. Fortunately for clichés, this not only meets my wholly unrealistic expectations, it blows them away. Taking hip-hop where it needs to go next has long been the province of artists on the Anticon label, but Restiform Bodies has proven themselves the Tony Stark of rap with this release. They’re consistently fifteen minutes ahead of everybody else, and since nobody is there yet, they don’t have anyone to have beef with. They take that surplus energy most rappers spend inflating their egos and apply it to tackling the bigger themes in life in the most honest ways imaginable, never resorting to lecturing their audience, as they don’t know the answers either. More albums need to be driven by this beautiful marriage of curiosity and creativity.

Help Desk?

Fiddling with WordPress again, and trying to figure out how to domain map one of my other domains onto a WordPress blog without having to pay them money. Is this possible, interwebs?

I swear I'm going to learn HTML this year. I've just been busy, you know, writing.

Also, if I were to start regularly embedding video, would those of you who pull the RSS prefer it to be before or after the jump?

Elephant Words - 6 Week Roundup

Andrew Cheverton is a fellow writer on EW, and he has this thing where he does a commentary track on his pieces after each 6 week period is over. I'll be emulating him now:


Long-Sigh Anxiety: I feel like I weaved drunkenly across the line of humor and melancholy with this piece, and it's weaker for it. I'm enamored with the idea of a city where every piece of graffiti is a memorial, but I lose the thread bitching about procedural television (my least favorite genre, because nothing new has been introduced to it since the early 1990s). If I could trim this one down to about half it's length, I think I'd find something quite nice.


Things My Father Told Me When I Was Young: I had three different half-stories for this image, all written out longhand in a notebook while sitting under a tree by the apartment I was living in near Pittsburgh at the time. As the sun was setting, I looked up and saw the moon was almost full. Ever since I was a child, I've had two fears: Wolves, as a result of a kid's book, Donald Cries Wolf (Disney used to draw wolves lean and hungry, with slavering jaws and yellow eyes), and foxes, because of my father. He's told me the story of The Bloody Eyed Fox many times over the years, and I wanted to do a spin on it, presenting it from the perspective of the son of one of the bad guys rather than the usual viewpoint of the boy who owned the fox. My father claims to have seen the Bloody-Eyed Fox, lurking around Ten-Mile Creek in Mississippi, and I don't doubt him. I've spent the night there many times, and spent days digging up arrowheads. Rest assured, it's prime haunting territory.


A Rivalry With Andrew Cheverton That's Not Based On Looks: The week prior, Andrew had written a six-word short story in Hemingway fashion. I wanted to do the same. Alan commented that it seemed as if I had started with four pages of story and trimmed until I settled on one upsetting sentence. He was pretty much right. I hadn't written a four-page story, but I had a ton of notes: a history of what had happened, a list of survivors, the equipment and rations they were down to; basically, the kinds of things that keep me up at night worrying about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Then, I realized it would just seem like horror-babble-genre fluff, and took it high-concept.

Another Low Lit Memory: This is just something that's been in my head for ages, ever since I found out the world turned and was a little bit tilted. Granted, I didn't have much of a solid understanding of science then, but when has that ever stopped a kid, or an author, from having some fun? My regrets with this piece are of the stylistic variety. I actually wanted to have no names, and write it more in the style of an Italo Calvino folktale, but I was a Monday poster, and had no time to go back through and rework it. As it is, it's still cute, but it's not quite timeless. I'm going to redo it someday, and try to pass it off as a folktale of the 22nd Century.

By Way Of An Apology: It was my week to post the picture, so I feel I can tell you my mom took this picture, while visiting friends in France. The man who did this sculpture apparently has dozens more all over his farm. I can't imagine he's able to sell them, much less figure out how he's able to build them. The statue struck me as kind of sad, unless of course you look at it up close. Its teeth are very sharp and nasty and obviously designed for meat, but barring that detail, I'd be terrified to see something punished like that. The idea was in my head almost as soon as I decided on the picture, and when everyone started writing melancholic stories that week, I became worried. Fortunately, nobody touched on my theme, and I got to write my story. This is another one that would benefit from a folk-tale style, though I like my first-person narrator.


Was This Last Month?: I'm big on costume parties. I'm also big on innovation at costume parties. I'm not big on people who half-ass them, and I'm not big on people who over-do them and then have to explain their costumes. I like the voice of this piece, though I recognize it's just a dialogue scene, and has no actual plot to it. That's okay. It's getting a feel for character. You're allowed to do that in short fiction. I hope.

Video Games Are Anathema To Work

I had written a long article about how I used to love games but never find myself playing them anymore, and started listing the few exceptions to that fact. The list kept growing and growing, and I quickly realized my thesis was a lie. So that article isn't getting published. But the end of it, where I talked about my renewed (never left) passion for games and listed the games I want to play, is as follows:

Things that I'm dying to play (that I have the capability to, seeing as I don't own a PS3):

1. Left 4 Dead - Xbox 360 - A zombie survival horror action game based on the Half Life 2 engine? 4 player co-op? You can play as the undead in a versus mode? Is there anything about this game that doesn't scream, "Matt Hartwell, I am your new lord and master"?

2. Fable 2 - Xbox 360 - I was one of six people who really enjoyed the original Fable, which was an amazing game that fell victim to its own hype. No, it didn't have a persistent world. No, it wasn't the be-all end-all of games, but it was a fun little action-RPG with lots of cool new ideas. Apparently, this isn't more of the same, as tons of new cool ideas have been stacked on top of the delicious cake that was already there. It too, has online co-op.

Co-operative play, I think, is why I enjoy games so much. Versus is nice too, but the feeling of accomplishing a feat with someone's help is awesome. I even enjoy, in this age of 3d graphics and interactive storytelling, the archaic concept of playing single-player games co-operatively by passing the controller back and forth as you progress.

3. Fallout 3 - Xbox 360 - It's basically Oblivion, but 3 times bigger, it's sci-fi themed (I'm far more partial to sci-fi than I am to fantasy, George R. R. Martin being the exception to the rule), and it's gorgeous. Plus, it's got a healthy sense of humor, as anyone familiar with the first two Fallouts knows. This is something you could get lost in and never come back from. Easily 50 to 100 hours of gameplay, because this is the kind of game I wander around in, doing every little thing imaginable.

4. Okami - Wii - I missed it on PS2, and have the chance to play it now. It's a completely art-driven game, and I feel like we don't have nearly enough of that.

5. Prince of Persia - Xbox 360 - Speaking of art driven games, this is an impressionistic dreamscape, masquerading as a maddening platformer.

6. Far Cry 2 - Xbox 360 - Because sometimes I just want to hunt people in the African Savannah, Most Dangerous Game style. I love FPSs. This one is apparently amazing.

7. Call of Duty: World At War - Xbox 360 - As is this one, or so I hear. It's supposedly the ultimate online experience, and lots of people I know play it. Which is nice, because everyone I don't know on Xbox Live is a dick. Who says the F-word and N-word a lot. For no reason. And is in 7th grade or using a filter that makes their voice sound like their in 7th grade.

8. Dead Space - Xbox 360 - I love survival horror. This will tide me over until Resident Evil 5.

9. No More Heroes - Wii - Brent owns this one, so it'll be the first on this list I play. From the maker of the trippy Killer 7, which I did beat, and did enjoy, but can't say I understood, this actioner has more style than Jesus.

10. BoomBlox - Wii - A party game to round out the list, this looks like a ridiculous amount of fun, especially after a few drinks.

Lesser works round-up: I also hear Condemned is insane and a blast to play with the lights off. I want to check out Alone in the Dark, and the King Kong game is probably only 5 bucks at this point.

There's a chance this lust will all lead to a GameFly membership, as the total purchase price of these games just about equals a month's rent, and that's not going to happen.