Please Welcome Our New TRA Ambassador!
First of all, a great big thanks to everyone who expressed interest in the position - there was a lot of interest from people who would have made great additions to our team, and I was spoiled for choice. So thanks to everyone for being excellent.
That said, I’m pleased to introduce Kristen Kalp, who will be helping me keep up on emails, and answer people’s questions about our actions. Kristen is a children’s photographer in the Philly area, who makes great photos, loves the TRAs, and who is a great fit for our “corporate culture” if can call it that :) She’ll be taking some of the workload on the customer service end of things, so that I can concentrate more on making our products the best they can be. So everyone say hi!
Also, we have made some changes to the TRA site, mostly in how emails get funneled to us (for the sake of efficiency). Most noticable, however, is that we’ve added a Support section, which will have an evolving set of articles on dealing with the actions, and a new, fancier way of contacting us. Our new system allows us to be more thorough and timely in answering your questions. So http://www.gettotallyrad.com/support is now the place to go for answers to all your questions, and the forms on the site are now there only for mailing list signups. Let us know what you think!
TRA Videos Up On Vimeo
Alright - I COULD blog about Barack Obama’s historic campaign victory, and continue on about how this is a milestone for America. I COULD tell you how excited I am at the prospect of having someone in the White House that I don’t absolutely loathe, and how I’m SO ready for someone to give me an excuse to be proud of the leadership in this country. I could go on and on about that for pages and pages, but there’s no shortage already of commentary on the subject, and I’ve already done my fair share of rambling in the last couple weeks about all that red, white, and blue stuff.
So instead, I’ll offer up this much-less-exciting blog post about how our video tutorials are now all available at www.vimeo.com/totallyrad, in addition to the www.gettotallyrad.com site. They’re also available at www.youtube.com/dougboutwell. Why is this newsworthy? Because some people have had issues watching the videos directly on the site, and the YouTube versions, previously the only alternative available, quite frankly looked like shit. Vimeo is great because of the high quality it allows for its content. You can upload videos up to 1280×720 (that’s right, full 720p HD), and it doesn’t appear to transcode the heck out of it until all that’s left is a pixelated mess. The new TRA videos are all 640×360 (1/4 720p res), but they look oh-so-much-better on Vimeo.
So there you are! Not exciting at all, compared to electing a young black guy to the highest office in the land, but that’s all I got for ya today. Just about everything over the next few years is going to look like a letdown compared to last night, so get used to it 
Last-Minute Musings On California’s Prop 8
Quoting John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:
“Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. ……Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”
Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!
Rap vs. Metal - Star Wars Style
Well, so which one wins? Both are so cheesy that I think WE’RE the losers, actually, but let’s suspend disbelief for a minute, and enjoy what a bunch of nerds can do with the miracle of technology we call the Internet.
Gangsta Rap
Metal
Election-Year Soapbox
I don’t usually post about hot-button things that will get people riled up, but things are boiling over in my head right now, and I need a place to vent some of them. There are a lot of arguments being made about the direction America should go under the next president. I have to take issue with a lot of the things being said, because a lot of them just plain don’t make any sense. I feel like a lot of the points being made by the candidates, their surrogates, and the pundits on TV, are taking things at face value that are just plain flawed in their logic. It’s driving me insane. Not that the policies themselves are nonsensical, but that the arguments being used to support or attack them make some fundamental assumptions that are VERY important to consider. So what follows is a random catalog of things that I believe are true and why… you can decide for yourself whether I’m full of it, and whether these things are even relevant to the issues being discussed in the presidential election.
- Taxes, by their very nature, are designed to “spread the wealth around”. Any tax structure that you could devise would, by definition, be taking money from some people to give to other people. Even if we eliminated every federal program except the military, we’d still be taking money from everyone to give to soldiers and arms manufacturers. The question at hand isn’t one of whether we should “spread the wealth around” or not - it’s one of who that wealth should be spread TO.
- Socialism is not a four-letter-word. We have a history of treating socialism just like facism or terrorism - as something to be feared as an oppressive form of government. People confuse socialism with Stalinism. They aren’t the same. Most other industrialized nations have political parties with openly socialist platforms, and most of those same nations also have elements of socialist policies at work in their governments. They get along just fine. Most people are afraid of the word without even knowing what it entails, because it conjures up images of and aggressive USSR. They’re not the same.
- Adam Smith-style capitalism doesn’t work in modern, global economies. The system works fine in the pre-corporation era where competition was ensured because no one could establish an oppressive hegemony over their market and then start buying congressmen to advance their interests. But blind faith in the market as some irrebukable gospel has proven dangerous, and even destructive in the past month. The fundamental underpinning of the US ideology, as framed by the founders, is that you can’t trust people with power. Yet we’ve allowed a situation to develop where unfathomable amounts of power (money) are concentrated in the hands of increasingly few people (witness the flurry of corporate mergers and buyouts post-2000), and where we simultaneously trust those people to play by the rules and look after our interests. It goes against everything we believe as Americans to think that system could work, but we’ve got an emotional attachment to the idea that unregulated free markets are somehow congruent with the American ethos. The founding fathers would turn in their graves if they knew the extent to which we allowed power to concentrate, unchecked, into the hands of the wealthy. Ironically, the medicine prescribed to fix the mess amounts to socialism. Funny that - a massive, government-ordered redistribution of wealth is the only way to fix our broken markets, yet we still cling like scared children to the simple equations of socialism = bad and capitalism = good. Things aren’t that simple in the world we live in.
- You can’t fix something you don’t understand. You wouldn’t trust someone who can’t tell you what a cylinder head is to fix your breaks, would you? Same applies for elected officials. Having a deep-seated, earnest desire to fix a broken Washington does you no good if you’re completely ignorant of how it would look if it DID work.
- “Elite” is not the same as “elitist”. One implies a high station in life, whether economically, socially, or intellectually. The other means condescention on the basis of your status. They don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. People need to stop inferring one from the other.
- The mortgage / foreclosure crisis in this county is not the fault of “predatory lenders.” That’s like saying you cheated on your wife because of a hot girl. Or that you got a DUI because of the bartender. Yes, those things all contribute to making it easier to do the wrong thing, but for a nation that prides itself on individual responsibility, blaming foreclosures on lenders is quite a cop-out. Our credit crisis has a lot to do with the fact that most Americans are very comfortable buying things they can’t afford with money they don’t have. We wouldn’t be in this mess if people at every level of society were living within their means. We might have eventually been screwed by over-leveraged banks and rampant speculation anyway, but the current mess we’re in… it’s not Wall Street that got us here, at this moment in time. It’s the millions of people out there who bought houses they couldn’t pay for. Until we can own up, as a society, to the fact that WE screwed up, and stop pinning the blame on everyone else, we’re just doomed to repeat the same lessons. We might be the most prosperous nation on Earth, at this moment, but it’s all been bought with borrowed money, and that money DOES eventually have to be paid back, one way or the other. (Edited to add - just read an article on CNN, a partial interview with Fareed Zakaria, who makes basically the same point. Most people consider Fareed a pretty smart guy. Check out the article here.)
- You can support the troops without supporting the war. I’m offended by the notion that wanting to bring our men and women in uniform home is somehow doing a disservice to them, while asking them to do 3 or 4 back-to-back tours of duty is supporting them. I’m proud of our armed forces, and they are honorable people doing heroic things. Which is why I’d rather have them back here, where they’re not getting shot at. Most people who oppose the war in Iraq feel the same way. They’re good men and women, and they shouldn’t be fighting a war that shouldn’t have been started anyway. The decision to send them there wasn’t made by the troops on the ground, therefore they don’t really bear the blame. Honor them by bringing them home, not asking them to keep dying because we’re too proud to admit we’re wrong to have gone there to begin with.
- The “Iraq War” is not a war, it’s an occupation. Wars end when you have defeated the enemy’s military and toppled their government, or else agreed to stop fighting. Wars have to be authorized by Congress, and this one wasn’t. This was an executive branch-led invasion of a soverign nation which, as it turns out, posessed no threat to us whatsoever. Our troops in Iraq are a police force, overseeing the installment of a US-sanctioned government. Continuing to talk about it like it’s a war is a dangerous mischaracterization of the reality of the situation. “War” implies immediate and present danger to our survival. Iraq presents no such threats, despite what apologists say about its implications for the war on terror (not a war, either). Viewing it through the distorted prism of a “war” scares people into supporting things that they wouldn’t support during peacetime. We need to stop calling it a war, because it’s not, and it never was.
- Finally, and this is unrelated to the election-year arguments we’ve heard this year, but I’ll say it anyway - Ike was right. If there’s one thing that concerns me about the US of A at this moment, it’s not national security, and it’s not the economy. It’s the military-industrial complex. Nearly half - HALF! - of our tax dollars goes to the military. That’s about 1.5 TRILLION dollars in 2009. Our paranoid obsession with perfect national security, stoked by neverending doom and gloom from the White House, and reinforced by an entrenched bureaucracy that is built to grow indefinitely, has resulted in a situation where we spend as much on national security than the next 15 highest spenders… COMBINED! And for all of that, our oil supply is in more peril than anytime in the last 30 years, and no one can say with any certainty that we’re any more safe than we have been since the end of the Cold War. We’re spending for the sake of spending, borrowing nearly a trillion dollars next year to do it, and it WILL bankrupt our nation. My kids will be paying the bill, but I’m reasonably certain that they won’t be any safer for it. They will, however, be worse off for the money we’re NOT spending on education, healthcare, and infrastructure. I can only imagine how much better off our country would be with even a fraction of that money spent on building things instead of blowing them up. We are a warlike nation, and we endlessly glorify combat and violence. We talk endlessly and self-righteously about a “culture of life,” while spending obscene sums of money sending our sons and daughters to kill and die. Anyone who sees fault in that situation is tarred and feathered as unpatriotic. If there’s any reason that our country is morally bankrupt, it has nothing to do with whether we let gays get married or whether you can say “shit” on TV - it has EVERYTHING to do with our obsession with war, and our constant glorification of death and violence.
Learn To Rock A Photobooth With Jay Reilly
My good buddy Jay Reilly is doing a one-day seminar focusing on doing a photobooth-style portrait setup at weddings and events on November 14, 2008. Jay has a bitchin little studio literally a couple blocks from the pier in Oceanside, CA (which picks up NW swells pretty well - good place to surf in the early winter! ;) Jay knows his stuff, has a lot of experience doing this sorta setup in the real world, and can back it up with technical chops honed as an advertising shooter. This is a really unique event, the cost is reasonable, and it will open up a lot of creative possibilities at your events. If you’re interested in learning about setting up and executing a portrait station at your weddings, then go learn how from Jay!
Check out the info at Jay’s blog!
One of Jay’s Images - this is the stuff you’ll be learning how to make!
Also, in case everyone has forgotten, I loved doing a similar setup back when I was shooting weddings, and have archived some of the work at www.dougboutwell.com… some of my favorite images from the past couple years have been shot with the same kinda technique - I think my style has always been a little stiffer and drawn its quirkiness from the tension between the formality of the setting and the oddness of the juxtapositions of its characters, but it isn’t nearly as saleable as what Jay does, nor what Nate and Jac do. Anyway - a couple of my faves from 2007:
(alright, I have no idea why my blog is being fucking retarded and not displaying my images… sorry!)
Took Me A Second To Get This One
But it makes me laugh… I don’t know why… but it’s just random enough to make me chuckle out loud when I think about it…
I love how they added a DOF effect, too, so that the face in the back is more OOF than the others. I don’t know how the hell people entertained themselves before Google.
Join The Totally Rad Team!
Do you like helping others?
Are you handy with Photoshop?
Do you have both sets of our actions, and use them all the time?
Does your friendly personality come across well in emails?
Do you have a few extra hours a week that you’d like to make some money with?
If you can answer “yes” to all those questions, I want to hear from you! I’m currently looking to expand our team with a Customer Support Ambassador. You would be responsible for responding to our support requests and general questions in a timely manner. If people are having trouble figuring something out, you’d give them a hand. If they lost their actions, you’d lookup their order and re-send the download link. If someone wanted to know why they should get our actions, you’d give them the million reasons to do so 
You can work from anywhere you’d like - just as long as you have an internet connection, good customer service skills, and are crazy about our actions. You will also need to be avaible 7 days a week, and respond to questions within 24 hours.
If you’re interested, shoot an email over to doug at gettotallyrad.com, and we can discuss things further.