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Comments and opinions expressed on THE KNIGHT SHIFT are those of Christopher Knight and not necessarily those of subjects discussed in this blog, of advertisers appearing on it or of any reasonable human being. Any correspondence/irate letters/lawsuit threats/Nigerian e-mail scams can be sent to theknightshift@gmail.com.
It was my friend Matt Smith who first encouraged me to start a weekly video series like his own Sunday school videos. He suggested some equipment and I've been playing around with shooting footage with my iPad Pro. Today I tried it again, this time with a wireless lavalier microphone.
This is still VERY rough, but I thought it could be shared with y'all. Few things from making this: the mic should be further up my shirt (crossing my arms in this muffled the sound). And this show is in dire need of a name. Maybe y'all can suggest one.
All the cool kids are telling me that Rumble is where it's at for videos which might otherwise not fit on some other hosting services. Gotta wonder why that is.
So this was a very important game for me to watch today. Not just because I
was rooting for Navy (the branch that my dad served in) but today was
the very first time that I watched an American football game... and
actually understood its rules!! This game has always mystified me,
until lately when I took it upon myself to read the rules of the game
enough times that I can finally understand it. Hey, I had to do something to occupy my time during the plague.
Well anyhoo, here's the beautifully performed national anthem before today's Army-Navy football game:
At this point I've lost count. It's at least the fourth or fifth time that my shenanigans have landed me on popular humor site Cracked.com.
This latest appearance comes courtesy of an article titled "5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites". With a title like that I just had to scan and tear it down and analyze it to see what I was doing that was so hypocritical... but I honestly can't find anything about my own part in that very strange episode from the fall of 2007. In fact, the entire article is about corporations - as Viacom did in that incident - who cry and crow about copyright laws protecting their assets and then steal and violate the assets of everyone else without giving a damn!!
Anyhoo, my situation, "Viacom Lays Claim to a County Board of Education Campaign Video", made #2 on the list. And if you wanna see the commercial that started it all, from my 2006 campaign for Rockingham County Board of Education, click here to watch "Christopher Knight for School Board TV Commercial #1".
(Personally, I'm still more proud of Commercial #2 and Commercial #3. In fact, Commercial #3 has always been my favorite of that batch of ads.)
Kristen's brother Scott Bradford was a witness to the turkey deep-frying on Thanksgiving two days ago. While maintaining a safe distance (and maybe more than that) he shot some terrific video of the action. Scott edited it together and now for your viewing pleasure y'all can watch the searing heat and tormentuous oil in all its glory!!
As of this evening I haven't seen Super 8, but some of the coolest cats that I have the honor of personally knowing seem to be completely losing their minds about how incredible it must be. I'm gonna be catching it Sunday afternoon with friends and am really looking forward to it :-)
But in the meantime, thought I'd turn y'all's attention to 8mm Vintage Camera, a sa-weeet lil' app from Nexvio for Apple iOS devices that are camera equipped (doesn't matter if it's an iPhone, iPod touch or the newest iPad). 8mm Vintage Camera turns your newfangled Apple contraption into an old-school 8mm movie camera with all the fixins. Select from different lenses, various types of film stock, and you can even give it a classic camera frame jitter effect. I've had this app for a few weeks now and it has definitely become one of my favorites. Indeed, all kinds of fun ideas have crept into mind since I started playing with it!
8mm Vintage Camera is $1.99 on the App Store, and the current version (1.1) is a tiny 2.7 MB download. Click here to get to it on iTunes. You'll thank me that you did :-)
Making a new video supplement wasn't something that I'd had in mind to do late last night, but... just had some things on my mind that I felt led to share.
This is the first Being Bipolar video that I've made with my iPad. Still playing around with figuring everything out, but that's why the aspect ratio is more vertical than horizontal with this segment. Next time I'll know better :-)
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
-- Maya Angelou
Edit 02/14/2011 2:18 pm EST: A friend let me borrow a book not long ago. It's called When God Winks At You. It's filled with stories of many people - including a number of celebrities - who experienced extraordinary coincidences and twists of fate that made them realize something: that God is watching over us. It's a very good book, and it written in a style that reads pretty quickly.
Ever since reading it, I have been praying that God might wink at me, too. And give me that personal assurance that "Chris, I know you are going through a very dark and difficult time. But I love you! I won't quit on you or abandon you. You are My child and I love you more than you could ever know and I will bring you through this."
I wish God would wink at me, and let me know that He didn't allow me to have this condition for naught, when it did lead to me hurting too many people.
Today, I am feeling... like damaged goods. Alone. Abandoned. Rejected.
I was a good person. I'm still a good person. I didn't ask for my condition or do anything to invite it to happen.
Mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder are diseases of the mind. Not the soul.
There was someone who was very precious to me, and I wanted nothing more in this world than to spend the rest of my life cherishing her, serving her, loving her... and having a relationship with her that put Christ at the center of it all. That's what I prayed for, for the longest time. God had to know that, wouldn't He?
But now, there is nothing. Because of a condition that hurt so many who were near and dear to my heart.
Is God punishing me for something? Is there something I missed in my pursuit of Christ and the life He would have me live?
This is the worst part of bipolar: that you are hurting and that you hurt others. You never mean to, but you do.
I have to be reminded that there was nothing that I could have done to have prevented this from happening to others and myself. But even on my best days, I harbor heart-wrenching regret for the pain that I caused.
That is something that I will never forgive myself for. And especially, I can never forgive myself for hurting her.
So I keep asking God to wink at me.
Maybe someday He will...
Edit 02/14/2011 4:45 p.m. EST: One person who has seen the video wrote this to me...
Chris, some of us have been on the other side of bipolar and other illness and apparently you don't know what that is like. You have hurt people, there is no denying that, and you need to stop putting the blame on God for 'letting you have the disease'.
I tend to not post when you say things like this because I believe you mean well. However, I do not agree with about 95% of what you say on the subject. I definitely agree that it is a struggle and that you will slip, heck we all do, but I don't agree that the blame should be on anything other than yourself. Now, with that said, once you realize it IS your fault then forgive yourself and move on with life. We all make mistakes.
Yes, we do. I do, especially. I'm not perfect and have never claimed to be perfect. I can only follow Christ, the only One who is perfect. The One who I must cling to and rely on to carry me and my heavy burdens. Burdens that I would not want any person to have to feel crushed beneath.
But here is the problem with what this person is saying...
Suppose that I had been drinking heavily. And I get into my car while intoxicated and drive off and then I hit another car because of my condition and the other driver is killed as a result.
Would that have been my fault? Absolutely. The condition was my own. I would have been the only party that could possibly be blamed. The bottle of liquor did not grab hold of my mouth and make me drink it. That would have been my choice... and I would have to suffer the due consequences and gone to prison. Because it would have been my fault.
However much cheap booze can rob a person of his or her faculties, judgment and sound mind, mental illness such as bipolar disorder do much, MUCH worse.
And there is no choice. It's in the cards that a person is dealt from the moment their chromosomes come together in a mother's womb.
I didn't have to get drunk. As a matter of fact, I've never been drunk in my entire life. Neither have I done illegal drugs. A person isn't born with the desire for drugs and alcohol.
I was born with this. I will die with this. I am trying as best God will let me, to make the moments between now and the time I leave this world mean something.
I do hurt and feel guilty about the things that I did when my bipolar was unable to be managed. I wish people would see that and understand it and not see me as some kind of a freak, or a pariah.
You wanna know something? I'm not suicidal, even though I know what it's like to be suicidal. But all the same: I can't fear death anymore like I used to. And you wanna know why?
Because Heaven is the place where nobody says "goodbye" to you, ever again. And it's the place where the people that you love do know that you really did love them and would have done anything for them and that you didn't mean to hurt them.
I don't know if I'll ever again in this life see the girl who I do still love as my wife. Knowing that I will get to see her again someday, in the presence of God, is the most precious bit of hope that I have.
I was wondering over the weekend if this might happen. And unfortunately, it has now. I am writing and posting this video during a bipolar depressive episode.
I need to reiterate something: managing bipolar disorder doesn't mean that I'm going to be totally free of its effects. There will be times when I go through episodes of severe bipolar. But I am thankful that it doesn't have to ruin my life as it has before.
I said last week in the first Being Bipolar video supplement that I intended to document a bipolar episode if and when it happened. This is the first bipolar depressive episode that I have been able to record. I don't think there's anything in this clip that most people would at all consider "disturbing" but, I wanted to give a heads-up about all the same...
And Part 4 of Being Bipolar should be up later this week! :-)
The idea hit a few days ago: as well as writing about having bipolar disorder as part of this blog's Being Bipolar series, that I could also do video entries as a supplement to the written material.
So today I went out and got a webcam and... well, here's the first one!
I intend to also record myself if/when a bipolar episode hits, and post the unedited footage of me talking about what it's like.
And for some reason, YouTube made sure to note that "IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors".
Ummmm... why is YouTube doing this? I haven't a clue. Perhaps someone could enlighten me about this. Because I'm having a very hard time imagining why anyone would need to display video at 4096 x 2304 (do they even make monitors that big?).
Heck, I've seen 1080P projected onto a regular-sized movie screen, and it looked just as good as regular film. Not really sure what mainstream purpose 4K could be serving at the moment.
Still working on my review of the Watchmen movie. Didn't get to see it a second time yesterday afternoon, but will later today. 'Til then, check out this hilarious send-up of Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon, with just about every horrible cliche of the genre!
A little over a year ago I posted the how-to tutorial on putting video content from a DVD onto an iPod. The workhorse program that I found perfect for my needs was HandBrake. When it came time to convert Lost Season 4 for my iPod classic ('cuz I like having all the Lost episodes hanging on my belt... along with my own movies, the Star Wars saga, etc.) I found that HandBrake had upgraded to version 0.9.3.
So if you haven't checked it out yet, I heartily recommend giving HandBrake a looksee, because it has become significantly more powerful since the last time I used it en masse. HandBrake 0.9.3 introduces universal video input: it can now convert practically any format of video into MPEG-4, including DivX AVI files (very nice for putting those bootlegged Doctor Who episodes on an iPod or iPhone or any other portable video device). The video quality has been greatly improved, with many more presets and options available. Syncing of video and audio is said to be fixed, but I never saw any problems with that to begin with. I have however found that HandBrake 0.9.3 is far more stable in Windows Vista: previously, I had to re-install the program every time I wanted to convert a new DVD. Version 0.9.3 has fixed that bug: I've "fired it at the walls" (my own terminology for probing software for its limits) quite a bit over the past several days, and it keeps coming back and asking for more.
If you are using a Windows machine, you will likely have to purchase and install SlySoft AnyDVD, which does the actual work of decryption of a DVD. But HandBrake itself is free and open-source, and is available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
Last night at Woodmont United Methodist Church in Reidsville, we had the strike party for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of Oliver Twist. Tony Hummel (who played Mr. Brownlow) brought his karaoke machine. And during the festivities I did something that I had been asked to do several times over the past few weeks, mostly from people who heard about what happened at the Children of Eden strike party in June.
So here it is: Yours Truly singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen...
Dear friend Jenna St.Hilaire (who was previously Jenna Olwin before her recent nuptials) spotted this video on YouTube and sent it this way. It's a four-way split-screen of a dude who's doing an a capella rendition of several John Williams movie scores, with a Star Wars-ish twist. It's pretty amazing!
So this afternoon my good friend Bmovies sends me an e-mail about a new post that he had made on his blog and that I should check it out. So I go to his link and read how he's not supporting McCain or Obama for President in this year's election either. Instead, Bmovies tells us, he's found a candidate that he does support. And there's an embedded video with a news story about whoever this person is.
I figure if Bmovies thinks well enough of the guy/gal, that I should find out more about them too. So I watch the video.
The first words out of my mouth were "What the...?!?"
