caliblog goes springer and disappoints me in the process

A year ago, a young Crimewave reader by the name of Chuck, and his friends, headed off to Los Angeles in hopes of making their way into the film industry. And, at my suggestion, they started a blog so that we could all watch their progress. Now, almost a year later, I think it’s safe to say that the Caliblog project is a bust. Lawsuits and physical violence are being threatened. Websites have been hacked, stolen, and stolen back. In a nutshell, the whole thing’s a fucking mess, and it really makes me sad… OK, the following links should fill you in on the details.

First, here are my thoughts upon their setting out from Michigan.

After a few promising months, things then took a turn for the worse when Chuck opted out of the project without telling anyone, and headed back to Michigan, by way of Europe.

Here’s how his roommates reacted to his sneaking out.

After that, things seemed to go pretty smoothly, until Chuck, not being promptly paid for a car that he’d sold to Billy, hacked into Caliblog and took the site down.

Now, the Caliblog site is back up and running again, and they’re pissed at Chuck.

Chuck, meanwhile, has a new site of his own, called ChuckGuide, where he’s talking about his car, the threats that have been made against him, and everything else. (See the Dec 11 entry.) (UPDATE: Chuck has since removed this post.)

And that, my friends, is how a website implodes.

My hope is that they’re just doing this for publicity, but I suspect that’s not the case… Whatever’s going on, my hope is that they can somehow all get through it without filing suit, throwing punches or casting any more aspersions.

This entry was posted in Other. Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

6 Comments

  1. Posted December 12, 2004 at 12:51 am | Permalink

    Hey Mark… interesting recap of the short-lived caliblog chronicles and somewhat… strange, for the lack of a better word.

    I would like you to read Billy’s post on caliblog, the email-breakdown on chuckguide is coming down, we made our point and that was enough. But I think there was a lot that people are missing between the lines when skimming over the

  2. mark
    Posted December 12, 2004 at 10:52 am | Permalink

    Just put it behind you, Mike. It sounds like things are moving forward with your film project, so, if I were you, I’d just focus on that. Yeah, it sucks to have someone say something like that about your girlfriend, but in the whole scheme of things it doesn’t really matter. Let it go and move on… I’d have the same advice for Chuck right now… You guys just need to leave each other alone for a while. No one looks good in this situation.

  3. Posted December 14, 2004 at 7:53 am | Permalink

    It’s so easy to second-guess people and their decisions (good or bad or indifferent) and emotions/meanings can be very hard to discern from e-mail/blogs. I can understand that *perhaps* Chuck didn’t say anything about moving to his roommates because he was embarrassed. It’s so much easier to write things out or even talk to relative strangers than it is with friends.

    I think Mark’s right and that it’s good to take a break from each other and then perhaps one day in the future (near or distant), the rifts can be mended. Good luck to you all, be you in CA or Germany.

  4. pedro
    Posted January 30, 2005 at 12:27 pm | Permalink

    I went to Chuck’s guide and read about his trip to China, including a description about how he cheated a cruise boat out of money by purchasing a lower class ticket for one of their entourage and then moving him into the pricier cabin. They saved all of $2 by doing this, confident that the Chinese seldom challenge westerners.

    Sorry, but this Chuck guy comes across as a total weasel. Here he is travelling in a foreign country and he’s trying to cheat them out of a lousy two bucks. He probably makes more in an hour at his Burger King job than a typical Chinese family makes in a wek and he’s trying to gyp them. It would be funny if the boat crew forgot about the rule against challenging westerners and threw him in a Chinese gulag to work off the $2.

    No wonder that Chuck was too spineless to tell his friends he was leaving. He has the morals of a turnip. One less weasel in Hollywood, one more weasel in Michigan.

  5. mark
    Posted January 30, 2005 at 1:24 pm | Permalink

    To be honest, I had exactly the same thought when I read that bit about not paying the full rate on the ship (because he thought that the Chinese, even if they caught him, wouldn’t prosecute him because he was an American). I didn’t like it on a lot of levels. I suspect, however, it’s something quite a lot of us have done in our lives, but just don’t talk about. I, for instance, remember taking my chances and jumping on a train without a ticket somewhere in Europe. I was only going a few stops and the train was there in the station, ready to leave. (Getting a ticket would have meant missing the train.) I, however, was caught, and had to pay the ticket price plus a fine. It’s something that I wouldn’t have done today, but I was stupid and I did it. I learned from it

  6. Pedro
    Posted January 31, 2005 at 3:53 pm | Permalink

    Admittedly a little harsh, calling him a weasel and all, but his admission just smells of a sense of entitlement; the attitude that I’m western, I’m white, and I can do whatever the f*** I please. Maybe I’m sensitive to that because, as a white man living in a city of over 80% black population, I hear enough about “white privelege”, even though being white is more of a liability than an advantage in my town.

    I have to admit some admiration for him spending a month in China outside of the tourist circuit, and I have to say that the sight of miltary men with machine guns would stifle any thoughts I had of crossing the line.

    No doubt a lot of it has to do with his age of 22 years. I know that when I was eighteen I had no principles at all, but I like to think that by 22 I was a little more advanced in discriminating between right and wrong…but I probably wasn’t. Anyway, I hardly think that screwing some poor working third world boat crew out of two bucks is worth the effort, and you might say he was just a poor student but poor people don’t take month long vacations on the other side of the globe, no matter how they come across the finances.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Connect

BUY LOCAL... or shop at Amazon through this link Banner Initiative Manchurian Candidate Banner