This article brings up a good point. I have an iPhone 6 Plus. It already has a 5" monitor. And costs me a bundle.

Does anyone know of the ability to get HDMI video INTO an iPhone via the Lightning port? That would be pretty cool. And save a lot of money.

Shoe laces attached to the plug end (so they stay out of the way) via a clove hitch knot that holds the lace to the rope permanently are a cheap and effective way to tie up cables after coiling. Light weight cotton or nylon clothes line around 3/16" diameter also work well.

The items noted here, made from bungee cord and PVC pipe, are available premade as Ball Stretch Cords from Harbor Freight Tools at 4 for $2.49. Devices like this tend to get lost however. Rope more or less permanently attached to a cable never gets lost.

http://www.harborfreight.com/4-piece-ball-stretch-cord-set-47302.html

Smartphones. Is there anything they can't do?

2001 came out when I was 16. It was, er, interesting. I didn't try to make an in-camera movie effect with my Super 8, but did succeed in making slit-scan single frame stills on my 35mm still camera. Psychedelic, man. Far out.

Also made cool spiral light studies by pointing the camera up and hanging a penlight over the camera on a string, start it swinging in a circle (which actually ends up moving all over, in a predictable, mathematical way) opening the shutter and waiting until the penlight quit swinging.

All analog of course, and I had to wait 1) until the roll of slide film was used up and 2) for Kodak (remember them? they were once a Dow component) to develop it.

But it was a fun teenage project.

The films that were produced before and after participation in WWII by five famous directors -- John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra -- are covered in the book "Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War" by Mark Harris. What they saw firsthand had a terrible effect on all five and it showed in their movies. It was extremely difficult to make lighthearted romps after seeing and documenting the Nazi death camps.

Which leads to your other point -- the existential consideration of one's mortality as year after year pass and you step closer to the grave. Death awaits us all. How you deal with that truth is critically important.

Christmas is about the incarnation of the creator God into human flesh. The baby's mission is to redeem His creation from the curse of death. There's a reason the Gospel is called the "good news." If one understands and believes the offer, Christmas is a wonderful time, and for existential reasons. If you don't believe the offer and feel alone, hopeless and simply waiting for death of nothingness in a hollow meaningless universe, it's no wonder Christmastime can be depressing.

Work like we do: shoot in 4K, edit in 1080p, release in 540p over an internal internet that's so hobbled that we might as well shoot in SD. Oh, well. Somebody might appreciate the footage sometime.