I’m off to Rochester (April 30), then Stuttgart for the Trickfilmfestival and Flashconference/FMX. Back May 9. I’ll only have sporadic email access until then, but will try to stay in touch. Bye New York - I love you!

I’m not leaving after all - I’m too sick with the Tribeca Plague ™ Tribeculosis which I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to conquer with sheer willpower. Now I can’t stop coughing and can barely speak so I guess I’ll try to go to a doctor tomorrow instead of Rochester. My cat will be happy though!

I made a little blog to more easily update Sita screening information.

The Sita Sings the Blues trailer is up for a Freddie Award in the “Best Design” category. It’s one of those “viewer-votes” things - aka “get the filmmakers to do the publicity and spam everyone they know to go to your site and increase its ratings for advertisers and investors” things - so if you have the time and inclination and don’t mind being used as a pawn please go here and vote for it.

(Unrelated to the Freddie award, there’s a newer version of the Sita trailer featuring the soon-to-be-infamous “shadow puppets” on the Tribeca site (click the “trailers” tab). )

Today’s New York Times Book Review contains an article on Sarah Boxer’s Ultimate Blogs, with this to say about the blog you’re reading now:

“I also liked being taken off the beaten path and into a blogger’s area of obsessive, esoteric interest. In the case of the cartoonist-blogger Nina Paley, it’s the Sanskrit epic poem the “Ramayana,” which cast its spell on her as her marriage fell apart in Trivandrum, India, to which she’d moved in the first place because her husband had taken a job there. (Her blog posts and drawings document her attempt to create an animated feature based on the “Ramayana” but told from the point of view of Sita, the subjugated wife of the epic’s hero, Rama.)” [link]

What can I say but, ‘w00t!’?

I could only resist Facebook for so long. My shiny new Facebook page is here, and there’s a Sita Sings the Blues group here. Lots of photos! Go crazy, social networkers!

In sadder news, I also reluctantly registered on MySpace, the ugliest, worst-designed, least-navigable, skankiest hivemind on the ‘net, because some friends still insist on using it. Feh.

What with the Berlinale and all, I forgot to mention ninapaley.com is included in Sarah Boxer’s new anthology, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web. She’s doing a reading from it TONIGHT:

at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble (6th Ave and 22nd St.) on Monday, Feb. 18th, at 7 pm.
Two of the bloggers in the book, Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise and Jennie Portnof of johnny I hardly knew you, have kindly agreed to help me out. I’d love to see you there!
– Sarah

If I’m awake, I’ll be there too, so come on down!

I’m back! Sorry I couldn’t blog from Berlin, nor clean up the comment spam until just now. Photos and stories to come after I sleep off my jetlag, but first some news in brief:

1. Sita got a Special Mention from the Generation 14plus Jury

2. Someone took a hot photo of me at the premiere

In addition, everyone loved the story of how you blog-readers helped the film, especially with the 35mm print. Congratulations to all of us!

Today I did a google blogsearch on my name (no, I’m not ashamed) and look what came up:

Not just a monster, a bargain monster. This may be my only five-star review.

Get me with no regrets. Beware of invalid information about me, there’s plenty out there.

Quality the me, conveniently located.

(I had a link to the squatter-site that generated this crap, but it’s since been replaced by sex ads.)

It’s getting pretty lonely at the Paley Center for Media. In spite of Links for Lunch and Eats for Endorsement, my Summer has been full of long stretches - days at a time - where I don’t see a single human I know. Sure, I can walk out my front door and be assaulted with crowds of tourists, but these are not my people. I know because of how slowly they waddle down the sidewalk, among other reasons. Even the comments here on my blog have dropped off. Is everyone vacationing in their Summer estates in the Hamptons or something? Is it my breath? Where is everyone?

Today I learned why WordPress creates a whole new domain for installing itself. My wee little lesson involved wiping out everything on my web site for a few hours. Now I’m older, wiser, and willing to accept my new homepage has a “.blog” prefix. I hope you, dear reader, can accept that as well.

In happier news, the archives are up and running, along with the rest of ninapaley.com. And I can already tell that WordPress kicks Blogger’s ass. Big thanks to Ariel, who actually knows how all this works.

Dear readers, please leave a comment if you’re still out there!

Today I switched blogging software: from Blogger to WordPress. My archives - the “old” blog - are moving but we don’t have a directory for them yet; please be patient. Meanwhile, you can still see all the other fine features of ninapaley.com by using the same trusty links on the right.