Instant Review: Directors Label Vol 3: The Work of Michel Gondry

"Slackjawed astonishment."

Haven't watched them all yet, but I think my favorite so far is the video for The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar, which almost brought me to tears when I realized what I was looking at. And then got to enjoy it for several more minutes.

Also contains another playful video for Fell in Love with a Girl. I dunno if the Lego Crystal Display version will replace the Flash kitties version as the thing I imagine when I hear the song, but the kitties didn't make me say "holy shit" despite myself several times while watching them, so.

Also also got the first two volumes from the set, including a Spike Jonze disc, but haven't really watched em yet; Gondry was the one especially recommended to me. (Well, I did dip into the Jonze just to see a full-screen version of Fatboy Slim's The Dancing Christopher Walken Song or whatever it's called, which I have seen only in Wee Bootleg Quicktime format before today. Yay yay.)

Dinky but cool Mac OS X command OTD

open -e filename opens a file in TextEdit. (The -a flag opens it with a specified application, but I knew that already.)

Murphy's Law Bites Again OTD

The DVDs I got yesterday are physically unusual in that they are double-sided, allowing each box to contain a single disc with the content amount two "normal" DVDs. And this design invites a humdinger of a UI misfeature: the label on each side is not only printed in teeny-tiny eyestrain-o-vision, printed around the middle ring (where else can it go?), but the "Side A/Side B" name refers to the content on the opposite side of the disc. So "Side A" means "Insert this side up to get at Side A of the disc", but anyone who has ever seen an LP before would first think it means "Insert the disc so that this side interfaces with the DVD's laser (in other words, this side down), in order to get at Side A."

I was honestly confused by this for a while! Can I safely assume that double-sided DVDs have existed for a while but I don't see more of them because of how confusing this label business becomes?