More music I saw
Oct. 27th, 2008 09:54 pmLast night I met
dougo, the only quintuple penultamour I know, at TT's to see The Octopus Project. I liked about half of what they played, and suspect I would have liked them more in a more sound-friendly venue.
I really liked their presentation, vaguely captured in this crappy iPhone shot, involving ambient video that included some simple, delightful hand-drawn animation. I assume it was by someone in the band, because those masked critter-props on stage had the same visual style. I now wish I'd asked one of the band about the animation while Doug was buying their CD. Oh well.
Was tickled that the video also included clips from the classic macabre bicycle safety film One Got Fat, a.k.a. that really weird thing with the kids in monkey masks.
Before them was Jeans Team, which is a couple of crazy German doodz with some really fun small-scale Euro-industrial that made Doug wonder if they're retro, or if Germany is just still doing that. I enjoyed them.
Because I'd played Rock Band at
mrmorse's place for six hours the day before that, the sight of a hyperkentic blonde pretty-boy with silver-lamé pants playing next to a more staid fellow dressed like your high school biology teacher made me think "someone's been having fun with the character editor".
They were out of earplugs at the bar! I stood up close to the crazy Germans because the sound was mostly bassy and didn't rise above chest-level, but had to fade back into the hall to escape head-on Octopus noise. I'll get some plugs at CVS or something before the next time I go to something like this. (And, yes, my ears went back to normal a day after that last show, just like you all said it would. Thanx!)
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I really liked their presentation, vaguely captured in this crappy iPhone shot, involving ambient video that included some simple, delightful hand-drawn animation. I assume it was by someone in the band, because those masked critter-props on stage had the same visual style. I now wish I'd asked one of the band about the animation while Doug was buying their CD. Oh well.
Was tickled that the video also included clips from the classic macabre bicycle safety film One Got Fat, a.k.a. that really weird thing with the kids in monkey masks.
Before them was Jeans Team, which is a couple of crazy German doodz with some really fun small-scale Euro-industrial that made Doug wonder if they're retro, or if Germany is just still doing that. I enjoyed them.
Because I'd played Rock Band at
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They were out of earplugs at the bar! I stood up close to the crazy Germans because the sound was mostly bassy and didn't rise above chest-level, but had to fade back into the hall to escape head-on Octopus noise. I'll get some plugs at CVS or something before the next time I go to something like this. (And, yes, my ears went back to normal a day after that last show, just like you all said it would. Thanx!)
But I guess it's pretty bright
Jul. 9th, 2008 11:04 pmAs an illustration of an artist dramatically improving his craft over time, I present a couple of works of Joel Veitch, an animator of memetically muscular nonsense pieces. (Both are SFW, but you'll probably want headphones if you're actually at work, slacker.)
Exhibit A: We Like the Moon, 2002.
Exhibit B: Princess Twinkly, 2008.
Exhibit A: We Like the Moon, 2002.
Exhibit B: Princess Twinkly, 2008.
Good morning, Mr. McIntosh
Jun. 1st, 2008 01:56 pmOne thing I didn't necessarily expect: several of the hairs in my beard, upon return from its three-year vacation, revealed themselves as snow-white. I'm a little surprised since I inherited my mother's hair, and she didn't go gray until her 70s. On the other hand, she was never one for growing beards.
The white hairs are scattered but loosely grouped. Maybe as more come in they'll form regular stripes and I can rock the Dr. Orpheus look.
The white hairs are scattered but loosely grouped. Maybe as more come in they'll form regular stripes and I can rock the Dr. Orpheus look.
Other blogs' videos
Feb. 11th, 2008 10:14 amHere's a haunting video that
bassfingers made after photographing an abandoned industrial building. I saw this right before going to bed last night. Delightful!
Another video has the cast of Spongebob Squarepants using their voices inappropriately (but still SFW (wow, you can watch videos at work? Must be nice.)).
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Another video has the cast of Spongebob Squarepants using their voices inappropriately (but still SFW (wow, you can watch videos at work? Must be nice.)).
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If you're like me, you'll watch it through, and then watch it through again, and the whole time feel a desperate need to see it through some channel other than YouTube's teeny tiny blur-o-vision. Here's one link to a less cruddy version. I ended up buying the video from iTunes for $1.50. I've vaguely wondered for a long time what would move me to spend ten bits on a music video, and now I know.
(Postscript: Have also taken to dropping two-dollah bills on Cartoon Brew Films' offerings, lately.)
More reasons to love XKCD
Jul. 25th, 2007 07:02 pm* The ambiguity of this comic:

Slashdorks will read it and be like "rofl i deal with idiots like this at work every damn day, but they'd fire me if I hung up on them for real", even though I'm fairly confident that's not the joke. Something for everyone!
* The comic is hand-lettered. I have probably already mentioned this as a reason I like the comic, but I'll say it again. Hand-lettering makes any comic look about ten times better to me. (And you could make a "zero times ten" wisecrack here, but I would retort that there is a basic charm to the art. Very basic, sure, but still.)
* There are no comments or ratings or anything attached to the comic. Everyone likes getting comments, and I'd understand if he wanted to have comments so that every comic would have an ever-growing beard of public "LOL ^^;" messages attached, but I wouldn't like it.
* The cartoonist invites and even encourages direct linking to the cartoon images, even printing the necessary HTML code beside each one. That's great.

Slashdorks will read it and be like "rofl i deal with idiots like this at work every damn day, but they'd fire me if I hung up on them for real", even though I'm fairly confident that's not the joke. Something for everyone!
* The comic is hand-lettered. I have probably already mentioned this as a reason I like the comic, but I'll say it again. Hand-lettering makes any comic look about ten times better to me. (And you could make a "zero times ten" wisecrack here, but I would retort that there is a basic charm to the art. Very basic, sure, but still.)
* There are no comments or ratings or anything attached to the comic. Everyone likes getting comments, and I'd understand if he wanted to have comments so that every comic would have an ever-growing beard of public "LOL ^^;" messages attached, but I wouldn't like it.
* The cartoonist invites and even encourages direct linking to the cartoon images, even printing the necessary HTML code beside each one. That's great.
Ratatouille
Jul. 14th, 2007 05:21 pmFor reasons that will take some amount of time for me to passively figure out, Ratatouille, which I saw with
classicaljunkie at the Boston Common multiplex last night, was such an elemental force of a movie that it left tears running down my face through most of its running time. The last time I reacted to a film this way was when I saw The Fellowship of the Ring in late 2001. Make of this what you will.
It is the best filmic implementation of follow your bliss that I've ever seen, a celebratory portrayal of the artistic obsession which I could really identify with, and nevermind that I can barely make spaghetti. I'm still feeling mushy just thinking back on it, it was so perfect and wonderful. Really.
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It is the best filmic implementation of follow your bliss that I've ever seen, a celebratory portrayal of the artistic obsession which I could really identify with, and nevermind that I can barely make spaghetti. I'm still feeling mushy just thinking back on it, it was so perfect and wonderful. Really.

I figured some of you would appreciate this. (From Secret Asian Man by Tak Toyoshima, originally spotted in The Dig.)
Reasons that
Bonus annoyance: I'm thinking of that one ATHF episode where Karl gets the magic Foreigner belt. Sadly, I think that's hilarious.
$not_first_time
is not a good variable name:- Not the first time for what, exactly? (This isn't helped by the fact that this programmer doesn't believe in using inline comments. Ever.)
- It's awfully rude to use an inverse boolean like that, where it's false if the thing it tracks is true, and vice versa.
not($first_time)
reads much better thannot($not_first_time)
, no? - I can't get that song from Foreigner out of my head now.
Bonus annoyance: I'm thinking of that one ATHF episode where Karl gets the magic Foreigner belt. Sadly, I think that's hilarious.
No IFF tonight; stuck with plan A to go to
jhango's to watch Casino Royale. It's a heck of a film. I enjoyed it.
Delighted to discover that it chose to go with a gorgeous (and game-themed!) animated opening credits sequence, and I wonder if it was purposefully harkening to the animated opening of the original, very silly movie with the same title. No Herb Alpert, though.
And of course watching any movie so involved with Poker with
rikchik in the room is a delight in itself. As computery wonks sometimes can't help cringing at every movie's blatantly incorrect computeriness, Mr. R will watch a Poker scene and mutter things like "Arrgh, he's splashing the pot" and "Bond raised last, so he should show his cards first, but I guess it's more dramatic this way..."
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Delighted to discover that it chose to go with a gorgeous (and game-themed!) animated opening credits sequence, and I wonder if it was purposefully harkening to the animated opening of the original, very silly movie with the same title. No Herb Alpert, though.
And of course watching any movie so involved with Poker with
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Ha ha, I think this is the very first xkcd that I am simply too old to appreciate, and right after I made that post, too. (Though the mouseover is on-target.)
No wonder your parents are never around.
Jan. 22nd, 2007 05:20 pmI really like this. The voice acting is great, and it's clear that the person who stitched it together really loves the show, even while snarking at it. This is always my favorite kind of parody. (Found via
chocorisu.)
Background: Yu-gi-oh is a popular kiddie anime about CCG players, and primarily serves as an ad for the real-life version of the CCG. I cannot knock it too hard because I liked G.I. Joe and Transformers and He-Man and shit when I was a kid, and they too were at once cynical toy ads and great entertainment for dopey lil kids. Heck, I'd probably have been more into the anime-style long-arced melodrama of this show than the punchy episodic nature of those older shows.
I don't watch this cartoon but I once skimmed its WP page, and AFAICT the plot is in fact as screwed up as this wonderful condensed version makes it out to be.
Edit Yikes, there's over a dozen of them, linked from the sidebar thingie on that page. And so far they're all as funny as the first one. "Little Kuribo" has real talent!
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Background: Yu-gi-oh is a popular kiddie anime about CCG players, and primarily serves as an ad for the real-life version of the CCG. I cannot knock it too hard because I liked G.I. Joe and Transformers and He-Man and shit when I was a kid, and they too were at once cynical toy ads and great entertainment for dopey lil kids. Heck, I'd probably have been more into the anime-style long-arced melodrama of this show than the punchy episodic nature of those older shows.
I don't watch this cartoon but I once skimmed its WP page, and AFAICT the plot is in fact as screwed up as this wonderful condensed version makes it out to be.
Edit Yikes, there's over a dozen of them, linked from the sidebar thingie on that page. And so far they're all as funny as the first one. "Little Kuribo" has real talent!
From the south-shore-memory vault
Oct. 13th, 2006 11:03 amChannel 56, when it was still Channel 56, would put up a special title card between after-school cartoons every Friday the 13th, showing Fred Flintstone being alarmed by a black cat and wishing us kids a happy Ft13. Even way back then I felt oddly touched that they went through the effort.
Also it is a beautiful autumn day out and I'm going to walk to Kendall now w/piping hot Rossini's coffee that I can suddenly afford again, and enjoy every step. Cheers!
Also it is a beautiful autumn day out and I'm going to walk to Kendall now w/piping hot Rossini's coffee that I can suddenly afford again, and enjoy every step. Cheers!
Good cartoons
Aug. 7th, 2006 04:05 amI am not the first to say it, but Venture Bros. seems to be getting better with every subsequent episode. I don't know how they do it. Well, yes, I do. And I am glad they're getting away with it, too.
Meanwhile, if you want to watch a cartoon featuring a chortling little furry shithead who I guess is trying to be the Italian Woody Woodpecker, I point you at Stripy, an accidental Youtube discovery. Both the zerpy-derpy proto-electronic music and the title character's color scheme, which is oddly evocative of the colored overlay you'd find on ancient arcade games' screens, remind me of my mid-1970s infancy. Very soothing, so it's a shame that the stories are pretty annoying. I'd probably get bored with them even if I was little.
Meanwhile, if you want to watch a cartoon featuring a chortling little furry shithead who I guess is trying to be the Italian Woody Woodpecker, I point you at Stripy, an accidental Youtube discovery. Both the zerpy-derpy proto-electronic music and the title character's color scheme, which is oddly evocative of the colored overlay you'd find on ancient arcade games' screens, remind me of my mid-1970s infancy. Very soothing, so it's a shame that the stories are pretty annoying. I'd probably get bored with them even if I was little.
(no subject)
Apr. 20th, 2006 05:51 pmI dunno which of you friended
videos_antville but thanks; it's a great feed.
Volity.net's release has improved my mood dramatically, even though I'm as busy as ever. This cartoon is not a terrible summary of how I feel right now. (Maybe NSFW; Contains cute but harmless animated French nudity and tasty dancing Don Ho chicken.)
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Volity.net's release has improved my mood dramatically, even though I'm as busy as ever. This cartoon is not a terrible summary of how I feel right now. (Maybe NSFW; Contains cute but harmless animated French nudity and tasty dancing Don Ho chicken.)
(no subject)
Feb. 17th, 2006 12:24 amThis is one of Tim Kreider's best cartoons in a while.
Also, and relatedly, this is a brilliantly simple and beautifully Eristic counter-response to certain events.
Also, and relatedly, this is a brilliantly simple and beautifully Eristic counter-response to certain events.