animation

One of the things we do at work, at lunch and otherwise, is talk about movies, old, new and forthcoming. We kibitz and argue and I get a lot out of it. I like talking about movies about people who care about them.

The one movie I am excited about that NOBODY else is is Speed Racer. I think it’s incredible looking. I suspect it’s going to massively flop, but I hope not. It reminds me a little bit of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy—which I find to be awful, but was an interesting experiment. My hope is that Speed Racer will be more than just interesting.

I enjoyed Iron Man very much, despite being very sick when I saw it. I juiced myself up on cold medicine, grabbed a handful of cough drops and we saw it last weekend. I followed the Iron Man comic in the 1980s so I do have longstanding (holy cow, 20 years) interest in the character. I thought the casting was great, and the movie was fun. Good action, believable characterizations: the film worked. I think criticisms like those voiced by Matthew Baldwin are valid, and I think his superhero movie pet peeves are particularly apt.

Interestingly enough, the funniest things I’ve read about Iron Man are not about the movie, but come from the Again With The Comics blog, which dives into the decades of history of Iron Man to find the more wonderfully ridiculous aspects of the character and his rogue’s gallery. For example: Things You Won’t Be Seeing In IRON MAN: The Iron Mullet!, Things You Won’t Be Seeing In IRON MAN: the Iron Nose and lastly: Things You Won’t Be Seeing In IRON MAN: Obadiah Stane’s “Costume”

I think Lebowski might’ve looked pretty good in that! Well, maybe. I’m curious to see how the sequels might do. Oh, and one last AWTC post: Iron Man 2 Villain Suggestions. And though that is a funny post, Black Lama really is a character who is “other-dimensional counterpart of Gerald Ford,” Wikipedia confirms this.

The other two “big” movies I want to see this year are Wall-E and The Dark Knight. I’ve been a fan of Pixar animation for decades, and a Batman fan even longer.

Speaking of animation, I would be remiss if I did not bring to your attention a Bollywood/Disney computer animated film called Roadside Romeo, which I found via Cartoon Brew:

It looks truly bad, though I will admit that I’m not the intended audience. It does include a heaping dose of ‘tude. Though John Kricfalusi does not care for the Simpson’s, when I think of ‘tude, I think of Poochie.

I like how this animation screwed with my expectations. Supernifty!

I’m up relatively early this morning. I can hear rain outside the window of the office. Leah acquired some of the lovely All Natural Cola by Whole Foods and I’m having one of those. I feel a tickle in my nose and I think I might be getting a cold. That’s not optimal.

I have a backlog of Misc and here it goes, helpfully organized by vague category!

Programming

I’m very impressed by DateJS—it provides functionality like PHP’s function strtotime() but in JavaScript. This is a tool I’ll be using. I found this via the excellent Ajaxian blog.

The Amazon Kindle has been getting nothing but hate on the net, but it feels like a different class of product to me. These two reviews in particular make me wonder if this device might be something I’d use: Andy Ihnatko and Don MacAskill.

Douglas Crockford wants to fix HTML. I think Crockford is the smartest programmer in JavaScript-land, but I think he’s late to that party. I do like some of his ideas though. Crockford also points out how crazy the expectations are on programming for the web, when talking about Unobtrusive JavaScript he says:

It also calls for Graceful Degradation, which means that a page should do something useful even if the JavaScript assets fail to run. This is bizarre. No other programming environment threatens to pull the rug out from under the programmer the way the web does. If you are writing applications in Java, you do not have to be prepared for having Java turned off. But because of the browser’s long and tragic history of security screwups, JavaScript does get turned off. It is ultimately the only security control given to users that works. So not only does the programmer have to be prepared for failure, the program is expected to fail gracefully.

And he adds: Madness.

Yup.

Speaking of madness, The Web Standards Project points to the Email Standards Project. I end up with responsibility to debug and test HTML mail sometimes and it’s a mess dealing with the various email clients. This a good development. As one of the original members of what would become the WSP, I am all for this. I’m glad to see momentum here.

I’d like to see JavaScript Beautify added to either/both of Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar.

Comics and Animation

This image of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy posted by Slashfilm reminds me of two of my cousins. I got into (back) into comics at age 13 and while I didn’t get into TMNT, the art style was cool. This figure really seems to hit the aesthetic of those black and white indie comics well.

One of the funnier blogs about comics Again With The Comics, did a series called Thanksgiving Turkeys, featuring terrible supervillains from comics past that made me laugh.

Not funny, but aesthetically beautiful is the work of illustrator Julienne Hsu, on startdrawing.org. Spare, impressionistic, but a turns precise. I find it very inspiring. Her website is www.juliennehsu.com

Marlo Meekins is a cartoonist from the John K. posse who has a way with markers I envy. She says of her work, anticipating the question, this about marker choice: “To answer a super common question about marker brand: I use most brands of markers and only a few select shades. But, all and even the best brands make gross colors and plenty of them. Never buy marker sets. It’s decisions about color combinations, line and application not brand.”

Also from the John K. posse is Uncle Eddy, on Underlight.

Terminus is a short film that spans animation and culture. It’s a disturbing but perfectly executed short film about a man and a looming concrete figure. via jwz.

Culture

Ads from the past might have been demeaning to women.

The estimable ze frank has two Christmas songs out: Listen and Buy, if you want! I particularly like Santa Ain’t Fat.

This interview with the Coen Brothers on Charlie Rose makes me want to see No Country For Old Men more. Open Culture has a few more links.

Anil Dash points out what’s interesting about memes and net culture, and points out ROFLcon, which looks seriously fascinating, bizarre, and potentially educational and entertaining.

Undercover Black Man points out some silliness by one Tay Zonday—a Dr. Pepper promotional song called Cherry Chocolate Rain. It’s fun, it’s silly, it’s a, well, I suppose it’s a parody of hip-hop videos, sort of, but it also uses the conventions of the genre, but funny. So fine, it’s cute, it’s funny—but this feels like a “forced” viral meme, and the production values are way too high to be homegrown. Then I zipped over to the young man’s YouTube Page and check out Internet Dream and I found myself inexplicably laughing. Well, maybe explicable. The dude is funny and talented. Sort of They Might Be Giants meet Biz Markie. Just watch Internet Dream:

And to complete this series of Misc items, I’ll make this a loop—this post on O’ Reilly Radar is about the confusion between Bill O’Reilly (right wing windbag) and O’Reilly (the publisher, mostly known for programming books).

And with that, I’ll start my day.

Uncov got some para-journalistic love from Wired. I have mentioned uncov before. I have thought a bit more about the salty language Ted uses, and I’ve decided it’s really interesting to my brain to have the subject be computer science and business and have the language come out of, oh, Quentin Tarantino. Id meets intellect. WIN.

My new favorite movie blog is Slashfilm. A recent post is about Across the Universe, and the fact that it’s developing a cult following: Across the Universe: the Next Cult Sensation?. Several of us went to see it the weekend it came out over in Simi Valley and I enjoyed it. It put me in the mind of a Chicago or a Moulin Rouge. Parts of AtU get a little too surreal, but basically it holds together like a musical, it’s magical, and the music is rather well handled. Also, I was pretty proud to spot the Joe Cocker cameo. And there are others too, but I won’t ruin those.

And ooh, what’s this, a new Cat and Girl collection! Yay! I’ve mentioned this strip before. Here’s $8228.40 and a Metrocard, described as:

This 468 page brick of a book prints every episode of Donation Derby from its inception through December 2006. It adds a handy place index and brief interviews with your Donation Derby regulars. Buying this book supports my lavish lifestyle.

See, if you send money to Cat and Girl’s cartoonist, Dorothy, she will draw you a comic of what she buys with it. I love the concept. I’ve even donated. One of mine made the cut. You know, I already told you to read it!

Meanwhile… I’m ashamed to admit that I totally forgot about World Egg Day, which was Thursday. I missed the Frederator Studios piece. However, I can do some penance by linking to the wonderful and hallucinatory iloveegg.com:

Their animation is sort of wonderful.

In a serious and more academic realm than cartoon dancing singing eggs, Paul Kedrosky says Ooooh, Blogs are Now Authoritative, reporting that the National Institutes of Health style guide describes how to cite a blog post—Sample Citation and Introduction to Citing Blogs:

Also in a serious vein, KPBS should choose JeSais.

Over on BLDGBLOG, I love this rant: Greater Los Angeles. I don’t agree with it all, but that’s L.A. for you. Heh. While I’ve brought up L.A., let me suggest you check out the Militant Angeleno Blog. BLDGBLOG was a part of the big Science Fiction and Architecture thing Chris G and I went to a few months ago.

It’s raining here. We have some friends coming, and we’re tidying up. Alex’s birthday was yesterday—she turned 17!—and she and some friends are headed to Magic Mountain, driven by Leah. Man, I so don’t want to be 17 again. It’s a lovely day.