Ever wonder what happened to that movie that was announced but never came out? Saw a great animated film but learned it completely bombed in the box office but you thought it had promise? While those movies probably won’t ever be given a second chance, they each can have their own spotlight here. DRAWING FOR NOTHING is a free ebook compiling the artwork of the world’s canceled and troubled animated films. Animation reels have been scrubbed, portfolios scraped, books scanned, interviews conducted and resumes analyzed to present this. Some movies within this book you’ll know pretty well, but there will always be at least one you’ve never heard of. The purpose of this book is to not only properly appreciate the work put into things that never got the chance to be appreciated, but to give artists another source of inspiration. Yeah, there’s a ton of things to be inspired by now, but what about the stuff that never made it? The stuff that was deemed too risky or not good enough?
Firehouse Five and the Cinderella Surprise:
My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two.
But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella.
Bronze Age Robots! 1970s comics and robots from the 1970s? yes, this is for me:
The Bronze Age of Robots is all about franchises. Movies, TV, comic book and especially, TOYS! This is the time of the SF products: Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, Doctor Who, Buck Rogers, etc. etc. Sure, there are a few superheroes still at it, but the Science Fiction series are king. The top of the pile for robot creation is 2000 AD, the British SF weekly: Judge Dredd, Sam Slade, ABC Warriors, and so many others. Only the toy companies seem to put out more: Transformers, Starriors, Rom the Spaceknight, Shogun Warriors and so on. There hasn’t been so many tin robots around since 1939!
I’ve had a personal website for a long time. When you put things on the web “the street finds its own uses for things” — which is how it came to be that in 2011 a guy emailed me out of the blue asking me why my website www dot artlung dot com was on the tv show Bones. (Includes an edit 10 years later when I finally sorted out why it might have happened).
Heresies of “Dune” By Daniel Immerwahr:
Herbert’s story of a teenage boy from a peripheral desert planet who learns to control people with his voice, wields a blade, and brings down a galactic empire bears a suspiciously close resemblance to George Lucas’s Star Wars — down to the hero’s mystically adept sister (Alia in Dune, Leia in Star Wars) and the villain with a feudal title who turns out to be the hero’s grandfather or father (Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Lord Vader in Star Wars). On seeing Lucas’s film, Herbert became furious and listed 16 points of “absolute identity” between his novels and Star Wars, from its “spice mines” to its “dune sea.”
Empire of Dune: Indigeneity, U.S. Power and a Science Fiction Classic — A Talk by Daniel Immerwahr
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
Are we creating our own realities? Well, yes. (See The Brainwashing of my Dad from 2015). But now we can do it self-serve. Tracy Durnell:
In a way we’re collectively creating a world of our own evidence, the way each of us does individually with our memories, pruning and changing the truth of the past, and forgetting a lot. We rely on documentation, not memory, when possible, to understand what really happened in the past, but now our collective, largely unintentional record deletion is creating a cultural amnesia — a cultural dementia, in a way.
From Ironic Sans, now a newsletter, writing about something that happened many years ago on his blog, and how it lingers into the now. The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock:
In 2008 … I wrote on my blog about an idea I called “The Bulbdial Clock”:
The Bulbdial Clock has no hands — just one pole in the center of the clock, and three light sources of varying heights which revolve around the pole casting shadows.
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I wrote a lot of “idea” posts back then, and my blog had active commenters who frequently used them as a jumping off point to imagine how they might be even better. I loved that. Sometimes I even held back some of my own thoughts in the hopes that someone else would have the same thought and chime in — a subtle way of fostering conversation in the comments.
Tales from the Glitter Gym: Addendum:
I was a the guilty party responsible for hastening the end of Tales back in 2011. I thought and still think MAS’s series is a funny, well-observed slice of life. Satiric, yes, but true. MAS was a person who I’d read for many years by that point, and here more than a decade later he’s still in my RSS feed.
…
As much as I’m excited for the blogging renaissance that’s happening right now in the IndieWeb, I am very well aware of the negative attention that can come from attention.
Chris Aldrich got a new and beautiful typewriter: a 1957 Remington Quiet-Riter.
Viridian Note 00325: Open Source Speech Saturday, August 03, 2002:
That’s the answer. “I wanna go pirate some Hollywood movies and keep ’em for myself, please!” And the reaction is: “Gee, our customers are criminals! They must be spied upon, lest they hurt us, and one another!”
The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But that’s not a market economy. That’s not even capitalism. That is a state-capitalist, state-sanctioned monopoly that Mussolini would have smiled on. Mussolini used to give the people of Italy free radios. But they would only tune in to the fascist station. This was supposed to be the only kind of radio that people in Italy understood. This was the entirety of Italian radio as a medium. Mussolini’s radio had just one big dial on the front that said “Radio Zone.”
Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic. A short videogame.
I NEED IT TO BE SUMMER… a kind of poem. a meditation
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Bodysurfing: Embrace the Ocean’s Embrace
100 (more) things you can do with your personal website from James:
The web is a place to be creative. To share your ideas and perspectives. You can do so how you want: with images, poetry, blog posts, collages, music, and more. Optionally, you can code, too! (But you definitely don’t need to code to have a personal website.)
