my.bicycle

Studio Ghibli’s next project is announced; it’s A Wizard of Earthsea. (c3fyn)

This film by Coudal Partners is funny, but it is a laugh riot if you’ve ever worked in print design.

Tutorial here. (Thanks, Ben!)

Labels: administrivium, web

Kathryn and Stuart Immonen (of Ultimate Fantastic Four fame) have a new webcomic: Never As Bad As You Think. (stuart immonen’s livejournal)

Despite the web being a surrogate for a real-world social life, there are plenty of people who don't want to check five different places to keep up with me. Go figure. I am pondering how to best lasso all my presences, My.Bicycle, Flickr, LiveJournal, into a unified whole.

Flickr's easy; I can drop it in the sidebar.

LiveJournal lets me restrict access to some entries, and that's really convenient. Probably what I want is to tie the Comments here to my LiveJournal account. Essentially I want to mirror the posts here to my LiveJournal, and let Comments happen there. This is largely what Game Politics does, and I think it is what Josie Nutter does.

How can I implement this, LazyWeb?
Can anyone see any drawbacks, other than losing the anonymity of my LJ?

Labels: administrivium, games, web

Hire the Black Eyed Peas to work your event of choice.

Labels: video

Outgoing Flight:
Christmas With the Kranks: gave it a miss, or maybe it wasn't playing.
Kindergarten Cop: I saw and enjoyed this in theaters a long time ago. It doesn't hold up at all. Who the hell is the love interest in this movie? She went up fast and disappeared quick, like a bottle rocket. Whatsit? Penelope Ann Miller? And the villain and his mom? Pure 80's suspension-of-disbelief-stretching movie kitsch.
Must Love Dogs: gave it a miss; I'll watch John Cusack in almost anything. Almost.
The Perfect Man: gave it a miss. Was that Heather Locklear?
The Polar Express: Not /nearly/ as bad as I'd expected. The Uncanny Valley comparisons are not unfair; the characters are all, to a one, very creepy. Where they should have used unmanipulated motion capture data or hand-animated the whole thing, they stay in some middle-of-the-road compromise that looks as unnatural as the weirdly facial motion-captured "acting." Truth to tell, they should have used a greenscreen technique like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow did. However there are musical segments that are a lot of fun, gorgeous sets and impossible camera movements that are really just breathtaking.
Seabiscuit: gave it a miss
X2: X-Men United: Stunning how well Brian Singer captures the feeling of what made the X-Men comics great, and updates it just enough for grown-ups and film transition.

The flight over pretty much sucked for movies. Luckily it was just over eight hours, nothing like the twelve hour return flight.

On the other hand, the return flight's movies were quite good—Return Flight:
A Beautiful Mind: This is the charming and bittersweet story of eccentric mathmetician John Nash, and his struggles with his unique intellect.As much as I am not a fan of Russell Crowe's personal antics, this is an absolutely wonderful movie with stellar performances throughout it.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The most common comment heard about this movie is that there was no need to remake the Gene Wilder film; however, this is not the same story as that movie. Tim Burton has a knack for stunning visuals and offsetting presentation of quirky, nuanced characters. In this, he shows Willy Wonka to be a troubled and imperfect ruler over his wondrous factory. The most common comparison is a rather grotesque and unfair one to Michael Jackson, which fails to notice the healing powers of a good-tempered innocent on a jaded adult, as well as tainting the movie's reputation with implied association with sexual abuse of children. This movie draws even more attention to the importantance of parenting in not only the resulting child, but how it will affect the entire family dynamic. And if that's not enough for you, Danny Elfman does all the vocals in the Oompah Loompah songs. Woot!
A Good Woman: gave it a miss
How the Grinch Stole Christmas: I had ZERO hope for this movie going into it, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. Jim Carrey is an excellent Grinch, and the Whos are a lot less purile than they are in the original story. Plenty of comedy that happens beyond the slapstick level for the adults, as well as standard Carry mugging for the camera, spazzing out, and toilet humor for the kids. I'll probably rent it to watch with my kids during this winter break.
Ice Age: The channel for this was on the fritz for the entire trip; I wanted to see it, but couldn't deal with the audio and visual static.
The Island: (sigh) Ewan MacGregor. Scarlet Johannsen. Sean Bean. Steve Buscemi. That guy who played Neelix on Star Trek: Voyager. How can this have gone so far wrong as it manages to? Leave aside dropped plotlines that might have been ill-conceived red herrings. Don't touch the continuity errors that cause things to make even less sense. What we have is essentially a movie about kids trying to get home while being pursued by a Bad Guy. But they don't have a home, and there is no place to go, so director Michael Bay makes things explode, loudly, instead. This is another one of those movies that, though I saw it for free, and had little better to do with my time on the flight, I still felt like I had wasted a chance to do something, anything else.
Little Manhattan: gave it a miss
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: I am a BIG, big fan of W&G, and was very excited to see this movie. I laughed out loud repeatedly; there are a lot of good puns, some subtle, some not, some delayed-reaction gems as well. Still, I think the characters were better served in their short film incarnations; the humor and plot get a bit, er, long in the tooth.

Wasn’t there a videogame based on photographing news events or helping people survive the events?

A photographer has come under fire in China for his pictures of a man falling off a bicycle. The man came a spectacular cropper in Xiamen city after his bike hit a pot-hole submerged in rainwater. But photographer Liu Tao was accused of lying in wait to take his pictures instead of warning people of the danger.
Readers of the Beijing Youth Daily, which published the shots, wrote in to express their feelings. One wrote: "The pictures are well shot, but the person who shot this is disgusting. He knew there was a pit, but was waiting there for someone to fall over."
And another said: "The photographer should really be condemned since he knew there definitely would be other victims."
Liu defended himself, saying: "I just knew that the city government has paved the pit, and without my pictures, the pit would not be noticed by the government, and there would perhaps be more people falling over." (jwz)

From the comedy team, Rahmens, that brought us the Japanese Tradition of Sushi video, enjoy Shinbashi (shockwave), a guide to Japanese pronunciation as demonstrated by 2-channel cat-emoticons. (tokyopia forum)

Hurratorpedo, of ass-crack and Total Eclipse of the Heart cover fame, are touring the USA. In a Ford, apparently. The whole site looks to be a bit of a piss-take, but it is unclear if the Norwegians are in on the gag. They rock. RAWK.

Continuing the Chuck Norris theme: Does anyone remember the 80’s cartoon, Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos “Do a shot every time the announcer says ‘Chuck Norris,’” says the hosting site. Man, you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning halfway through if you did that.

“A minority under siege by the powers-that-be” (Except for the President, Congress, and State Legislatures)

Both Colbert Report and The Daily Show tackle the War on Christmas.

Labels: video

Check out some of the beautiful, poignant, and sometimes horrifying pictures in this REUTERS Showcase. Some shots made me laugh, others... were hard to deal with.

Jedi Baby training (.mov); watch for the well-edited after-effects.

Spying, the Constitution — and the ‘I-word’
WASHINGTON - In the first weeks and months after 9/11, I am told by a very good source, there was a lot of wishing out loud in the White House Situation Room about expanding the National Security Agency’s ability to instantly monitor phone calls and e-mails between American callers and possible terror suspects abroad. “We talked a lot about how useful that would be,” said this source, who was “in the room” in the critical period after the attacks.

Well, as the world now knows, the NSA — at the prompting of Vice President Cheney and on official (secret) orders from President Bush — was doing just that. And yet, as I understand it, many of the people in the White House’s own Situation Room — including leaders of the national security adviser’s top staff and officials of the FBI — had no idea that it was happening. (continue reading)

At this survey, of 153142 responses, 85% say “Yes,” G.W. Bush should be impeached. Sicc ’em!

a: absolutely - this should be investigated and tried, considering the precedents set with the last presidency.

Despite my admiration for Nic Cage, Ghost Rider is going to suck monkey balls. (.mov)

A recent skit covering the The Chronic of Narnia Rap (Flash player); this is also a free download this week at the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). I didn't know that Andy of Awesometown is on SNL now! EXPLODING HIGH FIVE!

Labels: video

Lego’s Advent Calendar in virtual form, with a big FINALE! This, from the guy that brought us the Lego build of firefly-class Serenity.

Play a Java implementation of Quake 2, Jake2 in any Java-capable browser. Goodbye productivity. (/.)

“Eww. Veggie dogs are like buying a ‘Real Doll’ of your dead wife.”

CXF: Last, but certainly not least. It's December 22, 2012. As humanity takes its last wistful look at the constraints of space-time and dives headlong into the Supercontext, where is Grant Morrison?

GM: Shagging like bloody Shiva, I hope. I think that if anything happens at all, it's most likely to come in the form of a mass consciousness change - possibly triggered by planetary electromagnetic field alterations predicted to occur around that time - so that basically everyone will start peaking on the acid trip that never ends. 'Individuality' will dissolve and your minds will start to merge into one mass mind, which is likely to seem quite frightening and overwhelming, especially for the sheltered minds, and time will seem to disappear as we identify with the mitochondria in our cells, instead of identifying with the physical individual carrier 'bodies' we use to expedite the shuffling around of DNA.

The world's current social structures should collapse quite rapidly when that happens and chances are, only people capable of handling the immense influx of new information will be those already familiar with heavily-altered states of consciousness. For everyone else, it will seem like the Second Coming, the arrival of the Space Brothers, the Rapture, Hell on Earth, the 32nd path of the Tree of Life or whatever they decide to see - everyone will get their own personal apocalyptic transfer into this new mode of being. Some poor souls will have to be guided out of hell, others will have to be coaxed down from sci-fi Ultraspheres but we'll all be living in a state of permanent psychedelic ecstasy and will have to restructure our entire existence to cope with the new consciousness. I have a feeling that psychedelic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent.
—Future Hi: Grant Morrison, 2012, & the Supercontext

Documentary On Japanese Sushi: I’d claim it’s 100% accurate, but sarcasm doesn’t work well in text. (tokyopia forum)

Some days DJ stands for “Doing Just” — check out this very cool 12 minute trailer for SPIN. (thanks, Marc!)

Samurai Jack-esque animation (by Joel Trussell) featuring vikings and hard rock; it’s like my life story.

The trailer for House of the Dead 2 (which does not feature the “touch” of Uwe Boll) looks like it cold be a lot of fun. High school! Zombies! Panicked soldiers! Professional zombie hunters! Yes, it will still suck, but in a good way. (thanks, weezie)

Check out this Le Parkour runner doing his thing in “Off The Wall” (hosted at Compused.com, which means annoying ads, now that FlashBlock doesn’t work in Firefox 1.5). It’ impressive, but not as much as previously posted professionally shot Le Parkour stuff.

Not surprisingly, soon after ABC announced it’s limited offering of shows on iTunes Music Store to play on iPods, NBC has also quickly stepped up to do the same (iTMS link). Maybe I can watch The Office at last. But I have to admit to being a lot more excited about finally being able to watch the SciFi Channel revamp of Battlestar Galactica (iTMS)!

Labels: sf

Clever use for a digital camera and a bit of code: make a cylindrical map of a human mug. (thanks, Monty)

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Einstürzende Dead Mosquitos; stark, bleak, entertaining - not words one usually associates with commercials for home improvement warehouse-stores. (the other michael’s xradiograph)

You’ll note the sudden appearance of a backlog of posts. I have been too busy to compose entries until last weekend, at which point (despite paying my bills on time) my web host decided to heisman my FTP access to my account, and I have been unable to update anything for the past five days, though. Back now.

Slither features Nathan Fillon in a role that seems, well, non dissimilar to his role in Firefly. As a horror comedy with action sequences, Slither looks to be a spiritual follow up to the excellent Tremors.

The X-MEN 3 Announcement Teaser is a lot more of a trailer than a simple tease; spoiler for anyone who didn’t read the comic: Jean Grey is back, risen from the ashes, so to speak.

“From the makers of Traffic” comes Syriana, what looks to be a morality tale about lying down with dogs, and then being surprised at the flea infestation that ensues. With oil. It looks very exciting, but I can’t help but think that only us would-be lefties will see it, and it will not change anyone’s mind about mixing politics with business; might it stir us to greater action, though?

If all these visuals overload your Cool Gauge, check out the video for Lionel Richie’s All Night Long to bring yourself back to earth, and possibly begin weeping for the eighties.

Labels: comic

Sixteen Serious Questions Raised By "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer
“Why are they such fascists? Like the head elf isn’t way different than all the others? And what about the tall elf? Is he an engineer? Is he from MIT? Why is he tall? And how come the head elf and the tall elf don’t get any shit but Hermy does?”
(thanks, TimK)