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Colette and I are going to Reno over the weekend and then some. Among other things, there a chicken wing festival going on. I mention this only because The Great International Chicken Wing Society Home Page has one of the more disturbing logos I've ever encountered.
Today's Movie Theaters, Tomorrow
Apologies to those who sat through my movie theater grousing only to encounter the same grousing in somewhat altered form on Wired News. I hope the added jokes are worth it.
I just logged into Warcraft to get this encouraging message.
Things are afoot. Big things, exciting things. Big, exciting things. Big, exciting things I can't talk about. The immediate effect, however, is that my attempted vacation from thinking about my future -- my legacy -- is over like Battle Scallop.
So this is a good a time as any to announce that I will be continuing Bad Gods after the preview phase. In fact, I'm switching it from a MWF update schedule to a MW update schedule effective immediately, so that I still have a little bit of backlog.
I'm also going to include more features. First up will be embedding code, similar to YouTube. Also planned is a video Podcast so you can download them to your favorite portable video viewing device and make your train ride fifteen seconds shorter.
If there's anything in particular you'd like to see, feel free to post or mail. I am open to suggestions like the finest of camwhores.
I've uploaded another five Flash files to the source directory at Bad Gods. Jeez, two-thirds of the way through already?
Back in the early seventies, my father did some work for DC comics, primarily for the supernatural anthology titles House of Mystery and House of Secrets. Recently I discovered that DC has printed a House of Mystery compilation that includes some of his cartoons, which I think is pretty cool.
Due to the magic of work-for-hire, my Dad doesn't get any money from sales of the book, but I thought I'd mention it anyway, because it's neat. There are also some great cartoons by Sergio Aragonés in there, and some nice art by people like Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson.
The cartoons are credited to "Lore Shoberg," which bears some explanation. My family name, back in Sweden, was Sjöberg, but it was anglicized to Shoberg when the family came to the US two or three generations back. When I found this out, I legally changed my last name -- changed it back, by my way of thinking. "Lore" was originally my father's nickname, but it's my birth name, but actually my father legally changed his name to Lore Coyote Orion, so either way that explains why I'm not Lore Junior. Anyhow, back when he drew the cartoons he was Lore Shoberg.
And, as an added mystery to the House of Mystery, my dad may or may not be one of the Writers Unknown listed for many of the stories. I'll bring the book along and ask him next time I see him.
This doesn't quite fit in with what I'm trying to put up on Table of Malcontents, but it's pretty funny, so I'm putting it up here instead.
I generally carry a voice recorder with me, for taking down ideas for humor as they come to me. I don't really go through the notes as often as I ought to, and by the time I get to them I sometimes don't remember what exactly I was thinking. Here's one note, verbatim and in its entirety:
"3-D rendering with these, uh, these, uh naked lady, uh, video-y things."
Yeah, glad I got that down. Hate to deprive posterity of that culture-shattering insight.
*Edited a couple minutes later*
Now I remember. It was a note for my Alt Text article about the Musee Mechanique, where I compare early stereoscope machines that show pictures of naked women to modern 3-D rendering. Okay, not quite as random as I thought, just lacking context.
Summer has summered, and my thoughts turn to lager. Many folks were helpful in the last beer thread, so I thought I'd ask outright: does anyone have any recommendations for excellent lager, particularly excellent lager that there's a chance of getting in Berkeley, either at a brew pub or in the grocery store?
I had the idea that I was going to watch a bunch of comedies in the theater this summer. Every comedy that hit the top five in the box office in fact, just to get a sense of what people who don't get most of their entertainment from the Web are into these days.
Today marked the end of that project, thanks to summer vacation. I can put up with a certain amount of kid noise at a kid's movie like Cars, but I wasn't aware that while I was avoiding the theater, people had evolved from answering cell phone calls to actually making them during the movie.
I really should have said something, but the theater was such a cacophony of talking children, talking adults, and adults using the on-screen cars to teach their kids colors -- seriously, that's not one of my amusing exaggerations -- that I felt like I was clearly the outsider in this rough new society of filmgoers. At least when someone's talking on the cell phone you only hear one side of the conversation.
So, back to the couch for me. I don't pretend that there was some halcyon day in my lifetime when movie audiences were stone quiet except for non-verbal emotional reactions to onscreen events, but technology is pushing me back into my living room on both sides. Mobile electronics have gotten more ubiquitous and invasive, and home theater components have gotten more sophisticated. Most movie theaters don't serve Manhattans anyway.
In the spirit of the Creative Commons license that Bad Gods is distributed under, I've provided the Flash files for all the clips that have gone live so far. I'll update the directory with the latest files a couple more times before the preview is over. The files are, I believe, in Flash 8 format.
Hey, it looks like Scooby-Doo himself may become more inane than Scrappy. From a Kids' WB press release:
Shaggy and Scooby live in the bling'd-out mansion of Shaggy's Uncle Albert, solving mysteries with the help of a transforming Mystery Machine which, at the click of a remote, can morph into one of a number of modes of transportation. New Scooby Snacks infused with a top-secret nano-technology allows our canine hero to fly, become a towering robot or even turn himself into a giant magnet, which comes in handy as Shaggy and Scooby-Doo carry out their new mission: protecting the Scooby Snacks and keeping them safe from those who want them for evil.
Now, I'm not enraged or anything, because I stopped watching Scooby-Doo years ago, and I've learned that if you require your childhood memories to be enshrined in popular culture and never altered in any way, you're fucked. But still. "Secret nano-technology"? Isn't that what Dyno-Mutt was for?