The City by the Gay | January 28, 2005 21:49:20 PM

I read that somewhere.

I'm here in San Francisco this weekend, meeting people and acting as host in some short films.* Hopefully I will get a chance to see Leonard and Sumana on Sunday.

Also I have other exciting, unrelated, even more legitimate movie news that has to do peripherally with me, but I can't talk about it yet.

* non-pornographic

Movie roundup | January 25, 2005 16:45:18 PM

I expected The Aviator to be pretty standard inspirational biopic stuff, which I'm okay with, but I really liked how they handled his insanity. It wasn't at all a cute, kooky thing (it was at the start of the movie, but it just gets worse and worse). I think part of why it resonated with me so much is that, and it sounds vain, but I feel like that sometimes, and I start to think that creativity and problems like that are inseparable. Also I got a big kick out of seeing modern actors play period actors (Cate Blanchett as Hepburn stole every scene, and it was neat to see somebody do Jean Harlow).

The Life Aquatic had kind of an odd structure to it, but I liked it a lot. I don't think I've seen any other of that director's movies. I'm fond of Bill Murray and the whole "past-his-prime oceanographer documentarian" milieu. It was really interesting to me, an awesome setting for a story about little regrets and last adventures.

Chex | January 19, 2005 21:32:04 PM

I feel very positive... there's been an upswing in traffic lately, I have nice plans for the strip this year, and I've sold out nearly all the merchandise I'd made available for con last year. Granted, it's taken me this long to clear them out, but it tells me there is a demand, especially for the shirts, which I made little profit on. The next batch will be done smarter. I think this will be a good year to be Checkerboard Nightmare.

Power Rangers | January 18, 2005 16:07:14 PM

http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph/

Here's a really neat toy that doesn't always work so well. It applies characteristics of other races/ages to a picture of your face that you upload. Here's the picture I started with:


And to it, it applies the attributes of a child's face, which is pretty goddamn accurate:


And an old man, which sort of looks like my grandfather on my mom's side to me:


And here's me if I were black:


Asian:


West Asian (Indian, really):


And the one that should piss Kurt off a little, the result when a girl's attributes are applied to my face:


It sort of looks like Kurt, but not really.

NICKELBACK'D!!! | January 11, 2005 14:08:42 PM

Okay, I hadn't had a chance to hear this until now, but I already knew it was the case.

http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm

But the thing is, maybe these guys are writing one of those counterpart arias for a Nickelback musical, like "the Jets are gonna have their day, toni-i-i-ight" and "tonight there will be no morning star." That's pretty classy.

Nickelback sucks.

Brava | January 9, 2005 9:24:04 AM

You may have noticed an ugly new design on the front page. I'm testing it right now, so write me if it's not working for you. It uses CSS and was working in IE 6 and Firefox. And Netscape 6, too, I think. (Don't mention the black bar up there, that will be a nav menu soon.)

Also I have a cold.

Also, the meanest thing I've heard in a while: here is Kurt, watching an infomercial about a new-fangled spatula, when a portly woman appears on screen and is billed a "National Food Expert" --

"National Food Expert? On what, eating it??"

Spoiler | January 6, 2005 10:29:30 AM

Last night, I had a dream where I made dinner for myself, and then I forgot about it and left it somewhere. Just now I thought "dammit, I wish I had cleaned it up because it's in my head somewhere, on a table, getting spoiled."