|
Back to Nightlight Press |
Archive for November 2003 It's hard to believe that I bought the fighting fish I would call Unraveled two years ago. He is so named for his original appearance -- I thought that his shredded fins looked cool and mysterious when I brought him home, only to find that it was actually fin rot and they shouldn't look like that. But I nursed him back to health at my proverbial teat. (I would take him to my literal teat in a failed experiment some months later.) But leave us be serious. Unraveled has gone from a timid, frightened fish to a angry bastard of a fish; to his current state, a docile old man of a fish, who generally is lying on the bottom of his tank at an angle, probably waiting for death. He is still active when I bring him food, but today I noticed that he judges the presence of food by the gross movement of my hand, and not the pellet dropping into the water. He was barely able to see it in order to eat it. I will not mourn his passing, but celebrate his brief and boring life as I commend him to the bosom of the sewer. Hang on, Unraveled, your eternal reward is coming soon.  FINANCIAL Independence Is Calling You...betty "You're the person we've been waiting to see! All this can be yours, in our special personal offer to you! ... uh... " "Go on." "It's all yours... T-t... John." "Nope, sorry." "DAMMIT! Right, Ted, sorry." "It's not Ted, either." "FINANCIAL" Google for "Stop the internet, I want to get off" -- 14 hits. Google for "Stop the internet, I want" -- 14 hits. Google for "Stop the internet, I want to log off" -- 0 hits. Well, one after this gets indexed. I really like how Friday's panel came out, and Mr. Wallace suggested making it into a poster, so I did. I wonder if my new audience are more inclined to spend cash on merchandise, so let's find out. Of course, maybe no one bought much because the other merchandise is just not very good. Okay. I heard about that new Looney Tunes movie, and I saw the posters, and it looked like it was going to be garbage. Someone linked the trailer, and I watched that, and it looked like it was going to be rancid garbage. But then I read the CNN review, and the reviewer liked it. And the Ebert review, he gave it three stars out of four. And Rotten Tomatoes lists it at... 55% or so, oh well. But now I'm pissed off, because I'd like it to be a good movie, but I bet it isn't. Disney has ruined American animation. Or at least the concept of what animation is supposed to be. You could watch Disney cartoons from 1940-1960 and see Mickey getting into this sort of "cute" trouble, or Donald getting smacked around, or Goofy crashing through walls. You could watch Warner Bros. cartoons and see Bugs, Daffy and all them kicking the crap out of each other. As time wore on, Disney dropped any "mayhem" from their cartoons. It got to the point where the most Mickey would do is have some misunderstanding with Minnie about buying her flowers, and then fall on his bottom and bounce cutely. Mickey never got hurt. Even Bugs got cut up sometimes. Warner Bros. wasn't afraid to hurt its precious star. Anyway, Disney animation skyrocketed and now if you want to do an animated feature, you have to eliminate shootings, dynamite, blowing off a duck's bill, violence. Now the excitement comes from, I don't know, swinging across a deep pit. It's geared towards very small children. So WB follows suit, and their Looney Tunes movies (this and Space Jam) are much more simplistic, easygoing, dull. At least, that's why I think this movie would suck. I'm hoping it doesn't, but now I'm all excited that maybe it'll recapture some of what I liked from the old cartoons. It probably won't. What I'd like to start working on now is a new site hierarchy, or at least a new... something with the front page, now that Checkerboard Nightmare has moved out. Ideally, I'd convert all my journals to Leonard's NewsBruiser, but this host doesn't have Python, and I'm waiting on that, so let's see what I can do with this mess. This is potentially awkward for me, as I've always felt the need to hide behind some commercial facade (as my journal used to be "one of the features" instead of "the thing you end up looking at when you first get here"). So it's weird for me, even if my journal used to be only one click away from the front. I need to give it some more thought, but I'm thinking... I'm probably going to rip Leonard off wholesale, why not?! Let me say I wish him the best in Mechanicsburg or Moonshinetown or whatever obscure part of the Deep South he moved to to make a difference -- what, Little Rock? That's like a big city! That's hardly roughing it at all! I didn't envision him to be the "pick everything up suddenly and goddammit, do something big" guy. It's like a moxie explosion. I hope he doesn't become too busy to pop his head up at Crummy once in a while. ROT13: "pubxvgl" I'm always extremely cautious -- at least inwardly -- about putting forth some idea, particularly names of things. Names are important to me, and I don't use them lightly. People's names in particular, but that's another story. One of my least favorite things is hearing someone (or being someone) trying to brainstorm an idea, and then they go "wait... I've got it. It just struck me from out of nowhere, but it's perfect... [insert idea here]." And usually the idea is really bad. And you can't say "um... man, that's a bad one," because they made a big show out of it. I wish they'd say "is [this idea] any good? I like it" rather than "a bolt of lightning hit me and God Himself said 'good going!'"  I ordered a costume... but it never arrived. Melissa made this one in one day! It's really good. I'm probably going to wear this again next year, as Data turned out really good. More: http://www.nightlightpress.com/macro/1031184135.jpg http://www.nightlightpress.com/macro/1031184152.jpg http://www.nightlightpress.com/macro/1031184401.jpg http://www.nightlightpress.com/macro/1031193248.jpg |
