KinderForest – Growing a Playground is an animated short made by my brother to promote our friend Ezekiel’s ficus start-up. There’s a better version (Quicktime) of the video on that site.
Month: December 2006
Categories
The Loudness
On Saturday night, the annoying loud music in a restaurant prompted me to mention something I’d read on the internet about how there’s this trend in modern music to mix the recordings so that they’re too loud and grating to listen to. Now, I didn’t remember what I’d read well enough to explain it properly, but oddly enough, the next day I noticed that Fogi had linked to a profile (Hebrew) of Rick Rubin which describes Rubin’s criticized technique of using too much compression to make everything too loud.
Damn. If only in Real Life you could just scatter some links to information instead of needing to actually read and understand it well enough to be able to explain it.
Categories
The King responds to the comics
A long while back, Nimrod sent me a link to some stand-up routine with the premise “I was the Superfriends’ filipino maid”. The butt of the jokes was the man in the orange shirt. Apparently, he wasn’t amused:
Aquaman, King of the Seven Seas, Has Fucking Had It With You, Man. (at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – see also Back From Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied).
The Covenant looks like a pretty peculiar movie – one reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes described it as Harry Potter re-cast with underwear models, another says it really wishes it was Lost Boys; it’s like one of those teenage supernatural horror movies with sexy young actors, except with kewl powerz, romance and homoerotic high-school rivalry replacing the horror. The official site proclaims it is from the producers of Underworld
, which would explain a lot: it has a similar feel of relentlessly harvesting all the cool bits from a roleplaying game, of shame and guilt-free revelry in genre tropes worn smooth by constant fanboy groping. It looks to have none of Lost Boys‘ humor and charisma, and no sign of Kate Beckinsale(*) in black vinyl.
The bit with the car looks neat, though.
It’s so unoriginal that someone’s claiming they stole the script from him. On an internet forum.
* – Speaking of Kate Beckinsale, I recently saw her in this. Black stockings, white apron – you’d think she picks her roles based on their fetishistic appeal.
Categories
Dungeons and Dragons in the Dungeons
Erik Mona (the editor of Dragon) – The Lock Down:
Dragon receives several letters from prisoners every week. I renamed Dungeon’s mail column “Prison Mail” as an inside joke because of it. Part of the charm is that almost no one else sends letters. I get plenty of mail, but almost all of the hand-addressed envelopes are from guys on the inside.
There are thousands–probably tens of thousands–of prisoners playing Dungeons & Dragons right now. Just like in the military, the game has a strong hold anywhere groups of young men are trapped with a lot of free time. We get letters asking for campaign advice, letters apologizing for implicating D&D in crimes committed in the 80s at the height of the gaming scare, and letters with questions, criticisms, and praise of the latest issue–or sometimes and issue from months or even years ago.