Categories
Science Fiction and Fantasy

Wendy Pini’s college project: an Elric animated film

When I was in high school (like, 15?), a friend made the suggestion, fueled by a mutual enthusiasm for Ralph Bakshi’s animation and Am Oved’s Hebrew editions of Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer, that someone make a movie version of the latter, maybe with a Deep Purple soundtrack. I’m not even sure if “someone” was supposed to be us, but I’m sure a similar notion occured to many a young Michael Moorcock fan.

Anyway, Wendy (ElfQuest) Pini had the same idea when she was in high school, and when she went to college she made an honest attempt at it. Her efforts are lovingly detailed in this wonderful art book called Law and Chaos which is available in its entirety online.

(Although, my 15-year-old self would probably find that she drew an awful lot of ornate architecture and pretty dresses and barely any sword fights with demons. What a girl)

It’s remarkable to think that Moorcock gave her his blessing, and what technical difficulties she had to struggle with in those dark pre-computer days. These days it might be possible for a rabid fan to actually create something like this, except that nobody would be able to get the rights these days.

[via Tor.com]

Categories
Blather

The Flying Man

The Flying Man, a short film about a superhero seen from the outside.

The Flying Man from Marcus Alqueres on Vimeo.

Categories
Blather

Australian Biomass

The fundamental question is this: do we prefer our biomass in the form of gorgeous reef and rain forest ecosystems, or Australians? Unfortunately, the only country that has any say in the matter is also the only one that finds the question hard to answer.

Maciej Ceglowski visits the Daintree Rain Forest

Categories
Blather

Bright kids keep messing with Granddad’s junk (but it’s still cluttering up our lawn)

My response to the Perl 5/6 FAR (Frequently Aired Rant) – latest example here – reposted from a comment.

Every once in a while, like when meeting a non-Perl programmer in person, or hearing another “Perl is Dead!” screed in the echo chamber (they are as rare outside the echo chamber as “Sun is hot!” rants, and for the same reason – nobody cares about restating common wisdom), a Perl person will wonder “why the heck don’t we get granddad to move that big pile of junk he’s been tinkering with off our front lawn, so the neighbors will stop thinking our house is an abandoned shack in the garbage dump?”

“I mean sure, it gives granddad something to do, and maybe once in a while he’ll get a bright kid to wander in and get excited. But really, once those kids mess around a bit with some loose gears, they get this compulsion to take the whole thing apart again, then gradually lose interest and wander off, leaving even more of a mess.”

“And granddad won’t let us clear it all up, says it’s his baby. Won’t feel right taking it away from him, after all, he put up this house and he’ll make all kinds of fuss.”

So the Perl person throws a fit, and his or her brethren say “right on!” or “let’s move!” or “let granddad move!” For some reason, numbers keep getting mentioned.

Then we all sigh and go back into the house to do our work. We ignore granddad and his big science project. We follow our neighbors and even talk to them on the street, and everything’s fine until we bring up where we live and they go “Someone still lives in that place? I thought it was abandoned”.

And we start again with “granddad’s blasted science project” and “get him off our lawn”.

Until we move.

Categories
Blather BlogTalk

Blog Mitzva!

Fogi kindly mailed me 2 days ago with a link to the oldest post on this blog, reminding me that today is my Blog Mitzva: 13 years since I started posting stuff to the internet using a blog-type thing.

Reviewing the old posts tracks my convoluted route through assorted obscure publishing technologies, starting with Dave Winer‘s early public blogging platform (Edit This Page dot com, which couldn’t take the traffic even way back then, moving to blogger (hosted editing, but the results uploaded to my own site on corky.net via FTP), then back to a Dave Winer product, Radio (a local application for editing and uploading via FTP to my site). Once Radio moved to a paid model and I could no longer downgrade back to the free version, I installed Movable Type, a Perl CGI application that let you edit posts in the browser on your own server, storing them in a Berkley DB file, and “rendering” them to HTML files for presentation. This complicated setup got replaced by WordPress once PHP came to corky and too over web applications in general. And here I am today.

Reviewing the content accumulated in my blog over the years gives a somewhat sad picture. No essays or extended arguments, no fiction or poems, no reviews or technical articles. There was never much effort put into any of the posts, most of them are just odd links with a few words to pad around them, trivial notes, fragmentary documentation of my delinquent browsing, fiddling with software, percolating ideas for roleplaying games and general faffing about. Slim scriblets that fairly drown in the ostentatious blog adornments WordPress slathers on each (title! categories! tags!), like almond slivers sinking in rich cream. And even these bits, barely tweets are scattered over time, just 1,791 items posted over 4,745 days. Mostly, it’s just silence.

In short, a pretty accurate picture of my life.