Been feeling a bit burned out lately, too many weeks of running around doing stuff and not enough down time, I suspect (hence the lack of posts and lack of Ant-Boy).

Anyway, while taking a break I ran across this article over at CSM. I’ve felt that frustration as well when I was younger. Back in a high school painting class I took; I was working on painting a lighthouse on an icy shore. The teacher came over and said my waves were wrong, took the brush from my hand and painted the waves the way she thought they should be. After all these years1, I still feel somewhat annoyed/bitter that she did that. Ah well, not much I can do about it.

Our assignment was to paint watercolor landscapes. I painted trees with round tops, modeled after the pruned trees I saw as I walked to school each morning. I liked my painting; my teacher did not. She said my trees looked like lollipop trees; that they didn’t look like real trees, although they looked like the trees I knew.

Mrs. E picked up a paintbrush and painted over my trees to make them look the way she thought trees should look.

For the rest of my school years, I never voluntarily took an art class.

Anyway to Mrs. Kennar I say, though I’m not a teacher and I did continue taking art classes2 in high school and into college; I’ll never paint over your lollipop trees.

1 While I’ve been told that I look much older than my actual age (28); I’ve been through enough other experiences that thinking high school feels like I’m trudging through ancient history.
2 Though perhaps not surprisingly, I haven’t done any painting since I took that class.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to go and see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Wow was that ever a mistake!

I went in knowing that most of the reviewers out there had said it was bad and about half of the geeks were saying the same1. However the trailers for the movie looked just gorgeous with an impressive style that felt very much like one would expect a 1940’s pulp sci-fi movie to look2, from the giant robots to the cars down to the ray pistol. The one interesting thing about the movie that one should remember is that the entire thing was shot in front of a green screen and there were no locations. All the background stuff was computer-rendered. Then it appears that they pushed the film of the actors through some filters to add a bit of noise & distortion into the film, giving a feeling of being from the 40’s. These computerized specials effects were unfortunately the only good thing about the movie. The writing of the movie was wretched. The acting was sub-par at best. If you wish to know more details, following the (more) link but be warned that there are some spoilers mixed in there.
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While reading a blog, I followed a link they had to another blog whose design they liked. I pulled up the source code of the 2nd blog to try getting some idea of how they put their site together and found this delightful commentary in the comments:

Meta information was once really useful, but thanks to Google it doesn’t do much for your well being anymore. Kind of like comfort food – it tastes good and it makes you feel cozy but causes a lot of heartburn and gas.

The meta tags you see blow are mostly for show. All rebuilt from vintage 2001 code that was rusting out in a forgotten web site. The interior was re-stitched by hand and features an 800 thread count. I’m not sure if the ‘MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’ is needed anymore but I left it in as a reminder of how much our world is controled by heartless global coporations who seek nothing more than to turn us all into soulless lemmings with a Platinum Card.

Have a nice day!

Quote found on Airbag. Kudos to the Binary Bonsai for the link.

AOL hasn’t tried darkening my mailbox in quite some time but when I checked the mail today; there it was another “free trial offer”. Normally, I would have just tossed it directly into the trash since they no longer send their software out on floppies. However as I walked back up to my apartment, the packaging the CD was in reminded me of something I’d seen previously online.

In short, it looked rather much like Jewelboxing’s Kings, Movie-Sized Cases. I tore the case apart to remove all of AOL’s crappy marketing and to examine the case for manufacturing marks. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything on the case that positively identified it as a one of Jewelboxing’s cases. Is it the real thing? A cheap knock-off? Heck if I know!

What I do know is that I just got a nice DVD size case for free that goes for $49 per pack of 20 ($2.45 each). This will work great for storing some DVDs I’ve burned of fan-subbed anime. *keen*