8 July 2008
[blogs] The Documentary Blog … ‘Welcome to The Documentary Blog, a website created by and for documentary fans and filmmakers. Our goal is to become your quintessential source for news and reviews pertaining specifically to documentary films. Our regular ‘features’ will focus on filmmakers, style, and hopefully provide insight into the process of documentary filmmaking.’ [via Metafilter]
7 July 2008
[kubrick] Amazing Promotion Film for More4’s Stanley Kubrick Season … a 65 second one-take tracking shot following Kubrick’s point-of-view as he walks through the set of The Shining … ‘Your Script, Mr Kubrick.’
[funny] Unexpected Results: Kid vs. Wall … I don’t think I will ever tire of looking at this … [more…]
6 July 2008
[history] German Bunker in my Garden … the blog of a guy who digs up an abandoned Nazi War Bunker in his back garden … ‘Unfortunately… the boulder was too big for the digger to move (we estimated about 8 tonnes) and we needed to get behind it to keep digging. So we had to call a halt to proceedings while I source a rock-breaker attachment for the digger! Oh, and I hadn’t warned my wife either… so I had this to explain when she came home…’ [via Metafilter]
5 July 2008
[comics] Heroes … Ex-comics writer Gerry Conway on work for hire in comics and how he feels about not being credited as one of the creators of the Punisher or for the use of his ideas in the Spider-man movies… ‘So, to put it bluntly, I got nothing for either Punisher film, and nothing for my stories being adapted for the Spider-Man movies. I didn’t even get credit for creating the Punisher, or for the use of my story material in Spider-Man. Honestly, I didn’t expect that I would. I’m not happy about the fact, but I’m resigned to it. I accept the reality of how the business operated when I wrote those stories…’
[comics] Todd McFarlane’s Miracleman … an oddity – McFarlane’s version of the old British Superhero updated by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and currently tied up in legal limbo … ‘The character’s future remains uncertain as of 2008, due to further complications which have come to light since the end of Gaiman’s case against McFarlane…’
4 July 2008
[comics] God’s Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack T. Chick … a trailer for a documentary about Jack Chick … [more…]
[movies] One Storyboard from The Shining showing Kubrick’s meticulous and controlling eye for detail … ‘THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO IT REPEAT NO OTHER WAY exercise the greatest care as the compositional effect of a different path might be BAD BAD BAD’
3 July 2008
[google] Is Google Making Us Stupid? … interesting article suggesting that the internet may well be altering the way we think … [via Metafilter]
‘The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
[comics] Batman – The Superman of Planet X! … scans of Batman #113 from 1958 which are being referenced in Grant Morrison’s current Batman:RIP storyline … ‘I’m the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh!’
2 July 2008
[comics] Two This American Life Animations by Chris Ware: Fake Video Cameras in the Schoolyard and Judgement to the Wife [via The Ugly Truth]
[funny] Ah Fuck. I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This … how does a teenager cope with a video like this being viewed 341,994 times along with 5028 comments?
1 July 2008
[blog] One Post Wonder … a collection of blogs that only had one post or so … ‘Friday, September 22, 2000 I hate school, I hate all of my classes. Damn she’s beautiful. I wish I were drunk. posted by Stupid at 12:48 AM’ [via Waxy]
[comics] Interview and Q&A with Gerhard (part one) … an interview with Dave Sim’s artistic collaborator on Cerebus … ‘I do… I have… an appreciation for just the sheer amount of work that it took… the sheer amount of, I don’t know, discipline to actually, you know, do those twenty pages a month – month in and month out – I don’t think I could do it now. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do it now. ‘Cause I can barely do a commission a month or something.’
[london] Diamond Geezer’s Capital Numbers … ‘Six tube lines interchange at King’s Cross St Pancras – more than at any other station.’
30 June 2008
[kubrick] Stanley Kubrick – 79 – Male – Hertfordshire, St. Albans … wonderful profile of Kubrick on MySpace of all places … ‘By Barry Lyndon (1975) a pattern in Kubrick’s later work emerges: his leading men are either blank slates or over-the-top psychotics.’ [via Kottke]
[water] Why I like Cryptosporidium … Mo Morgan reports in from Northampton on dealing with a contaminated water supply … ‘It has reminded me of the value of tap-water. Not only is it there in abundance when I need it, but also that somewhere or other is a team of people in lab-coats ensuring that it’s clean and safe. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever had to put even the slightest thought into whether or not the water’s clean. The truth is, the vast majority of the time, it’s exceptionally clean and safe thanks to an army of boffins and engineers I’ll never meet, and whom I’ve never really thought about before. It’s the oldest of clichés, but I am starting to appreciate drinking-water now that I don’t have it.’
28 June 2008
[comics] The Comics Reporter: So Why Were The X-Men Popular? … Tom Spurgeon on why Len Wein, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne’s run on the Marvel title was so successful … ‘X-Men was solid comic book entertainment that distinguished itself against the comic books of the time in several savvy ways that caught the attention of longtime, hardcore fans, the same kind of fans that were almost certain to look past lot of the title’s more obvious failings (its nonsensical plots, its over-flowery language, its creepy undertones) and a group of people that would likely foster the next generation of creators. It hit in the right way at the right time with the right people, and soon launched itself into the sales stratosphere and took a lot of books with it.’
27 June 2008
[funny] Ninja’s on Ice … another funny motivational poster.
[polictics] David Davis has 25 by-election rivals … including: ‘David Icke – No party listed’
25 June 2008
[comics] Final Crisis Annotations … more comics notes from Douglas Wolk who also annotated 52 … ‘Perhaps a less frustrating way to deal with the contradictions is not to try to explain them but to accept them as a pesky but integral part of the story, a sort of continuity koan. Continuity is at least sort of mutable–rarely more explicitly so than in Morrison’s superhero comics. The prolegomenon to FINAL CRISIS is SEVEN SOLDIERS: MISTER MIRACLE, in which Shilo Norman’s many alternate lives both do and don’t happen. “Hypertime” is one way of putting it; another is to say that all stories are more or less true, but better stories, more satisfying stories, are more true in the long term.’
24 June 2008
[blogs] Tumblr – The Documentary … ‘Reblog This Nerds!’ [more…]
23 June 2008
[politics] Would you support David Icke to stand in the upcoming UK Parliamentary By-Election? … ‘If I stood, it would not be against Davis as such because I have no wish to be elected to Parliament and get stuck in that irrelevant web of deceit and corruption. I couldn’t take my seat anyway because I would never go through the pathetic ritual of pledging my ‘allegiance’ to the Queen. I would be supporting the stand of Davis against the Orwellian State and I would want him to win the seat and let him be a voice against the Big Brother society in Parliament.’ [thanks Phil]
21 June 2008
[life] Trapped in a Lift … slightly disturbing time lapse video of a man stuck in a lift for 41 hours.
20 June 2008
[comics] You want Moore? You got it! … second part of a Alan Moore interview … On his new novel, Jerusalem: ‘It’s mostly all new stuff, well not new stuff, because most of it’s historic, but I’m just finding out new material all the time. I found out the other day that Hitler’s invasion plan for England ended with Northampton, and there was also the eighth century monk who was directed by angels to place a stone cross here because it was the centre of the land. So the way I see it, that if people want to argue with me about the importance of Northampton, then they’re not only arguing with me, they’re arguing with God, and they’re arguing with Hitler. And that, I think me, God, and Hitler, that’s the dream team!’
19 June 2008
[windows] How to Make Windows Vista Less Annoying … many useful tips from Lifehacker. ‘How many times have you been right in the middle of something when Windows prompted you to reboot for updates? Or worse… you were right in the middle of something, stepped away for a bit, and come back to find your computer has restarted itself because Windows Update decided to…’
[blogs] Sorry I Missed Your Party … random pictures of people at parties from Flickr. [via iamcal]
18 June 2008
[movies] The Video Nasty Project … this blog will watch all 73 original video nasties so you don’t have to … ‘The plot is basic Frankenstein stuff. A mad surgeon replaces his terminally ill son’s heart with that of a gorilla, which transforms him into a half-man, half ape creature – or at least a man in cracked, slathered on makeup who makes silly growling noises.’ [via Metafilter]
17 June 2008
[comics] Top 10 Warren Ellis ‘Tweets’ … … ‘Some days I want to be written by Frank Miller. So I can yell WHORES at random and get looks of concern rather than the usual pity. WHORES’
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