Earbuddies
Feb 16Thanks to Daily Candy, which just linked to the awesome Pixel Girl Shop, I now want the most useless iPod accessory ever: Emotibud Earbuds. Look how cute, you guys! If festooning my earbuds with adorably extraneous charms is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Linkypost
Feb 15Items of note:
For all my peeps in Oakland: The Parkway is hosting a special “Once More, With Feeling “Buffy sing-along tonight! The Parkway is home of so many lovely memories for me. Were it not for that theater, I would have never witnessed Mark Wahlberg and China Chow’s amazing, chicken-stuffing love scene or Meg Ryan’s unbelievably unsafe bike ride. For those of us far away from the Bay Area, the Joss Whedon-directed eppy of The Office also airs tonight. Huzzah!
I meant to link to this earlier, but do check out this post from Ragnell and then take a gander at what a green Eva Mendes would look like. I think she’s pretty much perfect.
Finally, in addition to the BSG duties, I am now reviewing Heroes for iPod Observer.
Marvel Thanksgiving Parade Float, 1987
Feb 15Marvel’s next film project should be an adaptation of this:
The Dying Art of Visual Effects
Feb 15Caught a link on the Orlando Sentinel that Peter Ellenshaw has died.
Ellenshaw is the big name that always comes up when one talks about matte artists, those who practiced a dying (if not long-dead) visual effects artform for film. Basically, they’d paint detailed background scapes that would be inserted into a shot where one wanted to, say, depict Victorian-era London but not build a mock city on a backlot somewhere.
(He won an Oscar for Mary Poppins, by the way.)
Whenever matte painting comes up, like a good lil’ nerd, I always think of Star Wars. Those old vintage making-of specials feature the occasional glimpse of the matte artists–I seem to recall attention paid to the matte used of the Death Star shaft where the Emperor died, and another one of that gorgeous shot of Endor at night with the Imperial Shuttle flying into frame and landing.
Anyway, whether because of retirement or lack of work, Ellenshaw’s last recorded work on IMDB was uncredited mattes for the 1990 version of Dick Tracy. That seems to jibe well with the early dawning of digital effects, so ILM’s busy elves were probably already scurrying about to find ways for computers to do the work that artisans had once done by hand.
I’m no anti-CG absolutist–it’s an art form, just as practical visual effects were an art form–but it remains far more exciting and mysterious for me to watch classic visual effects. Even when you know how it was done–when you have seen the man behind the curtain painting his beautiful mattes–it draws me completely in.
Bullshit, Sir!
Feb 14This is going to sound incredibly petty, but…
What the fuck is up with online fandudes calling each other “sir” in message board posts?
It’s like some strange, archaic, INCREDIBLY nerdy form of “respect.” Like when two geeks are going at it in a thread, and then one points out a fact that the other hadn’t noticed, so the one with egg on his face says:
“You are right. My apologies, sir.”
Is it just me, or is that weird as all hell? I can always hear the nasally nerd voice saying “Sir” in my head.
It’s even more annoying when it’s used to address “celebrities” like comic book writers or actors when they post online. “Terrific issue of Nextwave, Mr. Ellis! My congratulations to you, sir.”
THIS ISN’T ENGLAND CIRCA 1860. CUT IT OUT WITH THE FAKE “SIR” CRAP. IT’S ASS-KISSY AND LAME.
(I also think it’s a subtle way in which the male-oriented chauvinism of fandom plays out–like us “sirs” are all talking to each other in some civil way, excluding the females entirely. But that’s a reach, I know.)
