Restraint

Suck my diiiiiiick, I’m a shaaaarktopus

February 12, 2010 – 4:56 pm

Q: What’s badder than the Battle of Tannhäuser and more dangerous than a swimming pool full of thumbtacks and facehuggers?

A: ROGER CORMAN’S SHARKTOPUS, motherfucker!

Sharktopus

oh no little man what are you going to do it's a fucking SHARKTOPUS

News of Sharktopus’ imminent approach came to us by way of Karen O’Hara’s Twitter:

Just got off the phone with the legendary Roger Corman who’s doing a new movie for us this year. Yes, it’s the long-rumored SHARKTOPUS! . . . Spent half an hour discussing what a sharktopus should look like, how many mouths it should have and how it should kill.

THAT’S RIGHT

HOW MANY MOUTHS IT SHOULD HAVE

SO FUCKING AWESOME ASDJFIASDJFASIOFDOAFWKO

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overdrawn at the irony bank

December 18, 2009 – 11:00 am

i⋅ro⋅ny [ahy-ruh-nee, ahy-er-]
–noun, plural -nies.

  1. the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend.
  2. a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly stated.
  3. pointing out to a heckler who is having a laugh because you’ve seen almost half of the Wikipedia list of films set in the future that not only is the heckler in one of the films set in the future, but that this film was in fact heckled by robots in the even more distant future.
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If I am not me, then who the hell am I?

December 18, 2009 – 9:27 am

A moment to remember screenwriting legend Dan O’Bannon, who left us yesterday:

Dan O’Bannon, one of the scriptwriters behind such seminal SF flicks as Alien and Total Recall, has passed away in Los Angeles following a bout of ill-health, at the age of 63.

O’Bannon was a lifelong SF enthusiast, and got his first experience of filmmaking when he worked as writer, editor and special effects producer on John Carpenter’s brilliant, cynical debut Dark Star. O’Bannon and Carpenter had studied together at USC prior to the film’s 1974 release.

He went on to do special effects work on the first Star Wars film and was involved in the early stages of comic writer Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to bring Dune to the big screen in the mid-‘70s. But it was when he began to concentrate on writing over production and effects that his career really took off. O’Bannon is credited with writing the original screenplay for Alien (alongside Ronald Shusett), and his influence on that film extended to bringing into the fold a certain Swiss artist called H.R. Geiger, who had also been involved in the failed Dune project.

O’Bannon’s other hits included the gloriously OTT Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by the O’Bannon-Shusett partnership. He was also involved in a number of cult classics, including Lifeforce, Heavy Metal, and Screamers, while his Moebius-illustrated comic The Long Tomorrow was the inspiration for the art style of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

O’Bannon changed the face of science-fiction (and horror, inventing ‘fast’ zombies in his 1986 directorial debut Return Of The Living Dead), and I’ve been hoping for years that he’d make a return to the big screen (possibly with the perpetually-delayed Silvaticus 3015) to show all these modern ’sci-fi’ writers what’s what.

A public memorial for Mr. O’Bannon will be held sometime in the next few weeks at my apartment in the form of a movie marathon. Interested parties please reply within.

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I see you.

November 19, 2009 – 7:38 pm

Is there any place as universally disliked as a hospital? Sure, no one loves a dentist’s office, but the pathos of an intensive care waiting room can’t be compared to anything else.

The last time I was in an ICU, I wasn’t visiting. I woke up with no idea where I was, or how I had gotten there. Now, I can’t help but feel helpless when I hear the machines and smell disinfectant. I was not prepared for how shaken the visit left me.

…

Back in the real world, I’m slowly getting decisions made for the next iteration of my work’s website. Our daily traffic numbers are six digits long, so I’m taking my time with these.

  • Which microformats do we want to markup our existing content with? hCard is a gimme, but what about hAtom for press releases? Do we want hCalendar for the schedule of events, or even hResume for biography pages? (And how much work is it going to be to microformat-enable fifteen years worth of content?)
  • Frameworks! We’re happily invested with jQuery as our JS framework of choice, but do we want or need a framework for CSS development? Typography and print? Wordpress theme development? Maybe even a fluid grid system? For my last project (which launches today, in fact) I used Tripoli, Carrington, and 960 — and while Carrington was amazing (and 960 was pretty good), I’m concerned by the lack of development on Tripoli. The typography is great, but I hate using dead projects. Maybe I should fork it.
  • Do I care if our site validates? CSS 2.1, or should I say fuck it and jump right to 3.0? (Seriously, CSS 2.1 is for suckers.)

I really love nerdy problems.

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this is totally my life right now

November 1, 2009 – 11:25 pm

success

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I love my job (second in a series)

October 16, 2009 – 2:12 pm

Today I made this for a presentation:
PET Microcomputer

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“You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.

July 15, 2009 – 1:22 pm

Alexander Charchar reimagines the cover art for Nineteen Eighty-Four:

1984 Reimagined
(Via the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.)

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Let me tell you about my mother.

May 12, 2009 – 10:07 am

Deckard’s blaster went on the auction block last week:

Featuring custom amber grips, dual triggers, and rich Corinthian leather.

Featuring custom amber grips, dual triggers, and rich Corinthian leather.

…don’t have an extra $258,750 to spend? You can always DIY.

(Via MeFi.)

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It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m all out of gum. Also, money.

May 9, 2009 – 11:08 am

It is a sad day today for old-school PC gamers. 3D Realms, the developers of Duke Nukem Forever, have shut their doors.

Duke Nukem Forever, the game that was promised to be a Quake II killer.  The game that was already so late by 2001 that they stopped announcing release dates. The game that had won the Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

Now, we will likely never see the pixelated stripclubs and alien cops that were promised to us back in 1997.  All we have are a few minutes of footage from E3, and a handful of leaked screenshots and promo art.

In memory of what could have been, I will end this post with highlights from a list of things that have happened while DNF was under development:

  • Over 25 Final Fantasy games and 2 Final Fantasy movies
  • The entire Sims and Grand Theft Auto series.
  • Also Unreal, Dance Dance Revolution, Tony Hawk, and Halo.
  • The rise of P2P filesharing, including Napster.
  • All three Star Wars prequels, and the LOTR film trilogy.
  • Bullet time, Family Guy, South Park, and Harry Potter.
  • Two Mars rovers and the International Space Station.

…and things that happened in less time than DNF’s development took:

  • Everything The Beatles ever did.
  • The United States moon program.
  • World War I.
  • World War II and the entire Manhattan Project. Including the fucking atomic bomb.

Rest in peace, Duke.

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And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until your floor is clean.

May 9, 2009 – 12:28 am

This is what robots do when you’re not home:

Roomba

30 minute exposure of a Roomba's cleaning path.

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