Tag: animation

everybody wants to be a hero

My review of the documentary Darkon has been published on Blogcritics. To be honest, I was surprised by how good it was. The cinematography is often quite stunning, and whomever they had doing the animation knew their stuff. Sure, it’s edited with a bit of a slant, and as the commentary track reveals, some things happen in the gameplay that might not have had the cameras been absent, but all in all, it comes off as a fair representation of the LARP game and players.

The tagline for the documentary Darkon is, “Everybody Wants To Be a Hero,” which succinctly sums up the main message of this film about a group of people involved in the full contact, live-action role playing (LARP) wargame of the same name. As one of the players puts it, “If you could watch Brad Pitt or be Brad Pitt, which would you rather do?” For these Baltimore area gamers, the answer is easy — they would rather pretend to be the heroes they wish they were.

call them what you like

Call them what you like, if you like rock ‘n roll.

Puffy AmiYumi is a pop/rock duo from Japan. I first heard them on the Japan For Sale Vol. 2 album back when I was a volunteer at a college radio station. I liked what I heard, so I made sure to give their next release (Nice.) a few spins when it arrived at the station. That one made me a fan, and eventually I bought my own copy.

The band is called Puffy in Japan, but when they started making inroads into the American music scene, they added on a combination of their own names so as not to be confused with the other Puffy. Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura were brought together in 1995 by talent agencies and currently they have an animated series on the Cartoon Network (Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi). The commercialized nature of the band should make me not like them, much in the way that I do not care for American Idol or the Backstreet Boys, but somehow this particular incarnation of the music industry’s pre-fabricated band formula does not make me want to retch every time I hear it. Maybe the Japanese know how to do it better.

Listening to Puffy AmiYumi always puts me in a good mood. They never fail to deliver just the right mixture of the pop/rock formula that makes this child of the late 70s and 80s happy. Their latest album Splurge! continues with the Jpop/rock goodness.

Continue reading “call them what you like”

happy new year!

I have been here, there, and everywhere these past few weeks, but now that I’m back home and starting to get settled in, it’s about time I did something with this weblog. The year 2002 has come and gone, and now it’s time for everyone to get a new calendar for 2003. I have an … Continue reading “happy new year!”

I have been here, there, and everywhere these past few weeks, but now that I’m back home and starting to get settled in, it’s about time I did something with this weblog.

The year 2002 has come and gone, and now it’s time for everyone to get a new calendar for 2003. I have an idea of what might be hanging on the walls of bibliophiles in Ocean County (NJ)…

Speaking of librarians, one of my favorite librarian webloggers (Jessamyn West) has created five technically legal signs to hang in your library now that the Patriot Act has stripped away patron privacy.

Some creative soul has put together a poignant flash animation regarding the aforementioned Patriot Act and other similar measures being taking by the current administration under the umbrella of national security. Oh, and take note of the URL. I think it’s rather amusing.

Speaking of the current administration, here’s a list of the twenty most annoying “conservatives” of 2002. The comments at the bottom are interesting, if a bit peevish. Looks like word got out to the “conservatives” about this list and they came whining.

One of my colleagues directed me to a website yesterday that contains information and images from an art exhibit currently being shown in Chicago. The basic theme of the show is that the art is “on the legal fringes of intellectual property.”

dumpster diving in dmoz

It’s been a long time since I was a junior in college exploring the World Wide Web for the first time. I started off with random directory searches in Yahoo!, but once I found my niches, I rarely ventured out again, unless it was a focused search on Google or some other search engine. Today … Continue reading “dumpster diving in dmoz”

It’s been a long time since I was a junior in college exploring the World Wide Web for the first time. I started off with random directory searches in Yahoo!, but once I found my niches, I rarely ventured out again, unless it was a focused search on Google or some other search engine.
Today was different. Today, I decided to explore my new preferred directory, dmoz, and see what I could find. Here are a few of the more interesting sites:

I think that’s enough fun for one day… Okay, one more, but this one I dredged out of my memory from those early years of internet surfing – the Dumpster Diver courtesy of HoosierTimes.com.

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