Like many cultured cartoon geeks my age, I have been waiting patiently for Eek! the Cat to come out on DVD, so that I might recapture the halcyon days of the early 90s watching the best thing on Fox Kids.

You won't see a cat getting sucked into a jet intake on Saturday mornings anymore

I asked writer/director “Savage” Steve Holland about the fate of Eek at Cinefamily’s recent double-feature of Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, and learned that Disney had bought the entire lineup of Fox Kids cartoons — including our beloved show. However, Eek! the Cat is too “politically incorrect” for Disney (see above pic) and it has remained incarcerated in the Disney vault for the last two decades, no doubt to languish on a shelf between Song of the South and Education for Death. It was a delightfully freakish show with a great voice cast including Dan Castellaneta (The Simpsons), Gary Owens (Laugh-In), Tawny Kitaen (that Whitesnake video), and Cam Clarke (everything, including the voice of none other than Max Sterling in Robotech). Eek still holds up because it was a kid’s show that didn’t dumb itself down and was great fun for those with the sense of humor to appreciate it. Disney is doing a disservice to animation fans by not releasing this (nearly) forgotten classic. I agree with Curtis Armstrong, character actor and voice of Scooter from Eek!Stravaganza, “It was ahead of its time.”

Until Disney decides to dust off this brilliant series, I hear there is a torrent somewhere…

I love Netflix, and I think they’ve shown some amazing innovation in the on-demand video market, which is why they more or less own it. But Netflix for the iPhone is the first product they’ve released that I am disappointed in, enough to make me rethink my earlier assessment of Phone Flicks, my Netflix stand-in. Let’s say I’m looking for a movie to add to my queue, such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Bye Bye Brazil, indeed. Dear Netflix, when are you going to release my film?

Ah, there is it. Unlike its rival, Phone Flicks was able to pull up one of the most important films of the 1980s (even its bastard re-edit). I understand Netflix is an app for streaming movies and Phone Flicks is an app for queuing them, but there’s no reason the Netflix app can’t do both.

And the user interface of the Netflix app is sluggish with some weird UI problems. I can’t wait for an update, so scrolling isn’t like trudging through molasses, more results are displayed per page, they fix the vertical alignment of list items, and if you look closely, that spinner in the top right of the search bar isn’t even animated: it is a static image that spins, which is a weird UI compromise. In all, it bears the earmarks of an app rushed through production, don’t ask me how I know.

I was glad to ditch PhoneFlixFlicks from my iPhone because of its crappy UI. Say I want to add Control, Anton Corbijn’s 2009 biopic of Ian Curtis. Well, PhoneFlicks gives me one result: it’s Control all right — a 2001 thriller with Sean Young.

Did you leave enough room for the ad, the header, and the keyboard? Oh shoot. We forgot to leave space for the search results! So I was excited to download the new Netflix app and finally get some Control. Only I get this:

Now it’s 2004’s Control with Ray Liotta. So to recap: the movie I searched for is still nowhere to be found, and the interface is still displaying all of nearly three results per page. Slick UI, Netflix.

Regarding my brief essay on how videogames are cruel taskmasters when compared to the halcyon days of say, 2005, CrunchGear has an apt description of Fanboyism: When Expression Meets Desperation.

“Lacking anything real in life, the fanboy latches onto that which he has, and imbues it with the significance he craves.”

They paraphrase Marx, saying fanboyism is the opiate of the internet, which should put those 600 or so words of mine into perspective. But putting repetitive tasks in a game that’s supposed to be fun is still no fun at all. If I wanted to set goals for myself, I wouldn’t be playing video games now, would I?

Let me blow your mind really quickly: playing video games are like doing chores these days, man.

I’ll gloss over how WoW and Farmville are designed to keep you playing (I’ll leave that research to Cracked, apparently), but want to talk about how this extends to even casual games you’ve already bought and paid for.

Games like Rock Band, where you can only unlock new songs in career mode, which means slogging through all the awful songs you can’t fucking stand to get to the ones you like. I still haven’t played Hot For Teacher because I gave up at the prospect of having to play through a set of only Tool songs. Does part of being a Guitar Hero means wasting your free time on things you wouldn’t do for money?

I saw Just Dance at WonderCon and it looked like fun, so I thought I’d check out some reviews of it. Turns out the motion capture isn’t so great, but in the review I read, the complaint wasn’t that; like with Dance Central, all the levels come unlocked. Christ, finally. “Well, what’s the incentive to play??” is the question. I guess because you enjoy the game itself, not because it makes you grind for the things you actually want. If you only like dancing to “Bust a Move”, and that’s why you bought the game, well… fuck off and let me play the one song I like.

This is something that goes back at least as far as Legend of Zelda for the Wii, where training takes the form of an endless stream of trivial tasks before you can get around to actually starting on your little quest. And oh you should hear me bitch playing Mario Galaxy 2. No thought is given to speed or efficiency, because even if I beat all the worlds on one level, I may still have to go back and beat some extra level just to get enough stars to access the level boss. The game has all the choice of a Model T dealership and everyone in this galaxy is asking for a handout. “Hey, I need someone to clean up all this garbage!” “Help! My goats got out of the pen!” Oh so I work for you now? Bowser’s been on a week-long rape vacation with Princess Peach while I’m helping a giant bee scratch its ass.

Boy you said it, fat purple floating guy.

What I’m asking for is a little more choice, rather than forcing every player to be an OCD completist. I’ve already bought Mario Galaxy 2, so what does Shigeru Miyamoto care if I play every last level or give up at the opening cinematic and use the disc as a coaster? What was special about even recent games was you could play it straight through, beat it, and having achieved a feeling of mastery over the game, could then – at your leisure – go back and play the rest, trying out the levels you skipped to beat the game. It becomes self-directed exploring rather than mandatory fun.

Let players love your game and keep coming back to it, rather than force them to take it in one great indigestible lump. Maybe there’s a marketing reason for designing games this way, but when it comes to gameplay, it’s turning the casual gamer off.

I wonder if these things are related…

Why is it that the older you are the more you can’t stand ‘Inception’?

If “Inception” plays especially strongly with a young audience, it’s probably because they instinctively grasp its narrative density best, having grown up playing video games. “When it comes to understanding ‘Inception,’ you’ve got a real advantage if you’re a gamer,” says Henry Jenkins, who’s a professor of communications, journalism and cinematic arts at USC. ” ‘Inception’ is first and foremost a movie about worlds and levels, which is very much the way video games are structured. Games create a sense that we’re a part of the action. Stories aren’t just told to us. We experience them.”

‘Scott Pilgrim’ Versus The Unfortunate Tendency To Review The Audience

Hating Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is perfectly fine. It’s got a style; you sort of embrace it and dig it or you don’t. But when there’s too much effort given to tut-tutting the people you imagine to be enjoying it, or declaring and promising that only narrow categories of losers and non-life-havers and other stupid annoying hipsters could possibly be having a good time when you’re not, it sounds pinched and ungenerous. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a little bit jealous and fearful of obsolescence.

That last article may have been directed at The Kansas City Star:

The geeks are pulling Hollywood’s strings right now, and that’s not a good thing

Their influence on what we see at the megaplex and on television is vast and powerful. The Ain’t It Cool News websites of the world are in effect telling those who are in charge what to do.

This is an awful development.

They’re making movies for a large, appreciative, sometimes-obsessive audience? Tsk. Tsk. How did Hollywood stoop so low? Let’s get back to making more of the right kind of movies, like The Switch and Dinner for Schmucks.

It wasn’t always like this. A quarter century ago, the heavy hitters of movies and television would have sneeringly dismissed these Comic-Con revelers as laughable losers.

I used to be with it. Then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now, what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I see someone who needs to be stuffed into a locker.

Maybe the author can see if he shows any of the 10 Signs You’re A Movie Snob rather than dismissing a culture he has no interest in, nor understanding of.

The art in Promethea tells a story. In From Hell it tells a story. The first page of Watchmen tells a story. Unless this is the story of a reliable Ford Focus with a FM radio/CD player standard, this page doesn’t tell me anything about Alan Moore’s Neonomicon that I need to know.

It’s a scene that takes place outside an asylum (…I assume it’s that afterthought in the distance?) but judging by the level of detail, the car’s center console and armrest are the two most important things in the scene. We don’t even see the faces of our protagonists. Also notice the eyes in the mirror reflect the eyes of someone who should be sitting in the driver’s seat. Sloppy.

Halfway through the comic, we get the next full-page spread, this time of Club Zothique. Now I have heard that Alan Moore is a pretty OK writer, and not one to skimp on detail for his descriptions — the first page of Watchmen was four script pages alone [PDF]. So I doubt there was any shortage of interesting angles the artist could have used, or inspiration to be had. And yet look at the result:

Totally flat. It may as well have read:

EXT. - CLUB ZOTHIQUE - NIGHT - A bad part of town.

Not to bang the Watchmen drum again, but there was world building in those panels: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” and “Cuba, the 51st state!” This street scene tells me nothing about the world to distinguish it from any other police procedural, even if it contained the usual “Fhtagn R’lyeh ai ai!” gibberish.

The framing is especially poor. Look at all the negative space at the top and bottom; an undercover police van (I assume) off to the side, and a collection of anonymous characters we won’t meet. You could have a tilted angle; an easy way to show the place is a little ‘off’. An extremely low angle to make the building more ominous, a high angle, to make the people look insignificant, even have them overlooked by a Lovecraftian stone gargoyle on the roof, adding character to the church. A high position showing the church in the foreground and the neighborhood it hopes to spread its malevolence into in the background — these are all off the top of my head, mind you — and despite all these possibilities, what we get is “EXT. CHURCH”?

Why should I be interested when the art is telling me ‘This is just a building’? The structure itself is mostly featureless, like it was poured concrete. It’s supposed to be an abandoned church from the 1920s, and this is all the character it’s given. The building to the left is scarcely more than a collection of rectangles, and it’s colored such that it merely blends in with the street and the sky, like it’s embarrassed to be there.

Ah yes, the colors. Inoffensive. Muted. Purple and tan. They aren’t even complimentary, so I don’t know what mood the colorist is going for. Add to that the drab palette and flay grey walls, and you have a comic that is at first glance a dull read.

I was expecting something more stylized, befitting the source material. Maybe I’m just making a knee-jerk reaction, and the art will begin to appropriately unravel as the characters delve into this world, and we readers are in for a treat. But until then, I have to give Boom! Studios’ Cthulhu Tales the edge purely on style alone (and Boom! is not known for their artwork).

–
Promethea source
From Hell source
Watchmen source

Let me start by saying that I hate OS X’s Spotlight. It willingly turns a blind eye to system files, which (like so much else for the Mac) is a solution that satisfies 90% of users, but does nothing for the other 10%: people like me, who need to edit httpd.conf, php.ini, and other files the OS prefers you ignore.

So in lieu of Spotlight, I have been trying to use find, albeit with mixed results. That changed when I found the terminal command mdfind — it’s Spotlight that actually searches your whole computer. What a relief! And it’s simple to use:

> mdfind php.ini

was all it took to find /private/etc/php.ini. Find without arbitrary limitations. Amazing!

Looking at the Lego Magician Minifig I opened, I had a great idea for a MOC.

Ti ot em teab enoemos.

After spending an inordinate amount on a complete set of Series 1 Lego Minifigures, I discovered a way to distinguish the individual bags based off the UPC code on the back. I was all set to open and scan in every UPC and post them here, then I realized someone had already done it. So enjoy.

Now what the hell am I supposed to do with these?!

The lesson to take away from this is that the day of one-man websites getting the scoop on anything new and popular are through. My personal website, testament to that ’90s way of thinking, is a delightful little time capsule to that bygone era. That or I just haven’t gotten with the times. It’s bad enough to be unhip, but much worse to fully comprehend your own obsolescence.

Or so said a friend of mine, “We are in the presence of the new.“

Here’s a chilling article from Cracked about 5 Guilty Pleasures The Web Killed.

That rant against corporate greed you made on the Nine Inch Nails forums in 1998? It’s still around, waiting to be Googled by your prospective employer. Your short-lived career as a blogger and passionate advocate of heroin legalization and lowering the age of consent to 16? That’s still floating around as well, ready to be stumbled upon by the Mormon congregation you just converted into. It’s all up there, archived forever, for your children and grandchildren to read.

This isn’t good if I ever apply for a job at, say Apple or Lego.

You may recall earlier my philosophical disagreement with the American imperialism implied in the LEGO Mars Mission sets. Maybe I’m imagining things, maybe it’s because sci-fi is really the domain of social commentary, but the LEGO Space Police sets are setting an unsettling tone as well.

“If you ask me, it’s the $10 withdrawal fees that are the real crime.”

Look at him. An alien. On that thing. The Space Police Officer, unaware of what “racial profiling” means, wants to search the vehicle. Of course Kranxx doesn’t consent to a search, which… the officer uses as probable cause. Kranxx knows his rights and attempts to lock the doors. That’s when he gets cuffed, and a routine traffic stop turns into an arrest. “This is such bullshit! That light was as orange as I am!”

Rench is exercising his right as given to him by the second amendment, which shouldn’t matter considering his city has open carry laws anyway. That doesn’t stop him from getting a suckerful of space-mace and hauled in for that vague catch-all “disorderly conduct”. Officer Anonymous has a quota to fill after all. And is the riot gear really necessary?

Getting this far with a “stolen” police laser screams inside job. Where is the Space Police internal affairs set?

Tired of the ridicule at their galactic city college, the Thompson twins changed their last name to Skull. Turns out they’re taking shop at said community college and just happened to be pretty good at it, even buying an old, broken-down Plymouth and tricking it out into a sweet ride they dubbed “The Skull Interceptor.” Not a single day’s jail time between them, but you see, the department dropped a lot of studs on their Space Police VX-Falcon and it isn’t going to pay for itself without writing a few speeding tickets. Your “gold bars” are the heat-sinks on our subwoofer’s preamp, you fascist. Still, reason enough to impound the vehicle. Paying for next semester’s classes is going to be a bitch after the $800 tow and impound fee. “You seem to have enough gold to put into that jalopy,” smirks Officer Nobody as the tow truck takes their vehicle away, along with Richard Skull, back to the station to fill out some forms. Harold Skull has to hitchhike home to tell his parents what happened.

Alien “punk” Snake is a multi-platinum rock star. He’s popular because he’s ‘alien’, but not too alien, if you know what I mean. Even while speeding through city streets and driving the wrong direction down the freeway, there are no police officers pestering him. The only times he gets stopped it’s for autographs. What happened to giving tickets? He’s had three DUIs already! Oh, that’s right — that hour of community service. Yes, he’s paid his debt to society, nevermind that pedestrian he hit. Who issued him a license when he has no depth perception, anyway?

We have it from a reliable source that an inhuman creature plans to strike an armored car shipment. Yes; alone, unarmed, and with a pair of handlebars that shoot fire as his only escape vehicle. Sounds like the space police are pushing for a budget increase. Of course, Frenzy gets to spend a weekend in lockup, because who are you going to believe, the yellow face of authority, or the giant green insect? He doesn’t even speak our language!

“You assume I’m a criminal just because I happen to carry a lot of cash? I’ll have you know I was just on my way to buy that overpriced $400 Death Star. Do you work for retentions at the LEGO store now, Officer?” He isn’t even the right Squid, they’re after Squidtron, the hick who tried to steal an ATM but left his bumper chained to it. With your identical smiling yellow faces, you all look the same to us too, y’know. Adding to his woes, “Squid” is a common surname, so he gets this every time he tries to board a rocketship.

I commend the space police’s use of a FReeZe-Ray® in place of the standard issue blaster, but can not condone their abuse of it in cases of non-compliance, or when a suspect is already subdued, or when a concerned citizen asks for an officer’s badge number. There is also the matter of a number of deaths associated with this “non-lethal” weapon that manufacturer Freeze-Ray, Inc. would like to play down.