The Hub is a new network airing a few favorite cartoons from the 80s and 90s, so I was excited when I saw this guy in one of their ad spots:

Blue fur, yellow eyes, razor-sharp teeth, a pointed nose and a bad attitude? Look familiar?

Joke’s on you, animation fans! It isn’t our beloved Sharkdog of Eek! the Cat fame, but Von Ripper from some new “Twisted Whiskers” show. Or so says its bio:

Ever seen a dog who looks like a shark on legs? Meet Von Ripper. This scary guard dog has sharp teeth, gray fur, and a really bad attitude. Stay out of his way – or else!

Ever seen dog who looks like a shark on legs? Why yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

Predicting that mobile video will only become more widespread in the future, I decided to keep my unlimited iPhone data plan, but how much data can I reasonably use in a month beyond the new AT&T data plans of 200MB and 2GB per month?

While reading Apple’s new app guidelines, I came across this gem:

Bandwidth:

• Audio streaming content over a cellular network may not use more than 5MB over 5 minutes
• Video streaming content over a cellular network longer than 10 minutes must use HTTP Live Streaming and include a baseline 64 kbps audio-only HTTP Live stream

So if listening to streaming audio, I have (1024MB x 2 per month used at 1MB per minute) a total of 34 hours of audio streaming, or over an hour a day just listening to the radio.

Video streaming at 64kbps (3.75MB/minute) yields nine hours of on-demand video a month, enough for four average-length films, or nearly all of Max Headroom.

Suddenly 2GB is starting to feel like a lot.

CORRECTION: Todd points out 64kbps is just the baseline audio-only stream, and doesn’t include video, which should be obvious to anyone who actually read the spec. That and Max Headroom isn’t available for Netflix streaming. Still, in a month, I was only able to use 1087MB, so 2GB isn’t what I thought it was, but it’s still quite a bit.

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?

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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!