March 2002 – Angry Robot

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absence

Content may be scarce around these parts until next week. Big Things. So maybe look elsewhere: leuschke, soapboxgirls, good ol’ ftrain.

Lurkin' Jesus

Whether you be truck driver, executive, or dental assistant, Jesus is there, crouching in the corner.

While I’m web-geekin’ here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to endorse Movable Type Version 2.0, available now, and running on this very website. It’s a fabulous system, and the update has an improved interface on top of numerous new features – multiple categories, automatic thumbnails, and tags enabling such things as the recent comments thing on the side of this page. I’ve had the privilege of beta-testing MT 2.0, and it works like a charm. Dig it.

trooper

That’s all well and good (even if you’re missing the fabulous top to the jumpsuit), but £10,000? Or £25,000 for a chat program? The forum is a steal at £2,500, especially if you’ve never heard of the $160 vbulletin or the free phpBB. But that could just be the petty griping talkin’.

superoutfit

Why is that that all superhero movies contain elaborate, celebratory scenes of the heroes suiting up in their costumes? Do these films provide, in addition to the closet fascist release valve, an opportunity for males to enjoy clothing and appearance without using Barbie dolls? Is this the arch-nemesis of the strip show: men watch women take off their clothes, vs. men watch men put on their clothes?

IHT

Yowza, that’s a hot interface they got over there at the International Herald Tribune. Hot! Hot! Could fry an egg offa that thing!

OK, fine, metablog

There I was, about to rail against a recent upsurge in metablogging, about to say little and offend many; poised, I readied the metaphor of USC, with its life-experience-free graduates only able to make films about other films; licking my lips, I prepared to encourage my fellow bloggers to pull their goddamned heads out of each others’ asses and write about life, man — when I realized this chunk of blogging coverage was written than none other than Henry Jenkins, fan culture expert and occasional videogame theorist, a man whose opinions interest me greatly.

(Here’s a much more in-depth essay by Jenkins on the topic of online community. It ends with a look to bloggers as “important grassroots intermediaries – facilitators, not jammers, of the signal flow.”)

So my anti-metablog stance fell by the wayside because a) I wanted to blog the goddamned article. And Jenkins’ writing made me realize that b) metablogging is a term for how this community communicates. As much as navel-gazing annoys me, to oppose metablogging is to oppose blogging as community. So what if writer X wants to post about writer Y’s post? They’re sharing something. Better in many ways than posting about media conglomerate Y’s latest article. MSNBC doesn’t give a rat fuck if I link to them. (In fact, they probably hate it.) The New York Times doesn’t want to kick back and shoot the shit with us. Mickey Mouse doesn’t want to hang out. Yet the problem we face is more that of the non-blogging weblog reader, who’s telling themselves right now: if this self-righteous clown says ‘blog’ one more goddamned time I’m going to close the window and never stray from Yahoo! again.

dada

Note to self: examine dada archive when opportunity arises. (via Su‘s post to MeFi)

51st state

Creepy article at the Globe about eliminating the Canada-US border. The fallacies are numerous, yet it’s a fascinating issue. Dissolving a country for economic reasons seems greedy and shallow at best, but nationalism alone may not be a good enough reason to maintain statehood. The defence of a culture, on the other hand, is an issue too often overlooked in this sort of analysis, primarily because culture is treated as just another industry. It is not.

Other problems with this article: North America and Europe are not analagous, until Europe contains only Germany, Ireland and Algeria. Free Trade has not been the glorious money party Fagan seems to think it is. “The threats to the two of us are shared” – no they aren’t. “A customs union could mean that Canada has to ban trade with Cuba” – why in the world would we accept this?

rockname

Rock band name needed. Apply within. Don’t be shy. Prizes awarded!

Tentative: Taffy. Merb. The Stiffy Problem. Sankey and the Idiots.

hot pants

Let this be your weekend anthem. Let it be a strong, funky foundation to a glorious, throat-flutey experience: hot pants, featuring “throat flute”. (1.7 MB mp3; not the James Brown song.)

producer story

There once was a pair of film producers. They operated in a small yet lucrative niche – the teen sex courtroom fantasy sequel niche. In fact they pretty much invented that niche.

While inventing their specialty genre, these producers arrived at a very strict set of rules that delineated films of the type:

The title is more important than the film.
The title must spell out all the key elements of the film, i.e., “Teen Sex Lawyer 2: The Virgining.”
The title must contain at least one colon.
The film must contain the following: court and/or lawyer scenes; teens.
The film must contain some of the following: fantasy elements; sci-fi setting; seniors in proactive roles; teen sex; gore.

By combining courts and teens, the producers ensured a large and diverse audience for their projects. Teens attracted teens and perverts, while the court scenes attracted seniors and the middle-aged.

They worked closely together, yet each had his own pet projects that he devoted special attention to. For one – let’s call him producer A – it was a little film called “Teenage Bilge Dwarves 2: Space Court.” It concerned a pack of sexy, sewer-dwelling dwarves who somehow got themselves into interstellar legal trouble. It’s unclear what it was, exactly (the swarthy, underdoggish dwarf heroes? the nudity? the monotonous court scenes?), but producer A’s tale caught the nation’s fancy. It was their biggest grossing film yet, and brought them rare mainstream attention. Producer A on the cover of Forbes, bathing in greenbacks. Intimating to Larry King that it was childhood fears of sewer dwarves under his bed that inspired the story. All was good in the world. Except, of course, that producer B felt the slightest peck of resentment with every photo op. And it’s only natural.

Yet being a productive type, he carefully channelled the resentment back into his work, so that with mounting success, his resolve grew – resolve to make his own pet project a reality. The project revolved around his own childhood terror, the fear of vegetarian cars on a killing spree. It was to be called “Autoflora: Plant-Eating Cars.” And it was to be made, and fairly well-made, at that. No one who saw it ever called it a bad movie.

But they rarely called it a good movie, either. It failed to enter the zeitgeist. It did not inspire generations of new filmmakers. The merchandising revenue was poor to nil. Why? Why? producer B asked himself rhetorically.

For one, plant-eating cars aren’t scary to humans. To plants, yes. Plants find plant-eating cars terrifying. But plants don’t buy movie tickets.

More importantly though, producer B in his ambition forgot all the rules. There were no sex scenes. No lawsuits or even writs being served. The teens were purely incidental. And it wasn’t a sequel.

So what happened? Not much, really. They were used to the odd flop. They were churning out enough films per month that it didn’t make a difference. Producer B got back to the basics. He devoted his life to perfecting his craft. He would wait until the timing was right. He would study the old masters. One day, he vowed, he would create the ultimate teen sex courtroom fantasy sequel.

props out to good friend Leo, co-creator of this old-school tale

Angry Robot

coming soon