What you see pictured here is some of the DVD packaging for the independently produced documentary film about text adventure games, Get Lamp. In the digital age, packaging matters and the creators of Get Lamp went above and beyond in creating a DVD package that satisfies collectable object fetishists like myself. The inner gatefold sleeve is covered with a nostalgic fantasy illustration that looks like it came straight off of an Atari 2600 cartridge. The DVD also came with a fancy numbered and editioned coin (mine’s number 1540), which would seem kind of cheesy (alá the tin coin that came Ultima V) but is actually very well crafted and, dare-I-say cool. All this comes together in a well made cardboard DVD case that alone almost justifies the $40+ dollar price tag. Thankfully, the film is very good and, as one might expect, the discs contain the usual DVD extras, featurettes and bonus footage. As an added reward, you also get a nice selection of actual, playable games on the DVD -ROM partition of the disc. If you have any interest in text adventures, video games and computing history, you should check this out! More on the film itself later.
Add to my slowly growing list of technical capabilities (in addition to Puzzle Quest Maester and lawn mowist) Motion Graphics Artist.The last couple of days of work have been spent making a video presentation for a major northeastern Illinois power company. I’ll let you guess to which company I am referring. Video is pretty fun to work with but it is somehow physically exhausting. Perhaps it is just the strain of having to listen to stock audio over and over again. In any event, I now want to get a newer version of After Effects. Good times.
Last night I attended the Chicago premiere of James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror and got to shake hands and chat with the director (pictured above… he’s the one with the menacing claws). Birdemic is a movie that has to be seen to be believed. It’s an ultra-no-budget “romantic thriller” filled with tons of cheap digital bird effects, brain piercing eagle screeches, scenes of driving, hilarious dialogue, more driving and lots of, how shall we say, “creative” film editing choices.
Okay, it’s a bad, bad movie. But, I can’t deny that it is incredibly fun to watch—especially with a rowdy midnight movie audience. Much of the film’s charm is the sincerity and enthusiasm of its director, James Nguyen. He seems to be loving the attention he is getting, and, despite the howls of unintentional laughter, Nguyen has the guts to stick to his guns regarding his seriousness his film and its mangled message. I highly encourage everyone to check this film out while it is still in theaters and bring as many friends as you can!
So, 1/3 of Nonagon posts in the Internet forums of Electrical Audio and, as a result, we will be playing at the super-secret underground music festival called the Electrical Audio BBQ (or something like that) on Saturday, June 12th at 1:40pm. We are not supposed to tell anybody about it but I figure no one reads this Web site, so I will promote it here. The address is 3722 W. Chicago Ave. Bring $15 and some raw meat, ear plugs and kevlar, I hear the neighborhood has its share of ruffians wandering the streets.
The faceless LASER-bowman who threatens Ocron in her writhing sleep.That symbol on my head means I have no friends, only enemies… and the friends you will meet in the next reel.Random innocent killed so our heroes can steal his food.The movie appears to have been filmed in smoke-o-vision.Okay, I have to admit these cobwebbed zombie ghouls are pretty cool.
You know I loves to get comments. But let’s not deceive ourselves here, visitors and their witty comments are a rarity around here. I was quite excited to see that I was getting lots of comments in the last day, but it turns out some less-than-moron with small genitals is taking the time to answer CAPTCHA forms just so they can post links to their stupid male-enhancement scam websites. For the time being comments are disabled until these trolls go away.
Leave it to Generation-Y2K to take something that was once cool, convert it into a stupid Internet meme, and ruin it for everyone. They are doing it to zombies just like they did it to Rick Astley, bacon and pirates. Well, pirates were never cool, and that whole “talk like a pirate day” crap was never even mildly funny, but you get where I am coming from. It’s been thirty-plus years since George Romero defined the zombie genre in film with Night of the Living Dead and what do we have? People dressing up in rags and pancake makeup and running 4K zombie fun runs, zombie themed weddings, zombie themed cakes, zombie themed wedding cakes, zombies in cereal commercials, Hello Kitty zombies, hip blocky “designer” zombie toy figurines, and don’t get me started on the reams of spiral notebook paper dedicated to inane ‘tude rife b-boy style art:
Without even having to resort to a Google search, you can bet some jackasses are busy making preparations for a rival “Talk like a zombie day.”
Okay, I guess I’m glad that there are people out there being creative in showing their love for the zombie, but, as a result of all this pop culture saturation, people are losing sight of what was so great about zombies of the past. Compare the crappy illustrations above with this awesome clip from the third-rate Italian zombie movie, Burial Ground:
The makeup is cheap but effective. No CGI. Just a couple of lumps of clay, some maggots and old burlap convey a sense of stinking death, decay and supernatural dread that is mostly absent in modern takes on the genre. Modern filmmakers are always trying to give us a rational explaination behind the existence of the zombies—it’s a highly contagious virus that makes everyone super aggressive (Zombieland and 28 Days Later). I’m sorry, but if that monster isn’t a reanimated corpse and just some dude with a really bad 24-hour flu, it’s not a zombie. Personally, I have always thought that Fulci’s notion that the zombies are the result of a more biblical apocalypse worked best. Woe be on to him who opens one of the seven doorways to Hell! I miss those iconic images of a rotted corpse digging itself out of the ground for no good reason at all. I gather that the real purpose for all these contemporary “zombies” being extreme cold-sufferers is that the producers need to have fast-moving zombies. Zombies lurch, stagger, scratch and crawl. They don’t run! Their power comes from their numbers and not their totally rad parkour skillz. And since when were zombies all about brain-eating? It was a cute joke in Return of the Living Dead, but I thought zombies weren’t that particular about what cut of meat they ate. Okay, now I’m just making myself so upset that I am forgetting to add paragraph breaks…
Ah, that’s better. I should just chill and watch a little Burial Ground: Nights of Terror. It’ll relax me.
Here’s the mighty Dolph Lungren from the movie Showdown in Little Tokyo. I highly recommend it for lovers of bad movies. This movie just reaks of super-awesome-tude. In the above scene, Dolph looks like he is doing a little stand-up at the Improv. He is, in fact, getting connected with his Japanese cultural roots by dressing like a Karateman and then machine gunning pony-tailed Yakuzas who wear double-breasted suits.
Although I try to minimize political posting here on the Pages of Fun, about a week ago I decided to run with a post featuring a “Tea Party” protest poster I created: Teabagger / Teabaggee. I tweeted (I hate that term… almost as much as webinar) a link, got a few dozen hits and that was that.
However, yesterday I started to get all sorts of notifications of new comments in my inbox regarding this post. I went and checked my analytics account:
This could graph could mean one of two things: anthropogenic global warming is real and we are all on the cusp of the apocalypse, or someone on the Internet with many more readers than me linked to my page. Fortunately it was latter. I was able to back track to find out where all these hits were coming from:
PJTV’s Stephen Green (a.k.a. Vodkapundit) featured the post on his weekly show, The Week in Blogs. In fact, he referred to it as “The Photoshop of Week” and “The Blog of the Week.” Also (and I’m not sure if this came first) I was also linked on Glenn Reynold’s mighty Instapundit blog!
In the immortal words of Three Stoned Men, “Smells Like the Big Time!” Ok, time to check my Google Adsense account and see all that money I raked in:
