Animal-based computer-generated cartoons aren’t doing well at the box office
Who’d have thought that a glut of CGI movies would suddenly backfire? Hopefully the channel will clear out so that the Wallace and Grommits and Incredibles of the genre can float back to the top. Also, Disney needs to go back to traditional animation.
Veronica Mars debuted last night. Funny how shows starting in October seem really late this year. I don’t have much to say about the season premier itself. It was a pretty good episode, clearly designed more to introduce new viewers to the characters than to deal with last season’s continuity. I would have liked a more compelling multi-episode mystery than the head shaving thing from last year. It will probably develop into something more, but I’d have liked to see something that we’d all be talking and theorizing about today.
The big thing I noticed was that they revamped the opening credits. You get used to hearing the same music and seeing the same basic visuals each week. For season three, there’s a new mix of The Dandy Warhol’s We Used to be Friends, and the images are… orange. It’s funny how much a change like that can affect one’s perception of an episode. I went from being excited about seeing the characters again to worrying the show was being retooled for a new network. I don’t have any indication The CW is meddling or anything, but certainly the creators know they need to pick up a lot of Gilmore Girls’s audience for the network to order the back nine. I’m sure once the season starts running my worries will melt away, and I’ll get used to the new intro, it was just a little unsettling not to have the familiar sights and sounds.
From 1941 to 1943, Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios produced a series of 17 short Superman films which are now in the public domain. Google Video and the Internet Archive both offer downloads of the shorts, which are well worth the bandwidth.
More information about the series is available on Wikipedia and Amazon has what looke like a nice DVD set.
Help Cure Cancer, Buy a DS Lite
This week Target is donating 100% of sales of Coral Pink DS Lites to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Google Gadgets For Your Webpage
Lots of little things you can fill your site with.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) - Google Video
This video is in the public domain, so download away.
EFF piece on why you can’t move shows from your TiVo to your computer on the new HD units.
Usability tweaks in the Series 3 Remote | PVRblog
I’ve actually been waiting for someone to write about the new remote ever since I heard the HD units had different ones. The traditional TiVo remote is designed so damn well.
The mystery is solved: Neil Armstrong really did say “a”
Interesting stuff. I do agree that “for a man” sounds less poetic than “for man”.
Earlier worries that Mario Hoops 3-on-3 would be unplayable for lefties have been put to rest. The game, as with most DS titles, offers an option to flip controls for left-handed players. The default control scheme involves using the stylus in one’s right hand to dribble, shoot, block, etc., and using the D-pad to control your player. Switching to left-handed mode lets you hold the stylus in your left hand and use the A, B, X, and Y buttons to move players around the court. It works pretty well, though not as cleanly as using the D-pad. All stylus-intensive DS games have the same problem, whether you’re left-handed or wrong, which is that you have to support most of the weight of the unit with your offhand. Mario Hoops, unlike Metroid, understands this and doesn’t require too much use of L or R. Also, it’s built that you’ll only use the same shoulder button you use to move your character, so you don’t have to figure out how to hit L while holding the stylus in your left hand, for example.
The game itself is pretty fun so far. I found the tutorial so be a tad overwhelming. You’re quickly taught how to run, shoot, dribble, block, steal, dunk, jump, dash, use items, and so forth all with various taps or flicks of the stylus, and it’s a lot to take in, but once you get playing you realize that they’re all basically the same commands. An upward swish can be a shoot, a dunk, or a jump block, but it in practice the game works out the proper context and provides the appropriate verb pretty well. One review I read expressed frustration that when you try to pass to a teammate who’s too close to the net you’ll often shoot instead. The game designers actually did anticipate this, so if you want to pass into that zone you need hold R (for lefties).
Worry set in when my trio of Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi were able to breeze through the first tournament with little idea of what I was doing. Penny Arcade indicates quite clearly that the game gets harder as it goes along, and as soon as I started the Flower Cup I began to see the other team doing some better block and ball handling. Nothing I couldn’t manage, but I’m guessing things will get trickier from here on out.