I’m on a serious cereal kick ever since I decided that it was the perfect at-work snack. Got any I should try?
Bizarre viral site starring Flight of the Conchord’s Jemaine Clement. (For the film Gentlemen Broncos)
I feel compelled to write about Dark Knight because Batman is so deeply entrenched in my childhood. After I saw the first Tim Burton Batman I become obsessed in the way only a child or crazy genius can be obsessed. For a solid year afterward I would dress up as Batman, along with my friend who also dressed as Batman, and run around the neighborhood, solving fake crimes and killing fake bad guys. For two years straight I was Batman for Halloween. I created my own custom cowl from papier-mache and had my grandmother sew me a cape. My friend and I would sandwich our play (oh but it wasn’t play it was real) between additional viewings of that first Batman. I’ve seen it so many times that I know every single sound effect before it happens, every single note of Danny Elfman’s score. Something captivated me so much about the Batman that I wanted to be him. I fantasized about what it would really be like to one day become a masked superhero, weighing the logistics with my child logic. Frankly, it seemed possible.
Eventually I got older, and Joel Schumacher came along. Nothing really needs to be explained about that one. You know well. The mystique evaporated and I started watching MTV and liking girls. Thank god for that.
But Batman is still a part of me. Something about an outcast nerdy boyhood creates a magnetic attraction to the Dark Knight. Naturally as I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker I had fantasies about how my own Batman film would look. Thankfully, Chris Nolan came along and made Batman into what I always dreamed it could be. A naturalistic truly dark super hero married to an approach with a slavish devotion to pragmatism. Why would Batman really have a cape? What would a real Batmobile look like? The kind of realistic approach I might have hoped for as a child, as someone who was really trying to figure out how I would one day become Batman for real.
Dark Knight is so good it’s painful. The world just drips and I’m still covered in it three days after seeing it. I can’t get it out of my head. It connects with my childhood fantasies with an electric shock that won’t let go and it’s all pure joy. I will see this movie many times.
I will not however, dress up like Batman this time.
» Twinkle
From the moment I first used the Twitterrific iPhone app I disliked it. It takes a long time to load, especially for a service that emphasizes casual updating. The scroll view is super laggy. Almost like trying to use a computer in the 90s while rendering something in a 3D app laggy. As if that weren’t enough it doesn’t cache user icons at all, even within the same session. If you scroll to the bottom then scroll back up it has to reload the icons you already looked at! Well, Twinkle solves all of these things and has a better UI. Thank god.
Slander
Another day, another wikipedia edit to defend my rep from the slanderous actions of a one Garrett Murray.
Human Giant: Carpet Monkey
via implodr
“ I don’t want shitloads of crap I want small amounts of the best crap.
— Garrett Murray sums up the internet
So one of my biggest pet peeves with the iPhone is that the silent switch doesn’t truly silence the phone. If the iPhone is set to silent mode, phone rings and all alert sounds are silenced, but the iPod is NOT. Give it a shot, flip the silent switch and go to iPod and play something, it’ll output through the external speakers.
This is clearly intentional and also clearly wrong. The only reason anyone would ever want to silence the phone is to be polite. You are in an office, a movie theater a dinner party and you don’t want to disturb anyone with your noisy phone. Thus the phone should be prohibited from making noise. Period. I’ve accidentally activated the iPod app and played music or a video when I didn’t mean to countless embarrassing times. At first because I would be fooling around with the iPhone and expected silent mode to be, you know, silent. Subsequently it’s happened several times when the headphones are slightly loose in the socket. It takes me about 10 seconds to realize that the distant filtered music I hear is not broken headphones but the blaring of my external speaker in the middle of my quiet office.
This is compounded by the fact that, once you leave iPod or lock the phone it takes a few taps to get back to a place where you can hit pause. When I’m frantically trying to silence my phone I should be able to access some kind of “panic button” to instantly quiet the phone.
One would think this would be the silent button. At the absolute least, this should be a preference. Someone fix this. Someone fix this immediately.
Census Taker
Via Garrett who has re-enacted this for me in person several times. Glad I found it.
This week Garrett and I guest wrote/directed the test film for Indy Mogul’s Backyard FX show. The effect? Blowing someone in half! In this case, Garrett. Check out the whole episode here!
Picture via Erik.