Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • Ruh-roh

    Quick quiz: who around here doesn’t like Scooby Doo?

    Odd that a cartoon that first aired before I was even born can be so popular, yet it’s even a favorite of my three-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn. And of course, it’s on my list of favorite cartoons, too. Well, the “classic” stuff, anyway.

    Nostalgia. What’s it good for, eh?

    Anyway. My definition of “classic” Scooby Doo is pretty much limited to the original series, “Scooby Doo, Where are You?“. Some of “The New Scooby Doo Movies” are amusing (these aired right after the original series in the early ’70’s), but some are really bad (badly drawn/animated, badly conceived) and it’s hard to reconcile them into “canon” anyway. Anything after that I could just throw out— especially anything dealing with Scrappy Doo. Ugh.

    (Ironically, Kaitlyn loves Scrappy Doo. I wonder if she’ll grow out of that?)

    I’ve gotten a big kick out of the newer animated movies, though (especially the first of them, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island). They fit perfectly into my notion of what the Scooby “universe” should be, give or take. Well-done and modern art and animation, too.

    So, I was excited today to find out that there’s a new Scooby Doo cartoon series on TV— the first in at least 12 years— that seems to fit canonically into the Scoobyverse between the original series and the new movies: “What’s New, Scooby Doo?” It just came out last September on the WB. Looks to be the same animation artwork/style from the new movies. And it’s going to be airing on Cartoon Network starting the end of this month. Is that cool or what?

    (Jeez… I am such a geek… but I couldn’t resist.)

  • I had what?

    My friend Justin just turned 30 a little over a week ago, and for his birthday I had all the video of our little public access show that we did together in Spokane transferred to DVD (almost three hours’ worth). Six episodes and a short movie (The Crusader), all at least 8 years old; the show ran in 1994 and ’95, I think, and all the filming was done then or from even earlier projects.

    Watching it all again and looking back on that time sure brings back memories. Most embarrassingly (and I think I blocked this out), I was at the time in a long hair phase, but all my hair was not uniformly long (as it would later become); no, it was nice and short in front and fairly long in back.

    That’s right.

    Worst. Mullet. Ever.

    I was like the poster boy for mullets. Bearing in mind, I’d never heard the term mullet back then, and was blissfully clueless. Now, though. Damn. And it’s all captured in DVD glory forever.

    It didn’t last forever, though. I got it chopped to a uniform length and let it grow out again, and for a time had nice, straight, long hair almost down to my tailbone. That phase ended in 1998, though, the year I got married. Now, I keep my hair very short. Go figure.

  • Clearing out the Month

    The end of the month is here already? Wow. Turn away for a moment, and the year’s already a sixth over.

    Interesting fact I learned this week in a Wired magazine article about the file-sharing software Kazaa: It’s a company decentralized and scattered around the globe: software code is housed in Estonia, the servers are in Denmark, the domain is registered in Australia, and the corporation— or pseudo-corporation, as it were— is located in the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu.

    The part I especially found interesting was Vanuatu itself, which is billed as a tax haven with a strict code of secrecy. Several years ago (okay, along the lines of 10 years ago!), I had a story idea that would involve this obscure little nation I found in an almanac that nobody had every really heard of before, but of course I never really did anything with it, other than file a bit of knowledge about the country away into some dark corner of my brain.

    So now, it seems a bit prescient (only to me, of course, since I never mentioned this story idea to anyone) to find this new stuff out about Vanuatu. It gets the idea gears turning again, and I’m thinking I should blow the dust off this story notion and see how well it dovetails with these new insights.

    Also this week we had a close encounter with the W32.Opaserv.Worm virus on my wife’s computer. Damn thing had been infected with three variants (in the C:Windows directory were three separate .EXE files of the virus: “brasil.exe”, “alevir.exe” and “scrsvr.exe”), and since this machine is running Windows ME (I hate Millenium Edition!!), you had to jump through four times as many hoops to kill the virus as you would for any other system. Watch out for this little bugger. It’s a pain in the ass.

    And how come nobody has registered the sweet domain mybandersnatch.com? 15 bucks on directNIC, people! (Ten points to you if you actually know what a “bandersnatch” is.)

  • The Man Without Fear

    Went and saw “Daredevil” Friday night. I liked it quite a lot, it’s worth seeing if you’re into the action/comic-book-adaption movie thing. I was especially interested as Daredevil, the comic book, has been the one comic I’ve consistently collected for, oh, the past 15 years or more. I’ll try not to spoil any critical parts of it.

    What I liked:

    • The realistic costume. No more of those 80 pound stiff rubber batsuits!
    • The realistic portrayal of a blind man going about his daily routine— folding various denominations of money in different ways to distinguish them, dark rooms (if you’re blind, why use lights?), all the braille.
    • The way they depicted DD’s “radar sense” was well done. Likewise, the fact that he spent nights in a sensory deprivation tank to give his ultra-senses a break was an excellent touch.
    • Depicting the physical strain and toll it must be to do what Daredevil does, night after night, by the scars all over his back in the shower, and pulling out a tooth (in a scene lifted neatly from “Fight Club”) in the same scene.
    • Colin Farrell as Bullseye.
    • Jon Favreau as Foggy Nelson.
    • A lot of nods/tributes to the original comic, and Marvel comics in general, like: the sports center sign featuring the boxing match of Jack Murdock vs. John Romita; cops named Miller, Mack and Bendis; Kevin Smith playing a bit part as a crime lab worker named Kirby.

    What I didn’t like:

    • A few of the action/acrobat sequences had an unnatural Matrix-quality to them. I really don’t think people can jump that far, or that high…
    • Where was Stick? Or any martial arts instructor? It’s kind of hard to buy that a young Matt Murdock could have taught himself how to fight and do acrobatics so quickly…
    • Hm…. I guess there wasn’t much I didn’t like.

    Go see the movie. It’s worth it.

    And for any comic geeks reading, Frank Miller is the definitive Daredevil writer. For artists, I’m partial to David Mazzucchelli and John Romita, Jr. Following that, it pretty much goes without saying that I think the two definitive runs on Daredevil are Born Again and The Man Without Fear.

  • Priceless

    Dell Dude

    Now, if only someone could do something about those damn Dell Interns…

  • Tribute to Gharlane

    A post on Wil Wheaton’s Soapbox made me think of this.

    If you had ever spent any amount of time on Usenet prior to 2001, especially in the geek-populous (hey, I’m a geek, so I can say that) groups relating to science fiction, then you’ve probably read posts from Gharlane of Eddore. As a Usenet poster, he was probably the smartest, most prolific, and most opinionated person I’ve ever come across on Usenet, before and since. Reading his posts were always worth the time, and it’s fair to say that in many ways, Gharlane was Usenet culture.

    Sadly, he died in June of 2001.

    I’ll just quote from the post on Wil’s site:

    *sigh* I miss Gharlane…

  • More random things

    While in Portland for Kaitlyn’s surgery, we found a little bit of time to go to Goodwill to accomodate my wife’s eBay habit. Browsing through the science fiction section of their used books, I happened across a paperback Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson that was in pretty good shape. I’d been wanting this book, and for the super-low Goodwill price of $1.99 I couldn’t pass it up. So it was just icing on the cake to find out the book was also signed by the author!

    I’ve been playing with Wikipedia a lot lately, even contributing some articles and editing others. I’ve mentioned Wikipedia before, but I’ve been becoming addicted to it and had to slip in a mention again. Go check it out. You’ll be glad that you did.

    We got a new computer a little over a week ago, an eMachines from Costco. Cheap, and far better than the other computers in the house. Unfortunately, I’m still not completely caught up with installing all my old software to it, so my Palm eBook “project” has been delayed. Rest assured, it will be continued again. Soon, I hope.

    PHP rocks. Yeah, I just had to slip that in there.

  • Frustration

    Two days ago my daughter Kaitlyn underwent surgery on her eyes to correct her congenital esotropia (lazy eye). This was the second surgery for her, the first occuring when she was only six months old (she’s three now). We drove up to Portland Wednesday afternoon, had dinner with our good friends Justin and Raegan, and had the surgery Thursday at Casey Eye Institute.

    Turned out to be an even worse day than we’d imagined; Kaitlyn had a pre-op appointment at 11:00, to be followed (we thought) by surgery at approximately 12 noon. Unfortunately, the appointment ran long, and the doctor told us the surgery would be around 1:30 or 2:00, as a baby was in surgery ahead of us.

    Well, it wasn’t 1:30, and it wasn’t 2:00 either. We got bumped again, and finally Kaitlyn went into surgery right about 3:00. At that point, we had been pretty much led to believe that we’d be getting into surgery between 2:00 and 2:30, because they let us bring Kaitlyn back at about 1:30 for an oral sedative to calm her down, which she needed because she was completely freaked out about the whole deal. So, from about 1:30 to 3:00, I held Kaitlyn (who was groggy with sedative, but fighting it), waiting for surgery to start and desperately hoping it would be soon so we could get the hell out of there.

    The thing is, we were apparently originally on the schedule for a 2:30 surgery to begin with, but nobody told us that— we were led to believe she’d go into surgery around noon right after her pre-op. No one told us otherwise, until after we got there and checked in for surgery. And since patients can’t have any food for six hour prior to surgery, we had to get Kaitlyn up to have a light breakfast at 5:30 that morning. So when they finally took her in, she’d been without food for 9 hours.

    She’s doing fine now, and her eyes are red but straight. It’s amazing how fast kids bounce back from something like this. Still, I’m not happy with the runaround on the day of surgery. If they schedule us at 2:30, fine. If a young baby has priority over us, fine. But nobody told us until it was too late. That’s what burns me up. We were there jumping through the hoops they laid out for us, but they didn’t even have their shit together enough to tell us what was going on.

    Enough venting. Kaitlyn is good, things are good and the whole ordeal is behind us.

  • Screech

    A couple of weekends ago we caught a marathon of “I Love the 80s” on VH1 and spent what seemed like a good portion of the day watching it and laughing at all the quintessential ’80s things we remember. And it had to happen.

    1989.

    The year that “Saved by the Bell” debuted on NBC.

    You’re wondering why that matters. You’re probably thinking of not visiting my site again.

    This is significant because of a certain theory I have about that show.

    And I’m not talking about “The New Class” or “The College Years,” no way. (Although “The College Years” did continue with Zack, Screech, Slater, and eventually Kelly.) No, the original series is where it’s at.

    It’s only with the original series, anyway, that my theory comes into play.

    Here it comes.

    Bear in mind, this is a phenomenon that I not only experienced firsthand, but have witnessed affecting others as well. Basically, it stems from this: whenever “Saved by the Bell” comes on, you can’t NOT watch it.

    Doesn’t matter if you were aimlessly channel surfing, or watching a different show: if for some reason “Saved by the Bell” appears on your TV, you are compelled to watch it until the end. Invariably. I’ve even had people that I didn’t know watched the show confirm this. My theory? At best, there’s a subliminal element to the original series of “Saved by the Bell” that compels you to watch.

    At worst? I shudder to think.

    Some links for your gratification:

  • Moving right along…

    A few random things.

    php|architect is offering a free issue of their new magazine. Anyone who’s into PHP should check this out.

    I found a neat site today called StoryMania. From their own description, they’re an “online community and marketplace for publishing, discovering, reviewing, buying and selling creative works — interact directly with authors and other viewers.” The site could use some technical improvements, but I like the idea a lot.

    So far I’ve got the first five chapters of Tom Sawyer done in Palm Reader format (.pml). It’s pretty plain, so I’ll be calling it version 1.0 and try to get my hands on the actual book to address additional formatting issues.