Author: Tim

An animator, video producer, Lego artist, and author—I am moderately skilled at a lot of different things.

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Big Sky would be the best Guitar Hero song evar!!1

Without a doubt, Reverend Horton Heat‘s “Big Sky” would be the absolutely most fret-burningest, string snappingest, finger shreddingest song were it ever to come to the Guitar Hero franchise.

I get dizzy imagining the hammer-ons, pull-offs and wrist-cramping strumming needed just to keep up with this frenetic, massive Rockabilly tune. If you don’t believe me, give it a listen at the iTunes Store.

Or, just see for yourself. Conquering this on Export Expert mode would be like jumping up and slapping the face of God.

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Blog

The 21st Century Format Wars are worse

Comparing the new generation of media to the old Beta vs. VHS format war of the 1980s is a no-brainer, but the most obvious comparison of Blu-Ray vs. the now-defunct HD-DVD is really only the tip of the iceberg — and like icebergs, what you can see isn’t the worst of it.

Any early adopters of video tapes felt burned when investing in a BetaMax player only to see VHS become the dominant player, so two decades later consumers were understandably cautious about throwing in with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD before the dust had settled and a victor emerged. But lurking in the shadows, if digital entertainment can even do that, was the dark horse of digital downloads [alright, enough with the purple prose].

Without being chained to one particular format, digital downloads would be a panacea, a non-combatant in the format wars, that would rise above the two competing media formats as they fought each other for supremacy. Your movies and TV shows would no longer be tied to a particular player — you could download them once and play them anywhere, on any device. And as a result of the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray infighting (and with a little help from BitTorrent), digital downloads started to catch on. You can now sidestep the whole HD-DVD / Blu-Ray battle and download your high-def video directly to your Apple TV, TiVo, Unbox, Netflix on Demand, Xbox 360, or Vudu. But there lies the rub.

Just try to get the HD movie you downloaded from your Apple TV to play on your Xbox 360, or try copying that TV show you downloaded to your TiVo to your iPod. You can’t do it. And suddenly you find yourself mired in a format war you didn’t even know about. The unifying potential of digital downloads has been squandered and carved up into a variety of competing, closed players. Faced with the plethora of locked-in media players, having to decide between just Beta vs. VHS seems downright quaint. Welcome to Format Wars 2.0, with still no winners. But you can guess who the losers are.

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Blog

Crackle finds the 411 on parking

The Emergency 411 keeps showing up in more places! This time, it’s part of Crackle’s Wet Paint contest, featured alongside many fine (and some familiar) animated shorts currently gracing the web. If you’ve been stuck circling the block and haven’t gotten a chance, check out Emergency 411: Finding Parking — it’s on Crackle right now!

And while you’re there, the shouting talking half of Penn & Teller has something to say on Penn Says, with one of my favorites being his thoughts on fame. And just because I’m linking to Penn doesn’t mean I’m trying to convert you into an internet libertarian.

Song Charts

LOLcats are the big thing right now, but I found my new favorite internet joke meme which combines the moving, emotional ephemera of music with the drab suckfulness of an Excel spreadsheet: song charts.

It started with hip-hop music charts:

Mo Money, Mo Problems

Then widened to include the music Todd I listen to:

Love Will…

The robots behind Daft Punk would approve.

Harder Better Faster Stronger

So now I’m giving back to the community. Anyway, here’s my first song chart:

Rumpshaker

Dorky? Yes. But at least I’m not making Rush image macros. If you’d like to add your own, join the flickr songchart photo pool!

It could be worse, this might be a wiki

John Linnell once observed that even though They Might Be Giants kept getting older, their audience always stayed the same age. The last time I saw They Might Be Giants, they were performing Here Come the ABCs at Amoeba Records in 2005, but elbowing for room against a bunch of hip parents who brought their toddlers to listen to the same band as me, a person roughly ten times their age, made me realize I’m probably getting too old for these guys.

That wasn’t the case two years before when I saw them perform at UCLA in collaboration with Dave Eggers and his twee writer stable to produce McSweeney’s issue #6. Putting Sarah Vowell’s “It could be worse” mantra to music was the highlight for the show for me, even more than Egger’s story about him shitting his pants.

A caveat: I place TMBG’s performance of It Could Be Worse above Dave’s shit story but at least on par with Zadie Smith’s wry british description of the way a gangly, awkward girl ran “like a naturally uncoordinated animal after it had been shot.”

A selection from It Could Be Worse:

You asked for baked potato
and instead they bring you fries
at least that’s not as bad, now
as the day the music died

I had tried in vain to download a full-length version of the delightfully macabre song I heard that night but only ever found the truncated 1:05 version, which is in and of itself a minor tragedy befitting the song. You can try and download the .ogg version (which won’t play on iTunes!), but you’ll get a 404 error. Oh well, it could be worse.

A bright spot is that in my searching, I found this might be a wiki, the TMBG knowledge base, and got to traipse down memory lane and recall fondly the songs and music videos from my one and only favorite band 1988 through 2001.

I think I’ll dig up my DVD of their videos, and maybe give John Henry another listen. Now that I think about it, I was in high school when that came out — just the right age for a They Might Be Giants fan.

Gary Gygax Dungeons & Dragons co-creator dies at 69

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080304/ap_en_ot/obit_gygax

He was slain by an Orc.

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Shorts Video

Vomit Tag!!

I’ve been trying to lose a little weight, so my friends and I got together for a game that’s both great exercise and a clever way to hide my secret bulimia: vomit tag!

Banned from YouTube!

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Video

I’m calling from the Home Office

A new Weak Nights video is up, and what could be better than office drama? Why it’s home office drama. Watch a guy argue with his girlfriend!!

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Cartoons Work

Requiem for a Green Monster

Betty RossIt was 2001 when my friend Nick and I wrote our first (and only) cartoon about the sardonic, ever-suffering super hero The Sarcastic Hulk. And over the last two years I had been living that cartoon. I’m so damned observant I only needed my friend Lisa to point it out. You tell me if there are any similarities between a certain mild-mannered workaday tool and the jaded giant:

  • Pushover Bruce Banner gets laid off at his dead-end job.
  • Bruce dates a hippie. Their relationship consists mostly of arguing and making out.
  • Mounting failures and everyday frustrations make SH bitter and also kind of a dick.

And most of all…

  • Our hero is sarcastic.

Talk about life imitating art! If only someone had kept writing these I may have had some warning. Oh wait. But what gets me is I didn’t see this situation coming and I wrote it.*

*I will catch endless hell from one Nick Shaheen if I don’t mention that he also wrote the script, and that I’m an ass for taking out all his best jokes. Nick, nobody was going to get a joke about Meredith Baxter-Berney.

“Zeitgeist” and the Astrological basis of Christianity

Yep, it finally happened. I’ve put on my internet blogging tinfoil hat.

It started with an insightful, possibly apocryphal, letter from Thomas Paine to Andrew Dean claiming “The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles … is a parody on the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac”. It is still a relevant letter to this day, as Paine takes a moment to call out anyone who would wear their religion on their sleeve, cynically claiming to be a Christian without actually acting like one. “Their religion is all creed and no morals.”

This then led me to one of those interminable conspiracy documentaries a-la “Loose Change” entitled Zeitgeist. I skipped past the worthless first ten minutes, past some laden anti-religious indoctrination and bad clip art until I found a compelling argument for the astrological basis of the story of Jesus and his 12 disciples — an analog Paine discovered long before I did. Maybe he had Google Video, too?

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