The Occasional Blargh

They give you free computers? I should try this "blogging" thing, then!

Had I known that free computers could be had, I would have actually done this blogging thing.

Though there seems to be an ethics debate over this. I wonder how critics or academy voters do this with those screener DVDs?

In Amazement: CN remembers Mr. B

For a network that has actually began to show contempt for the medium that it was created to celebrate, Cartoon Network has actually paid some small tributes to Joseph Barbera on his passing. and two commercials remarking on his passing (an Adult Swim version and a Cartoon Network/Boomerang version of the tribute). That said, with some occasional exceptions, the Boomerang network can be seen as the broadcast museum to the works of Hanna-Barbera.

Largely, I grew up after the H-B heyday, but of the so-called animation renaissance spurred on by the critical and commercial success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which helped revive the Disney Feature Animation unit, and encouraged Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros. into producing animation for television. (Remember when Tiny Toon Adventures got a primetime special on CBS for its premiere?)  Disney got in to the act by expanding their daytime offerings into a two-hour block, calling it The Disney Afternoon. With Fox entering the scene, you had a small but active environment for animation, which of course helped spur the creation of Cartoon Network.(Ironically, a 24-hour animation network would eventually kill off afternoon cartoons on network TV, and drain the remaining audience for SatAm cartoons.)

Now, it may be giving too much credit to Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna to say he kept animation alive from the 60s-80s through their Saturday morning works (and the Flintstones in primetime), but if nothing else, they kept a lot of their colleagues in work, and inspired lots of kids at home, through those cartoons, as well as through those Tom and Jerry shorts from the 1940s onward. J.B. also was one of the helpful bridges to the history of the medium. He will be greatly missed in the animation community. I'm glad to see he will be missed by Cartoon Network, too.

Bettie Page House Spotted by Voxer...

BettiePagePaintedHouse

...Film at 11!

Just a random search through Vox turns up someone who lives near the Bettie Page house which was mentioned on the news a few months back, and journaled here then.

Justice League: The Conclusion. . .

Justice League Unlimited - The Complete Second Season (DC Comics Classic Collection)

Note to myself: Justice League Unlimited season 2 (actually season 3) -- the final season -- is scheduled to be released on March 20th. (Now with DVD box artwork from Amazon.com)

QotD: In My Shopping Cart

Where do you do your online shopping?

Amazon orders (Oct. 2006)

Funny enough, I just cancelled my free trial of Amazon Prime. Unlike Joe, even with the extra shopping spurred by free two-day shipping, I didn't spend nearly enough to justify the $80 yearly fee that would have been levied. In addition, the free "Super Saver Shipping" option frequently got my stuff delivered two days after order, even though Amazon would over estimate shipping time by a week. Right now, since I have a order I placed two days after my trial expired, I have Amazon estimating it won't arrive until between the 22nd and the 29th, however UPS is estimating the delivery to happen on the 21st. UPS is always right in these cases.

I joined Amazon Prime because it was offered as a free trial when I ordered Justice League Unlimited season 1 (and technically 2, too) when it came out in October, along with Teen Titans season 1.

Wonder Woman

Following that, I've been using Amazon.com to build up my trade paperback collection of Wonder Woman starting from the 80s relaunch. (I actually had picked up the first book in 2005 so I could have something for George Perez to sign at Baltimore Comic Con in 2005. He couldn't make it in 2005, but he was there in 2006, so he I got him to sign it then. And he and Marv Wolfman were nice enough to pose for a picture as well, which I wasn't expecting. Eventually, I should get it off of my digital camera and onto some more permanent medium.) Anyway, since I have the first paperbacks, I thought I may as well get the rest as they come out so I can follow the story to its apparent conclusion at spring 2006, after which it was relaunched again. I don't follow comics enough to know why, though.So, while I had Prime, I've ordered Beauty and the Beasts, Destiny Calling, Spirit of Truth, and JLA: League of One.  Not counting Spirit as it is out of print and I bought it from a collector who had it signed by Paul Dini and Alex Ross (and thus sold it for $30 through Amazon), the other books from Amazon came to cost about $30, thus not justifying any membership for Prime.

Explodopop Batteries. . .

Quickie blogging because I'm still sick. . .

• If your Apple, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo computer users ignored that battery recall a few months ago, the inflate-o-battery may be waiting for you.
  
  
• Joy of joys -- the smugness of Apple ads have annoyed a few too many people. January will be the Month of Apple bugs, where a vigilante security researcher will point out unfixed security bugs in Apple software. Despite protests by many fanatics, there likely are security flaws in OS X. As complicated as an operating system is, you can't assume otherwise. And given that Apple had a few doozies of their own not so very long ago really should have ended the debate a while ago. Then again, Apple still sings backup in their own Amen Chorus. And thus driving people to try to knock them down a peg or two.
  
  (One interesting argument given to advance the case that OS X is "flaw-free" is the argument that if this was untrue, then why don't Macs have an equal share of malware. This argument is repeated ad-infinitum at places like MacDailyNews. For those who ever took biology, it is shown that it is far harder for of a disease vector to take root unless a critical mass of infect-able hosts exists. A small scattered population is much much harder to infect.)
  
  Even with all of the "haterating" above, I still think the PowerBook...I mean MacBook Pro is a nice looking, nicely designed machine. (If anyone in blog-land wants to send money to help me buy, I'll gladly accept. Hey, I had to try)
  
  
• Elsewhere, two pieces wondering how open the new MS Office open standards are: Bob Sutor, Andrew Shebanow.
  
  
• Joseph Barbera died yesterday. Mark Evanier has been posting lots of stuff about him this week.
  
  
• Fed Ex retrieved my warranty and delivered it to me.
  
  
• I did not get a MacBook Pro. I got an HP Pavilion for about $900 less. A benefit is getting a discrete graphics card at $1100 (as the $1100 MacBook only comes with Intel's integrated graphics chip).
  

Funny... this post doesn't feel as quick anymore...

Archie's redesign. . .

Simple blogging because I am sick...

They're going to redesign the Archie comics characters. Understandable, since as I look at Archie right now, the house style screams 1950s, and not in a cool-timeless way, but in a way that repels anybody who was born after 1960. Archie looks archaic.

That said, this redesign looks ugly. The cover looks repulsive, lacking in simple grace and style that at least the archaic Archie had. As someone who has criticized Manga-ization as a cheap way to try to make things new and hip, I wish they had opted for a more Manga style (no, I'm not going to go more into specifics than that). That said, my opinion doesn't mean anything, since I have never in my life bought or read an Archie comic. I may have watched a cartoon of it while ill and too sick to find the remote, throw a rock at the TV, or will myself into unconsciousness.

FedEx, what the hell?

So, if somebody can sign for a package addressed to someone with a Scots-Irish surname with a Iberian-Romance surname, then exactly what is the point of even asking for signatures for packages? For that matter, I've been sitting within the address to which the package in question was addressed to, and yet I recall no delivery personnel of FedEx arriving here to deliver aforementioned package, not even at 8:09pm, which is the time FedEx claims that the package was delivered. Of course, had it been delivered to my address, the signers surname would have properly matched the surname to which the package was address to.

One consolation is that this was a trial-run. Federal Express was only delivering a $100 warranty. The $1200 computer to which the warranty was for doesn't ship until next week. Please get this right next time!

Now I need to track down who has what is essentially a worthless (to them) stack of papers. And figure out how in fact FedEx misdelivered my package, and allowed it to be signed for by someone with a completely dissimilar last name!

Green Lantern Ike.

That's one badass Dwight D. Eisenhower!

QotD: If I Had To Do It All Over Again

What's one thing you regret not doing? 
Submitted by Mr. Nice.

Applying to one of the major colleges back when they were sending me brochures unsolicited (I presume). I remember getting catalogs from Stanford, Wake Forest, and believe-it-or-not Princeton. Unfortunately, first off I was not the most organized or diligent person about requesting or filling out applications, and secondly, my mom had died early in my Senior year of high school, so that final year I was in a daze, right when I needed to hunker down and give myself an ulcer trying to get into some super-duper school. That last year of school, I felt as though I had just gotten off a tilt-a-whirl: disoriented, unmoored, lost. I'm still trying to ground myself, six years later.

A good time to buy DVDs...

Amazon.com is in the midsts of one of their holiday sales; they are selling many of their DVDs at half-off.

While that is going on, I availed myself to their television section to pick up as a gift for a friend that old Wonder Woman series from the 70s, which for some odd reason is cheaper to buy individually by season than it is to buy as the complete set. Actually, that seems to occur frequently at Amazon.com.

That means unless you know there are additional extras in the omnibus packages, shop around Amazon, you might actually find a better deal there.

Just so that this post isn't a complete advertorial, that last link is a postscript by writer Mark Evanier brought upon because of the annoying practice by folks releasing DVDs where to get you to buy the same thing multiple times. For TV, they'll release a show, by season. Then they will collect all the seasons together, but instead of just releasing that, they'll add some treats and extras to try to get you to buy again.

So you think, don't buy right away. Wait for the inevitable full release. Unfortunately, nothing is inevitable. If not enough people buy the first seasons on DVD, they won't release the remaining seasons. It flopped in the marketplace.  No point throwing more money down the well. Writer Earl Kress mentions Murphy Brown, and F Troop as such victims. I can give you one more. Right now, I'm looking at Gargoyles: Season 2, Volume 1. with the tag-line "We Live Again" at the bottom. No they won't. Earlier this year, Disney announced they weren't going to release any more. This DVD set concludes cliffhanger-like shortly after the start of a lengthy story arc where our key characters stuck on a magic boat unable to return home. And there's no resolution in sight. This is actually worse than the case of Murphy Brown, as they gave up on the show in the middle of a season! (Though it could be worse... the show could have been cancelled in the middle of the season while on broadcast TV, like a number of continuous dramas this season.)

So, I guess if there is any television series you want to see continued to be released on DVD, now is a good opportunity to buy.  If there isn't, just buy Gargoyles. I really really want the rest of season two to be released.