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Bayonetta Trailer Commentary May 13, 2009 4:43 pm

Well, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before, Bayonetta developers Platinum Games, have gone and put out a Commentary video for the first Bayonetta trailer they released this year, a 20+ minute video discussing a 1m30s trailer. Commentary below, consider me amused. I’ve a mild interest in the game, if for nothing else than their goal of seeking a level of over the top action that out-Devil May Cry’s Devil May Cry. The character design certainly doesn’t hurt, but high levels of absurdity is a bigger draw for me.

In Console
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Webcomics 3:56 am

Warren Ellis has started a thread on Whitechapel for webcomics creators to pimp their work, tons of stuff to check out, a few highlights:

Wide Awake

Wide Awake: Wherein a woman deals with the Cthuluish monsters that stalk her dreams, occasionally following her into reality and keeping her from her coffee. Looking fantastic, and being done by some comics pros: co-written by Eric Trautmann (Checkmate, Perfect Dark Zero, Final Crisis: Resist) and Brandon Jerwa (Battlestar Galactica, Highlander, G.I. Joe), with art by Mirco Pierfederici (Doctor Who, Star Trek Alien Spotlight). This is just getting running, so its the perfect time to get started, and it looks to follow the Freakangels format of 6 pages a week every Friday. The initial Week 0 teaser is bringing Joshua Ortega and Francis Manapul’s recentish comic The Necromancer to mind, which is not a bad thing.

Monster Commute

Monster Commute: Okay, so I’ve already known about this one and have been reading it regularly, but it is great fun and this gives me an excuse to link to it. I love it and I don’t even drive! Brought to you by Daniel m. Davis and his Steam Crow Press label.

Clandestino

Clandestino: This gypsy revenge tale is currently competing in Zuda’s online competition, a friggin’ gorgeous tease from Amancay N. Nahuelpan B. I seriously hope this one gets picked up, but I’ve consciously stayed away from the whole Zuda thing so I have no idea what happens if it stays in its current #4 spot.

Shaobaibai

Shaobaibai: Another fairly new comic, nicely stylized in a way that brings Samurai Jack to mind, but with a lovely warrior maiden who seems to have done something bad and is now stuck on the borders of Hell because its gatekeeper won’t let her in(?). From French creator Fred Boot, but kindly translated to English for those of us who never really learned anything in 3 years of French classes…

Surviving the World

Surviving The World: This one’s a bit different, amuses like indexed, but in a slightly different fashion, quite good.

The System

The System: Just enough time to take a peek at this one, but the strips I’ve looked at certainly amuse. Will have to crawl through this some more when I get a chance.

And its waaaay too late, wrapping this up for now, possibly doing another look at the thread, again, lots of good looking stuff to be had. Go. Discover.

In Comics
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Shorpy Photo Archive May 12, 2009 5:45 pm
Gotham, 1931

Just found myself pointed at the Shorpy Photo Archive, a collection of high-res vintage photography, great stuff and the feed’s getting added to my reader straight away (with updates several times a day).

In Photography
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Aaaaalmost there. 1:43 am

As you can clearly see, I’ve shifted over to the new layout, though its not quite complete. Still some tweaks to make to the CSS and some of the sub-pages, some weird behavior that I may/may not be able to iron out(PHP fail on my part), and possibly a rewrite of the sidebar(which is clearly not finished). Altogether, I’d say it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-95% complete, which is good enough for me to push it out of the gate. Hopefully I’ll have the rest done by week’s end, but we’ll see what happens.

In Random
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Falcoon Returns May 11, 2009 2:51 am
Falcoon is back

I don’t know if this means he’s done with his gig at SNK or what, but Falcoon started updating again! He seems to be updating daily, and you can find the older sketches linked at the bottom left corner of his site, but I recommend either keeping a close eye on it or using something like page2rss to make sure you don’t miss an update.

Update: Paying a little more attention here, he’s added the header “Rehabilitation – 7200sec Theater” to the top of it, so it seems he’s getting himself back into the posting/drawing habit with daily 2 hour sketch sessions.

In Japanese Art
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B:TBatB S1E16 – Night of the Huntress 2:04 am
Jaime's completely smitten by Huntress and swoons over her every word

Oh Batman: The Brave and the Bold, how I love you. This show is entirely camp, revels in it, and is all the better for it. Sadly, I’ve been without new episodes for over a month now, but it has just come back from its hiatus and in fine form. In fact, this may be my favorite episode yet (though it faces stiff competition from The Atom and Aquaman’s adventures inside Batman in Journey to the Center of the Bat).

Black Canary sweeps Solomon Grundy off his feet

Batman and Black Canary have some fun at poor Solomon Grundy’s expense in the cold open, Jaime(Blue Beetle) come to Gotham to check out colleges because of all the supervillain babes (“everyone knows bad girls are the hottest”) the outstanding criminal justice program, Jaime goes gaga over super sexy Huntress while helping Batman take down Babyface and his crew of circus freaks(Ms. Manface- wow, just wow), and we get the line “The Hammer of Justice is unisex*” out of the Deidrich Bader-voiced Batman. Oh, and did I mention the Batmobile transforms into a giant fucking robot!? With Rocket Fists!?

Batman reporting for duty to Team Gurren

Next week looks to be outstanding as well, a cold open with the R. Lee Ermey-voiced Wildcat helping Batman take down an escaped Bane, and then hijinks with the ever-goofy Booster Gold.

* I wonder what Captain Hammer has to say about that?

In Cartoons
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Dollhouse 8-12 May 10, 2009 3:02 am

Right. Just caught up with 8-12, as I’ve been pathologically unable to keep up with it as it was airing. Whatever the status of the will it/won’t it air 13th episode, Fox needs to renew this right away. This is really, really good television and it needs to continue. I mean, even bad shows like this rarely exist, but one that does and is good? It’s like winning the lotto for me, this is exactly the sort of science fiction that I love, and you need look no further than Ghost in the Shell and Gunnm (which, admittedly also have lots and lots of cybernetic tech going for them too, but still) to see that. Burn Notice kind of gets at that with Michael slipping in and out of roles, and Pretender did a really good job of scratching this itch, but Dollhouse just jumped things to a whole different level of excellence and it’d be a terrible loss if we didn’t get to see it continue to unfold. Consider my hat tossed in with the rest of Angry Internet Men who demand Fox bring it back for more, lots more.

Right. I should probably get on with watching Firefly now. Of course, I’m sure I’ll be sad that it’s done with after I get through Serenity. Hmm.

In Film & TV
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Pardon the mess. May 9, 2009 9:53 pm

Switching over to the default theme for the time being so I don’t keep fiddling with the old one trying to get things (that broke because of the WP upgrade) working again. If you’re really bored and do nothing but look at the site all day you may see it hop in and out of attempts at getting the new layout live. Hopefully yet tonight I’ll get it up in a rough fashion, probably without the category fanciness I wish to incorporate, but if I manage that, it actually shouldn’t be too difficult to manage getting categories going as well. I think.

UPDATED: Blargh, screw it, I don’t have a clue on where to begin with where WordPress is being weird on me at the moment and I’ve been staring at this for the better part of 8 hours, time to do something else for a while.

In Random
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MundaneJoy / Ian Talty April 27, 2009 1:28 am

After a long day at work, I’ve come home to find news that Ian Talty, better known to me as MundaneJoy on the White Chapel forums and Twitter, died today. I never met him in person, but he was an absolutely amazing local photographer that I’d hoped to hook up with in one of his always impressive urban exploration expeditions. Adding to it, it looks like it happened blocks away from my apartment and just before I was headed to work this morning, and its just striking me now that the police car with its lights going that I almost took a photo of because it looked cool in the rain(but didn’t because I didn’t want to bust out the camera in the rain) had to have been headed to the scene as it turned off Marshall in getting to my side of the bridge. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Wow, its hitting me pretty hard here and I’ve only known him for a brief time online. He had a great personality, a true passion for his art, and an outstanding capability to make even the worst decay look beautiful. He was also doing a pretty good job of being an inspiration to my own photography and my baby steps into getting off the beaten path to finding the hidden gems all around us. He always had a kind word for my own shots, and was nice enough to let me take my pick of his photos for part of the new layout I’m working on when I asked him about it just last night. Sadly I don’t have more words for him as I knew him in such a limited capacity, so I’ll shut up and let some of his recent photos speak for themselves:

He’ll be missed greatly, seeing new shots from him always made the day a little brighter, and he always came across as someone I’d enjoy hanging out with.

Updated: Star Tribune and Pioneer Press articles on the accident. I was really looking foward to linking you all(however small the number) to his newest shoots as a part of getting my blog going again, and knowing that I won’t be able has been bumming me out all day. And, as I carelessly failed to mention it last night, my thoughts are with his friends and family, this can’t be a pleasant time for them by any means and I wish them the best as they deal with it.

In Photography

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Not as swift as I’d hoped. April 26, 2009 2:13 am

So, clearly I haven’t gotten the new layout done up yet, and my weekend’s about at its close. Still making progress in fits and spurts, taking way too much time to find, try, and settle on the category banners (which you can peek at here, minus a few as yet unmade stragglers), which is keeping me from focusing on the code-y bits. So, going to attempt to force myself into a bit of a workflow here by making a checklist of things to do:

1) Finish the remaining banner graphics (possibly involving a new self-portrait shot for the Living super-category).
2) Finalize appearance for center and right columns (and what bits go in the latter), can come before or after Item 1.
3) Clean up code before grafting into WP, to save potential headaches and remove/more rigidly define placeholders.
4) Convert layout to WP, unrusting my meager PHP powers and figuring out the Category Templates thing as I go along.
5) Run through secondary WP pages to make sure nothing breaks.
6) ?
7) ProfitPublish.
8) Write.

In Inform & Amuse

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