Well, This Place Is Dead

And I guess it has been for a while. All the same, I thought I should give it a proper burial.

So long, internet. It's been a good two years. And... well, I guess that's it.

History Of Visual Effects

Check this out:

I don't know who put that together, but I thank them on behalf of the internet. Also, bear in mind that the technology we use in films nowadays is a relatively recent development. Given that computing power doubles every year, I see no reason we can't climb out of the Uncanny Valley within the next three or four years. (Then the tech will keep growing until we have CGI characters who look more real than you.)

Ryan

This is my new favorite thing. It's a video of previously recorded interviews with Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who is going on the ever-expanding "My Heroes" list. Enjoy. (Watch it full-screen and high quality, if possible. You'll thank me.)

Oh, I almost forgot this; a link to "Walking", Larkin's 1968 Oscar-nominated short.

Untitled

Ooh, so much. Alright, well here's a ton of stuff I couldn't flesh out into full posts:

My new favorite jazzman, Lee Morgan, comes highly recommended from this Russian forum, complete with Rapidshare links. Seriously. Just get The Sidewinder (each word is a link) and listen to the title track. If that doesn't convince you, just listen to the rest of the album. Now do you see the might of the trumpet?

TRANSLATION PARTY! Yeah! Do not ask questions, just click this.

A little site appropriately entitled HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheEarthYet.com. You should probably check. I'll wait.

A fairly comprehensive Pixies anthology of albums. Listen to them all. If you're kinda like "maybe, I guess," then do me a favor and just listen to Surfer Rosa. It doesn't have the best Pixies songs, but it's the most consistently enjoyable album.

That is all.

Art On Acid

While testing the effects of LSD in the 1950s, the US government ended up dosing a man before giving him a box full of pencils and crayons, instructing him to sketch the medical officer in the room with him. Observe and enjoy.

20 minutes after first dose: An attending doctor observes - Patient chooses to start drawing with charcoal. The subject of the experiment reports - "Condition normal... no effect from the drug yet." ____________________________________________________________________
85 minutes after first dose: The patient seems euphoric. "I can see you clearly, so clearly. This... you... it's all ... I'm having a little trouble controlling this pencil. It seems to want to keep going." ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty minutes after first dose: Patient appears very focus on the business of drawing. "Outlines seem normal, but very vivid - everything is changing colour. My hand must follow the bold sweep of the lines. I feel as if my consciousness is situated in the part of my body that's now active - my hand, my elbow... my tongue." ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty-two minutes after first dose: Patient seems gripped by his pad of paper. "I'm trying another drawing. The outlines of the model are normal, but now those of my drawing are not. The outline of my hand is going weird too. It's not a very good drawing is it? I give up - I'll try again..." ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty-five minutes after first dose: Patient follows quickly with another drawing. "I'll do a drawing in one flourish... without stopping... one line, no break!" Upon completing the drawing the patient starts laughing, then becomes startled by something on the floor. ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and forty-five minutes after first dose: Patient tries to climb into activity box (with the crayons and pencils), and is generally agitated - responds slowly to the suggestion he might like to draw some more. He has become largely non-verbal. "I am... everything is... changed... they're calling... your face... interwoven... who is..." Patient mumbles inaudibly to a tune (sounds like "Thanks For The Memory"). He changes medium to Tempera. ____________________________________________________________________
4 hours and twenty-five minutes after first dose: Patient retreated to the bunk, spending approximately 2 hours lying, waving his hands in the air. His return to the activity box is sudden and deliberate, changing media to pen and water colour. "This will be the best drawing, Like the first one, only better. If I'm not careful I'll lose control of my movements, but I won't, because I know. I know" - (this saying is then repeated many times). Patient makes the last half-a-dozen strokes of the drawing while running back and forth across the room. ____________________________________________________________________
5 hours and forty-five minutes after first dose: Patient continues to move about the room, intersecting the space in complex variations. It's an hour and a half before he settles down to draw again - he appears over the effects of the drug. "I can feel my knees again, I think it's starting to wear off. This is a pretty good drawing - this pencil is mighty hard to hold" - (he is holding a crayon). ____________________________________________________________________
8 hours after first dose: Patient sits on bunk bed. He reports the intoxication has worn off except for the occasional distorting of our faces. We ask for a final drawing which he performs with little enthusiasm. "I have nothing to say about this last drawing, it is bad and uninteresting, I want to go home now."

Source. Directed by the wonderful Drawing On Drugs, a blog with user-submitted pictures drawn under the influence.

Emails From Crazy People

First of all, read this entire blog: Stranger Than Eviction. It's only three pages long, and it's totally worth it. It chronicles the back-and-forth between a man and his criminally insane landlord (very reminiscent of the now-famous exchanges of this spectacular man). I was directed to Gabe Dunn's tragic exploits by a comparatively new website, Emails From Crazy People. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.

The Westphall Hypothesis

Beginning its six season run in 1982, St. Elsewhere garnered little critical acclaim and virtually no viewer response as a sleepy medical drama set in a dilapidated teaching hospital in Boston. In all respects, it would have been an easily forgettable hour-drama if not for the series finale, which has become the stuff of nerdy legend. In the final episode, a main character's autistic son, Tommy Westphall, is shown staring at a snow globe with a tiny version of the teaching hospital inside. Given that the final moments of the show are completely at odds with the rest of the show's 100+ episode run, it is generally assumed that all events depicted in the show were a figment of Tommy's imagination.

In our crazy modern times, such a gimmick seems interesting, but not too outlandish. I mean, just watch more than three consecutive episodes of LOST to get what I'm talking about. But the story gets better. Some bright spark assumed that if St. Elsewhere was just the figment of a character's mind, then every crossover episode it ever had must have also occurred inside little Tommy's head. The main lynchpin of this theory rests with Homicide: Life On The Street, a crime drama produced by Tom Fontana (St. Elsewhere's creator). In more than one instance, doctors from Elsewhere appear on the show, presumably making the entire Homicide run similarly a product of Tommy's psyche. One of Homicide's main characters was a cop by the name of John Munch. Yeah. This guy:

For those not in the know, John Munch later appeared as a main character in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Since L&O:SVU belongs to the same universe as all of the Law & Order universes, Tommy is also responsible for one of television's longest running franchises. It doesn't stop there, either. Munch appeared in an X-Files episode, an episode of The Wire, and in an episode of The Beat (also the series finale of Arrested Development. Shit yeah). Also, let us not forget his brief stint on Sesame Street.

If your mind isn't fully and thoroughly blown yet, let me just cut to the chase. Through an extremely tenuous and unlikely series of connections, over two hundred and eighty television shows currently compose what has come to be known as the Tommyverse. Or I might have just made that name up right now. Either way, think of it. A lot of minor shows, but a vast majority of stuff you've probably seen. Stuff like Cheers; Alf; M*A*S*H; Las Vegas; Heroes; I Love Lucy; The Office (both versions); Crossing Jordan; Buffy The Vampire Slayer (therefore Angel) and Firefly; Doctor Who (all incarnations); Friends; Seinfeld; The Brady Bunch; Home Improvement; Matlock; The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air; Boy Meets World; Gilligan's Island; King Of Queens; Malcolm In The Middle; Alias; Knight Rider; Touched By An Angel; the entire Star Trek universe; the entire Crime Scene Investigation universe; and Moesha. In the unlikely event that you still care, just check out the full map below (click to enlarge), courtesy of this site. Tommy bless you, good sir.

If you want a key to the whole thing, you'll find it here. There's something else that gets me though. As a Buffy fan, I was instantly reminded of the season six episode "Normal Again", in which it is suggested that the entire Buffy universe may be the hallucination of a troubled teenage girl (who can't really kill vampires and prevent multiple apocalypses). What could this possibly mean? Are insane Buffy and little Tommy Westphall the only "real" characters on TV? I'd say: "Sure, why not."