Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace just started on Adult Swim. Check it out.
The BBC is clearly one of the best production groups out there these days. Not only do they actively explore and support interesting technology applications (although their open source video codec never really went anywhere… but you can’t blame them for trying!). And they have always had a progressive attitude towards online media.
This series is like Look Around You meets Dr. Who. It’s a retro show done with such perfect pitch that you will wonder whether or not it is really an old 70s/80s BBC production. It also features Richard Aoyade, “Moss” from the IT Crowd, which is another of my fave recent BBC productions.
Darkplace is an interesting thing. How much longer can it be before Adult Swim picks up Look Around You?
Sarah has been sitting next to me all night giggling at wildly inappropriate moments considering the movie I’ve been watching: a PBS documentary about some sad down being forced to relocate due to widespread lead contamination (“The Creek Runs Red” on Independent Lens). Talk about depressing…
So she finally IMs me a link to the gallery she’s looking at and it’s this Album Sleeveface Meme, which she’s pointed out to me a few times before. I’m not sure where it came from, but there are about twice as many images today as there were yesterday (at least on the sites Sarah has found) and the images have two crucial qualities: 1) They are hilarious. 2) They are easy to make. Just like slapping some IMPACT or ARIAL BLACK text onto a kitty-cat photo, these things practically make themselves. In fact, a run of photoshopped sleeveface images can’t be too far away…
I decided to re-skin the site for the new year. I’m about 85% finished, but I am so excited I couldn’t resist making it active on the site. So to celebrate the new skin, here’s a video from Jamie T.
Side by side with some coverage of the latest TeacherLine project (Peer Connection — more postings on that later, I’m sure) was a blurb about Mrs. Burk’s Simplified Fractions Rap posted to TeacherTube. I wanted to give big ups to Mrs. Burk for keeping it real.
This video of a Spore demo comes from Joystiq, who are one of my fave newer gaming sites. They do a good job with the whole blog-as-respectable-news-source thing and lack the Drudge-like sensationalism of Crescente’s crew at Kotaku. I was glad to see a lot of the Joystiq crew at E3, so I know they are doing their work. I also managed to see writers from The Escapist, and of course the usual G4 monkeys. It blows my mind how that channel gets worse and worse — TechTV had finally worked into something halfway decent, and then G4 came along and added a whole lot of suck.
But back to the story at hand: This is one of the most successful celebrity appearances I’ve ever seen in a press conference. Robin Williams demonstrating Wil Wright’s Spore is absolutely hilarious. He’s exactly the kind of person you want to show off both how easy the Spore creation engine is, and how much fun it is to create new lifeforms. When the game brings his creation to life, Williams truly sounds surprised and excited. It’s an infectious clip, and I hope you enjoy it.
Chris Coleman is a video/electronic/etc. artist who graduated from UB a few years back, has posted his new video on YouTube, so I thought it was worth a watch. The animation is great — I love some of the shots, like the brief sequence where the guy on fire runs across the screen. I’ve always thought that Chris had a real flair for editing, and we see that here, too. This animation uses those iconic “airplane emergency instructions” figures, although the line at the end of the video makes me wonder if they aren’t copped from Ready.gov directly.
From Coleman’s write-up on YouTube:
The original movie, “Modern Times,” featured Charlie Chaplin struggling to deal with man’s relationship to technology in the Industrial Age. We have now moved into the Age of Information in which our connection to the world around us is not only defined by technology, but the information it does or does not provide.
Look around you: It’s a whole new website. I’ve moved my blogging in-house, and I’ve re-created the site. I have a lot of thoughts about why I did things the way I did, but I’m not sure those thoughts would be interesting to any of you in the least. I do plan on making a much more minimal theme available, and this should resize fairly nicely.
To celebrate, I’m including the “Germs” episode of Look Around You, one of my favorite television shows. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s still free on Google Video. I noticed that BBC America has just started showing the second season of Look Around You, so try to catch it while you can in the US (there are only six eps, so it will go quickly). I hope they release a real DVD set of both seasons in the US soon.
And as an extra bonus, a clip from Look Around You Season Two’s Music 2000 competition:
Alive in Joburg made the meme-circuit last Fall. I was totally blown-away and have been glad to see it remain available on Google Video for quite a few months now. It’s an indy film, directed by Niell Blomkamp, whom I believe is South African. Blomkamp is well-known for his CG work: Many people remember his transforming-Citroen commercial, which made the old viral video rounds quite awhile ago. Blomkamp is also responsible for an incredible, and much lesser-seen, short “commercial” (hard to tell if this is real sci-fi marketing or fanciful filmmaker) advertising future cop-bots. The latter video is very much like Alive in Joburg, which posits that aliens land in Johannesburg, South Africa and are not exactly welcomed.
Thanks to Skarcha’s WPvideo Plugin, which makes it possible to share so many cool vids. Expect this to be a feature on the page, for the benefit of all of us.
