The Wired Jester

The best DVD commentaries

November 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment

When it comes to books, games and music I’m often happiest away from the bright lights of the charts, exploring dark, dusty corners of the catalogue. Film, though… I never seem to enjoy going beyond big budget megahits. I’ve fallen asleep in every single one of Pedro Almodovar’s films.

These three threads (one, two, three) on the always excellent Ask Metafilter feature people recommending their favourite DVD commentaries, and sound like they might inspire me to be a more considerate and appreciative student of film. The posts are worth reading in their entirety, but the following were consistently recommended:

  • Spinal Tap ( “This Is Spinal Tap is pretty excellent- the cast does their commentary in character, complaining about how the movie was a hatchet job. It’s sort of like having a whole new Spinal Tap movie” – COBRA!)
  • Ghostbusters
  • Roger Ebert’s commentaries on Citizen Kane and Dark City
  • Various seasons of The Simpsons and Futurama
  • John Carpenter and Kurt Russell on both Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China

I can’t stand Wes Anderson’s films – tedium that mistakes faux-depressed self-regard for genuine self-revelation – but I liked thirteen’s description of how to listen/watch a film with commentary:

“I find the commentary tracks on the Criterion Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaum DVD’s to be very relaxing. I know the movies backwards and forwards, and Wes Anderson’s voice is good company when I am drawing late at night. Plus his observations are often things perpendicular to the movie so it feels more like what you would talk about at a party than what he is trying to do in a scene.”

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The difference between a Latte and a Flat White

November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

flatwhite

A Flat White is an excellent coffee to start the day with – and just as you can identify a typography geek if they can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, it’s the real coffee geeks who know the difference between a Flat White and the more common Caffe Latte. Lokesh Dhakar put together a nice, simple graphic that demystifies these and many other coffee drinks.

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Who would win in a fight? The Mummy or the Wolf-Man?

October 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment

“In the future, if your children ask you, “Who would win in a fight?  The Mummy or the Wolf-Man?” please refer them to this list, as it will save a lot of time…. Monsters are rated according to how dangerous they are against each other, and then according to how dangerous they are to all the other monsters on the list. Only if all other metrics are equal is the relative danger to the average human considered–because, let’s face it, they’re all dangerous to the average human.  They are monsters.

“Now, here’s the thing about regular vampires:  they’re fucking lame.  They sneak around in the dark and drain blood from people.  They talk a big game, sure, and everyone thinks they’re sexy.  But is sexy going to protect you from the Wolf-Man?  No.  The Wolf-Man is going to tear your god-damn head off.”

Don’t miss the author’s follow up in the comments, addressing why Godzilla isn’t in there.

The only thing I would add to this is:

14. Chuck Norris.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Ephemera and links · TV and Film
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Grmmr advice from Twitter

October 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

You might not think Twitter is a great place to go for grammar advice, given that every message has a maximum character count of 140, but you say that before laying eyes on FakeAPStylebook:

Bonus points for spotting the writer uses Birdhouse, the semi-ridiculous iPhone app which allows you to save your draft tweets so that you can re-read, re-read and refine your work. If you did want actual grammar advice, you could always try following ThatWhichMatter, but it’s not quite so much fun.

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Novels written by dictators

October 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment

By definition, dictators can do anything they like, so why wouldn’t the mad, bad and crazy men at the top of tinpot regimes want to write novels?

“Some recent examples have been Saddam Husseins’s last publication, Be Gone Demons!, sales of which suffered due to bomb damage, despite the author’s previous million-selling form; and Radovan Karadžić’s The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night, written while on the run from the UN’s War Crimes trials yet still nominated for Serbia’s highest literary prize, the Golden Sunflower. Neither, unfortunately, are available from Amazon.”

Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler’s List) wrote a novel about the literary ambitions of a dictator, called The Tyrant’s Novel, which I read in 2006. It’s worth a look, but I remember it being a little restrained and dry.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Books and reading · Ephemera and links
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8-bit trip: Lego bricks as pixels

August 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This video comprises “1,500 hours of moving Lego bricks and taking photos of them.” It’s not particularly coherent in terms of theme, unless you call “8-bit games and music rule” a theme. Which maybe we should. Worth it for the chiptune soundtrack, the use of Lego as pixels and the particularly nice Pacman shots, which put you right into the maze.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creativity · Ephemera and links · Games
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Utility Pole T-Shirt

August 22, 2009 · 1 Comment

Been a while since I posted a new t-shirt design, but this Japanese design is clever and certainly deserves a mention. The wires of the utility poles are both printed and stitched onto the shirt. (One thing I found surprising when I first visited Japan – a place you mentally associate with clean, minimal design and neatness – is the fact that there are overhead wires everywhere).

utilitypoleshirt

Available at Tokyo Art Beat.

(via Jean Snow)

→ 1 CommentCategories: Japanorama · T-Shirts
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Stop Safari always opening new tabs

August 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’ve moved away from using FireFox as my browser – it’s too slow to start, too fond of updating – and now have Google Chrome on my PCs. It’s not properly available for the Mac yet, so I’ve switched to Safari, which is reasonably quick to start, and gives you more of the web to look at than FireFox. However, it does have an annoying habit of spawning new tabs EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. YOU. CLICK.

Glims is a very useful free add-on that enables you to fix that, plus you can easily add Google UK as a search engine, and there’s a nifty full screen mode too.

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You will be surprised how easy it is

August 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The cover of a magazine called Home Farmer, which I spotted while out and about at the weekend. I spend quite a lot of time looking at other magazine’s covers, and this one was quite something – brilliant use of a question even regular readers might not be thinking of asking themselves.
Home Farmer

→ Leave a CommentCategories: On Journalism and Media
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Pet Sounds, a capella

August 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

It’s a beautiful sunny morning in London, so this seems like just the right thing to listen to: Pet Sounds, a capella. Despite the fact that it’s a YouTube link, sound quality is terrific. This is probably the first time I’ve really understood just how spine-tingling what music writers refer to as a singer’s ‘phrasing’ can be - check out God Only Knows. Particularly stunning is when the harmonies simply ends, and one of the group says in a very normal voice, ‘how was that?’

Apparently, the original source is a box set called The Pet Sounds Sessions.

Wikipedia’s entry on a capella singing is interesting, relating ”a cappella music originally was, and still often is, used in religious music” and that the use of instruments was a matter of debate in the early Christian church.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Music · The Sixties
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