You may have heard that there’s a Simpsons movie coming out soon. As part of the marketing scheme, they’re temporarily rebranding a dozen 7-Elevens as Kwik-E-Marts, 11 in the States and one in Canada. As an erstwhile convenience store resident, and moderate 7-Eleven delinquent during high school, Apu’s naturally one of my favourite characters. (Best [...] » Read more

Busy weekend here. Susan and I dressed up for the Ratatouille wrap party on Saturday, this year at the Masonic Temple in SF. Started early for us since she had singing dress rehearsal in the afternoon. The Pixar singers outdid themselves this year; there were the usual speeches (Brad Bird had some moving things to [...] » Read more

I can’t claim credit for the original idea; someone else did a Star Wars themed version over on RPGnet, in this thread. I just thought Kill Bill was a better fit. Click image for the full version (1287 x 765, 313Kib). Incidentally, crazy42’s quote is exactly what was mailed to my Nintendo DS while playing Final [...] » Read more

Just finished The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell – you may know her better as the voice of Violet in the Incredibles. It’s a good read. In her essay on Al Gore’s nerdiness, she references an anonymous commentator on slashdot. Furthermore, geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of [...] » Read more

I was thinking about Bacon numbers a couple of days ago, and noticed an article about Erdös-Bacon numbers on Wikipedia. Then I realised that if you scrunched up your eyes, squinted very hard, and somehow equated “actor” with “visual effects person who got credit on a movie”, I had a finite Erdös-Bacon number. With an [...] » Read more

I don’t know what it means either, but it’s the two words that popped, side by side, into my head while staring into the freezer before dinner. State of mind indicators? Caught “Wallace & Gromit – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” at the Cinerama on Friday. It was good but ultimately unsatisfying, since I had [...] » Read more

Since I got Dungeon Siege 2 out of my system (summary: prettier, very dumbed down Diablo 2), and while the energy lasts, it seems you’ll get more blog entries from me. I don’t know why I bother, since my weblogs clearly indicate I get more traffic when I don’t write, and I’ll lose the [...] » Read more

I took the bus to the Cinerama yesterday. A clean cut guy, in his fifties or sixties, who was on his way to Westlake Mall to take part in a protest was earnestly discussing his experience in the Vietnam war, why he had to speak out against the situation in Iraq, and his plans [...] » Read more

As I wait for builds at work, I occasionally update an informal list of entirely CG animated films. I was doing this today (reminded by tomorrow’s release of Shark Tale) and updated what I knew of the CG movie releases for 2005 (most of these dates are from IMDB, these aren’t state secrets): [...] » Read more

I half-jokingly predicted at the office that Nemo would rake in $65 mil over the opening weekend. Well, it currently looks like it’s on track to surpass that. Kudos to everyone at Pixar for an amazing five successful movies in a row. [...] » Read more