I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

JUST A COUPLE OF LINKS...

First, when I was preparing my 6000^th post thread of random recycled crap for RottenTomatoes.com, I came across this weird orphaned review of the Ah! My Goddess movie that I had completely forgotten that I wrote. This was written when I was taking a break from Concordia and was at the animation college, so it wasn't done for The Concordian, and it was well over a year after I stopped submitting reviews to Anime On DVD, so I'm not completely sure why I wrote it. I must have just written it for the sake of itself, perhaps to submit to Anime News Network, though ANN has a review of that movie written by Allen Divers. It was actually written half a year after I wrote mine. I wonder why I never submitted it to them? Since I don't remember writing it, I don't remember my motives for not submitting it, so it's difficult to say, but it's rather well-written by my standards and fits nicely in my Rotten Tomatoes journal.

Also, Arxane has an article up about a site called OurMedia, "The Global Home for Grassroots Media", which is run by the same people who run the Internet Archive and which promises "free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches." I decided to put the site to the test... with mixed results. You see, I have this little Transformers inspired animation that was the only thing I did at the animation school I went to before I ran out of money that I'd willingly show to other people. Everything else I did was such crap that I don't think I bothered saving it to CD. It's thirty seconds of insanity... albeit rather slow motion insanity (I slipped in a lot of "Easter Eggs" of things I like)... and the file size of the AVI file is almost 30 mb. I've been wanting to show you faithful readers this animation for over two years, but the file is large enough that there wasn't anywhere free and reliable with enough bandwidth so that more than a couple of people could download it a month, until now. Unfortunately, OurMedia.org does accept files larger than 10 mb, but you have to load it using an external programme similar to Hello, the thing that uploads pictures directly to Blogger rather than having to use a seperate hosting site like Photobucket (though I find photos uploaded using Hello make updating this blog very, very sluggish, for whatever reason, which is why I still use Photobucket 90% of the time). So I installed this external programme and then selected it from the Windows Start menu and... bupkis. The programme just won't work on my system (Windows ME) for whatever reason. But, it's like v. 1.000000000, so I assume that, as the very first version ever, it will inevitably be really buggy and one of the versions with the bugs ironed out will actually show up when I start it, so I can upload my masterpiece, More than Meets the Eye, and I will finally be a noted animation director who can teach that chump Hayao Miyazaki a thing or two.

Another thing OurMedia.org automatically gives you is a blog, which is like my fourth or fifth blog. I'll doubt I'll use it much, as I have no intention of abandoning this blog, but I'll use that blog for when I want to post several large image files and don't want to nuke the bandwidth in my Photobucket account. And, I had the perfect opportunity to test it out: over at X-Entertainment.com, Matt Caracappa has posted an article in which he scanned some sticker album from the 1980s, and, as someone who was born in the same approximate era as the former kid who collected the stickers for the album, I have a similar sticker collection myself (though collected in photo albums). Ripping off Matt's idea, I scanned three sample pages that are either retro cool or retro hilarious and did this OurMedia blog entry. It works, though the downside is that you have to read the description and then click on the link to see the pictures. Here's how I sold the entry on the X-Entertainment "blog": "so you can see Transformers! More dentist stickers! A couple of stamps from the other doomed Royal Wedding from the 1980s! Lesbian fishes! And dated pop-culture references!"



Nothing to do with the rest of this entry, but, if you're wondering about Ember, my cat who went missing for a week and mysteriously returned yesterday, she's mainly been sleeping for most of the day yesterday and today. I guess she couldn't sleep too deeply outside, as she must have had to have kept one eye open at all times to avoid being chomped by large dogs or stepped on by people. We're keeping her inside for the next little while, which pisses her off a bit, but we don't want her wandering off again as she has proven that she won't always come back in a couple of hours, and she might have been fed by someone else while she was away, and, if that's the case, we don't want her to seek him or her out again. And, yes, in terms of being a pet who disappeared and reappeared just before Easter, I have made a tasteless mental comparison to the Christian animated special, Easter Is, where a kid named Benji is going to do some sort of religious production but his dog, Waldo, is kidnapped and held for ransom for (put Dr. Evil pinky to mouth) "Five Dollars", but why real life isn't ripping off television is because:

1. she's a cat, not a dog.
   
2. no one was holding her for ransom.
   
3. no kids have come up to me and started talking about Jesus for no particular reason.

Well, have a good Good Friday to anyone of an applicable religious affiliation.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:39 PM