OMG PURPLE FOX!

Why the Helvetica Do Fonts Cost $40 Each (And What Does That Even Buy)?

2009-10-13T15:20:26Z

I know that designing a typeface is no trivial pursuit. I’ve tried it. It was really, really hard. But in spite of that, it’s always seemed unreasonable to me that to use a new font, you often have to purchase it for upwards of 40 dollars. And you don’t even get it in Bold.

But once you have a font on your computer, you can use it for anything, right? Well, it depends. Sometimes that $40 only gives you the right to display the font on your screen and print it out. Can you use it in an image on the web? Sure, unless maybe you can’t. I don’t know. How can they even prove you used their font, though? A lot of them look really similar. What are these things legally protected by, anyway?

Both the exorbitant prices and confusing legal situation make it difficult for anyone but professional graphic designers and/or established companies that employ them to use a particularly wide variety of fonts. The web, however, has given almost everyone who can read a CSS tutorial to be a graphic designer, but for a long time font licensing has stood in the way of using anything but nine free(-ish) fonts that everyone (maybe) has on their computer. Fortunately, this situation is being rectified; soon you’ll be able to pay $78467 to license a font for web use, once they’ve figured out how to deal with “illegal uses”. Whatever the method of preventing these illegal uses may be, some 16-year-old kid in Bangladesh has already cracked it.

But seriously, 40 dollars? For a font? And then maybe I can’t even show anyone what I do with it? Again, I know making fonts is hard work, but are they really that valuable? Especially if it’s the sort of font you use for one small project and then never need again. These prices might have made sense when fonts were the sort of thing that you’d take out of a box and arrange on your printing press, but that’s just not how things work anymore.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

I Bought a PS3. Don’t Tell My 14-Year-Old PC Fanboy Self.

2009-10-08T04:11:27Z

Yesterday I got one of those (non-)shiny new PS3 Slim things. This is a very special occasion for me; it is the first video game console I’ve ever owned.

I’ve played games on consoles before, of course, but only because my friends always had them. Like any child of the 90s who had a life, I grew up on games, but not “video games.” Video games were on consoles (or, as they were called before I discovered proper English, “systems”). I played computer games. And I was a snob about that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Death to “In My Humble Opinion”

2009-09-26T22:15:50Z

Why is it that we must tell everyone on the Internet that things are only our opinion?

Of course “I think” what I’m about to say. Why else would I be saying it? Of course it’s “in my opinion,” because I’m saying it. Anything said by anyone is, when you get down to it, inherently related to what they think, which is consequently their opinion. But now that they’ve been so kind as to emphasize that fact, it hurts their argument.

Here are two different statements a person can make:

A: I think that jumping off the George Washington Bridge can cause severe bodily harm. That could be fatal, in my opinion.

B: Nobody can get hurt from jumping off the George Washington Bridge. It’s actually very healthy and promotes long-life.

Now, assuming you didn’t know anything about the effects of jumping off a bridge, which of these two arguments would be more convincing to you? At first glance, without Wikipediing anything? Most of you will say statement B.

Adding language like, “I think” or “In my opinion” (or IMO or IMHO) to your arguments weakens them. You will sound less sure of yourself, or at the very least like you don’t care as much. This applies to actual speech as well as online discussion.

Some might argue that such disclaimers are common courtesy, but to the audience you’re addressing, they’re common sense. It’s not impolite to omit needless words, and doing so makes the remaining words stronger.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Google Goes After Cyanogen For Making Their Customers Happier

2009-09-25T02:53:10Z

About a month ago, I installed a wonderful thing on my G1 called CyanogenMOD. Named after its developer, a man who goes by the pseudonym Cyanogen, CyanogenMOD takes the free and open source Android operating system included with the G1 and makes it run faster, look better, and save storage space. After installing it, my G1 barely ever felt sluggish, all of the space-hogging applications could be stored on my spacious 8 GB memory card, and the interface improvements made it so much more of a joy to use. I’m now happily using all of the Google services that make Google their money much more often than I had before, and my phone would be too sluggish for me to make Google money nearly as much if I had to go back. The 30,000+ people who have also downloaded and installed CyanogenMOD probably agree.

So, naturally, Google is showing Cyanogen their thanks for increasing the Google-use of 30,000 people by sending him a Cease and Desist letter. Wait, what?

Well, apparently some of Google’s applications aren’t open source, such as the Android Market (which allows you to give Google money indirectly by buying apps from developers, who then give a portion of their money to Google). Sure, you can easily download and install these apps yourself from the freely available developer repository, but Cyanogen had the audacity to save 30,000 end users the trouble of doing all that just so they could continue using Google’s products and making them money. That constitutes “distribution,” which only licensed developers who ~~sent in $25 and the filled-out form from the back of the comic book~~ work for Open Handset Alliance members can do. Never mind that there aren’t any alternatives to many of these applications, and they’re kind of essential for a lot of Android’s usefulness.

Admittedly, under the current Jurassic-era copyright law, Google has the legal right to do this. Cyanogen does not have the resources to license their software, thus he does not have the license to distribute it. But considering that Android, as a whole, is a free and open source operating system, and that Google has nothing to lose from CyanogenMOD and much to gain, this is a real dick move by the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

An Anthrocon 2009 Retrospective: Or, How I Learned To Stop Procrastinating and Finish The Video

2009-09-22T23:35:23Z

I meant to have this done within a week of the con being over. That didn’t quite happen.

Often with these videos I run into editor’s block. There’s always one point where I just can’t figure out the right clip to match the song, and it stalls me. Then I stop and decide to come back to it later. And despite how much I really want to get it done, “later” sometimes means months later.

But it’s here now, so…

You can also watch it on YouTube if you’re on an Android phone or iPhone, but only because you can’t watch Vimeo on those. Seriously, only click that link out of necessity. If I catch anyone watching this on YouTube because they actually prefer it over Vimeo, I will smack them in the face with the Internet. No joke. I will literally pick up the Internet and hit someone with it.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Realization: Hideo Kojima is Video Gaming’s Béla Tarr, Except Not Talented

2009-09-15T01:36:31Z

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Wow, I’ve Been Posting a Lot of Really Negative Stuff Lately

2009-09-08T23:55:31Z

Sorry. I’ll try and write happier things.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Tweetdeck is a Piece of Shit, But I’m Stuck With It

2009-09-08T23:38:54Z

Fuck Tweetdeck. Fuck Tweetdeck sideways with a kerosene-coated pineapple.

Fuck Tweetdeck so hard that I’m not even going to do that middle-of-word-capitalization thing that its creators insist on (It’s supposed to be “TweetDeck,” which is fucking stupid so fuck that, you fucking fuckers).

Normally, I’d just switch to another Twitter client that doesn’t suck, like Nambu, except I switched away from Nambu because the one thing that did suck about it ended up driving me nuts: multiple account support. Tweetdeck, however, solves the problem with Nambu by being a piece of fucking shit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

IEEE’s “Digital Personal Property” Is The Stupidest Idea Anyone Has Ever Had. Ever

2009-09-08T02:35:01Z

So I’m looking through my RSS reader and see this Ars Technica headline: “Goodbye, DRM; hello ’stealable’ Digital Personal Property.” It was like a fucking trainwreck. I could not just pass by the article. I had to read it.

Consumers hate DRM—all that “phoning home,” the outside control over one’s behavior, the fact that you can’t resell encrypted digital media, the worries about activation servers dying. But what if digital rights management could be turned into “consumer rights management” and people could actually own and fully control the digital content they purchase? That’s the dream of Paul Sweazey, who’s heading up a new study group on “digital personal property” at the IEEE.
[...]
Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects.…[DPP files] can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here’s the trick: anyone who can view your content can also “steal” it irrevocably.

And why would anyone want something like that? Well…

Digital content lends itself easily to the creation of identical copies, so crafting a system in which digital content can be “stolen” is trickier than it might sound. The idea is to make it a “rivalrous good,” one that, after being taken, deprives someone else of something.

Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do; DPP, at its core, amounts to nothing more than changing two letters. Of course, that’s not just because it tries the same thing. It’s also because it fails spectacularly in the exact same way. Much like every DRM system ever, “the scheme will be cracked, and once it is—even if only a few technically-savvy people can do the necessary work—content will flood P2P [file-sharing] networks,” says Ars.

The fact that people who have actual jobs and educations still consider these kinds of ideas is absolutely baffling. I mean, they’re presumably sapient enough to know how to wipe their own asses, so why does the fact that DRM doesn’t work continue to elude their common sense?

Given that digital content just isn’t like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model…His answer is that such freely-copiable [sic] goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

You know, Mr. Sweazy, you’re right; freely-copyable goods do break the basic business model of human commerce. That’s certainly a problem. Now, you go run along and play, because us adults have to go back to accepting reality and coming up with a solution that works outside of Magical Unicorn Fantasyland.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

“Content” Is A Horrible Word That Needs To Die In A Fire

2009-08-23T03:29:45Z

I could say that I am appalled by the word “content” and find it to be a disgusting blight on Internet lingo. I’m not going to, because that would make it sound like it’s only my opinion as opposed to an undeniable fact.

To clarify, the word I am referring to is not “kun-TENT,” which is an adjective (or less often, a verb) related to a state of peaceful satisfaction. I am referring to “KHAN-tent,” the noun, which is quite appropriately pronounced similarly to an evil dude that makes William Shatner scream loudly. This word, a bastardization of “contents,” is a generic term for some generic thing that you shove into a generic container, generally speaking. But lately, as part of media conglomerates’ transformation into Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, this generic product term has come to refer to cultural works: music, movies, news, games, photos, and anything else containing some form of digestible information and/or artistry.

It groups together everything creative in this world as some mundane product like a dishwasher or a lampshade. Casablanca is not a lampshade.

Well, of course it’s not. Isn’t that obvious? Nobody who watches movies thinks of them as generic objects, nor do they think that of news articles or Facebook photos. So why is anyone referring to them as if they are?

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Furries and the Art of Surviving in a Post-Copyright World

2009-08-08T01:10:01Z

Let’s be realistic here: copyright is dead. At least, it’s dead in the sense of “the right to make copies.” Once a piece of media is digitized — be it textual, visual, audible, or interactive — copying it costs exactly zero dollars (or -45,000 euros at the current exchange rate). Because of this, the perception of art not as a product but as information is rapidly reentering the collective human psyche after about 100 years of technical difficulties.

So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with Young Earth creationism in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of Usenet (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Arpeggi – An Experimental Gameplay Project Game With 0D Graphics

2009-08-07T06:17:14Z

The Experimental Gameplay Project, a “make a game in seven days” thingamajig which begat the prototypes for World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe, has announced their theme for the month of August as “Bare Minimum.” So I decided to spend three days (it was done by then) making a game with the minimum possible resolution: one pixel.

Due to some technical limitations, such as the fact that one pixel is really hard to see, I magnified it by 600 times. With these extra 599 pixels of space, I decided to cheat and add some intro text, but all of the actual gameplay could theoretically be scaled down to a single pixel if you traded the mouse-based control for an analog stick.

I hope the game is relatively easy to figure out despite the limitations of the resolution. And because that was my goal, I’m not going to say anything else about it.

Hit the jump to play it, and to download the X11 Licensed source code:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

MG Siegler Destroys the English Language – Episode 3

2009-07-23T23:03:28Z

Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, MG seems to be having a better day in terms of competence. But in “The Mac Versus PC Debate Has Never Been Clearer“, he proves once again that he has no idea what an em dash is supposed to do. Oh, and some other things.

The point MG makes in the article is a great one: the Mac vs. PC debate is very much like a Porsche vs. Camry comparison. But that doesn’t make his writing any less aggravating to read.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

MG Siegler Destroys the English Language – Episode 2

2009-07-20T00:19:07Z

TechCrunch writer MG Siegler is certainly no stranger to “innovative” grammar. While experimentation in writing style and the bending conventional rules is often a wonderful thing, MG’s methods cause his articles to read quite awkwardly. It seems he hasn’t learned a thing since then, as he has once again brought out the Strunk & White supremacist in me. I get the feeling these incidents aren’t going to stop very soon, so I might as well start keeping count.

Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, we turn our attention to MG’s piece “FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up To Ten Times Faster In 2010“. Once again, MG can’t get two sentences out before screwing something up, and one sentence later proves that he can’t finish his opening paragraph without misusing the em dash:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

In Which Zacqary Compels The Internet To Force an Innocent Man To Dance in a Kilt

2009-07-07T02:55:31Z

One of the things I missed at Anthrocon this weekend were the consequences of leaving a spur-of-the-moment comment on the Wolfire Games blog. The dire, dire consequences.

Just…watch this video…

I am so, sorry, John Graham. I never meant for this to happen. Please forgive me.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Anthrocon: It’s Like WWDC, But With More Animals, and No iPhone Announcements, and Not Like WW

2009-07-01T17:11:52Z

Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The time of year when the entire economy of the city of Pittsburgh is sustained by about 3000 crazy people wearing tails. Once again, I will be one of them.

This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:

I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.

Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.

See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

What If Mahmoud Ahmedinejad Were A Tarantula?

2009-06-16T04:29:44Z

If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet lately, you’ve probably heard that there’s been a lot of violent reactions to the likely-fraudulent Iranian elections (If you rely on television or newspapers to hear about current events, then you have an excuse for not knowing). While the streets of Tehran are filled with protesters and trigger-happy police, the pressure is on other world leaders to make a choice: acknowledge Ahmedinejad as President and condone his totalitarian tactics, or walk away from negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

This tense situation leaves a burning question in the mind of everyone in the world: what would this situation be like if the disputed Iranian President were a tarantula?

This femto-length film is my attempt to answer that question:

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Garage Saleinginging

2009-06-12T21:37:55Z

Dear Furries,

I'm doing a garage sale this weekend. Random stuff owned by my family and me will be purchaseable en masse.

'Twill be done at my grandfather's house because his yard is flatter.

Saturday and Sunday
June 13th and 14th
10 AM - 5 PM

1966 Ladenburg Drive
Westbury, NY 11590
Directions

If you feel like seeing what excessively inexpensive things we have to offer or just want to bother a purple fox while he's trying to work, come by.

Love,
Xerxes

The Fact That I Find This Deeply Satisfying is a Testament To How Sad My Life Is

2009-06-08T05:35:28Z

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

PreThinking.com Article on iPhone Smasher Accidentally Creates Lol Image

2009-06-08T02:15:29Z

Palm Pre-enthusiast blog PreThinking has posted an article about a first-generation iPhone user who got a shiny new Palm Pre. Now he has no more use for his iPhone. Instead of coming up with a better solution, such as selling the old phone to someone who might want it, the man smashes it with a hammer:

PreThinking added their logo to the image, as is common practice in the interblogosphernetwebs, where anyone can take your image and claim it as theirs unless you put some form of identifier on it. For what this man did, the phrase “pre-thinking” is coincidentally appropriate.

[PreThinking via Gizmodo]

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Wait A Minute, Wouldn’t Better Motion Controls Hurt Wheelchair Gamers?

2009-06-04T21:02:42Z

Both Sony and Microsoft’s upcoming motion control revolutionary thingies have one advantage over the Wii: they can track your position in a room. If the demonstrations for both (well, more so for Sony, simply because they did a better job of it) are any indication, we’ll be seeing a lot of games in the near future which require a player to do quite a lot of movement. This is even more so than what we’ve already seen on the Wii, where most games require just hand motions, all doable while seated.

So how can more physical activity by gamers, still often stereotyped as overweight nerds, be a bad thing? I started to have my doubts reading Gizmodo reader kagegiri’s comment on an article about the physically challenging (and possibly dangerous) Tony Hawk Ride:

It’s peripherals like this, Natal, and Sony’s baton that make me feel like some people don’t get the charm of video games and virtual reality.

When you get perfect-mapping motion games, yes, you can apply real-world skills to a game. But it turns out a lot of the population can’t swing swords properly, or kick a soccer ball far, or swing our arms fast enough to hit a real home run, or balance on a skateboard while doing tricks, etc. If it’s too realistic, it’s like your physical weakness in real life is translated into weaknesses in game.

This is definitely a concern for me. Frustration due to failure in Grand Theft Auto causes far more urges to go on a shooting spree than actually succeeding at shooting virtual people; anything to increase the chances of frustrating failure in a video game is not a good thing by any means. But while many people can overcome their “physical weakness” by excessive exercise, what about the people who can’t?

Like people in wheelchairs?

Some people are wheelchair-bound their entire lives. Others will be wheelchair-bound temporarily after playing Tony Hawk Ride. If video games get too physical, not only will the ability to feel like a superhero be limited to actual superheroes, but less people will be able to play. Some people already can’t play games because they can’t afford all forty-seven platforms; adding a physical ability barrier on top of the economic one isn’t a good idea.

That’s not to say the idea of greater physical immersion in games doesn’t excite me, but there always needs to be an alternative.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Second Thoughts: Natal Has Great Potential For Both Awesomeness and Shovelware

2009-06-04T00:22:46Z

On Monday, I dismissed Microsoft’s Project Natal’s possibility to be the most revolutionary thing since sliced clichés, saying it was little more than both the good and bad qualities of the Wii taken to the extreme. On reflection, I’ve come to an interesting realization: my assumption that Natal was thought up by stupid marketers was a reaction to the fact that it was stupidly marketed.

The video which played the role of Project Natal’s big reveal featured many awful, awful uses of the technology, each doomed to failure without any haptic feedback: the discomfort caused by holding an imaginary steering wheel and hovering your foot over an imaginary gas pedal would be intense; throwing punches at an imaginary man (and getting occasionally punched back) would instantly de-immerse the player when a blow connects, changing the position of their avatar’s limbs but not theirs; jumping on an imaginary skateboard will do a better job of knocking fragile objects off shelves than conveying a crucial sense of balance. While not as important when using a gamepad, you need haptic feedback, not just visual, when the controls are haptic — no edges of mirrors or clashes of zenos can compensate anymore.

Where Natal will succeed is outside of classic “action” gameplay. That trivia game concept, for instance, could work quite nicely with Natal. And Milo (featured in this article’s video) is pretty self-explanatory. The technology to feel imaginary objects and experience imaginary changes in balance doesn’t exist yet (that I’ve heard of), but it’s not important in these types of games. Games in which a player is supposed to be moving fast, holding objects that weigh anything, getting jostled around, and similar physical things are not suitable for Natal. They will be fun until the novelty factor wears off, which won’t take long.

In a way, this is a good thing; while nothing is inherently wrong with video games focused on fast action and/or violence, the market is oversaturated with them. That’s not to say 99% of recent games are twitch-actiony (and sometimes violent, because that’s a compelling reason for fast action), just 99% of recent character-driven games. There are a lot of recent games which don’t focus on the player’s reflexes, but most don’t give the player very deep control of a character; they cast the player as an invisible “controller” or, rarely, simplify the player’s control of their single character. With Natal, though, game designers can allow the player to inhabit every aspect of a character’s body. The limitations come from physical space, as walking away from (or into) the screen is impossible and long periods of manipulating imaginary objects can be awkward and uncomfortable (in case I haven’t made the latter clear, pretend you’re riding a subway train and grab onto an imaginary bar overhead for ten minutes; stop beforehand when your arm gets tired). These limitations make these action games impossible to Natalize in an enjoyable way, so the only way to take advantage of its new capabilities is with new, fresh types of games. Milo is a very good example.

That’s not to say people won’t try to make Natal-based fighting games and racing games, and that’s not to say they won’t pass the farce that is Quality Assurance and make their way to store shelves. Those games will just quickly fall into the bargain bin and get terrible reviews. Meanwhile, people with actual talent will bring us games that don’t try to fight against Natal’s limitations, and turn out to be lots of fun.

The only thing that still concerns me is that there is still a distressingly low number of Wii games that use its motion sensors well, and a distressingly high number of games that still don’t get it. This is after three years, and those good Wii games still mix in some traditional control methods. Natal has zero traditional methods of control, so everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up. The potential for miserable failure by talentless hack developers forever set in the ways of their more skilled predecessors is even higher, and even veteran designers may have some trouble coming to terms with the fact that this thing is not good for first-person shooters.

For that reason, I see Sony’s motion control effort as being more successful, at least in the next several years. While it can only track two hands and doesn’t appear to recognize facial expressions, the player still has buttons to press, and still has something physical to hold. This is a much better way of adding motion-sensing to traditional action games; it could be used mostly for positioning, with much of the long-distance movement and object manipulation — which would be awkward for Natal — being controlled by buttons and analog sticks. This is nice because there will always be a place for video games about fighting, running, and/or jumping; they’re fun, they relieve stress (which, for violent games, is synonymous with the desire to partake in their real-world equivalents), and they speak to the primal instinct that all animals — a group which humans belong to, don’t forget — have. At the same time, it may serve as a stepping stone for designers who may not have a good idea about how to make use of Natal.

But based on the current push for games to be released on the 360 and PS3 and play the same way (which is good, because distinct platforms do nothing but limit the number of people who can play a game), we’ll likely see some Natal-optimized controllers on the market.

By the way, “Project Natal” is still a terrible name, but it sounds like it’s eventually going to be changed to something more generic.

Originally posted at Plankhead
Leave a Comment

Go See Drag Me To Hell Like Now

2009-05-30T11:42:16Z

I am not a fan of horror movies. I’ve never really gotten into them. The reason I went to see Drag Me To Hell wasn’t because the trailers got me interested, and not even that it was a Sam Raimi film (I confess, I only know him from Spiderman). I went because my dad wanted to see it.

He had heard that the lead character, who is facing the titular threat of being dragged to hell, is a loan officer who forecloses on a poor old woman’s house because she can’t pay her sub-prime mortgage. Given that he’s a financial editor for Bloomberg and covers that sort of thing, he “had to see it for work reasons.” Intrigued, I went with him.

Awesome. Movie. You want to see it. You really do.

If you’re not a fan of horror movies, you still want to see it. It’s not a disturbing kind of horror, more like a fun, roller-coaster sort of thrillride which will have you jump in your seat and then laugh your ass off. It’s both thrilling and hilarious, often at the very same time.

The plot is cheesy and predictable (which is perfectly fine), until it isn’t (which is even better). It gives off the vibe of a summer camp ghost story throughout, albeit a very refined and polished one. It’s best to go into the movie not having heard a lot about the plot, in my opinion, so I won’t say much more about it.

Just go see this movie. It’s excellent.

Original post on my Anthro.me.

IM Awkward…

2009-05-20T20:40:54Z

I’m sorry, Marc, I just don’t feel for you that way. And what were you doing with my chat window open anyway? I was offline, and we hadn’t been talking when I was last on.

Original post on my Anthro.me.

No More Kumquats!! - InkFur commission

2009-04-27T23:37:47Z

This summer, one fox’s kumquats have run out.

Original post on my Anthro.me.