Life Beyond Earth

And The Mind of Man.

From the same collection of National Archive Films that have been uploaded for free downloads to Google Video, the film is an edited version of a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972. It explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe.

Featuring some of the most brilliant minds of the time, and in fact, the most brilliant minds still of today... Dr. Richard Berendzen, astronomy professor and historian of science at Boston University; Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, social biologist and author at Rutgers University; Dr. Philip Morrison, physicist educator and philosopher of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Krister Stendahl, clergyman and theologian at Harvard University; and Dr. George Wald, biologist at Harvard University...

and of course...

Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University.

Intellects... Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic

"Minds that are to our minds as our minds are to the beasts in the jungle."

Google is running a project with the National Archives to upload 101 significant films from the archive to Google Video.

One of those videos is called Who's Out There. Made in 1975, the year I was born, and narrated by Orson Wells. (with a guest appearance from the beloved and brilliant, television's favorite nerdy scientists, and 1970's swinger... Carl Sagan!)

Wells begins the film by reading from H. G. Wells' famous science fiction book The War of the Worlds. He then talks about his equally famous radio broadcast and dramatization of the same book, and how people really thought aliens were landing wen they heard the broadcast. Then actual real-life people who were fooled into jamming the highways, or who ran into the hills are interviewed. They try to give us perspective as to why they were fooled so easily.

Spotted: The Jewish Canadian Rapper

wow...

I just stumbled onto the reel of a video director that totally blew us away. His name is Keith Schofield. He makes charming, funny, and interesting videos for mostly indie bands. Though he seems to have some projects with some bigger names on the horizon. (read: Deathcab)

First, here is the video for Pi by Hard 'N Phirm. It involves some kid's from the 70's learning about math, 2 weird wizards with mustaches, and of course a robot.

Next up is the video for 3 Feet Deep by DJ Format featuring our favorite Jewish Canadian Rapper Abdominal.

He even did a video for another one of our favorite indie bands The Notwist, for their song One With the Freaks. It's basically a jellyfish out of water story.

you won't regret watching.

Dodongo dislikes smoke!

The Legend of Zelda turns 20 years old.

Everything about that game was awe-inspiring when I first played it. From being able to SAVE YOUR GAME, even down to the awesome illustrations in the game manual.

Here's something I didn't know. You could only carry up to 255 rupees because this is the maximum value an unsigned 8-bit value can hold. Crazy huh... the old 8-bit cartradge literaly couldn't handle saving a number higher than that.

Suit Sat 1

On February 3rd, 2006 the crew of the International Space Station pushed a Russian space suit out of an airlock. It was filled with batteries, radio transmitters, and some diagnostic instruments.

They called it SuitSat 1:

People all over the world then tracked the floating man-made satellite.

Newtendo

This weekend we got a new Nintendo DS.

Nintendo's newish portable game system, while not nearly as slick and powerful as the pricey Sony PSP ($240!), is more within our budget. Nintendo also does a good job of making games that can be played and enjoyed by both myself and my special lady friend. Also the games range from $20 to $40, which is better for us that dropping $55+ on an iffy Xbox game.

I'm a big fan of the Advance Wars turn based military strategy franchise. The game reminds me of an old favorite, Military Madness for the Turbo Grafx 16.

And as always, Nintedo permeates our culture. Here are a few interesting Nintendo related links... This guy turned his old NES game system into an alarm clock! And these guys hacked the old Super Mario 3 game, and turned it into an whole new game called Mario Adventure that's downloadable for free! The game features brand new art, new story lines, new villains and bosses, and new power-ups for Mario and his stereotypical Italian brother.

You ready Biv?

Yeah I'm ready Slick, are you?

Turkleton auditioning for the Janitor's "Air Band" in a recent episode of Scrubs (still one of the best comedies on television)

Youtube is wonderful.

The Prodigal Art Student

Today C-dub and I were invited back to our old art college to speak to a group of students for their "Think Outside the Lunch Box" program. (yeah... I know) We showed them the first completed episode of the new cartoon we're making for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

The Atlanta College of Art is located in the Woodruff Arts Center, right next to the High Museum of Art. All students of the Art School are granted free admission to the museum.

The most memorable part of entering the 4th floor, where most of the Art School is located are these mail tubes. All inter-art-school-mail is delivered to students via these mail holes. Once, as a prank, we stuffed a Vegan student's mail hole full with hot dogs. It was gross... even to us. And it wasn't even our most dispicable prank.

As a student I worked in the computer lab as a lab monitor. My boss was Don Hassler. He only teaches one class at ACA, an experimental sound class, other than that, he is the guy who keeps the computers running. He also gave me a great piece of advice when I was preparing to graduate from ACA, he told me:

"If you want to ensure job security, make yourself indispensable. Make it so they can't run the company without you."

It was great going back to ACA, especially in light of the recent take-over by The Savana College of Design. By this time next year, there will be no ACA, it will have been swallowed whole by SCAD. I told Don that my biggest problem with the take-over is that there will be no more ACA legacy, and visiting there today re-inforced that for me. That classic long hallway, and those stupid mail tubes will be gone. Don said, however, that the school will only be romantisized, in fact it's already begun. ACA will be remembered as a much better place than it actually was... or is. Maybe it's better that way.

Badgesers

We've been busy rehearsing for a new show at Dad's Garage. My buddy Tim wrote a play called Get Downsized. It takes place in a typical office, there are no words spoken during the play, everything is completely physical. It's a real challenge. Lately, when I actually perform on stage, I have become so reliant on smart alecky "wisecracks" it's hard to keep my mouth shut. Plus it's sooo much easier to just say what you're doing rather than actually do what you are doing... you know?

As an improvisor, speech is a luxury we take for granted. Expressing an emotion or thought without talking is like... real acting. (read: hard)

Anyway, Get Downsized (<-- here is where I'd link to the Dad's webpage so you could buy tickets to our show, but they haven't listed it yet, thanks Dad's, smart move) opens this weekend Friday the 17th at 8:00pm in The Top Shelf @ Dad's Garage. Also, our animation ("as theatrically invigorating as watching TV" says The Sunday Paper's Bert Osborne) is still running in the main space @ Dad's as part of the 8.5 X 11 short play Festival The Birds and The Bees.

I took some time to make a few project badges, you can notice them to the right over there ---->

They look like this:

Often times I'll tell someone about one project or another we've done here on the website, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. I thought maybe it was because traditionally my projects are subtly listed in text in the navigation bar. I've dropped that approach in favor of the large gaudy eye-catching badges you see now.

1 Infinite Loop; Cupertino, CA 95014

Mike Matas is a User Interface Designer for a little company out of Cupertino, California.

On his weblog he gives step by step instructions detailing how to make a "Life Poster" in iPhoto out of 98 of your favorite photos. And despite the name "Life Poster" it's a super cool trick. In the comments he even briefly covers how to do it on a PC.

The last couple versions of iPhoto have had the option to buy prints directly through the program, and have them shipped to your door. To order one of these 20X30 inch "Life Posters" through iPhoto only costs around $30 including shipping. For a complete custom one-off poster, that's not too shabby. I wonder if you could upload a vector line drawing, and have a poster made of that...

Time to get The Papers... The Papers

The reviews for 8.5 X 11 have mostly come in, that's the short play festival our animation was commissioned for.

Almost every review calls the entire show a success, which is nice.

Two of the reviews (Creative Loafing, and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution) site our animation as a high-point of the show...

Two of the reviews fail to mention our piece at all. (Backstage, and David Atlanta... I actually see this as completely fair, the reviews in question come from theatrical publications, our animation is not very theatrical)

Finally the last review calls our animation a low point. (The Sunday Paper) Even going so far as to call it: "a computer-animated presentation that has no more to do with the birds and the bees than it belongs on a stage (it's as theatrically invigorating as watching TV)."

Heh, yikes!

That last review presented here in the pursuit of fairness, or maybe to convince myself that I really do have a thick skin. Not every review is going to be a good one. But somehow I can't help thinking that Bert Osborne at The Sunday Paper missed the point of what we were trying to do. But again, that's his right as a reviewer.. to miss the point.

Over the 7 or so years that I have performed at Dad's Garage, either as an Improvisor, a straight-up Actor (well straight-up except for the time I played that gay character, oh... and that woman), or as a Director/Play-write, I have been met mostly with positive reviews. And if the review was a bad one, I was never sited so explicitly as in The Sunday Paper. You know what they say though, the bad ones stick out.

Even so, I am happy to consider myself lucky. I'm also lucky that I don't work at The Sunday Paper, a terrible publication I wouldn't line my imaginary bird's cage with, nor wrap my imaginary dead fish in.

Just kidding... but not really.

Oh Canada!

Everybody knows how great Canada is. (we have often speculated that Canadians are at least 20% funnier than Americans) I once spent a week in Edmonton Canada improvising at The Rapid Fire Theater for one of their improv festivals. It was like the greatest spring break a dorky improvisor could hope for. The weather in Edmonton was unseasonably warm, the hostel we stayed in had no air conditioning because the canadians were all like "It's never this hot!! It's the end of the WORLD!" It wasn't, but those Canadians can be so dramatic. (only 10% more dramatic)

We at Dad's Garage, the theatre I work at, call Rapid Fire Theatre our "sister theatre" but that's just because we want so badly to be associated with their awesomeness. They are some of the funniest performers I have had the luck to see perform, and be on stage with!

While in Edmonton, I remember thinking that these people I was seeing perform, these are the people I'm going to see in the next few years on sitcoms, television commercials, sketch comedy shows... I was seeing the future. And I was right.

One of our favorite people from Edmonton, the boyishly handsome Josh Dean, has landed himself a starring role in a sitcom. Josh is also writing partners with one of our other favorite canadian performers, Graham Wagner, one half of the world famous Iron Cobra. (the other half being the awesome Iron Becky)

The sitcom is called Free Ride,

If you've been watching the American Idol auditions like we have, you might have seen a commercial for it. The good news is that Josh is the main character, the bad news is that it's on Fox. And we all know how they treat talented and funny people.

Am I saying that Free Ride will be the next Arrested Development? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it does look funny, and I KNOW Josh is hilarious. So the forecast for now is "mostly sunny with a chance of breakthrough popularity."

And as an added extra bonus, also starring in the sitcom is our beloved Allen Havey. Who is Allen Havey? He was the host of the lovable Night After NIght with Allen Havey way back when on The Comedy Channel... that's right, before it became Comedy Central.

This show definitely has the credentials, now it just has to be funny, which I am sure it will be. Check it out, There's a special preview of Free Ride March 1st after American Idol on FOX @ 9:30pm eastern

Binary Death Spiral

So far people have been complimentary about our animation. Thanks. One of the comments we get the most is that people want to be able to read all the text that pops up in the animation. We appreciate that too, I think it means people are interested in what's going on.

The good thing is that all the text is real, it all says something. Like in the launch scene, all the text boxes that pop up next to the rocket are real specifications for a titan II rocket with two stages, and a capsule payload. But for the most part the text isn't supposed to be legible.

There are a few parts where it might be beneficial to read the text. For instance, when the boy robot is in space, he writes some poems that he sends to the girl robot. Each poem is supposed to be inspired by the cosmological images he observes. And each of those images has been digitally painted by us in photoshop.

Here is the quasar he sees, and the dorky poem associated with it, presented as a desktop in two formats:

@ 1440 pixels wide (15inch powerbook version)
@ 1600 pixels wide

Life Beyond Earth

And The Mind of Man.

From the same collection of National Archive Films that have been uploaded for free downloads to Google Video, the film is an edited version of a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972. It explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe.

Featuring some of the most brilliant minds of the time, and in fact, the most brilliant minds still of today... Dr. Richard Berendzen, astronomy professor and historian of science at Boston University; Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, social biologist and author at Rutgers University; Dr. Philip Morrison, physicist educator and philosopher of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Krister Stendahl, clergyman and theologian at Harvard University; and Dr. George Wald, biologist at Harvard University...

and of course...

Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University.

Intellects... Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic

"Minds that are to our minds as our minds are to the beasts in the jungle."

Google is running a project with the National Archives to upload 101 significant films from the archive to Google Video.

One of those videos is called Who's Out There. Made in 1975, the year I was born, and narrated by Orson Wells. (with a guest appearance from the beloved and brilliant, television's favorite nerdy scientists, and 1970's swinger... Carl Sagan!)

Wells begins the film by reading from H. G. Wells' famous science fiction book The War of the Worlds. He then talks about his equally famous radio broadcast and dramatization of the same book, and how people really thought aliens were landing wen they heard the broadcast. Then actual real-life people who were fooled into jamming the highways, or who ran into the hills are interviewed. They try to give us perspective as to why they were fooled so easily.

Spotted: The Jewish Canadian Rapper

wow...

I just stumbled onto the reel of a video director that totally blew us away. His name is Keith Schofield. He makes charming, funny, and interesting videos for mostly indie bands. Though he seems to have some projects with some bigger names on the horizon. (read: Deathcab)

First, here is the video for Pi by Hard 'N Phirm. It involves some kid's from the 70's learning about math, 2 weird wizards with mustaches, and of course a robot.

Next up is the video for 3 Feet Deep by DJ Format featuring our favorite Jewish Canadian Rapper Abdominal.

He even did a video for another one of our favorite indie bands The Notwist, for their song One With the Freaks. It's basically a jellyfish out of water story.

you won't regret watching.

Dodongo dislikes smoke!

The Legend of Zelda turns 20 years old.

Everything about that game was awe-inspiring when I first played it. From being able to SAVE YOUR GAME, even down to the awesome illustrations in the game manual.

Here's something I didn't know. You could only carry up to 255 rupees because this is the maximum value an unsigned 8-bit value can hold. Crazy huh... the old 8-bit cartradge literaly couldn't handle saving a number higher than that.

Suit Sat 1

On February 3rd, 2006 the crew of the International Space Station pushed a Russian space suit out of an airlock. It was filled with batteries, radio transmitters, and some diagnostic instruments.

They called it SuitSat 1:

People all over the world then tracked the floating man-made satellite.

Newtendo

This weekend we got a new Nintendo DS.

Nintendo's newish portable game system, while not nearly as slick and powerful as the pricey Sony PSP ($240!), is more within our budget. Nintendo also does a good job of making games that can be played and enjoyed by both myself and my special lady friend. Also the games range from $20 to $40, which is better for us that dropping $55+ on an iffy Xbox game.

I'm a big fan of the Advance Wars turn based military strategy franchise. The game reminds me of an old favorite, Military Madness for the Turbo Grafx 16.

And as always, Nintedo permeates our culture. Here are a few interesting Nintendo related links... This guy turned his old NES game system into an alarm clock! And these guys hacked the old Super Mario 3 game, and turned it into an whole new game called Mario Adventure that's downloadable for free! The game features brand new art, new story lines, new villains and bosses, and new power-ups for Mario and his stereotypical Italian brother.

You ready Biv?

Yeah I'm ready Slick, are you?

Turkleton auditioning for the Janitor's "Air Band" in a recent episode of Scrubs (still one of the best comedies on television)

Youtube is wonderful.

The Prodigal Art Student

Today C-dub and I were invited back to our old art college to speak to a group of students for their "Think Outside the Lunch Box" program. (yeah... I know) We showed them the first completed episode of the new cartoon we're making for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

The Atlanta College of Art is located in the Woodruff Arts Center, right next to the High Museum of Art. All students of the Art School are granted free admission to the museum.

The most memorable part of entering the 4th floor, where most of the Art School is located are these mail tubes. All inter-art-school-mail is delivered to students via these mail holes. Once, as a prank, we stuffed a Vegan student's mail hole full with hot dogs. It was gross... even to us. And it wasn't even our most dispicable prank.

As a student I worked in the computer lab as a lab monitor. My boss was Don Hassler. He only teaches one class at ACA, an experimental sound class, other than that, he is the guy who keeps the computers running. He also gave me a great piece of advice when I was preparing to graduate from ACA, he told me:

"If you want to ensure job security, make yourself indispensable. Make it so they can't run the company without you."

It was great going back to ACA, especially in light of the recent take-over by The Savana College of Design. By this time next year, there will be no ACA, it will have been swallowed whole by SCAD. I told Don that my biggest problem with the take-over is that there will be no more ACA legacy, and visiting there today re-inforced that for me. That classic long hallway, and those stupid mail tubes will be gone. Don said, however, that the school will only be romantisized, in fact it's already begun. ACA will be remembered as a much better place than it actually was... or is. Maybe it's better that way.

Badgesers

We've been busy rehearsing for a new show at Dad's Garage. My buddy Tim wrote a play called Get Downsized. It takes place in a typical office, there are no words spoken during the play, everything is completely physical. It's a real challenge. Lately, when I actually perform on stage, I have become so reliant on smart alecky "wisecracks" it's hard to keep my mouth shut. Plus it's sooo much easier to just say what you're doing rather than actually do what you are doing... you know?

As an improvisor, speech is a luxury we take for granted. Expressing an emotion or thought without talking is like... real acting. (read: hard)

Anyway, Get Downsized (<-- here is where I'd link to the Dad's webpage so you could buy tickets to our show, but they haven't listed it yet, thanks Dad's, smart move) opens this weekend Friday the 17th at 8:00pm in The Top Shelf @ Dad's Garage. Also, our animation ("as theatrically invigorating as watching TV" says The Sunday Paper's Bert Osborne) is still running in the main space @ Dad's as part of the 8.5 X 11 short play Festival The Birds and The Bees.

I took some time to make a few project badges, you can notice them to the right over there ---->

They look like this:

Often times I'll tell someone about one project or another we've done here on the website, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. I thought maybe it was because traditionally my projects are subtly listed in text in the navigation bar. I've dropped that approach in favor of the large gaudy eye-catching badges you see now.

1 Infinite Loop; Cupertino, CA 95014

Mike Matas is a User Interface Designer for a little company out of Cupertino, California.

On his weblog he gives step by step instructions detailing how to make a "Life Poster" in iPhoto out of 98 of your favorite photos. And despite the name "Life Poster" it's a super cool trick. In the comments he even briefly covers how to do it on a PC.

The last couple versions of iPhoto have had the option to buy prints directly through the program, and have them shipped to your door. To order one of these 20X30 inch "Life Posters" through iPhoto only costs around $30 including shipping. For a complete custom one-off poster, that's not too shabby. I wonder if you could upload a vector line drawing, and have a poster made of that...

Time to get The Papers... The Papers

The reviews for 8.5 X 11 have mostly come in, that's the short play festival our animation was commissioned for.

Almost every review calls the entire show a success, which is nice.

Two of the reviews (Creative Loafing, and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution) site our animation as a high-point of the show...

Two of the reviews fail to mention our piece at all. (Backstage, and David Atlanta... I actually see this as completely fair, the reviews in question come from theatrical publications, our animation is not very theatrical)

Finally the last review calls our animation a low point. (The Sunday Paper) Even going so far as to call it: "a computer-animated presentation that has no more to do with the birds and the bees than it belongs on a stage (it's as theatrically invigorating as watching TV)."

Heh, yikes!

That last review presented here in the pursuit of fairness, or maybe to convince myself that I really do have a thick skin. Not every review is going to be a good one. But somehow I can't help thinking that Bert Osborne at The Sunday Paper missed the point of what we were trying to do. But again, that's his right as a reviewer.. to miss the point.

Over the 7 or so years that I have performed at Dad's Garage, either as an Improvisor, a straight-up Actor (well straight-up except for the time I played that gay character, oh... and that woman), or as a Director/Play-write, I have been met mostly with positive reviews. And if the review was a bad one, I was never sited so explicitly as in The Sunday Paper. You know what they say though, the bad ones stick out.

Even so, I am happy to consider myself lucky. I'm also lucky that I don't work at The Sunday Paper, a terrible publication I wouldn't line my imaginary bird's cage with, nor wrap my imaginary dead fish in.

Just kidding... but not really.

Oh Canada!

Everybody knows how great Canada is. (we have often speculated that Canadians are at least 20% funnier than Americans) I once spent a week in Edmonton Canada improvising at The Rapid Fire Theater for one of their improv festivals. It was like the greatest spring break a dorky improvisor could hope for. The weather in Edmonton was unseasonably warm, the hostel we stayed in had no air conditioning because the canadians were all like "It's never this hot!! It's the end of the WORLD!" It wasn't, but those Canadians can be so dramatic. (only 10% more dramatic)

We at Dad's Garage, the theatre I work at, call Rapid Fire Theatre our "sister theatre" but that's just because we want so badly to be associated with their awesomeness. They are some of the funniest performers I have had the luck to see perform, and be on stage with!

While in Edmonton, I remember thinking that these people I was seeing perform, these are the people I'm going to see in the next few years on sitcoms, television commercials, sketch comedy shows... I was seeing the future. And I was right.

One of our favorite people from Edmonton, the boyishly handsome Josh Dean, has landed himself a starring role in a sitcom. Josh is also writing partners with one of our other favorite canadian performers, Graham Wagner, one half of the world famous Iron Cobra. (the other half being the awesome Iron Becky)

The sitcom is called Free Ride,

If you've been watching the American Idol auditions like we have, you might have seen a commercial for it. The good news is that Josh is the main character, the bad news is that it's on Fox. And we all know how they treat talented and funny people.

Am I saying that Free Ride will be the next Arrested Development? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it does look funny, and I KNOW Josh is hilarious. So the forecast for now is "mostly sunny with a chance of breakthrough popularity."

And as an added extra bonus, also starring in the sitcom is our beloved Allen Havey. Who is Allen Havey? He was the host of the lovable Night After NIght with Allen Havey way back when on The Comedy Channel... that's right, before it became Comedy Central.

This show definitely has the credentials, now it just has to be funny, which I am sure it will be. Check it out, There's a special preview of Free Ride March 1st after American Idol on FOX @ 9:30pm eastern

Binary Death Spiral

So far people have been complimentary about our animation. Thanks. One of the comments we get the most is that people want to be able to read all the text that pops up in the animation. We appreciate that too, I think it means people are interested in what's going on.

The good thing is that all the text is real, it all says something. Like in the launch scene, all the text boxes that pop up next to the rocket are real specifications for a titan II rocket with two stages, and a capsule payload. But for the most part the text isn't supposed to be legible.

There are a few parts where it might be beneficial to read the text. For instance, when the boy robot is in space, he writes some poems that he sends to the girl robot. Each poem is supposed to be inspired by the cosmological images he observes. And each of those images has been digitally painted by us in photoshop.

Here is the quasar he sees, and the dorky poem associated with it, presented as a desktop in two formats:

@ 1440 pixels wide (15inch powerbook version)
@ 1600 pixels wide

Life Beyond Earth

And The Mind of Man.

From the same collection of National Archive Films that have been uploaded for free downloads to Google Video, the film is an edited version of a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972. It explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe.

Featuring some of the most brilliant minds of the time, and in fact, the most brilliant minds still of today... Dr. Richard Berendzen, astronomy professor and historian of science at Boston University; Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, social biologist and author at Rutgers University; Dr. Philip Morrison, physicist educator and philosopher of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Krister Stendahl, clergyman and theologian at Harvard University; and Dr. George Wald, biologist at Harvard University...

and of course...

Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University.

Intellects... Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic

"Minds that are to our minds as our minds are to the beasts in the jungle."

Google is running a project with the National Archives to upload 101 significant films from the archive to Google Video.

One of those videos is called Who's Out There. Made in 1975, the year I was born, and narrated by Orson Wells. (with a guest appearance from the beloved and brilliant, television's favorite nerdy scientists, and 1970's swinger... Carl Sagan!)

Wells begins the film by reading from H. G. Wells' famous science fiction book The War of the Worlds. He then talks about his equally famous radio broadcast and dramatization of the same book, and how people really thought aliens were landing wen they heard the broadcast. Then actual real-life people who were fooled into jamming the highways, or who ran into the hills are interviewed. They try to give us perspective as to why they were fooled so easily.

Spotted: The Jewish Canadian Rapper

wow...

I just stumbled onto the reel of a video director that totally blew us away. His name is Keith Schofield. He makes charming, funny, and interesting videos for mostly indie bands. Though he seems to have some projects with some bigger names on the horizon. (read: Deathcab)

First, here is the video for Pi by Hard 'N Phirm. It involves some kid's from the 70's learning about math, 2 weird wizards with mustaches, and of course a robot.

Next up is the video for 3 Feet Deep by DJ Format featuring our favorite Jewish Canadian Rapper Abdominal.

He even did a video for another one of our favorite indie bands The Notwist, for their song One With the Freaks. It's basically a jellyfish out of water story.

you won't regret watching.

Dodongo dislikes smoke!

The Legend of Zelda turns 20 years old.

Everything about that game was awe-inspiring when I first played it. From being able to SAVE YOUR GAME, even down to the awesome illustrations in the game manual.

Here's something I didn't know. You could only carry up to 255 rupees because this is the maximum value an unsigned 8-bit value can hold. Crazy huh... the old 8-bit cartradge literaly couldn't handle saving a number higher than that.

Suit Sat 1

On February 3rd, 2006 the crew of the International Space Station pushed a Russian space suit out of an airlock. It was filled with batteries, radio transmitters, and some diagnostic instruments.

They called it SuitSat 1:

People all over the world then tracked the floating man-made satellite.

Newtendo

This weekend we got a new Nintendo DS.

Nintendo's newish portable game system, while not nearly as slick and powerful as the pricey Sony PSP ($240!), is more within our budget. Nintendo also does a good job of making games that can be played and enjoyed by both myself and my special lady friend. Also the games range from $20 to $40, which is better for us that dropping $55+ on an iffy Xbox game.

I'm a big fan of the Advance Wars turn based military strategy franchise. The game reminds me of an old favorite, Military Madness for the Turbo Grafx 16.

And as always, Nintedo permeates our culture. Here are a few interesting Nintendo related links... This guy turned his old NES game system into an alarm clock! And these guys hacked the old Super Mario 3 game, and turned it into an whole new game called Mario Adventure that's downloadable for free! The game features brand new art, new story lines, new villains and bosses, and new power-ups for Mario and his stereotypical Italian brother.

You ready Biv?

Yeah I'm ready Slick, are you?

Turkleton auditioning for the Janitor's "Air Band" in a recent episode of Scrubs (still one of the best comedies on television)

Youtube is wonderful.

The Prodigal Art Student

Today C-dub and I were invited back to our old art college to speak to a group of students for their "Think Outside the Lunch Box" program. (yeah... I know) We showed them the first completed episode of the new cartoon we're making for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

The Atlanta College of Art is located in the Woodruff Arts Center, right next to the High Museum of Art. All students of the Art School are granted free admission to the museum.

The most memorable part of entering the 4th floor, where most of the Art School is located are these mail tubes. All inter-art-school-mail is delivered to students via these mail holes. Once, as a prank, we stuffed a Vegan student's mail hole full with hot dogs. It was gross... even to us. And it wasn't even our most dispicable prank.

As a student I worked in the computer lab as a lab monitor. My boss was Don Hassler. He only teaches one class at ACA, an experimental sound class, other than that, he is the guy who keeps the computers running. He also gave me a great piece of advice when I was preparing to graduate from ACA, he told me:

"If you want to ensure job security, make yourself indispensable. Make it so they can't run the company without you."

It was great going back to ACA, especially in light of the recent take-over by The Savana College of Design. By this time next year, there will be no ACA, it will have been swallowed whole by SCAD. I told Don that my biggest problem with the take-over is that there will be no more ACA legacy, and visiting there today re-inforced that for me. That classic long hallway, and those stupid mail tubes will be gone. Don said, however, that the school will only be romantisized, in fact it's already begun. ACA will be remembered as a much better place than it actually was... or is. Maybe it's better that way.

Badgesers

We've been busy rehearsing for a new show at Dad's Garage. My buddy Tim wrote a play called Get Downsized. It takes place in a typical office, there are no words spoken during the play, everything is completely physical. It's a real challenge. Lately, when I actually perform on stage, I have become so reliant on smart alecky "wisecracks" it's hard to keep my mouth shut. Plus it's sooo much easier to just say what you're doing rather than actually do what you are doing... you know?

As an improvisor, speech is a luxury we take for granted. Expressing an emotion or thought without talking is like... real acting. (read: hard)

Anyway, Get Downsized (<-- here is where I'd link to the Dad's webpage so you could buy tickets to our show, but they haven't listed it yet, thanks Dad's, smart move) opens this weekend Friday the 17th at 8:00pm in The Top Shelf @ Dad's Garage. Also, our animation ("as theatrically invigorating as watching TV" says The Sunday Paper's Bert Osborne) is still running in the main space @ Dad's as part of the 8.5 X 11 short play Festival The Birds and The Bees.

I took some time to make a few project badges, you can notice them to the right over there ---->

They look like this:

Often times I'll tell someone about one project or another we've done here on the website, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. I thought maybe it was because traditionally my projects are subtly listed in text in the navigation bar. I've dropped that approach in favor of the large gaudy eye-catching badges you see now.

1 Infinite Loop; Cupertino, CA 95014

Mike Matas is a User Interface Designer for a little company out of Cupertino, California.

On his weblog he gives step by step instructions detailing how to make a "Life Poster" in iPhoto out of 98 of your favorite photos. And despite the name "Life Poster" it's a super cool trick. In the comments he even briefly covers how to do it on a PC.

The last couple versions of iPhoto have had the option to buy prints directly through the program, and have them shipped to your door. To order one of these 20X30 inch "Life Posters" through iPhoto only costs around $30 including shipping. For a complete custom one-off poster, that's not too shabby. I wonder if you could upload a vector line drawing, and have a poster made of that...

Time to get The Papers... The Papers

The reviews for 8.5 X 11 have mostly come in, that's the short play festival our animation was commissioned for.

Almost every review calls the entire show a success, which is nice.

Two of the reviews (Creative Loafing, and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution) site our animation as a high-point of the show...

Two of the reviews fail to mention our piece at all. (Backstage, and David Atlanta... I actually see this as completely fair, the reviews in question come from theatrical publications, our animation is not very theatrical)

Finally the last review calls our animation a low point. (The Sunday Paper) Even going so far as to call it: "a computer-animated presentation that has no more to do with the birds and the bees than it belongs on a stage (it's as theatrically invigorating as watching TV)."

Heh, yikes!

That last review presented here in the pursuit of fairness, or maybe to convince myself that I really do have a thick skin. Not every review is going to be a good one. But somehow I can't help thinking that Bert Osborne at The Sunday Paper missed the point of what we were trying to do. But again, that's his right as a reviewer.. to miss the point.

Over the 7 or so years that I have performed at Dad's Garage, either as an Improvisor, a straight-up Actor (well straight-up except for the time I played that gay character, oh... and that woman), or as a Director/Play-write, I have been met mostly with positive reviews. And if the review was a bad one, I was never sited so explicitly as in The Sunday Paper. You know what they say though, the bad ones stick out.

Even so, I am happy to consider myself lucky. I'm also lucky that I don't work at The Sunday Paper, a terrible publication I wouldn't line my imaginary bird's cage with, nor wrap my imaginary dead fish in.

Just kidding... but not really.

Oh Canada!

Everybody knows how great Canada is. (we have often speculated that Canadians are at least 20% funnier than Americans) I once spent a week in Edmonton Canada improvising at The Rapid Fire Theater for one of their improv festivals. It was like the greatest spring break a dorky improvisor could hope for. The weather in Edmonton was unseasonably warm, the hostel we stayed in had no air conditioning because the canadians were all like "It's never this hot!! It's the end of the WORLD!" It wasn't, but those Canadians can be so dramatic. (only 10% more dramatic)

We at Dad's Garage, the theatre I work at, call Rapid Fire Theatre our "sister theatre" but that's just because we want so badly to be associated with their awesomeness. They are some of the funniest performers I have had the luck to see perform, and be on stage with!

While in Edmonton, I remember thinking that these people I was seeing perform, these are the people I'm going to see in the next few years on sitcoms, television commercials, sketch comedy shows... I was seeing the future. And I was right.

One of our favorite people from Edmonton, the boyishly handsome Josh Dean, has landed himself a starring role in a sitcom. Josh is also writing partners with one of our other favorite canadian performers, Graham Wagner, one half of the world famous Iron Cobra. (the other half being the awesome Iron Becky)

The sitcom is called Free Ride,

If you've been watching the American Idol auditions like we have, you might have seen a commercial for it. The good news is that Josh is the main character, the bad news is that it's on Fox. And we all know how they treat talented and funny people.

Am I saying that Free Ride will be the next Arrested Development? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it does look funny, and I KNOW Josh is hilarious. So the forecast for now is "mostly sunny with a chance of breakthrough popularity."

And as an added extra bonus, also starring in the sitcom is our beloved Allen Havey. Who is Allen Havey? He was the host of the lovable Night After NIght with Allen Havey way back when on The Comedy Channel... that's right, before it became Comedy Central.

This show definitely has the credentials, now it just has to be funny, which I am sure it will be. Check it out, There's a special preview of Free Ride March 1st after American Idol on FOX @ 9:30pm eastern

Binary Death Spiral

So far people have been complimentary about our animation. Thanks. One of the comments we get the most is that people want to be able to read all the text that pops up in the animation. We appreciate that too, I think it means people are interested in what's going on.

The good thing is that all the text is real, it all says something. Like in the launch scene, all the text boxes that pop up next to the rocket are real specifications for a titan II rocket with two stages, and a capsule payload. But for the most part the text isn't supposed to be legible.

There are a few parts where it might be beneficial to read the text. For instance, when the boy robot is in space, he writes some poems that he sends to the girl robot. Each poem is supposed to be inspired by the cosmological images he observes. And each of those images has been digitally painted by us in photoshop.

Here is the quasar he sees, and the dorky poem associated with it, presented as a desktop in two formats:

@ 1440 pixels wide (15inch powerbook version)
@ 1600 pixels wide

Life Beyond Earth

And The Mind of Man.

From the same collection of National Archive Films that have been uploaded for free downloads to Google Video, the film is an edited version of a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972. It explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe.

Featuring some of the most brilliant minds of the time, and in fact, the most brilliant minds still of today... Dr. Richard Berendzen, astronomy professor and historian of science at Boston University; Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, social biologist and author at Rutgers University; Dr. Philip Morrison, physicist educator and philosopher of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Krister Stendahl, clergyman and theologian at Harvard University; and Dr. George Wald, biologist at Harvard University...

and of course...

Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University.

Intellects... Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic

"Minds that are to our minds as our minds are to the beasts in the jungle."

Google is running a project with the National Archives to upload 101 significant films from the archive to Google Video.

One of those videos is called Who's Out There. Made in 1975, the year I was born, and narrated by Orson Wells. (with a guest appearance from the beloved and brilliant, television's favorite nerdy scientists, and 1970's swinger... Carl Sagan!)

Wells begins the film by reading from H. G. Wells' famous science fiction book The War of the Worlds. He then talks about his equally famous radio broadcast and dramatization of the same book, and how people really thought aliens were landing wen they heard the broadcast. Then actual real-life people who were fooled into jamming the highways, or who ran into the hills are interviewed. They try to give us perspective as to why they were fooled so easily.

Spotted: The Jewish Canadian Rapper

wow...

I just stumbled onto the reel of a video director that totally blew us away. His name is Keith Schofield. He makes charming, funny, and interesting videos for mostly indie bands. Though he seems to have some projects with some bigger names on the horizon. (read: Deathcab)

First, here is the video for Pi by Hard 'N Phirm. It involves some kid's from the 70's learning about math, 2 weird wizards with mustaches, and of course a robot.

Next up is the video for 3 Feet Deep by DJ Format featuring our favorite Jewish Canadian Rapper Abdominal.

He even did a video for another one of our favorite indie bands The Notwist, for their song One With the Freaks. It's basically a jellyfish out of water story.

you won't regret watching.

Dodongo dislikes smoke!

The Legend of Zelda turns 20 years old.

Everything about that game was awe-inspiring when I first played it. From being able to SAVE YOUR GAME, even down to the awesome illustrations in the game manual.

Here's something I didn't know. You could only carry up to 255 rupees because this is the maximum value an unsigned 8-bit value can hold. Crazy huh... the old 8-bit cartradge literaly couldn't handle saving a number higher than that.

Suit Sat 1

On February 3rd, 2006 the crew of the International Space Station pushed a Russian space suit out of an airlock. It was filled with batteries, radio transmitters, and some diagnostic instruments.

They called it SuitSat 1:

People all over the world then tracked the floating man-made satellite.

Newtendo

This weekend we got a new Nintendo DS.

Nintendo's newish portable game system, while not nearly as slick and powerful as the pricey Sony PSP ($240!), is more within our budget. Nintendo also does a good job of making games that can be played and enjoyed by both myself and my special lady friend. Also the games range from $20 to $40, which is better for us that dropping $55+ on an iffy Xbox game.

I'm a big fan of the Advance Wars turn based military strategy franchise. The game reminds me of an old favorite, Military Madness for the Turbo Grafx 16.

And as always, Nintedo permeates our culture. Here are a few interesting Nintendo related links... This guy turned his old NES game system into an alarm clock! And these guys hacked the old Super Mario 3 game, and turned it into an whole new game called Mario Adventure that's downloadable for free! The game features brand new art, new story lines, new villains and bosses, and new power-ups for Mario and his stereotypical Italian brother.

You ready Biv?

Yeah I'm ready Slick, are you?

Turkleton auditioning for the Janitor's "Air Band" in a recent episode of Scrubs (still one of the best comedies on television)

Youtube is wonderful.

The Prodigal Art Student

Today C-dub and I were invited back to our old art college to speak to a group of students for their "Think Outside the Lunch Box" program. (yeah... I know) We showed them the first completed episode of the new cartoon we're making for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

The Atlanta College of Art is located in the Woodruff Arts Center, right next to the High Museum of Art. All students of the Art School are granted free admission to the museum.

The most memorable part of entering the 4th floor, where most of the Art School is located are these mail tubes. All inter-art-school-mail is delivered to students via these mail holes. Once, as a prank, we stuffed a Vegan student's mail hole full with hot dogs. It was gross... even to us. And it wasn't even our most dispicable prank.

As a student I worked in the computer lab as a lab monitor. My boss was Don Hassler. He only teaches one class at ACA, an experimental sound class, other than that, he is the guy who keeps the computers running. He also gave me a great piece of advice when I was preparing to graduate from ACA, he told me:

"If you want to ensure job security, make yourself indispensable. Make it so they can't run the company without you."

It was great going back to ACA, especially in light of the recent take-over by The Savana College of Design. By this time next year, there will be no ACA, it will have been swallowed whole by SCAD. I told Don that my biggest problem with the take-over is that there will be no more ACA legacy, and visiting there today re-inforced that for me. That classic long hallway, and those stupid mail tubes will be gone. Don said, however, that the school will only be romantisized, in fact it's already begun. ACA will be remembered as a much better place than it actually was... or is. Maybe it's better that way.

Badgesers

We've been busy rehearsing for a new show at Dad's Garage. My buddy Tim wrote a play called Get Downsized. It takes place in a typical office, there are no words spoken during the play, everything is completely physical. It's a real challenge. Lately, when I actually perform on stage, I have become so reliant on smart alecky "wisecracks" it's hard to keep my mouth shut. Plus it's sooo much easier to just say what you're doing rather than actually do what you are doing... you know?

As an improvisor, speech is a luxury we take for granted. Expressing an emotion or thought without talking is like... real acting. (read: hard)

Anyway, Get Downsized (<-- here is where I'd link to the Dad's webpage so you could buy tickets to our show, but they haven't listed it yet, thanks Dad's, smart move) opens this weekend Friday the 17th at 8:00pm in The Top Shelf @ Dad's Garage. Also, our animation ("as theatrically invigorating as watching TV" says The Sunday Paper's Bert Osborne) is still running in the main space @ Dad's as part of the 8.5 X 11 short play Festival The Birds and The Bees.

I took some time to make a few project badges, you can notice them to the right over there ---->

They look like this:

Often times I'll tell someone about one project or another we've done here on the website, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. I thought maybe it was because traditionally my projects are subtly listed in text in the navigation bar. I've dropped that approach in favor of the large gaudy eye-catching badges you see now.

1 Infinite Loop; Cupertino, CA 95014

Mike Matas is a User Interface Designer for a little company out of Cupertino, California.

On his weblog he gives step by step instructions detailing how to make a "Life Poster" in iPhoto out of 98 of your favorite photos. And despite the name "Life Poster" it's a super cool trick. In the comments he even briefly covers how to do it on a PC.

The last couple versions of iPhoto have had the option to buy prints directly through the program, and have them shipped to your door. To order one of these 20X30 inch "Life Posters" through iPhoto only costs around $30 including shipping. For a complete custom one-off poster, that's not too shabby. I wonder if you could upload a vector line drawing, and have a poster made of that...

Time to get The Papers... The Papers

The reviews for 8.5 X 11 have mostly come in, that's the short play festival our animation was commissioned for.

Almost every review calls the entire show a success, which is nice.

Two of the reviews (Creative Loafing, and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution) site our animation as a high-point of the show...

Two of the reviews fail to mention our piece at all. (Backstage, and David Atlanta... I actually see this as completely fair, the reviews in question come from theatrical publications, our animation is not very theatrical)

Finally the last review calls our animation a low point. (The Sunday Paper) Even going so far as to call it: "a computer-animated presentation that has no more to do with the birds and the bees than it belongs on a stage (it's as theatrically invigorating as watching TV)."

Heh, yikes!

That last review presented here in the pursuit of fairness, or maybe to convince myself that I really do have a thick skin. Not every review is going to be a good one. But somehow I can't help thinking that Bert Osborne at The Sunday Paper missed the point of what we were trying to do. But again, that's his right as a reviewer.. to miss the point.

Over the 7 or so years that I have performed at Dad's Garage, either as an Improvisor, a straight-up Actor (well straight-up except for the time I played that gay character, oh... and that woman), or as a Director/Play-write, I have been met mostly with positive reviews. And if the review was a bad one, I was never sited so explicitly as in The Sunday Paper. You know what they say though, the bad ones stick out.

Even so, I am happy to consider myself lucky. I'm also lucky that I don't work at The Sunday Paper, a terrible publication I wouldn't line my imaginary bird's cage with, nor wrap my imaginary dead fish in.

Just kidding... but not really.

Oh Canada!

Everybody knows how great Canada is. (we have often speculated that Canadians are at least 20% funnier than Americans) I once spent a week in Edmonton Canada improvising at The Rapid Fire Theater for one of their improv festivals. It was like the greatest spring break a dorky improvisor could hope for. The weather in Edmonton was unseasonably warm, the hostel we stayed in had no air conditioning because the canadians were all like "It's never this hot!! It's the end of the WORLD!" It wasn't, but those Canadians can be so dramatic. (only 10% more dramatic)

We at Dad's Garage, the theatre I work at, call Rapid Fire Theatre our "sister theatre" but that's just because we want so badly to be associated with their awesomeness. They are some of the funniest performers I have had the luck to see perform, and be on stage with!

While in Edmonton, I remember thinking that these people I was seeing perform, these are the people I'm going to see in the next few years on sitcoms, television commercials, sketch comedy shows... I was seeing the future. And I was right.

One of our favorite people from Edmonton, the boyishly handsome Josh Dean, has landed himself a starring role in a sitcom. Josh is also writing partners with one of our other favorite canadian performers, Graham Wagner, one half of the world famous Iron Cobra. (the other half being the awesome Iron Becky)

The sitcom is called Free Ride,

If you've been watching the American Idol auditions like we have, you might have seen a commercial for it. The good news is that Josh is the main character, the bad news is that it's on Fox. And we all know how they treat talented and funny people.

Am I saying that Free Ride will be the next Arrested Development? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it does look funny, and I KNOW Josh is hilarious. So the forecast for now is "mostly sunny with a chance of breakthrough popularity."

And as an added extra bonus, also starring in the sitcom is our beloved Allen Havey. Who is Allen Havey? He was the host of the lovable Night After NIght with Allen Havey way back when on The Comedy Channel... that's right, before it became Comedy Central.

This show definitely has the credentials, now it just has to be funny, which I am sure it will be. Check it out, There's a special preview of Free Ride March 1st after American Idol on FOX @ 9:30pm eastern

Binary Death Spiral

So far people have been complimentary about our animation. Thanks. One of the comments we get the most is that people want to be able to read all the text that pops up in the animation. We appreciate that too, I think it means people are interested in what's going on.

The good thing is that all the text is real, it all says something. Like in the launch scene, all the text boxes that pop up next to the rocket are real specifications for a titan II rocket with two stages, and a capsule payload. But for the most part the text isn't supposed to be legible.

There are a few parts where it might be beneficial to read the text. For instance, when the boy robot is in space, he writes some poems that he sends to the girl robot. Each poem is supposed to be inspired by the cosmological images he observes. And each of those images has been digitally painted by us in photoshop.

Here is the quasar he sees, and the dorky poem associated with it, presented as a desktop in two formats:

@ 1440 pixels wide (15inch powerbook version)
@ 1600 pixels wide

Life Beyond Earth

And The Mind of Man.

From the same collection of National Archive Films that have been uploaded for free downloads to Google Video, the film is an edited version of a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972. It explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe.

Featuring some of the most brilliant minds of the time, and in fact, the most brilliant minds still of today... Dr. Richard Berendzen, astronomy professor and historian of science at Boston University; Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, social biologist and author at Rutgers University; Dr. Philip Morrison, physicist educator and philosopher of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Krister Stendahl, clergyman and theologian at Harvard University; and Dr. George Wald, biologist at Harvard University...

and of course...

Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University.

Intellects... Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic

"Minds that are to our minds as our minds are to the beasts in the jungle."

Google is running a project with the National Archives to upload 101 significant films from the archive to Google Video.

One of those videos is called Who's Out There. Made in 1975, the year I was born, and narrated by Orson Wells. (with a guest appearance from the beloved and brilliant, television's favorite nerdy scientists, and 1970's swinger... Carl Sagan!)

Wells begins the film by reading from H. G. Wells' famous science fiction book The War of the Worlds. He then talks about his equally famous radio broadcast and dramatization of the same book, and how people really thought aliens were landing wen they heard the broadcast. Then actual real-life people who were fooled into jamming the highways, or who ran into the hills are interviewed. They try to give us perspective as to why they were fooled so easily.

Spotted: The Jewish Canadian Rapper

wow...

I just stumbled onto the reel of a video director that totally blew us away. His name is Keith Schofield. He makes charming, funny, and interesting videos for mostly indie bands. Though he seems to have some projects with some bigger names on the horizon. (read: Deathcab)

First, here is the video for Pi by Hard 'N Phirm. It involves some kid's from the 70's learning about math, 2 weird wizards with mustaches, and of course a robot.

Next up is the video for 3 Feet Deep by DJ Format featuring our favorite Jewish Canadian Rapper Abdominal.

He even did a video for another one of our favorite indie bands The Notwist, for their song One With the Freaks. It's basically a jellyfish out of water story.

you won't regret watching.

Dodongo dislikes smoke!

The Legend of Zelda turns 20 years old.

Everything about that game was awe-inspiring when I first played it. From being able to SAVE YOUR GAME, even down to the awesome illustrations in the game manual.

Here's something I didn't know. You could only carry up to 255 rupees because this is the maximum value an unsigned 8-bit value can hold. Crazy huh... the old 8-bit cartradge literaly couldn't handle saving a number higher than that.

Suit Sat 1

On February 3rd, 2006 the crew of the International Space Station pushed a Russian space suit out of an airlock. It was filled with batteries, radio transmitters, and some diagnostic instruments.

They called it SuitSat 1:

People all over the world then tracked the floating man-made satellite.

Newtendo

This weekend we got a new Nintendo DS.

Nintendo's newish portable game system, while not nearly as slick and powerful as the pricey Sony PSP ($240!), is more within our budget. Nintendo also does a good job of making games that can be played and enjoyed by both myself and my special lady friend. Also the games range from $20 to $40, which is better for us that dropping $55+ on an iffy Xbox game.

I'm a big fan of the Advance Wars turn based military strategy franchise. The game reminds me of an old favorite, Military Madness for the Turbo Grafx 16.

And as always, Nintedo permeates our culture. Here are a few interesting Nintendo related links... This guy turned his old NES game system into an alarm clock! And these guys hacked the old Super Mario 3 game, and turned it into an whole new game called Mario Adventure that's downloadable for free! The game features brand new art, new story lines, new villains and bosses, and new power-ups for Mario and his stereotypical Italian brother.

You ready Biv?

Yeah I'm ready Slick, are you?

Turkleton auditioning for the Janitor's "Air Band" in a recent episode of Scrubs (still one of the best comedies on television)

Youtube is wonderful.

The Prodigal Art Student

Today C-dub and I were invited back to our old art college to speak to a group of students for their "Think Outside the Lunch Box" program. (yeah... I know) We showed them the first completed episode of the new cartoon we're making for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

The Atlanta College of Art is located in the Woodruff Arts Center, right next to the High Museum of Art. All students of the Art School are granted free admission to the museum.

The most memorable part of entering the 4th floor, where most of the Art School is located are these mail tubes. All inter-art-school-mail is delivered to students via these mail holes. Once, as a prank, we stuffed a Vegan student's mail hole full with hot dogs. It was gross... even to us. And it wasn't even our most dispicable prank.

As a student I worked in the computer lab as a lab monitor. My boss was Don Hassler. He only teaches one class at ACA, an experimental sound class, other than that, he is the guy who keeps the computers running. He also gave me a great piece of advice when I was preparing to graduate from ACA, he told me:

"If you want to ensure job security, make yourself indispensable. Make it so they can't run the company without you."

It was great going back to ACA, especially in light of the recent take-over by The Savana College of Design. By this time next year, there will be no ACA, it will have been swallowed whole by SCAD. I told Don that my biggest problem with the take-over is that there will be no more ACA legacy, and visiting there today re-inforced that for me. That classic long hallway, and those stupid mail tubes will be gone. Don said, however, that the school will only be romantisized, in fact it's already begun. ACA will be remembered as a much better place than it actually was... or is. Maybe it's better that way.

Badgesers

We've been busy rehearsing for a new show at Dad's Garage. My buddy Tim wrote a play called Get Downsized. It takes place in a typical office, there are no words spoken during the play, everything is completely physical. It's a real challenge. Lately, when I actually perform on stage, I have become so reliant on smart alecky "wisecracks" it's hard to keep my mouth shut. Plus it's sooo much easier to just say what you're doing rather than actually do what you are doing... you know?

As an improvisor, speech is a luxury we take for granted. Expressing an emotion or thought without talking is like... real acting. (read: hard)

Anyway, Get Downsized (<-- here is where I'd link to the Dad's webpage so you could buy tickets to our show, but they haven't listed it yet, thanks Dad's, smart move) opens this weekend Friday the 17th at 8:00pm in The Top Shelf @ Dad's Garage. Also, our animation ("as theatrically invigorating as watching TV" says The Sunday Paper's Bert Osborne) is still running in the main space @ Dad's as part of the 8.5 X 11 short play Festival The Birds and The Bees.

I took some time to make a few project badges, you can notice them to the right over there ---->

They look like this:

Often times I'll tell someone about one project or another we've done here on the website, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. I thought maybe it was because traditionally my projects are subtly listed in text in the navigation bar. I've dropped that approach in favor of the large gaudy eye-catching badges you see now.

1 Infinite Loop; Cupertino, CA 95014

Mike Matas is a User Interface Designer for a little company out of Cupertino, California.

On his weblog he gives step by step instructions detailing how to make a "Life Poster" in iPhoto out of 98 of your favorite photos. And despite the name "Life Poster" it's a super cool trick. In the comments he even briefly covers how to do it on a PC.

The last couple versions of iPhoto have had the option to buy prints directly through the program, and have them shipped to your door. To order one of these 20X30 inch "Life Posters" through iPhoto only costs around $30 including shipping. For a complete custom one-off poster, that's not too shabby. I wonder if you could upload a vector line drawing, and have a poster made of that...

Time to get The Papers... The Papers

The reviews for 8.5 X 11 have mostly come in, that's the short play festival our animation was commissioned for.

Almost every review calls the entire show a success, which is nice.

Two of the reviews (Creative Loafing, and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution) site our animation as a high-point of the show...

Two of the reviews fail to mention our piece at all. (Backstage, and David Atlanta... I actually see this as completely fair, the reviews in question come from theatrical publications, our animation is not very theatrical)

Finally the last review calls our animation a low point. (The Sunday Paper) Even going so far as to call it: "a computer-animated presentation that has no more to do with the birds and the bees than it belongs on a stage (it's as theatrically invigorating as watching TV)."

Heh, yikes!

That last review presented here in the pursuit of fairness, or maybe to convince myself that I really do have a thick skin. Not every review is going to be a good one. But somehow I can't help thinking that Bert Osborne at The Sunday Paper missed the point of what we were trying to do. But again, that's his right as a reviewer.. to miss the point.

Over the 7 or so years that I have performed at Dad's Garage, either as an Improvisor, a straight-up Actor (well straight-up except for the time I played that gay character, oh... and that woman), or as a Director/Play-write, I have been met mostly with positive reviews. And if the review was a bad one, I was never sited so explicitly as in The Sunday Paper. You know what they say though, the bad ones stick out.

Even so, I am happy to consider myself lucky. I'm also lucky that I don't work at The Sunday Paper, a terrible publication I wouldn't line my imaginary bird's cage with, nor wrap my imaginary dead fish in.

Just kidding... but not really.

Oh Canada!

Everybody knows how great Canada is. (we have often speculated that Canadians are at least 20% funnier than Americans) I once spent a week in Edmonton Canada improvising at The Rapid Fire Theater for one of their improv festivals. It was like the greatest spring break a dorky improvisor could hope for. The weather in Edmonton was unseasonably warm, the hostel we stayed in had no air conditioning because the canadians were all like "It's never this hot!! It's the end of the WORLD!" It wasn't, but those Canadians can be so dramatic. (only 10% more dramatic)

We at Dad's Garage, the theatre I work at, call Rapid Fire Theatre our "sister theatre" but that's just because we want so badly to be associated with their awesomeness. They are some of the funniest performers I have had the luck to see perform, and be on stage with!

While in Edmonton, I remember thinking that these people I was seeing perform, these are the people I'm going to see in the next few years on sitcoms, television commercials, sketch comedy shows... I was seeing the future. And I was right.

One of our favorite people from Edmonton, the boyishly handsome Josh Dean, has landed himself a starring role in a sitcom. Josh is also writing partners with one of our other favorite canadian performers, Graham Wagner, one half of the world famous Iron Cobra. (the other half being the awesome Iron Becky)

The sitcom is called Free Ride,

If you've been watching the American Idol auditions like we have, you might have seen a commercial for it. The good news is that Josh is the main character, the bad news is that it's on Fox. And we all know how they treat talented and funny people.

Am I saying that Free Ride will be the next Arrested Development? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it does look funny, and I KNOW Josh is hilarious. So the forecast for now is "mostly sunny with a chance of breakthrough popularity."

And as an added extra bonus, also starring in the sitcom is our beloved Allen Havey. Who is Allen Havey? He was the host of the lovable Night After NIght with Allen Havey way back when on The Comedy Channel... that's right, before it became Comedy Central.

This show definitely has the credentials, now it just has to be funny, which I am sure it will be. Check it out, There's a special preview of Free Ride March 1st after American Idol on FOX @ 9:30pm eastern

Binary Death Spiral

So far people have been complimentary about our animation. Thanks. One of the comments we get the most is that people want to be able to read all the text that pops up in the animation. We appreciate that too, I think it means people are interested in what's going on.

The good thing is that all the text is real, it all says something. Like in the launch scene, all the text boxes that pop up next to the rocket are real specifications for a titan II rocket with two stages, and a capsule payload. But for the most part the text isn't supposed to be legible.

There are a few parts where it might be beneficial to read the text. For instance, when the boy robot is in space, he writes some poems that he sends to the girl robot. Each poem is supposed to be inspired by the cosmological images he observes. And each of those images has been digitally painted by us in photoshop.

Here is the quasar he sees, and the dorky poem associated with it, presented as a desktop in two formats:

@ 1440 pixels wide (15inch powerbook version)
@ 1600 pixels wide

Life Beyond Earth

And The Mind of Man.

From the same collection of National Archive Films that have been uploaded for free downloads to Google Video, the film is an edited version of a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972. It explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe.

Featuring some of the most brilliant minds of the time, and in fact, the most brilliant minds still of today... Dr. Richard Berendzen, astronomy professor and historian of science at Boston University; Dr. Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, social biologist and author at Rutgers University; Dr. Philip Morrison, physicist educator and philosopher of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Dr. Krister Stendahl, clergyman and theologian at Harvard University; and Dr. George Wald, biologist at Harvard University...

and of course...

Dr. Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University.

Intellects... Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic

"Minds that are to our minds as our minds are to the beasts in the jungle."

Google is running a project with the National Archives to upload 101 significant films from the archive to Google Video.

One of those videos is called Who's Out There. Made in 1975, the year I was born, and narrated by Orson Wells. (with a guest appearance from the beloved and brilliant, television's favorite nerdy scientists, and 1970's swinger... Carl Sagan!)

Wells begins the film by reading from H. G. Wells' famous science fiction book The War of the Worlds. He then talks about his equally famous radio broadcast and dramatization of the same book, and how people really thought aliens were landing wen they heard the broadcast. Then actual real-life people who were fooled into jamming the highways, or who ran into the hills are interviewed. They try to give us perspective as to why they were fooled so easily.

Spotted: The Jewish Canadian Rapper

wow...

I just stumbled onto the reel of a video director that totally blew us away. His name is Keith Schofield. He makes charming, funny, and interesting videos for mostly indie bands. Though he seems to have some projects with some bigger names on the horizon. (read: Deathcab)

First, here is the video for Pi by Hard 'N Phirm. It involves some kid's from the 70's learning about math, 2 weird wizards with mustaches, and of course a robot.

Next up is the video for 3 Feet Deep by DJ Format featur