Month: June 2005

Stop! Hammertime. 🙂

TV Shows On DVD reports that “Fox has officially announced the direct-to-DVD title Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story Unrated.” The release date is September 27th, and some of the DVD features include an alternate “unrated” audio track, an “animatic comparison,” and a Season 4 Preview. Sweet!

Boing Boing posts about the MIT Weblog Survey:

The MIT Media Lab’s Cameron Marlow, creator of the excellent Blogdex service, is in the final throes of his PhD, and as part of his project, he’s conducting a survey of bloggers:

This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

FARK reports that “[horrific American Idol reject] William Hung to hook up with Billy Ray Cyrus [horrific country music wannabe] for remake of Achy Breaky Heart. Scientists fear collision of two self-parody media footnotes could create black hole of suckage so strong, it could destroy the universe.” Most distressing…

Excellent.

A couple of weeks ago, Kodak announced that it will stop making black and white photographic paper and chemicals for processing.

Having taken a black and white photography class a couple of years ago, I have a definite appreciation for developing my own film and making my own prints, but I also acknowledge that the digital revolution is slowly but surely allowing almost all darkroom functions to be reproduced digitally. There’s still something to be said for the art of tweaking your own print in a darkroom that will probably never be reproduced on a computer, but I have to admit that it takes a lot longer…

I bought my own photographic enlarger after my class and had a grand scheme of building a darkroom in our unfinished basement, but I’m not sure that will ever happen, partly because I’ve learned to work pretty well digitally, but also because I don’t know that I’ll ever want to deal with buying and maintaining all of the associated chemicals and equipment.

Many alternatives exist for black and white paper and chemicals. However, Kodak has always been the de facto leader in photographic products, and its abandonment of this format could be a death knell for conventional black and white photography…

Besides its Google Earth announcement yesterday, Google also announced the ability to play videos found during a Google Video Search via a downloadable Google Video Viewer that is based upon the open-source VLC media player application (a nice program, by the way). Very interesting…

NASA’s 3D New Worlds Atlas is a really nice interactive Flash site that allows you to explore our Solar System and galaxy.

Play Emilie’s Don’t Yawn Game and see how long you last. Oh, and here’s an article that explains the contagiousness of yawning.

A teaser trailer for Peter Jackson’s upcoming King Kong movie (embedded QuickTime video) is available for viewing. It looks like it might have promise, although watching Jack Black in a “serious” role might be tough…