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Behind “The Waldo Ultimatum” (Part 1)

The Where’s Waldo on WordPress blog has posted the first part of a three-part interview Matt Hoos and I conducted with blogger Michael Liss last month about “Where’s Waldo” and even thought it was a three hour discussion about Waldo, he’s somehow managed to make us sound reasonably coherent.

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Ah man this is going to be stuck in my head all day…

Feist teaches us about counting to a number bigger than three, but less than five…

Plight of the Beer Commercial Husband

beer commercial husband, your plight is that of blindness to her plight. your only explanation you offer when she found you pouring kitty litter into the bathtub is a sheepish grin. you impulse-bought a motorcycle when the two of you were saving for a minivan, and your solution is to get a sidecar and a baby-sized germanic helmet that reads “lunch time” beneath a cartoon drawing of some tits.

Yes this is a little late, what with the theme-park distractions and all, but I felt it was important to publicly acknowledge the post that accompanies this comic over at Chainsawsuit.

Plight of the Beer Commercial Husband is quite possibly the finest thing Kris Straub has ever written.

And that’s saying something.

Rocket Ace Moving Pictures: Questionable Choices in Corporate Retreats Since 2008

Sorry it was such a quiet few days. I have a bit of a hard time tracking to whom I’ve said what (and where), but much of the RocketAce family decended upon San Diego last week to celebrate the wedding of Chad Thompson and Jennie Reichert. We were only a handful of cast and crew away from a full on Dead End Days convention – so good times were most assuredly had.

Also there were theme parks.

C-61: Attack of the Comments Thread

My previous post on C-61 sparked some interesting comments from Russell McOrmond (a programmer from Ottawa who raised some interesting points vis-a-vis software) and Tim Harwell (a musician from my hometown of Calgary who… just didn’t agree with a lot of what I said).

Since I know many/most of you don’t read the comments – I thought I’d take a minute to summarize a couple of points (and Tim’s latest e-mail, which I think deserves a full response as it echoes a lot of things I’ve seen both in e-mails, and on other sites about this issue.
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Bill C-61 isn’t great for producers either.

Yeah, you had to know this was coming.

So here’s the standard disclaimer – I make the entirety of my income off profits from the exploitation of copyrighted works. Far from being a piracy apologist, I believe content creators have the right to monetize their creations as much (or as little) as they like. I have walked into certain Toronto malls and seen, no hyperbole, an entire wall of near-professional quality Asian bootleg DVD’s of a film that I worked 60-hour weeks on for more than a year. I watched people (multiple) purchase said bootlegs, knowing that not a cent of that money was going to anyone who slaved with me on that film, (or the dozens of companies that put up serious money to make that film a reality). By all accounts I should be drinking the RIAA/MPAA Kool-aid and throwing a Jim Prentice party… but I’m not.

Because this bill is just bad policy for both consumers and content producers.

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Confidential to Disney / Pixar PR & Marketing – A Proposed Deal Regarding WALL-E…

Presumably your corporate fiefdoms contain (somewhere) a vast staff who does nothing but Google your various interests all day, in order to quantify and relay “the buzz” of people with websites in lovely digest reports. I desperately cling to this belief (come on Google spider – hook a brother up).

I have nothing of any consequence to add to the already widespread discussion (and near-unanimous love-fest) of your current feature film. I viewed it seated next to a little girl – I’d guess she was about eight? Maybe? She was extremely tired upon arriving which troubled me as sleep deprived and cranky children seem to be an increasing trend at the late movies I frequent.

(A digression: Hey Parents! Your kids do not want to see 10pm movies. They want to be sleeping. They are children. It is your job to say things like “I want to see the movie too sweetie, but we’ll go tomorrow”. The film will still be playing then. It is a Pixar movie. It will still be playing at Christmas.)

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Please stop e-mailing me about DJ Coffman and “Heroes by Night”

Based, presumably, on the fact I referred to DJ Coffman in this post about why self-publishing isn’t a panacea, and the still wildly popular trio of posts about the TokyoPop pilot (the inciting incident, ensuing brough-ha, and third thing where Zuda gets dragged into the morass) people are seeming to take DJ’s post from yesterday that all is not well in his ongoing efforts to regain his “Hero by Night” rights as some kind of absolute sign from the heavens that I must renounce everything I wrote therein.

So here’s why I’m not going to do that. Read more