Blue Smoke of the Moon

I blew my writing wad this weekend on a review of The Flaming Lips full album tribute to Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I didn't really like it, and the comments section thus far are in disagreement with me. See if you agree with me or the commentors - you can listen to the whole thing on LaLa for free. Admittedly, the premise of my review is that it's really not worth fifty minutes of your time, but you'll never know unless you try it.

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Hiding in Plain Sight

Couldn't find the damn thing for years. And it turns out that it was just sitting in the corner of the bedroom.

I'm pretty stoked.

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Low Moon

Just rolled over to see the moon lurking like a streetlight outside our window/

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Goddamn Blogger

Just got a message from Google today that they'll be discontinuing their FTP service as of March 26th. Which means that I'll no longer be able to publish the Subway Rambler to my own site folder. I can switch to their host, or something they call 'custom domains,' which I haven't yet looked into because something about the name sounds depressing to me - like they know it's a fairly lame service so they gave it a sweet-sounding name to candy it up a little.

The main selling point with Blogger, as far as I'm concerned, was the ability to host it on the main Copper Man site. Google claims only 1/2 of 1% of Blogger users use the FTP feature, a figure I don't believe at all and yet have to assume is true. If it is true, it's partly because they don't make it easy to use the FTP publisher, or even to find it. One more part of the increasingly annoying Google service based on their economy of free is the sheer opacity of navigating the help directory or even finding out about their tools searching elsewhere on the internet. As much as I've enjoyed digging around and solving problems on Blogger, I'll admit that pretty much every solution I've come up with to meet my needs has been very much one of the spit-and-sealing-wax variety, and I'm kind of tired of having the seams showing.

So, the big question: do I use this opportunity to switch the Rambler to WordPress? There are apparently WordPress tools that migrate the site seamlessly, but I've also got 715 entries (nearly three years' worth by the deadline), and I'll become positively apoplectic if I lost them. But the fact is that I've been needing to learn WordPress for a while (and Joomla, if I can ever bring myself to), and this may be the writing on the wall for me and Google, which is a company I've grown daily less fond of.

Perhaps the main reason why only .005 of all Blogger users use the FTP feature is that those who have the skills to work it out just go ahead and use WordPress instead, because it's better.

One thing's for sure: time to break out the printer and get a hard copy of all this. Ugh.

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Let It Be Known That I Am A Complete Photoshop Genius

That's the final product, a poster for Putnam's side project. Click to see the luscious detail. No big deal? Well, check out the raw materials:













Hosannas may begin in the comments section when you're done picking your jaw up off the floor.

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Disney Gets Going

Waited longer to see The Princess and the Frog than I usually do with new Disney films. The delay was for a lot of reasons, but mostly a feeling from the previews that this would be lackluster.

But I have to say, it was very enjoyable. The animation wasn't quite up to the peak of their late 90's run. Too, the character designs were a little bland, and the color palette was hazy and undefined, leaving the whole production feeling a little more like an animated Thomas Kinkade painting than any Disney film should.

All of that aside, the film was well written, easygoing and had two really stunning sequences - namely, the heroine's first song, as usual, the villain's song. Apologies for no full video on that second number, which is wonderfully kinetic and spooky, and psychedelic in the best Disney tradition. Dr. Facilier is a wonder of lanky animation, and it's nice to see that the artists aren't afraid to push his design a little bit into caricature. You can see a little of it here.

If this film is the starter's pistol in a new run of amazing animated features from Disney, then not only is it a good start, but also placing them a little ahead of the game, since I think it's a bit stronger than 'The Little Mermaid,' with the exception of Ashman and Menken's excellent songs from that film, of course.

PS: Yesenia liked it, too.

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The Swing of Things

The Spring semester starts this week, and I'm still only taking one class, although it's a doozy - Pre-Calculus. Just the fact that - unlike Intermediate Algebra, which met once a week - Pre-Calc is Monday and Wednesday nights, gives the whole thing an air of being harder, so the math anxiety is coiling up accordingly. Ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.

I've also started work on a 'secret project.' Nothing spectacular about it, I assure you, but I've always wanted to have a secret project. No animals will be harmed during production. The work itself goes/will go slowly, so I won't make any further announcements until there's something to announce.

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