Journal
September 24, 2007 | Links
A collection of references, some obvious, others less so on the influences of Star Wars. A rather interesting read.
Concentrating on influences or references utilized in films based solely on the Star Wars saga doesn’t paint a whole reference picture. Some people may be surprised that Lucas borrowed so many elements from the past. But, anyone who watches films or reads books, all genres and generations, realizes that there is nothing new in the world. We repeat and repackage themes over and over again. I, for one, am thankful there are people on the planet, like Lucas, who pay homage to ideas, story concepts and visual elements from admired and legendary foundations.
It must have taken a lot of time and close examination to put this all together. There’s even some Indiana Jones references towards the bottom of the page.
[via JazJaz]
September 18, 2007 | Web Design
Gone are the days of marquees, animated gifs and embedded midi files (thank God) but there are still things that people do that drive others crazy.
Since I am (still) working on my “redesign” for Binary Moon I thought I would look into what stops people from reading blogs. More specifically I was looking for reasons people would stop visiting a site, or worse, close it as soon as it loads.
The Tips
These tips are ranked in my personal order of preference, but I’m sure there are others I’ve missed so please do let me know in the comments if there’s anything I’ve missed.
Snap.com previews. Snap.com offer a way to add “previews” to external websites you link to on your pages. By previews I mean tiny screenshots that pop up on mouse over. In my mind they offer no value to visitors whatsoever. All they do is slow down the page load, …
September 14, 2007 | Reviews
JazJaz.net was the winner of my links competition and his main prize was a permanent review on my site, so I thought it was about time I pulled my finger out and wrote the thing.
The Site
First some background. JazJaz.net is a blog consisting of a multitude of short, pop culture inspired, articles. Many are geeky, many are daft, but all are interesting (to me at least). The reason I picked JazJaz as the winner of the competition was simply that his site had the content I found most enjoyable.
Things I like
The content. I know I said it above but the content is great. It’s actually almost a tumbleblog style affair but without the mindless nonsense and just the geeky goodness I love
The design. I realise the site is built on Wordpress, and I realise it uses a theme which itself is the offspring of two other themes, …
September 13, 2007 | Links
Just been pointed to a rather nice little Firefox addons called Leechblock by a post over on Blog Clout.
LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.
The idea of the extension is that you can block groups of sites for specified periods of time - either an amount of time per hour/ day/ week (eg you can access the sites for 10 minutes an hour) or between certain times of the day. The plugin is only really as good as your conscience as it is trivial to disable but it’s a nice way to warn yourself that you are doing something too much, when you should be working.
September 7, 2007 | Links
An Italian friend of mine showed this to me recently - some 3d visualisation technology (or whatever you call it). Unfortunately I don’t speak the language so my friend did the translation for me so, in the likely event that you don’t speak Italian, I have added the transcript below.
Look at this thing. It’s really cool. It’s like Star Wars… only real!!!
Watch the video and be amazed - I’m looking forward to seeing future versions of it.
To tell the truth I had to do some digging to find a video to put on my site… the one on the Italian site wouldn’t embed for some reason, you should check it out though as it is more interesting and better quality than the Youtube one above. The video is actually a prize winner from Siggraph 2007 - a yearly graphics and animation conference. Basically it’s where all the clever …
I saw the Simpsons movie recently and I must say - I enjoyed it. A lot.
Going in to it I was concerned that it would be like watching three episodes back to back, and I had seen some reviews on tv where they said it was just that, but once the credits started to roll I felt I had watched a fully fledged movie - and an enjoyable one at that.
The basic premise of the story is clearly inspired by the tv series. In short the story is… Homer does something disastrously wrong… then fixes it.
Along the way you bump into all the major (and many minor) characters from the last 20 years of cartoons, and you even get to find out where Springfield is located… kinda.
I liked the way the story started off like a normal episode and then grew to a full fledged narrative of it’s own …
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