Tim's Journal

The wallpaper meme

2009-09-25T21:33:31Z

(Snagged from my wonderful kevinjdog)
☞ If you like, post this meme and your current wallpaper.
☞ Explain in no more than five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
☞ Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

(Click it to see it fullsize)
In one sentence: Look at the picture :D :D :D

Luv ya, Thomas :D :D :D :D :D :D

timtylor @ 2009-09-21T21:40:00

2009-09-21T20:43:40Z

"Uh, wait... we ARE in Kansas."
(Link from Dkumar)

Movie trailers run long enough to get their own reviews now.

2009-08-05T01:45:29Z

The Box trailer review. Agreed about the general bloating, but... the reviewer just described "Do we kill someone for cash?" as a complex moral dilemma. What the heck?

It sounds like the original was a good sharp story but there's no obvious dilemma, just a nasty well-oiled temptation. Big important difference. It's a dilemma when something makes it hard to see the right choice. The button doesn't do that - it just makes the wrong one easy.

Prosecution, Egoboostion

2009-07-21T19:02:02Z

On trial for assault, England footballer Steven Gerrard. David Turner QC, prosecuting, lets flow the prose.
"Not many people on Merseyside, or indeed anywhere else, would refuse a request from Steven Gerrard ... a succession of well aimed uppercut punches delivered with the style and speed of a professional boxer..." Man, if I'm ever in dock I want this man prosecuting me. Turner QC knows how to butter up a defendant.

Horrible effects of cumulative jam toxicity

2009-06-14T21:27:38Z

Things I learned from Corman's Wasp Woman (Youtube link)

When lab rats get very old, they become guinea-pigs.
Cats can't act in fight scenes.
A werewasp can eat three people in a few days and keep her figure.
Corporate mad-science labs are badly lit.
Werewasps can't act in fight scenes.
You can have too much jumpy jazz in a horrorfilm score.

The Herbert Luvvyduvvy Awards for Elegant Golden-Age Comicbook Prose

2009-05-20T20:27:12Z

"...A dark ominous shadow disjointed itself from the eerie grotesque boles bordering the steaming, cobbled street..." The Clock Struck Doom, Black Cat Mystery #37, posted at Pappy's Golden Age Comic Blogzine.

According to the online dictionaries, "bole" is either the trunk of a tree, clay, paint, or a Chadic language spoken in northern Nigeria and closely related to Hausa. Can't see any of those in the pictures...

The Left-Behind Theory of Big Voids in Seattle

2009-05-10T10:35:12Z

Could this...

explain that? (Video)

timtylor @ 2009-04-09T14:44:00

2009-04-09T13:56:40Z

Cowboys and zombies, hard-boiled crime and zombies, space invasions and zombies, Regency romance and zombies... basically, zombies are the new fries.

timtylor @ 2009-01-31T15:10:00

2009-01-31T15:12:30Z

Quick check - is anyone else finding every single Google search result for any term apart from Youtube pages flagged "This site may harm your computer"?
Update: Okay, it's not just me and the mescalin then.

Tim Likes To Rant Insanely About Bad Movies

2008-12-26T23:43:30Z

Journey To The Center Of The Earth (2008) is as enjoyable as watching milk go off. Journey To The Center Of The Earth (2008) (3D version) is as enjoyable as watching milk go off in Ultra-Futuristic OwIveASplittingHeadache-O-Vision. Film score is Michael Dudbland's much-loved Generic Upbeat Symphony, the same music that's used in every dull family film ever. There is one (1) half-decent joke in the whole horrible affair, but it's half an hour into the thing, and after the first ten minutes you won't remember what a sense of humor is. Stay away, friends. There aren't even many CGI monsters - a few plesiosaurs, one (1) T rex and some bitey fish. Oh, and a little blue tweety-bird.
(Disclaimer: The above was written in the grip of mild flu. I'm looking through jaundice-coloured glasses right now.)

I've got an Earworm, A teeny tiny Earworm...

2008-11-26T19:44:06Z

It's a rock-and-roll number with an irresistable tune and a lyric composed of random cliché porridge run through a fit-the-rhyme program, or sounds like it - Ride a circle round the Sun / Touch - The - truth and burn! / Like a Mes-Sage on the run / Sea-sons change, turn turn turn! "In the name of Liberty" and "Heal this loss in me" are in there too. I want the witless thing out of my head. Now.

Actually, the band responsible have a lot of pretty fine numbers too. Maybe this one's their equivalent of Tailsteak's The Band's Parsnip Song. Though that's angry energetic nonsense and my earworm is sappy-clappy Bad Eurovision nonsense.

On closer websearching, I find it was "written for Key to the North, a film about Newark's involvement in the English Civil War". Which clarifies nothing.

timtylor @ 2008-11-15T13:09:00

2008-11-15T13:13:38Z

Stan Lee's Harpies (YouTube clip) makes me appreciate the true genius of Ray Harryhausen. I mean, by comparison.

timtylor @ 2008-11-06T01:40:00

2008-11-06T01:43:45Z

If I cannot forget this, I will never sleep again.
"Baby Laugh-a-Lot" doll commercial. (YouTube)

Babble

2008-10-25T01:21:02Z

I really really want to see a Scott Bateman video of Re your brains. Really.

timtylor @ 2008-10-16T21:51:00

2008-10-16T23:46:38Z

Some favorite linkies.

For those not sick of the economic fubar, HowStuffWorks.com on Credit Default Swaps. Page one is a beautifully nasty analogy for this part of the frakkin' mess.

For those who think that after all the bad nights it's given us, economics owes us a bedtime story: Daniel Abraham's The Cambist and Lord Iron. A Wildean fairytale giving an economics lesson of a different sort: not so much about how the systems work as about what trade and exchange and wealth actually mean.

For those who want to change the topic entirely: Puppet for Your Thoughts from Larry Blamire's Tales from the Pub short video series. Twilight Zone melted into Monty Python. This link dedicated to the great kevinjdog. :)

Localicalities

2008-09-15T21:49:29Z

Bits and bods on my home town, for all whom it may concern.

A potted intro, not entirely flattering but basically accurate. The centre's in the throes of a much-delayed makeover, so is progressively getting poshed up and prettified.

A more colourful piece from the local historical society. We're not the most exciting of towns but we do have some nice bits of building round the place. :)

Lo, our rail station has its own Wikipedia entry.

A ghost story. The southwest has more phantom hounds than rabbits, almost.

Aggadon't

2008-08-15T00:45:02Z

Satire can backfire like a Stephen King clown-car. Summer of 1986, this frakkin' song was everywhere and driving me NUTS. And returned in after years as the local Christmas pantomime singalong number.

(Youtube video of the original comedy sketch. I'll concede it's funny there... but it didn't stay there...)

Rugose goodness

2008-08-09T22:25:07Z

The yellow dog rocks mightily. Thanks, Thomas. :D

timtylor @ 2008-08-09T20:52:00

2008-08-09T20:19:09Z

"One of my ancestors, the first owner of this house, practiced black magic with the aid of mystic candles made from bat's eggs and strands of hangman's rope for the wicks!"
(Pre-code horror comic The Beyond, no. 12,, courtesy of Wowio and Hero Initiative)
Black magic is a lot harder than it looks.

Holy Massively Overused Clich-ay, Blogreaderperson!

2008-07-21T18:12:26Z

When the collecting bug goes buggy
The comic is now ready to be fitted inside an archival-quality interior well, which is then sealed within a transparent capsule, along with the book’s color-coded label. This is accomplished through a combination of compression and ultrasonic vibration. The result is a newly-encapsulated CGC comic, ready to be shipped to its proud owner. Em-hem.

I suppose the conflict between keeping collectable things safe and sellable vs. being able to enjoy-them-as-meant comes to a head with comics. "Book" books are relatively robust, and you can see a baseball card fine inside a transparent plastic box. But comicbooks have the tragic combination of flimsiness and interior pages. And so it becomes a common though controversial practice for collectors to have their comics professionally checked for quality and sealed away in "Quality guaranteed, void if opened" boxes. I understand it, but it still tastes like Python to me.

A little bed-time thought

2008-07-19T00:47:15Z

The idea that ghosts are hallucinations is creepier than by the thought of them being real. You could avoid "real" ghosts by staying out of haunted properties, cemetries etc. But hallucinations can happen to you anywhere. >;D

Coulrophobia for fun

2008-07-17T20:01:33Z

These days the major western folk-demons are Vampires, Werewolves and Clowns. The first two have a steady tradition, moon garlic graves silverbullet pointysticks yadda yadda, largely patched up by Hollywood from bits of folklore and Stoker, but they seem okay with it. But clowns are starved of back-story - Monday morning, they're happy serial killers, Tuesday lunch they're aliens in fright wigs and by Thursday they're Tim Curry down a storm-drain prattling about buoyancy. Justice demands they be given their own consistent mythos.

"They grow from the garish-colored fungi infesting lost cellars and evil woods. A dead clown should be burned; if buried, the fungi will grow from its grave, and any who eat this will die of it and rise from their own graves as clowns. In the day clowns hide from the sun in garbage bins and the larger kinds of postbox; at night they fall on travellers, paralysing them with pies of poison custard, and make them into sausages. They feed on the blood of their victims, stored in their bloated nose-bladders. Their cold hollow laughter corrodes mind and soul.

The only true defense is to gather one's courage and laugh back at them, for they have no true sense of humor and will burst and die from rage at human mockery. For this purpose the institution of Circus was created, in which men dress as clowns and perform absurdities so as teach us mirth in the face of these monsters."

timtylor @ 2008-07-06T00:43:00

2008-07-06T00:24:51Z

Being poor on architecture I'm wondering what the official term is for the "American Stereotype Haunted" house-style favored by the Addamses and the Bateses. The sort with the cute turrets and the steep roofs topped with spiky-railed platforms. (I don't think there's a British Stereotype Haunted style, which is maybe a pity.)

Destined for the 23rd circle of Hell, the one filled with custard

2008-06-29T11:23:33Z

Seen on a Youtube webpage, a big yellow Google-syndicated ad for "Wacky Prank Calls" offering such delights as "You got my daughter pregnant", "The IRS wants 20K", "You were caught downloading porn".

Coming up soon, a detective breaks down in tears as he tries to read a thirty-page murder-suspect list...

Like tar. But tasty tar.

2008-06-28T23:46:03Z

Interesting info on marmite (thanks to francisblack and his team). I love the stuff but even I have to admit wonderment that it ever caught on.