Posts from October 2012

Hello, everyone! Today is my favorite holiday of them all, Halloween!

This was my first Halloween in which I actually owned my own sewing machine, so I went for a much more ambitious sewing project than usual. After looking around the internets for a few minutes trying to find a good template or instructional video, I figured out how to sew the head of my costume. Here is my costume for Hween 2012!

Super Mario Mushroom coming out of a Question Block

Just by happenstance the cardboard box I chose to be the Question Block ended up being 16″ × 16″ and the original Super Mario sprite for the Question Block just happens to be 16 pixels × 16 pixels. So I just made a one-inch grid on the backs of a big piece of orange and a big piece of black paper, and cut out all the shapes for the question mark and shadows. Easy-peasy!

Continuing with the same Super Mario theme, here are my punkins for Hween 2012:

The Big Boo punkin is so shy when you’re looking at him!

But when you look away, Big Boo punkin is gonna getchoo!

I was not, of course, the only person to have a costume. On Saturday night Fools Play had its annual Halloween Show, and the whole cast was all costumed-up:

Lookit all dem Fools!

And, finally, here is Baman Piderman’s Halloween episode, “Ghost Night!” Enjoy!

Happy Hween E’rybody!

I recently stumbled across this absolutely awexome short film called Monster Roll. It’s about Sushi chefs fighting giant sea monsters. For reals. It’s very well done; take a look:

This is a “proof of concept” pitch; director Dan Blank wants to make Monster Roll into a full-length film. This is his way of showing he has the skillz to do it.

You can learn more at the Monster Roll official website and like them on their Facebook page or what-not if you like. Me, I’m a-gonna watch it one more time and hope that Mr. Blank can make it happen for realsz.

Via Daily Peril.

Last Saturday Carrie & I (and two of our friends) headed out to Leavenworth for its annual Octoberfest.

The verdict? Leavenworth was awesome. Octoberfest… not so much.

We all really loved walking around Leavenworth, eating in the restaurants (we went to Gustav’s for lunch, where I had a massive Reuben, then Baren Haus for din-dins, where I had a schnitzel done cordon-bleu style), and poking through the shops (we bought many cheeses at the Cheesemonger’s Shop and many meats at Cured).

But the actual Octoberfest itself was underwhelming. For several reasons:

• It was held on one of the only ugly streets in Leavenworth, right up against this depressing, concrete facade. One of us joked that this was the “East Berlin” part of Germany being represented.
• It was expensive to get in, and you didn’t even get any beer tickets with admission. Those were extra.
• None of the beer offerings were in any way exceptional. You could get better beers in most of the restaurants downtown.
• It was kinda frat-like. Or Douchey. Take your pick from those two adjectives.

I’m pretty sure this was another “I’m too old for this” moment. We left town before 10:00 PM (we were staying at one of our cohort’s parent’s house over in Monroe). That said, Leavenworth was lovely with its changing leaves and dramatic mountain setting. The food and drink outside of Octoberfest was delicious. And the company was delightful. Of course I didn’t take any photos.

I would love to return to Leavenworth in the fall sometime again, but I would completely skip Octoberfest and just go bar-hopping in the town itself or something.

So apparently Homer Simpson was alive in 1949. He lived in Iceland and swung a mean axe:

Translation: “The Axe Bit Too Well”

via Retronaut

On Monday Google did one of my favorite of recent Google Doodles, this one based on Little Nemo, the old-timey comic strip created by Windsor McCay. You should click this image and enjoy, then come back here for more info:

If you don’t know about Little Nemo, you really should take it upon yourself to get some educamation about him. Here’s some primers:

The Comic Strip:
Little Nemo began as a comic strip at the turn of the 20th century, in which Nemo has a series of short adventures in Slumberland that always end with him waking up in his bed. You can read a whole bunch of these amazingly-drawn strips at the Comic Strip Library here. Here’s an example of one, the famous “Walking Bed” sequence:

Little Nemo: The Walking Bed, 1908

The Animé:
In 1989 there was an animé version of the charachter, Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland. It unfortunately is not exactly stellar entertainment. There’s some excellent animation, but the screenplay went through too many hands. Eventually the screenplay was co-credited to Chris Columbus, of The Goonies, Home Alone, and Harry Potter fame. The whole movie is actually on YouTube right now, but due to the dubious legality of it, you might not be able to watch it for long:

The Video Game
There was also an excellent and quite difficult NES video game that was released around the time of the movie, called “Little Nemo: The Dream Master.” In it you throw candy into various animals and then climb into them and wear them like pajamas, each one giving you a different ability (frog lets you jump high, mole lets you dig, bee lets you fly, etc.). It’s really a classic of the NES, and you can play it online at NESCafe (again, of dubious legality) right here.

The Songs:
The “Little Nemo: The Dream Master” video game, of course, inspired the opening line of The Crazy Boy Floyds song “Scrambled TV Super.” Wot’s that? You ain’t never heard that song? Well, take a listen:

Yes, that’s right: “Sometimes you crawl into a frog, and wear it like pajamas as you hop along your log.” Pretty sweet, I know.*

And then, of course, rapper Mega Ran wrote a song about the video game that samples the 8-bit music from the game! Take a listen:

It all just keeps going! Little Nemo forevah!

*Full disclosure: I wrote the music for the “Scrambled TV Super” song, so I might be a bit biased.

Fortune favors the brave…

Brave is a nice, pleasant little film. It is certainly enjoyable. It just seems like it could have been… more. [Read my full review]

I don’t like sportsball, as you all know. But on October 6th something magnificent happened during the halftime show of an Ohio State vs Nebraska footsball game:

Seriously, watching that brings tears to my eyes.