Monitor Duty

December 04, 2006

And now a brief word from our sponsor

Play it big. Don’t crowd around that tiny computer monitor. Play your PC games on the big screen with the power of Intel® Viiv™ and HP®.

I hope you'll all give this a click just once before the campaign ends this month. I had to take off the ad banner because we'd actually maxed out the number of impresions...which is a good thing, meaning the site's traffic is way up. I think it's a much more suitable product for our site, anyway. It's a bit of a unique idea, allowing people to watch PC video games on their big plasma screen TVs instead of squinting at a small monitor. I know there's a good portion of our audience who are big enough video game enthusiasts to be interested in this.

Sadly, I don't play anything besides solitaire and the occasional Red Ace Squadron because if I were to play any new video games they would take over my life for a week...and I just don't have any spare time to devote to them. I haven't even cracked open my "Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich" because I'll just wreck my carpally tunneled hands playing it for hours!

Posted by thehutch at 12:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty Site News

December 03, 2006

X-MEN 3: The Broadway Cut!

Genius. Sheer comedy genius.

X-MEN 3: THE LAST STANDING OVATION!

Sadly, this would have been more entertaining than the actual film was.

Kistler has spoken.

Posted by Alan Kistler at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty's Own Reporting

December 02, 2006

Great, now I'm addicted

[UPDATE: Half a day late, it occurs to me that "The 'a' in aStore is for Addictive" would have been a way way funnier subject line.]

This stupid "Monitor Duty aStore" is just too much fun! Or maybe it's a lot of work. I can't really tell at the moment.

Aside from talking to Beau Smith on the phone (Beau answers as though he's auditioning for "The Blue Collar Comedy Tour") and hitting a showing of "Casino Royale" for an all-too rare date with my wife, my Friday was spent adding products to the aStore. My only regret is that I filled up a category called "Cartoon box sets" before I realized it should have been a sub-category, and i don't want to have to redo all my work!

One thing I would mention: Amazon is having a major sale on DVD box sets for TV shows, as you'll see at our aStore. Robot Chicken (which I JUST bought for the "low sale price" of $15 at Target) is only $9, as is the highly-recommended "Venture Brothers" and the first season of Harvey Birdman. These and many more would make great Christmas Presents for the geek on your list (though any true geek already has them).

I created a "Making Comic Books" category and am busily hunting up more books for it. I'm sure that will come in handy to many of our readers. There's also a "Michael Recommends" section; I realize I'm opening myself up to ridicule as you see the kinds of music I like, but it had to be done.

Posted by thehutch at 01:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty Site News

December 01, 2006

"Mask of the Phantasm" composer dies

From Paul Dini's Live Journal:

Just learned Shirley Walker passed away at age 61. Shirley was the composer we worked with on many of the Warner Bros. animated adventure series: BATMAN, SUPERMAN, BATMAN BEYOND, THE ZETA PROJECT as well as a number of direct to videos. In addition to be a tremendously talented composer, Shirley was one of the sweetest people you could ever hope to meet.
I could go on and on about how amazing her music was, but any of her scores could tell you better.

Shirley did the music for "Mask of the Phantasm" and created a new choral Batman theme that was so good it replaced the Danny Elfman theme as the opening for "Batman: The Animated Series." R.I.P.

Posted by thehutch at 09:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Television

Kistler's Review of SUPERMAN II - THE RICHARD DONNER CUT

A while ago, Richard Donner made a wonderful movie called (fittingly) SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE. It was a fun story with some great acting and wonderful moments and lines that just made you smile. Sure, even a child understands that time travel is not as easy as turning the Earth back on its axis, but what the Hell.

Donner had been simultaneously filming SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE and SUPERMAN II, but disagreements with the producers led to him being fired before he could complete the sequel. Richard Lester was brought in to direct and gave us his version of the film. Gene Hackman left the film when Donner was fired, necessitating the Lester use a body double and some voice dubbing for a couple of scenes (the other scenes he used what footage he could that Donner had left behind). Marlon Brando also left and his scenes were dropped from the movie entirely, as Richard Lester decided to replace his character Jor-El with Superman’s mother Lara, played by Susannah York. Lester didn’t even use the footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El acting as jailer to Zod and his crew, instead choosing to carefully cut the same footage from SUPERMAN I so that it looked like Jor-El wasn’t even necessarily there.

SUPERMAN II was hailed for giving us the first ever super-hero/super-villain battle in cinema as our hero battled Zod and his two henchmen. It also featured such classic scenes as Lois finally discovering (almost purely by accident) that Superman was Clark Kent and a very touching moment when Superman seems to speak to the ghost of his mother, asking Lara for permission to become human so he may love as a human being.

I enjoyed SUPERMAN II. There were a few scenes that dragged for me and a couple of little things I thought were unnecessary. And I had some criticisms. Richard Lester, for instance, had very little knowledge of what Kryptonians could do in the comics or simply didn’t care, because in several parts of the movie Zod and his cronies were able to telekinetically lift people into the air by pointing at them. Likewise, Superman suddenly was armed with a giant cellophane S-shield that he could throw like a net and was able to create the illusion of duplicates of himself, which he claimed had been part of a game he played as a child, implying he remembered a childhood on Krypton, which is odd since he was sent to Earth as a baby.

But still, I enjoyed it.

Ah, but now what’s happened? Because of constant fan demands, Warner Bros. was able to recover just about all of the alternate scenes and takes that Richard Donner shot and never showed on film. With all of this, Richard Donner went back and re-cut the movie, using this never-before-seen footage and giving us a VERY different film. And so, this week fans have finally been able to purchase SUPERMAN II: THE RICHARD DONNER CUT.

Before I begin, I want to point out that anyone who wants to buy the Richard Donner cut, please be aware that Donner’s version is the one with the black box and which says “The Richard Donner Cut” in big letters. [Shyster Editor's Note: It's the first thing linked in Monitor Duty's new aStore so that you can't get the wrong one. Shop with confidence!] It is NOT the re-released version of Superman II on DVD which also comes in the Superman box set. That is Lester’s film with a couple of special features added, that’s all.

All right, let’s begin. Be warned, some SPOILERS follow.

Continue reading "Kistler's Review of SUPERMAN II - THE RICHARD DONNER CUT"

Posted by Alan Kistler at 11:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty's Own Reporting

November 30, 2006

Visit Monitor Duty's new aStore!

I'm still building it as we speak, but I'm giving out the URL now:
Monitor Duty's aStore

Posted by thehutch at 10:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty Site News

Harry Belafonte was bad enough

Every time I buy bananas, I end up looking them over tentatively. Why?

A beautiful bunch of ripe ba-na-na
(daylight come and me wanna go ho-ome)
hide de deadly BLACK TARONCHLA!
(daylight come and me wanna go home)

i know, I know, it's a goofy song and tarantulas aren't even deadly, but I think of that every time I am in the supermarket. Belafonte has had me creeped out for decades now because of his stupid little hit song.

And now there's an actual deadly spider hiding in storebought grapes in my state! Aagh!

It's getting so an arachnophobe can't go to the store these days!

Posted by thehutch at 09:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Off-topic

Sorry Mike, I couldn't resist...

Posted by gottlieb at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category:

Can we all agree on the death penalty for spammers?

[WARNING: Angry, angry rant follows. If you want to skip over the screaming and find out where this impacts you, just scroll down to the bold part.]

Spam is getting to be far more than just an annoyance.

Here on Monitor Duy, our comments get spammed all the time. Our trackbacks get spammed. Our message board was losing visitors because the spam posts were so constant. Dealing with this spam is just getting to be too much, even with filters. It's just enough of a daily hassle that it makes this site an unpleasant chore.

And now, after a long respite, the spammers are kicking into overdrive for the holidays. I know this because they spoof my domain's address. They find a list of established domains and send out spams that hide their sender's real information by claiming to be from that domain. Thus the sender field reads "fred-at-fanzing.com" and "jimmy-at-fanzing.com", the first name generated at random, and the recipient doesn't know who is really sending it.

A victimless crime? Not when I get 400 e-mails in six hours all addressed to nonexistent fanzing.com users. I have to deal with all the bounced e-mails that I didn't send, all the "I'm out of the office" notifications, all the spam-weeding systems that ask me to sign in before my original spam message that I didn't send can go through. I try setting up rules and filters to deal with all of this, but legit e-mails always end up paying the price.

I don't even get why there are spammers. Can there really be any people left taking stock advice from an e-mail from someone they don't know with a subject line "Outbursts not incongruent" followed by a two page fiction story to mask the e-mail's content hidden in a graphic? I recognize the principle at work here, that of casting a wide net and catching just a few, but I can't believe it pays at all anymore. Yet spammers continue to be relentless.

Why can't you see your comments on this site until I approve them? SPAMMERS! Why do e-mails to me get lost or not read for days? SPAMMERS! And why do I have to write "fred-at-" instead of "fred@"? Because SPAMMERS steal e-mail addresses from web pages.

Spammers take everything wonderful about the world and turn it to crap.

Spammers should be shot in the head...and I'm suggesting such a fast, painless death merely so that the proposition can gain a wider appeal. What I truly wish would happen to them involves ferrets.

Henceforth and heretoforthwith this site now requires a Typekey ID to comment. I'm sorry to have to do this, but as I said, spammers ruin everything good. The upside of this is that all comments will now appear instantly.

I ran this by you a couple months back and some of you said you wouldn't get a Typekey ID. Your reasons are your own, but I wish you weren't afraid of it. Here's the Typekey main page, and check out the short signup page which asks for just a name and e-mail. Your information is totally secure, and once you've signed in you can comment more easily than before.

I realize some of you said you prefered the confirmation code box. I realize that it's a satisfying alternative for the really desperate libertarian or those who crave total anonymity, but these things are at the very least a hassle and sometimes they're dang near impossible to read. Every time I contribute to the Homestar Runner Wiki I have to squint and try to determine whether a line is an uppercase I or a lowercase L, whether the squiggly thing is a u or a v and whether it's a small uppercase or large lowercase. FORGET IT! It's ridiculous to install a hassle when Typekey is hassle-free.

The only downside I can see is that our most-commented-on-post ever will not receive any more comments.

Until we can hunt spammers for sport, this will have to do.

Posted by thehutch at 11:25 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty Site News

November 28, 2006

Surprised this isn't a worldwide sensation

These people made a Non-Newtonian Fluid from water and cornstarch. Result? It's a liquid, but if you hit it with enough force it's solid. You can run across the surface of the fluid as if it's a sheet of Jell-o, even when someone else is floating in it like it's a swimming pool.

Just water and cornstarch. Amazing that this isn't something we've heard of before. You'd think fraternities would be whipping this stuff up for fundraisers.

Comment by JHoughton on MAKE:

"Two 50# bags of cornstarch from a food products supplier. That part's easy. Getting rid of the Oobleck afterwards is a bit of a pain.
N.B. Don't try to run it down the drain. It didn't really work with the hotel bathtub full that I was involved with. Turns out it doesn't decompose quickly when left outside, either."

Hat tips to TechEBlog and MAKE.

Posted by thehutch at 07:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Toys, Games and Fun

80s cartoons you might remember

Watch Intro Clips of 1980s Cartoons

This guy's linked to YouTube hosted videos of the openings from many Saturday morning cartoons. Some of these are my favorites... like...

Continue reading "80s cartoons you might remember"

Posted by thehutch at 02:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Television

November 27, 2006

PvP: The Animated Series

Scott Kurtz announced today the 2007 launch of "PvP: The Series", a hand-drawn animated cartoon that will be viewable on the web for subscribers only. Subscriptions are $19.95 for the next month, after which they will be $29.95.

Posted by thehutch at 11:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Comic Strips

November 26, 2006

Dave Cockrum 1943 - 2006

This has been a tragic weekend for comic book fans. At age 63, Dave Cockrum, the man who was so influential to the worlds of the X-Men, the Avengers, Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, passed away. It has been know for years that Mr. Cockrum has been in poor health due to complications from diabetes. He died in his sleep early this morning.

I met Dave Cockrum a couple of times and found him to be an absolute delight who loved comics and greatly enjoyed talking to fans and fellow creators at any time of day. He was a wonderful man who was responsible for creating the characters Nightcrawler, Storm and Colossus of the X-Men and Wildfire of the LSH. He pencilled the stories that featured the origin of the villain Immortus and provided the artwork for the now famous Avengers story "The Celestial Madonna" and the popular X-Men story "The Phoenix Saga." Cockrum was the writer and artist of the first Nightcrawler mini-series. Without Len Wein and Dave Cockrum's revival in the mid-70s, the X-MEN title would have remained a cancelled comic book series and possibly would have vanished into obscurity. Cockrum also did his own comic The Futurians and had a proposal for a Legion of Super-Heroes/Blackhawks crossover that would have been a lot of fun.

He was a great man and a fun man and he loved creating art. He will be missed.

DaveCockrum.net

Dave Cockum's LSH/BLACKHAWKS proposal

Posted by Alan Kistler at 03:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Category: Monitor Duty's Own Reporting