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weblog :: the.rumpus :: archives Friday, March 31, 2006 Heat Vision and Jack Ben Stiller produced this show as a pilot for FOX in 1999. It stars Jack Black as an ex-astronaut on the run and Owen Wilson as the voice of Jack's talking motorcycle. Since FOX TV is run by child-eating ogres with brain damage, the show was not picked up. Thanks to the POWER OF THE INTERNET, however, we get to see what might have been. Watch the 30-minute pilot here Knowledge is power... FOR REAL. :: 11:28 AM :: :: link to this post :: Thursday, December 08, 2005 You Don't Call You Don't WriteYeah, the ol' blog has been neglected. Sorry about that, folks. I've been writing mostly on my game blog lately. I have a new game coming out this year (as in, the next few weeks) so that's where my energy has been focused. Some of you have asked to see what it is that I do for a living, so I just created a simple little online gallery of some stuff that I've made for work, plus a few random non-work images. Check it out here: http://www.workwithin.com/jsh/ Oh, and belated congrats to you, reader, if you have: - Given birth - Gotten married - Put on an art exhibit - Taken a new job - Survived a circumnavigation of the globe by sail - Pwned n00bs Please check all that apply. :: 11:19 AM :: :: link to this post :: Saturday, July 30, 2005 The Editing Room: Revenge of the SithCheck out the Editing Room's treatment of Episode III. Funny, true, and sad. But mostly funny. :: 2:18 PM :: :: link to this post :: Thursday, July 14, 2005 It's A Mario WorldI was never the biggest Super Mario fan, but as guerrilla art projects go, this is super keen: http://www.qwantz.com/posterchild/ Might have to make some of those. :: 3:36 PM :: :: link to this post :: Thursday, July 07, 2005 Why the Internet Sucks So BadLet's say I have an electric drill. It's a fine drill. I love it. I drill things. Life is good. Then one day, I find out about hacksaws. A friend of mine gives me one. Now I have an electric drill AND a hacksaw! I try to saw things, and it's cool! Sawing is fun. Now I can drill when I want to drill and saw when I want to saw. I go to the Internet and I say: "I used to have only an electric drill. Drilling is fun, and I like my drill. The other day, my friend gave me a hacksaw. I tried it, and sawing is fun! I like to saw, now, too. I wonder what other tools there are? There could be all kinds! I can't wait to find out!" The Internet says: "Why are you hating on drills? Drills are rad! All I have is a drill and I don't need any stinking hacksaw! There are all kinds of good reasons to drill things. Here is a list of 42 different reasons, with references. And there are all kinds of electric drills. Here are links to five that I like! Maybe you haven't found the right kind of drill yet. Sawing isn't drilling anyway! Sawing is something totally different, and it probably doesn't work anyway." Jeez. It's uncanny. Visit any forum or blog or anything out there, about any topic. It's all the same. The next time I see this "argument" I'm going to go right off the deep end. Maybe I should unplug my computer. :: 5:16 PM :: :: link to this post :: Friday, May 20, 2005 Matt has an interesting post about violence and aggression on his blog now (May 18th entry), and he's asking some good questions. My answers got a little long to post in his comments, so I'm going to post them here in two parts. This violence thread started on Vincent's blog, and you can check out the original discussion there.----- I used to get in fights as a kid. Nothing too serious. I had a very righteous attitude and felt like it was justified to "punish" bullies or escalate situations when there was something "wrong" going on. I took a few beatings from the school bully in 4th-6th grade, and ultimately became pretty good friends with him when his family moved into my neighborhood. Now that I think of it, I have three good friends in my lifetime that I had a knock-down fight with before we became friends. I didn't fight much in high school, but the few times it happened it was more serious. My friend Rich was a real troublemaker. He was always starting fights, and I tried to avoid being around him when he was in that kind of mood. On one occasion, though, he got in over his head with three other guys and they were gonna really pound him. I went outside and saw what was going on and so I jumped in. One of the guys grabbed me and pulled me away. I thought he was just gonna hold me back, so I stopped swinging. Then he turned and pinned me against a car and started choking me. Everything started to go dark. This is a feeling I will never forget. I hit him as hard as I could but it didn't seem to do anything. Fortunately, by then a bunch of people inside had come out and they broke it up. I didn't lose consciousness, but it was a close call. As a summer camp councilor, I broke up a few fights, but I wouldn't say I resorted to violence, really. I pulled some kids off each other and held one of them down, but didn't do any harm. By then I was studying aikido, so I restrained the kids pretty well without hurting them. They teach aikido to the parents of abusive children for just this reason. After I moved to Seattle I was teaching aikido at college as a kind of informal "club" thing. A wrestler came to class (a guy I knew and liked) and ended up basically trying to show off by tackling me suddenly. I was surprised and I threw him down pretty hard. He got mad and grabbed me again and we ended up rolling around on the floor. He pinned me and wouldn't let go so I really nailed a pressure point in his foot to get free. That was certainly a resort to violence. I had nothing to lose in that situation but my pride. I had no reason to cause the guy harm and if I had just relaxed and laughed about it, he probably would have let up. We were not friends after that, and he didn't come back to class. That was 1994. In the past 10 years, I've managed to be in no violent situations. One day before work, a homeless man staggered into me and when I turned to let him fall past, he took a swing. I stepped away and kept on walking and that was the end of it. My whole philosophy about violence and harming others has changed so much, it's hard to imagine getting into any kind of "fight" now. Your average person is not that dangerous, and if I ever have to take a few glancing punches from a drunk or a shove or two, it's no big deal. No kind of violence or retaliation would be called for, probably not even a very gentle aikido response. A few bruises is nothing worth hurting someone over, even accidentally. I'll talk about aggression in the next post. :: 11:30 AM :: :: link to this post :: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 Scenes from Skywalker Ranch, 1994 to present:Okay! Time to start writing Episode I. Got my yellow legal pad and pen... Ready! I should probably pop in the tapes of those old space movies of mine before I start. Oh what the hey... I remember them! I wrote them after all! Wait... DID I write them? I definitely wrote the first one... Let's see... I need a planet... Oh SNAP! I totally just remembered one! Tattooine. Yeah. Then the series will have symmetry and everything! Let's see... I think it had a desert on it... So... Darth has a mommy. I mean, everyone does! No father though. She needs a good name... let's see... she... me... see... she... SHMEE. Oh man, I am on FIRE! The fans have waited long enough to learn who built that stuffy gold robot. DROID. Droid. That's what I call 'em. Anyway... don't want to disappoint them! Just writing THE ORIGIN OF GOLD DROID is giving me goosebumps! They're gonna love this... Holy cow... I'm 45 pages light. This movie needs to be whole lot epic-er than that. Oh SNAP! George, you big dummy! What do people want? They want 45-minute-long chases, is what. I mean, that's like screenwriting 101. Earth to George! Heh heh. Now how do we get the kid into a car chase? It needs to be TOTALLY BELIEVABLE... Man... this "Phantom Menace" isn't very funny. I mean, sure, it's exciting, what with the trade negotiations and senate hearings, but it needs some slapstick! Like people tripping and getting their tongues caught in things. I always wanted to do that in the old movies, but we just didn't have the right tongue technology... Honey! Can you take the little one? I'm trying to write in here! Alright buster, your mom is gonna take you now... Pee-yew! Smells like someone left a little surprise in his diaper! Didn't you? Didn't you, my little Count Dooku? OH SNAP I JUST HAD THE BEST IDEA. "Wookie." Heh heh heh. Man that's funny. Right, right... in the commercial, Yoda steals the Diet Pepsi from the guy at the counter. What? Because he has a Jedi-sized thirst, that's why! Do I have to think of everything?! Now, about Darth Vader and the Burger King... To be continued... :: 5:46 PM :: :: link to this post :: Sunday, May 08, 2005 Donald knew he was an asshole. Cheryl had spent six years making sure he understood just exactly what sort of asshole he was and then she put her sweaters into a bag and flew to Denver and that was that. She was a fine woman and she deserved to be happy -- sometime, somewhere, with someone else.In the evenings, Donald sat on the front step and watched the light fade away. The night air would cool him down and the glass of whiskey in his fist would grow warm. Donald knew he wasn't going to get another woman like her. He didn't deserve anything near that good and fine. The whiskey went down easy. Donald tried the phone first. Cheryl was staying with a friend from college. He had the number on a piece of paper in his wallet from the time Cheryl went to visit for the baby. Cheryl had nothing to say to him. Donald told her lies. He wasn't sure at which point the line went dead -- how much had been lost. Letters were no good. In the deep blue evenings, on the front step, Donald wrote a hundred of them. He could imagine the letters, still sealed in their crisp white envelopes, burned, or shredded, or buried in the ground. Donald added ice to his glass, but it only melted away. :: 10:55 PM :: :: link to this post :: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 If you're not listening to The Forgotten Arm right now, you have a lot of explaining to do.10 bucks from iTunes, or listen to tracks for free from Aimee's site. Gorram incredible album. "Little Bombs" just blows me away. iTunes > Controls > Repeat All > Volume Up. :: 3:18 PM :: :: link to this post :: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 You know who rocks? Clinton Nixon. Dude is an unstoppable force for goodness and truth. I miss him muchly, what with the moving to New Orleans and all.I choose to remain steadfastly in Seattle, until the orbits of all my distant friends (I'm looking at you, Mr. and Mrs. The Deuce) carry them back again. But uh... can we get an ETA on that? Soonish would be good. :: 11:46 AM :: :: link to this post ::
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