I HAVE RETURNED! I have swum through endless oceans of time and space, past the universe, past reason, PAST SANITY! in search of wisdom! knowledge! good schools! reasonable access to public transportation! AND WISDOM! I have sat with elders of a gentle race this world has seldom seen and talked of days for which they sit and wait, when all will be revealed. Ooooo, and it was heavy, baby! I BRING YOU!…

Um…

(searches pockets)

…Some crumpled cocktail napkins, half a circus peanut and a spiral-bound notebook with “BEWARE THE MIDGET” scrawled on every square inch.

Hmm.

Y’know, I was kind of thinking this Prometheus thing would be way cooler than this…

Anyway, you’re probably wondering why you haven’t seen me here since, dear gods, since August. Well, one reason is that I was just burned out from blogging. It happens… usually with a little more warning than I gave. I can’t believe that anyone missed me, but if you did, I’m sorry.

But I have another, much more legitimate reason for not blogging (at least for the last month)! That’s right, it’s National Novel Writing Month! 50,000 words in 30 days! Pure hell! Now I know what those American POWs felt like on the Bataan Death March… if those POWs had been forced to type over 200 pages of Courier New 12-point in 30 days! “Raust schnell, American dog! Your metaphors are trite and your plot derivative! Another night in The Box for YOU!” [1]

And you know what? I did it. I have a first draft of an urban fantsay novel about revisionist dragons, complete with one character undergoing a sex change when I realized I needed a romantic subplot. Now all I need is about 20 rewrites, and I’ll have my first novel!

Kill me. Just kill me now.

Anyway, I could continue Shanoah’s muppet thread with, say, this Baby Tooth version of a dragon dance, courtesy of MarshalGrover…

But I think, in honor of my novel about revisionist dragons, I think I’ll go with a short about revisionist dragons. This is Ritterschlag from the Institute for Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction Film Academie of Baden-Württemberg, the only movie that dares ask the question: “Why do dragons keep kidnapping fair damsels?”

Courtesy of axiomcodex.

You’re lucky I didn’t post something about sex changes.

[1] Yes, I know my Japanese are speaking German. And you know what? I don’t care.

Well, keeping going with the theme for now. I may diverge into Japanese Shakespeare shortly, given the strange stuff I’ve been finding, though.

This next song, Cat and the Fiddle, I first heard on one of Heather Alexanders albums called Life’s Flame. I’m assuming it’s on the album Cat and the Fiddle, too, but I could be wrong.

It’s just a nice, light-hearted, fun song.

Dance all day with the cat and the fiddle; come and lay with the heather on the hill…

Damn, we’ve gone from kawaii to cosmic horror in just a day. It’s not such a stretch, though. I mean, both induce mind-numbing, soul-shattering horror in me, so why not?

The question, though, is who would win if those two went head to head. I hate to say it, but…

I mainly posted this for the quality of the animation. There’s a lot of spliced-together AMVs out there, but few are the anime fans who go crazy and make original anime… especially of this length and quality.

Or maybe they all do, and I’m blowing it out my ass. Either way, I like this.

This film was made by Shawn the Touched, with voices by Kate Peterson as Sarah and Kara Dennison as Jeanette and music by Louie Ambriz and Brendan Becker. Shawn the Touched sez:

This is my first all-Flash anime short, and first submission to Newgrounds. This short assumes familiarity with H.P. Lovecraft and his works referenced within. Most of his works are public domain and available for download.

Us? Familiar with Lovecraft? Nah. But to continue…

I don’t intend to make a series involving the same characters or situation…this was just a one-shot. You may see the character designs resurface in later works, though not as the same characters. Sarah’s design, for instance, is very similar to one of the girls in The Evil at Tentacle High, although of course in Cutethulhu she’s much younger. Think of it as the same actor, playing a different role. ^_^

Well, I know what  I do when the kawaii gets too thick and the cuteness so toxic it can eat through an I-beam in 15 seconds.

That’s right! I send in Flippy, my favorite Happy Tree Friend with deep-seated emotional problems!

This is MondoMedia’s Flippin’ Burgers.

Well, if we’re going to have animated bunnies, then we ought to add this little confection from Elizabeth Ito, who made it as her sophomore film at CalArts. It’s Hot Crossed Bunnies, and it tears away the so-called “civilized facade” with which we fool ourselves to reveal the cutthroat, murderous of stuffed bunny dolls.

Courtesy of cartooncatbus.

Shanoah’s still out in California, hunting down the wily snipe (and if I know him, he’ll manage to bag one).

Anyway, continuting the Russian animation train, here’s another one translated by Niffiwan. It’s Kolobok (credits here), based on an Eastern European fairy tale similar to the Gingerbread Man. I recommend reading this English translation the original fairy tale, with some nifty illustrations, here, before you see what the animators did with the story.

By the way, if you can’t see the closed captions (especially Part 2), click on that little triangle in the lower right corner of the viewer and turn them on.

Part 1

Part 2

Well, Shanoah, I don’t feel like doing synth-pop anymore, but I also don’t feel like posting hemophiliac Finns again, either.

So I’m going combine two of my passions – Sherlock Holmes and freaky East European animation – in one post, with this Russian retelling of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It won Best Writing honors and came in third at the 2006 Open Russian Festival of Animated Film, if that means anything.

Posted and subtitled by Niffiwan, who’s also done The Cat Who Walked By Herself and The Golem.

Part 1

Part 2

Nope, no Barry Manilow-induced themes here today.

Don’t know if you heard, but Ed McMahan died yesterday. Cause of death hasn’t been specified, but he’s known to have, as I recall, a broken neck, cancer, and pneumonia. So it was probably one of those.

And the moment I heard that news, I knew exactly what song I was playing today. This song is from Weird Al’s Polka Party cd, and is entitled Here’s Johnny!. Catchy song, actually, from one of these Weird Al cds you rarely here about (though I own it, of course).

I didn’t say we were Christians, Shanoah. I didn’t even say we were Christian Scientists. I said we were Christian Mad Scientists.

“Lessee here, take some of the less odious parts of the Bible, add a little apocrypha, a little Buddhism, a little gnosticism, a little discordianism, some fertility rites, some of the hotter goddesses, the Osiris-Horus myth without the creepy incest and necrophilia and stone phalluses, a piece of Lovecraft, a smidge of Douglas Adams and a couple nine-volt batteries… Voila! JESUS-STEIN! It’s alive! ALIVE! But only after three days!”

Or, if you prefer, Zombie Jesus.

Courtesy of pigeonfilm. Movie site here.

In other words, we’re pagan heathens who are going to burn burn burn.

We interrupt this John Lennon train (yet again) for this brief semi-coherent message.

Okay, I just saw Star Trek (you know, the one that, according to the Onion, Trekkies hate because it’s fun and watchable?). So what does this particular Trekkie think of it? Let me put it this way:

The Enterprise has transporters. Said transporters can apparently pluck two people falling at terminal velocity out of the air. I saw them pull off this handy little trick myself.

But ask them, just five minutes later, to beam up five people standing stock still on solid rock, and suddenly they’re not up to the task. Suddenly beaming up with said transporters is slower than molasses in Reykjavik… slow enough, in fact, to kill off the mother of one of the main characters.

This is not Trekkie tech nitpicking. This is a big fucking plot hole. It’s also manipulative and, if you catch it, pisses you the hell off, like it did me.

Need I add that the whole movie is full of shit like this?

Star Trek, it turns out, is just like a rollercoaster – fun while you’re on it, kind of dumb on reflection. And that’s what this latest incarnation of Star Trek is: just another dumb summer movie. It’s got big special effects that you’ve probably seen before, loud music and characters and plot that, really, could have been lifted from a hundred other Hollywood movies. Even the Enterprise is characterless: the bridge looks like one of Bill Gates’ wet dreams, and the rest of the ship looks like a municipal water treatment plant.

But, really, this YouTube movie, courtesy of FernandaGollo, says it so much better than I could. So, aside from asking Hollywood to please please please put down and step away from their copies of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I give the floor to My Favorite Movie.

We now return to the John Lennon train. Or maybe we don’t.