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Here's a short documentary about Los Angeles comedian Joseph Patrick Larkin.
I have Joseph's first two comedy albums and his book, and he's been gracious enough to let me produce shows of my own in some of the clubs he owns.
The Transit
Something like seven years ago, I heard the story of Le Gentil and thought it would be fun to do in a Reading Rainbow style. We could do a whole series of cartoons about people who lost in a big way while doing Science.
Later on, I made friends with some people who were pretty well equipped to make it happen. And it did!
Also, this year, a Transit of Venus actually happened, so it was nicely timed.
#1,820: The House on Skull Mountain
Sometimes old posts get stuck in draft form because they need more thought and revision. I have no idea why capsule movie reviews don't get published. These seem to be from December 2011.
-Hugo - Great 3D, and identifiably Scorsese, from the first shot, a long tracking through the station. Weird script though; characters exclaiming stuff in the same room instead of listening or talking to each other. Also, hints of a hated trope: Can't Spit It Out. That is, if one character would just speak up when they're a) in trouble and b) in no danger as a result of just using their words, so much trouble could be avoided, and so easily.
- J. Edgar - A perfectly good telling of the story of J. Edgar Hoover. If you've ever seen or read anything about him before, you've probably got the story down already. Saw it in the theater with a bunch of chatty audience. But they were a few guys in their 60s, so nobody had anything to say to them.
- The Lie - This seems like something that would be sold as a drama, but actually: pretty funny. Dark, and funny. Jess Weixler is great. Especially her reaction to her husband's terrible rock song.
- Real Life - Albert Brooks on reality TV. Really good. I love the nonsense presented as good science and sociology.
And of course:
- The House on Skull Mountain - a mostly black version of Dark and Stormy Night, or any other meeting for the reading of will in a spooky old house. Above all else, this was a movie that lives right on up to its title:
Monkeying with the blog
Spent the evening trying to make the blog look a little better. Preparing a theme all on my own isn't something I wanted to do, so there's a struggle to find a theme that looks okay and is maybe kind of obscure enough to look original. A lot of the stuff that popped up early in the googles is just awful. I don't want a big billboard for the theme designing company with a little square for my words. There's a thing where you play with a mass market tool / toy for a while, like Garageband, and then you've heard all the good loops, so you notice them in things other people make. And now I see where a lot of the site designs for dreadful SEO-gobbling linkbait sites come from.
Anyhow, I found something that looked okay, and ended up digging around in the code for a few hours anyway to make it a negative version of the main site, snip out some broken javascript, and to add some rules to fix the links in the sidebar here. The Tron Legacy soundtrack made this feel like a much more sophisticated project than it was.
The google reader box is gone, since it's dead. There's a new page with accurate information on ordering a copy of The Dialysis, in case anyone's been in need of an update to the 2004 info page. It contains the forbidden secrets and unstoppable techniques of our ISBN!
Also, if all goes according to plan, posts found here at http://notArt.org/log will now be duplicated over at http://notArtist.tumblr.com for people who like to tumblr.
If you actually look at the site on the site and have a suggestion, let me know. I don't think I'm quite finished, but apparently it was time to change things up.
Moving Comic Zeal libraries between iPads
Hello Reader: This post still gets a lot of traffic, but be warned - it is now ten years old. It feels very unlikely to me that much or any of the advice below is still valid, but feel free to give it a whirl. I switched to Chunky Comic Reader many years ago and I love it.
One of the highlights of the iPad, for me, is reading comic books. I used to enjoy Comics Reader Mobi, but like Camera+, they got caught doing something sneaky by the app review team, and banned from the app store. Unlike Camera+, they never got back in. When their 1-year suspension began to look like a lifetime ban, and since I don't jailbreak, I've moved on to a similar program that is capable of updates, Comic Zeal. It's not perfect, but it's still pretty great. The two caveats (for me) are all the fiddling around with sorting digital comics (I don't think this is an area where I desire skeuomorphism... If, indeed, I ever do.) and having to convert everything.
Unlike CRMobi, Comic Zeal converts all of your .cbr and .cbz files into .cbi files, and then into folders of images on your iPad.
An Update: As I've learned from the developer, this is merely the step of unpacking the zip or rar files to speed loading times. However, the problem remains: How to move your already unpacked or converted or just Comic Zeal-friendly bundle of comics?
When I swapped iPads recently, I did make a backup of my old device, but I opted to treat the new one as brand new. AND, I don't save .cbi files. I make them, transfer them, and delete them. So how to get your comics library from one iPad to the other without rebuilding the world?
I copied my entire 'Imported Comics' folder to my laptop via iTunes. If you have a full backup of your ipad, you can either juggle backups (backup new device, restore old backup, get files, restore new backup), or use a backup-unpacking software, like perhaps JuicePhone (which I have not tried). If your backup is encrypted, then you're probably looking at yet another intermediate step. (edit: All this is assuming your comics are actually included in backups. I don't know if this is the case.)
I installed and ran Comic Zeal on the new iPad to create the folders and database files it expects, so I could see where they go.
I used iExplorer to navigate to iPad -> Apps -> Comic Zeal -> Documents -> Imported Comics
I moved all the files from my backup - whole folders + comic_database.sqlite into the Imported Comics folder on the iPad (I don't know if it used, needed, or threw away the database file. I didn't experiment since it worked on the first try.) Note: I recommend doing this in small chunks. I have almost 10GB of comics data, which took a couple hours to transfer, and somehow this action quickly generated 30-40GB of swap files on the laptop.
I forced Comic Zeal to quit and relaunched it, and there were my comics. In delightfully high resolution.
Excelsior!