We lost Dan Obannon last week, screenwriter for Alien and Total Recall, but before those he wrote a little gem in film school called Dark Star…
This being Xmas Day, I hope you and yours are somewhere warm and protected (or cool and protected if you are in the southern hemisphere), and enjoying today with close friends and family. You deserve every bit of quality time the Universe can offer; So Say We All!
Out of all the online Advent Calendars this holiday season, two of them have been outstanding. I didn’t know what an Advent Calendar was when I stumbled onto the first site, and by then I had missed the first ten days or so of the offerings. Rest assured that next year I will be searching for them in early November, and post a list of the best ones I find Thanksgiving weekend, so we can all be ready come 1Dec2010.
The first is the AppVent Calendar, a project put together by Blacksmith Games. Starting on December 1st, each day they made one to three of their IPhone/IPod games available for free, and several of them were quite impressive. Most of the games offered for free for one day were also offered for dirt cheap ($.99 for a normally $3 piece of software, on average) for the remainder of Advent.
The other one that gave me useful presents was the WP Engineer’s amazing offering, where each day the tech-savvy team handed out another way for you to rebuild your WordPress driven web site into a true powerhouse. Each entry in this arsenal is a small bit of code, usually in the 5 to 25 lines category, but sometimes as simple as using the Custom Fields entry in the Query Post function to sort entries in a way that would normally take you some development time (as a single example).
I am pretty sure their goal was to offer a VAR (Value Added Resource) to their site in order to attract another one or three hundred potential customers. I am also pretty sure they added a lot more visitors to their web site than they were expecting, and even if most of the new additions do not end up being paying customers today, it will be a good thing for them in the long run. Congratulations to WP Engineers on creating my personal favorite holiday site this year!
Coming up on the 27th, the Indianapolis Comic Book Show takes place. It happens a few times a year (usually about 3), lasts one day, and includes minimal guests; this event is strictly for the collector. Too bad the timing this year means they will miss their audience.
No film fests this week, so today a few Nerdcore tunes instead, including a couple of old favorites you have seen here before…
This week: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus!
Also out this week, the Robert Downey Jr. version of Sherlock Holmes on the big screen. I mention Downey because there is another one coming soon from the UK with Gareth David-Lloyd.