Via Lydia Pintscher, I found Sita Sings the Blues, a delightful CC-licensed movie. It’s basically a “musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana.”
One neat thing it does is frequently switch between different narrative and visual styles. It’s a bit slow at times, but I like it.
Here’s a typical clip. Visit the site for the full thing.
The Blog Readibility site was making the blog rounds the other day and I thought it would be interesting to run all the Planet Mikix blogs through the test.
One unintended feature that I really like about the Onion news feed is that each entry is uncategorized. That is, it’s not clear whether it’s a news “brief,” an article, or one of the “What do you think?” questions.
Now, normally it doesn’t matter. But I don’t usually click through if it looks like an article because most of the joke of an article is the headline. However, the “What do you think?” entries have all the jokes in the body of the article via man-on-the-street responses.
“But how can you tell which ones are which if they’re uncategorized?” I hear you say. And there’s rub. The “What do you think?” entries all deal with actual — though sometimes absurd — real news, while the articles are fake news. It’s a bit of a game to tell the difference.
Dave sent me a link today to a little something he whipped up. The punk.
In order to understand why it’s funny, you’d have to have known me around this time last year. In which I committed the third most classic blunder: mass mailing an incriminating email in which you rate all the recipients’ suitability for a task.
One of the more memorable lines was my statement “Amy: is she even fun to hang out with?” (name changed to protect the innocent) And hence I get that question a lot.
Not only did Dave create the one tombstone, but a tombstone generator. So I crafted my own.
I’ve noticed that many of my friends now use Gmail chat, and it got me thinking. Ever since I realized DreamHost can run a Jabber server on your domain, I’ve wanted to move to Jabber full time.
Now that a bunch of people I know are regularly using Jabber accounts, it seems feasible. So I’m going to start phasing out my msterry3k AIM account in favor of my mike@mterry.name Jabber account.
If you have a Gmail chat account and you worry about only seeing my pretty face when you check your email, know that you can log in to your chat account from any Jabber client ((I recommend Pidgin for Linux/Windows, but some people prefer Trillian on Windows)).
If you don’t have a Jabber account yet, one may be closer than you think. If you have a Google account, you’ve got the aforementioned Gmail chat account. If you have a LiveJournal blog, you have an LJTalk account.
If neither, you can sign up for one for free from jabber.org (most clients will let you register for an account there from inside the client).
No, not another invasion of “Africanized” bees. Rather, my good friend Swifty has created a new webcomic, Millions of Bees.
Swift may already have a cult following from founding a previous comic Friend Bear. But unlike Friend Bear, I like Bees (sorry, Swift). I guess I like my comics like I like my coffee: covered in bees.
Bees has cutely snarky turns of phrases like “satchelful of dongs” and “such a crotch” as well as obscure references like to Naglfar. The lead character is a touch melodramatic, but I’ll forgive a lot for his jacket’s bear ears.
And thankfully, the webcomic tradition of mouse-over text was not overlooked. 
Point is, I look forward to more. Swifty’s a great writer and a funny dude. Good luck!
Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke is a pretty funny daily “webcomic.” I was never that into Marmaduke, and reading this, I’m glad. It’s pretty bad.
“Why did the robot order a milkshake?”
“To blend in with the general human population, making it easier to infiltrate society and — in time — conquer it.”
– J. Alex Boyd’s Jokes Made by Robots, for Robots
I was tickled yesterday by this poster of Richard Dawkins (seen via BoingBoing).
I’ve always inexplicably liked the “André Has a Posse” meme. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe the implication that his posse status needs to be defended at all, let alone in a guerilla public relations campaign.
I want to share this neat word puzzle game I found.
It’s really quite fun, though difficult. Dave and I have been working through it together, with occasional help from anyone else that will try it out. You should definitely have at least a couple people working on it. The game makes it easy to share boards.
It’s basically a word association game, with a meta-puzzle as a win condition if you reach the corners of the word map. My big beef with it is its ridiculous “cheat detection” code that seems to kick in during the most innocuous moments. Just ignore it and press Back to resume.
I first saw this on Jamin Gray’s blog.