Tomasulo.net

I'm probably pretty late to the party on at least one half of this post, but I'm betting my readers (if there are any) are even less informed than I am. Joss Whedon wrote a horror movie to be released early next year called The Cabin in the Woods, starring The West Wing's Bradley Whitford, of all people. It is being directed by a guy named Drew Goddard, who has worked on several Whedon TV projects. Now, it has been scheduled for February, which has always been a dumping ground for crap films, so I'm not getting my hopes up or anything. It'll be cool to hear Whitford's take on Whedon's notoriously stylized dialogue, and hear how it compares to his take on Aaron Sorkin's notoriously stylized dialogue. Also, here's a link to a bunch of news about Season Two of Dollhouse, which includes, as an aside, the revelation that Alan Tudyk will be in the remake of V this fall.

Scribblenauts is an upcoming game for the Nintendo DS with an audacious game mechanic. To help your character solve puzzles, you can summon any object simply by writing the name on the DS's touch-sensitive screen. Eurogamer has the first article I've seen that goes into how they do that on a technical level. It is actually a pretty cool extension of traditional object-oriented coding theory, in that they define qualities, like "flammable" and assign those to types, like "wood" and then assign those types to various objects, so they don't have to code every different interaction between objects in their universe. There is still a tone of grunt work that they have to do, besides defining every noun in the dictionary in this manner, they have to create art assets for all this stuff. It is a pretty cool undertaking, and they seem incredibly confident about it.

Labels: 8Tracks

Watching people drive on TV or in movies, I often find myself consciously trying to figure out if this is the kind of show where they don't need to watch the road because the magic of television will guide them, or if they are about to plow into a oncoming truck.

I'd pay money to hear William Shatner cover "Red Barchetta" by Rush. "A gleaming Red Barchetta... from a better... vanished time." In the meantime, here's Shatner doing Harry Chapin's "Taxi," which I can't believe I've never heard before.

Labels: video