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Posted on 11.08.07 by Widge @ 7:52 pm
ScottC sent me this: On Halloween night I was attacked by zombies. Funny thing is, I think I recognized one of them. "Hey, aren't you Ben Franklin?" Go read the whole thing. Well played. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 11.07.07 by Widge @ 4:00 am
And everyone else had left the world, and I was all alone. You were all just gone. Then for the next week I fancied that the entire world had Then the worst of it was gone, and I spent several months I kept myself busy. For a solid week I provided chalk outlines I went and lived in abandoned houses and pretended I It's going to be fine. I've stopped incessantly checking my voicemail, The last man on earth. There's not even any vampires here to harass me and be Nothing. I'll be moving south before it gets cold. Just in case the grid It's strange, you know. I'm not feeling lonely, really. I'm If I could talk to someone and find out what And that someone would be free to go. Filed under: Writing Fodder
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Posted on 11.07.07 by Widge @ 1:51 am
Okay, so it really is Overstock's policy to be pushy. You know how you dread going into some stores because you're going to be pounced on by a sales rep? I'm on their site looking at comforters again, yes? And I'm going back and forth between two browser windows, scrolling up and down and comparing information, when guess what pops up?
Good God, people. Can't you just leave us be? I feel like the screaming guy in the second episode of Black Books. When I want to buy something from you, I'll let you know. Otherwise, just simmer down, wouldja? Filed under: Ranting
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Posted on 11.07.07 by Widge @ 1:45 am
Okay, well, I had to work way too hard to try and help a guy on 43 Folders. Anyway, here's what he was complaining about: tucking away songs that you don't want because they are tied to a particular event. Xmas, for example. Real simple. It helps if you have everything tied with a genre like "Xmas" or "Holiday" or something. Select all the songs you wish to tuck away somewhere else. Then right click and "Get Info" on all of them. Change the album to "Xmas Tunes" or whatever you want to call it, and make sure you check that this IS a compilation. Now…go to your compilations folder, grab that Xmas Tunes folder and move it wherever you want it. Then just go back into iTunes and delete the songs from your library. When it becomes time to celebrate our favorite "reformed" pagan holiday, just throw the songs back into your library. Done. Now, if you don't have everything fixed with a genre, then just use my previous tip about using stars to mark things needing action, and if you come across "Jingle Bells" when you shouldn't, mark it with the right amount of stars and then deal with it when you get home. As to the comments on 43 Folders: I had to register, fill in my personal info, do a captcha, then wait for my password to show up. Then I put the password in and was told that I was denied access to the comment form after all that. No error messages. No whoops, you did something wrong. Just nada. If I ever put in place a scheme so user-unfriendly as that bullshit, please promise me one of you will call me on it, okay? Filed under: Free Ideas
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Posted on 11.03.07 by Widge @ 3:27 pm
Here's a chat my wife had with the people at Overstock.com regarding a down comforter we're trying to get. The name has been changed to "Smith" for the protection of the guilty.
First of all, if you were wondering–we're trying to avoid Chinese products, at least until they get their shit together. And I know you're thinking: Widge, what would be the chances of you getting a tainted product? And if you have to ask that, then you don't know me very well. I was voted Most Likely to Wind up a Statistic by my high school class. So I know better than to tempt fate. Anyway, I was fine with this until he automatically assumed that we were ready to purchase. And then he turned into Used Car Salesman guy by trying to talk her into buying when it was obvious she just had a question. And then he took it one step further by saying, essentially, "Well, what can I do to help you think it over faster, so I can close this sale?" The only thing I can take away from this is that Overstock.com chat people, if they are people and not Skynet drones, must get some kind of bonus for selling their shit via a chat. Because can you think of another reason they would act like this? Has anybody else ever run into this? Dear Overstock: when you're coming on stronger than comissioned salespeople in brick and mortar stores, then you're forgetting why most of us shop online to begin with. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.31.07 by Widge @ 9:32 pm
16. The Climax (1944). Boris Karloff again as a doctor who wants to keep a woman's voice for his own. Hmm. That sentence didn't come out just right. Anyway, it's suprisingly good if formulaic. 17. The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971). Karl Malden as a blind crossword puzzle creator in an Argento-scripted giallo flick? Who knew? And it wasn't terrible either. I actually would have liked to have seen that character in something else. 18. "Treehouse of Horror V," The Simpsons (1994). My favorite Simpsons Halloween episode, because not only do you get the Shinning but the Time Toaster. Maggie's proclamation, in James Earl Jones' voice, "This is indeed a disturbing universe," is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. 19. The Thing (1982). A classic sci-fi horror flick that we watch every year because it's just brilliant. We watch it all the time and we just caught, this year, some new stuff in seeing it. 20. Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995). Billy Zane in this is hilarious. "FUCK this cowboy SHIT! You human aren't worth the skin you're printed on!" For a goofy EC-based flick, it seems like a kindler, gentler version of Demons more than an actual Tales From the Crypt episode. But it works. 21. "The Galaxy Being," The Outer Limits (1963). Starring Cliff Robertson, this first episode from the series which involves an electromagnetic alien showing up and inadvertantly causing havoc, lacks any subtlety whatsoever. It positively bellows from the rooftops "TOLERANCE, YOU FUCKERS!" Which is a nice sentiment, but doesn't make for good television. 22. Pulse (2006). This was unmitigated crap. The worst flick I saw this year. I will have to post a full review. It begs to be beaten with a stick. 23. The Wolf Man (1941). Again, as I mentioned previously, I love Lon Chaney Jr. And I get Claude Rains. Rains sells "beating a werewolf to death with a cane" better than anyone else has or ever could. 24. Tower of London (1939). Not really horror, except that we have Boris Karloff as Mord. And Cosette considered the costume design a comedy. But how could I resist Karloff, Rathbone and Vincent Price in a single film? 25. Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978). While Pulse is definitely the worst film I watched this year, Zoltan made the least amount of sense. 26. House on Haunted Hill (1959). This is usually my token William Castle film just because it's so wonderfully goofy. 27. Dance of Death (1968). More Karloff, later in his career. And this ending makes little in the way of sense. The credits, when they start rolling, come as a complete surprise, especially since there's still footage playing under them. Very odd. 28. Dawn of the Dead (1978) and 29. Day of the Dead (1985). Obligatory stops on my film festival schedule. 30. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987). 31. Devil Bat's Daughter (1946). I couldn't believe someone made a sequel to this. And it completely retconned the events of the first film anyway, because they probably realized no one would care. Hilarious. 32. Frankenstein (1931). 33. Shaun of the Dead (2004). Ending our festival with the horror comedy classic. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.31.07 by Widge @ 7:39 pm
11. Graveyard Shift (1996). Okay, we see the thing's tail caught in the machine. We saw it the tenth or eleventh time you showed us. Would you quit fucking showing us so we can get on with the end of this shitty movie? Thank you! 12. King of the Zombies (1941). I pretty much already wrote about this here , but it was terribly amusing nonetheless. I need to go find more stuff with Moreland in it. He's freaking hilarious. 13. "The Ventriloquist's Dummy," Tales From the Crypt (1990). I just wanted to see Don Rickles and Bobcat Goldthwait in an EC Comics adaptation together. How can you go wrong with that? Answer: you cannot. 14. Dorm of the Dead (2007). Full review is coming on Needcoffee. Stand by. 15. The Mummy (1932). Have to watch this every year because of Karloff. He makes for a great Imhotep. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.31.07 by Widge @ 6:43 pm
In addition to my already existing reading of "The Tell-Tale Heart," here's two more bits by Poe that I recorded simply because no one was here to stop me. "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" Let me know what you think. Filed under: Projects
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Posted on 10.28.07 by Widge @ 10:47 pm
Some of you might have noticed, apart from the virtual server apocalypse, that we've gone back to a Google Adsense banner in the header of Needcoffee. For a while there we had a Project Wonderful banner. Well, I had promised earlier to let you know about my experience, and Mark over at Weblog Tools Collection jogged my memory. Project Wonderful is a pretty nifty idea. You offer up ad space. People bid on said ad space. Highest bidder wins the use of that ad space. There's other detail bits in there, but that's the gist. No click throughs…they're paying for ad space, which is what needs to happen anyway. If somebody puts up a billboard, they have no way of tracking how many eyes saw it. You can't clickthrough a billboard. So it's pretty much that simple. Now…I agree with Mark Ghosh's post. The setup is easy. Once you've got them in place, there's little to do but any approvals you've set yourself up for. It doesn't clash with any Adsense you've already got in place. You can divide up ad space into smaller bits, like Ectoplasmosis does on their blog, for example. There are some things I don't get. Mark says that the ad setup and code generation is confusing. I don't get that. It seemed pretty easy to slap together. However, the site is slow. And there aren't a lot of advertisers, from what I can gather. I had a banner across the top of my site and a skyscraper down below the fold. However, the deal is that after two weeks I was making less money off of the Project Wonderful banner than I was off of Google Adsense. Now, perhaps when there's a better group of advertisers who want to buy the space, they'll be in better shape. And I've still got the skyscraper so I can keep my toe in the pool, so to speak. So we'll see. I like the concept well enough, I think they just need to evolve it a bit. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.28.07 by Widge @ 8:34 am
6. Jess Franco's Succubus, 1968. They billed this as erotic horror. Trouble is, it's neither erotic nor horrifying. Perhaps the utter waste of time would be horrifying to some. And unless you find incomprehensible cinema stimulating, you won't find this erotic in the least. One bit with mannequins is creepy, but in a film that seems to be filled with random crap, it's one dull spark amongst the dung. 7. Black Christmas, 1974. Supposedly the first slasher flick, it's amazing that there was ever a second. This is garbage. You do have a cast with Margot Kidder, Andrew Martin, John Saxon, Olivia Hussey and Keir Dullea (looking somehow wrong in his long hair), but they have precious little to do. When there are times when they emote, it's mostly to fill time because the WTF-ness can't possibly fill the entire running time. I'm not going to call this a spoiler, but I am going to give you an example of how goddamn stupid the film is. Girl dies in a sorority house. Her body's in the attic. Propped up in a chair. Right in front of a window. That's clearly visible from the street. So when she goes "missing," okay, fine, you would assume that civilians might not think to check the house. But even when the cops get involved, nobody decides to actually check the sorority house for the girl. Ever. During the whole film. Sweet Jebus, this is a dumb damn flick. 8. The Frighteners, 1996. A truly goofball horror film from Peter Jackson and WETA, the introduction to the director's cut is interesting in that it explains how Lord of the Rings, in a sense, was just a way to use computers they had already bought for something besides Frighteners. The effects hold up surprisingly well, even over ten years later. 9. "Fog Closing In," Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1956. Probably the most interesting bit about this is that Hitch delivers a epilogue where he explains how the wicked person got their just desserts in the end. I think this is back when they had to do that shit lest somebody think that crime actually paid or something. 10. April Fool's Day, 1986. Call me crazy, but I just have a soft spot in my heart for this flick. I appreciate how it took the slasher genre and gave it a nice light hearted boot to the buttocks. Filed under: General BS
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John Robinson is a writer of prose, poetry and comics who also writes under
the pseudonym of Widgett Walls.
This is my latest book. Short stories written especially for you, or at least someone who reminded me a lot of you at the time.
