Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Monday, October 28, 2002
19:49 - Cartoon Network, how do I love thee...	(top)
Sunday nights are the highlight of my week. The "Adult Swim" lineup, particularly on Sunday when they trot out all the wacky and subversive stuff made by people who go through life with a constant giggle, is just so jam-packed with material I never thought I'd see on TV again that it completely restores my faith in The System to provide a conscientious palliative to discerning viewers. They know it isn't kids watching cartoons at midnight on Sunday; it's sarcastic twentysomethings would would rather watch anime with boobs or twisted neo-nostalgic romps that give new life to ill-begotten 1970s superheroes or the knife-edge artistry of Samurai Jack. It feels like someone who knows exactly what I want to watch is holding the levers on Moltar's control station and diverting a personalized stream of soma into my TV. It's never been better than this. Freaky! Outtie! FREAKY! OUTTIE! FREAKY! OUTTIE! ...Ahem. Sorry; got carried away there. And what should they report to be showing next Sunday night? Why, "Rejected", by Don Hertzfeldt, of all things. Yes, that bizarre, jiggly little five-minute doodle that you may have seen in godawful low-res WMV format floating around the net. I haven't been able to find a decent version of it, so the WMV is all I have. But Cartoon Network will be showing it next Sunday night. The preview ad, showing the guy with the not-so-silly hat, being beaten to death by the guys with the silly hats under the SILLY HATS ONLY sign, in glorious full resolution, made me break down and weep openly. I'll be recording it this time, and making a decently-sized QuickTime out of it for future enjoyment on the plane or wherever I might happen to be when I'm in desperate need of a giggle. And by the way, if you'll permit me to yank the stick hard-a-port for a bit: What the hell is it with QuickTime that makes people shun and hate it so much? I mean, when it has the following things going for it: � The player application isn't the least bit gaudy-- no embedded ads, no freaky trippy color scheme, no large bulbous ameoboid shape with randomly ovoid buttons. Just the obvious controls, thank you very much. � QuickTime is the only player that lets you copy a still frame from a playing movie and paste it using the Clipboard into another application. I mean, what the hell? How can people stand to use Real and WMP when they don't even deign to provide this basic functionality? � Live back-and-forth scrubbing through any movie type, including (in QT6) live MPEG-4 streams. Real still doesn't let you do live scrubbing, and WMP's scrub bar is shoddy at best (it loses video sync if you move the window around). � And for the content creators, some pretty damn fine codecs. Sorensen 3 isn't open, but it's the equal of DiVX;-) LOLOLOL OMG J00 GET DA 1 WIZ BRITN3Y SP34ARz NAKED B00B!!1!!``` any day of the week, and it also uses MPEG-4 natively, and is the flagship platform for that codec. Yet people still stick to Real and Windows Media, for reasons that are unclear to me. C'mon, guys, $30 gets you a complete content creation suite, and the broadcaster is free. And cross-platform. And there's plenty more stuff about it that's subjective. Whether on Windows or the Mac, QuickTime just makes me feel like I'm a lot more in control of what I'm watching. As far as downsides go, though, this bullet point seems to trump all foregoing line-items: � It's made by Apple. Shock and horror! Can't have that! Now that QuickTime has been largely crowded out in the Internet data pool by MPEGs and WMVs/AVIs (and even .MSWMM files, from Windows Movie Maker, which WMP can't read, for God's sake), I'm forced to conclude that for no good reason at all, we're now going to be forced to live with video-handling systems that are far, far less controllable and integrated into everything than what we could have had. Ah well. At the very least I'll be using it for my own content creation and personal re-encoding purposes. It works bloody well, and I can copy a frame out of an existing movie and copy it into Preview so I can save a thumbnail JPEG for it anywhere I choose. Urrg. Sorry. Just one too many WMVs getting uploaded into the art archive, which I can't play back accurately or copy a frame out of. But that's the Way of the Future! Get with the program, Brian! Sheesh.