Total Nonsense

McFarlane toys has a long (and well deserved) reputation for creating toys and sculptures based on TV/Movie/Comics material, but their latest venture is especially appealing. They've taken some of the great posters for classic movies and have created nifty 3D versions of them. Not flat 3D images, but actual sculpted 3D takes on these classic posters.

Take a look at some of these at the following links. Each link also has addditional links to other photos taken at different angles. The fidelity to the actual posters is pretty impressive to me.

Nightmare on Elm Street
Jaws
Friday the 13th
Alien
Rocky Horror Picture Show

The horror of karaoke has spread the the web via the new free service SingShot.

For chuckles, I signed up and tried it out. Now I can't carry a tune at all, so you'll thank me for not saving any of my efforts for public consumption. I will say that for those who love Karaoke, this is a pretty well done web version. It uses flash movies (like youtube, google video, etc.) to post up the words to the song as the music play in the background. One can listen to a reference of someone singing the song properly which is a great assist when practicing the songs before recording ones own take. The selection of songs is excellent (over 3000) with categories including "rock", "classics", "country", "oldies", etc. After posting up your karaoke, others can rate it. This sort of thing isn't really for me, as I was appalled to find out my singing voice is even worse than I thought! But for karaoke lovers out there, this free service is worth a try.

I thought this was kind of wild. This fellow actually built a small monorail (yes, just like at Disneyland) right in his own backyard. Make sure to check out the video clip he's got on his website.

Niles Monorail main page
The Niles Monorail TMS Exclusive! In October of 2001, TMS President Kim Pedersen dedicated the Niles Monorail, thereby introducing a new hobby to the world...rideable garden monorails.

 

For you conjure nation forums members out there, be advised we're having some technical issues.

Seems the forums can be viewed but not posted to at this time.

I'm working on it...

--Update. I think things are finally back to normal now.

If members are still having log on issues, I recommend clearing your browser cookies.

Specifically any browser cookie from www.totalnonsense.com needs to go so it can be properly recreated.

Just wanted to post up a link to some really fabulous caricature work by my friend Tony Cabral.

<--- Here's a sample (John Cleese of Monty Python fame)

I'm a huge fan of the open source (free) web browser Firefox . Aside from protecting me from the security foibles of Internet Explorer, it offers the functionality of being able to add features via its "Extensions" web page.

I thought I'd post up my favorite Firefox add-ons (which are also free) in hopes it might be of interest to some.

All the extensions can be found and added directly from Firefox.

Tools -> Extensions -> Get More Extensions

So here is my "Top 15".

Add Bookmark Here - This allows one to add a bookmark in one step to either your bookmark menu or any menu you've set up on your launch bar.

Disable Targets for Download - Keeps Firefox from opening a new blank tab every time one downloads something.

It's seems popular music satirist "Weird Al" Yankovic recently recorded a parody of the James Blunt song You're Beautiful, getting permission from Blunt to put it on his next album, only to have Blunt's label then put a kibosh on the whole deal. Now legally, Yankovic could put the song on his next album anyway, but instead chose to respect the label's request and is now offering the song as a free download from his website. It's quite funny, free, and worth a listen for those who have heard the original song. For a bit of additional fun, he's also offering for free download another new song amusingly titled Don't Download this Song.

The Official "Weird Al" Yankovic Web Site

In the end, the snakes hardly sizzled.

After months of buzz on the Internet and in the media, along with weeks of speculation over how that buzz would translate into B.O., "Snakes on a Plane" opened to $15.3 million. An estimated $1.4 million of that came from shows at 10 p.m. Thursday night.

Gross is well below predictions at New Line and among industry folk that the hype could translate into a bow somewhere in the 20 or perhaps even 30 millions.

I thought this was kind of intersting.  A show doesn't make it beyond "pilot" phase which means it normally never gets seen by anyone but network executives who reject it.  But in this case, the pilot was so popular via a video sharing service that it look like it will be revived in some sense (internet only episodes sure, but much better than nothing for those who might like the particular show).  I wonder if we'll be seeing more of this as networks try to find new/better ways of gauging interest in their new shows?

NBC's Watching "Nobody" - Jul 24, 2006 - E! Online News

Judging by views, the undisputed king of YouTube these days is Zinedine Zidane, the head-butting French soccer star. Judging by TV deals, its undisputed beneficiary is a red-carded sitcom. Nobody's Watching, back in the game after its never-aired pilot popped up on the video Website last month, will be revived by NBC in a series of new made-for-the-Internet episodes, the network has announced.

While it's not something I'm that personally interested in, I've read that many folks take an interest in attending classes in creative and screenplay writing. One issue with wanting to write a screenplay properly is that normal word processors don't really have an easy way to produce the very rigid formatting that is expected for a screenplay. Filling a niche market here, there are a few pricey vertical market (ie market specific) software packages, likely not a good choice for a student or just someone who wants to dabble.

In the hope of saving folks some cash, I'm drawing attention today to a new open source, totally free to use screen writing tool called Celtx. I've given this a try and it's super easy to use and let's you keep track of characters/locations/etc. and will autofill/autoformat using those as you type, allowing you to concentrate on what you're writing rather than struggle with your word processor to format it all correctly. The program is under active development, so there's an occasional small bug, but overall it's at a very useful stage. Interestingly, this excellent free application is built on the skeleton of the open source (and very popular) web browser Firefox. So like Firefox, Celtx has an extremely easy to use tabbed interface that makes it easy to keep track of your project. While I haven't tried them, the collaborative features seem pretty neat also. I did try their online PDF generation and backup features which both worked really well. Versioning features are not present which is a bit of a drag for collaborative work, but they say those are in the works.