The. Best. Superhero. Movie. Ever.

(more later, gotta’ pack for Seattle, heading to Mobius 2008)

If for some odd reason you only read this blog, and don’t follow my “real” sites, you might not have heard about this: on Saturday night I launched my $5000 HP laptop giveaway contest ($5500 once you factor in the bundled software). Go check out this post on Digital Home Thoughts for all the details.

It’s an ugly way to start my week: opening up my personal email account and seeing 300+ messages…290 of which are spam bounce-backs from some jackass spammer using my personal domain as a reply-to address. And it just happened a couple of weeks ago! Hopefully it will be as short-lived this time as it was then. And I really hope all the alpha-geeks in the world would get together and solve the problem of email domain-hijacking once and for all (and spam for that matter).

Ok, we’re back up and ready to rock - although things are a bit slow at the moment because we’re copying over large chunks of data. I’ll be posting the Dragon contest later today as planned - but it won’t be until the late afternoon/early evening. Watch Digital Home Thoughtsmebeli for it!

Yeah, ye old Thoughts Media sites are down - we were in the midst of moving to a new server, and something went a bit wrong. Doesn’t it always? I hate going to bed knowing that my sites aren’t up and there’s nothing I can do about it. It sucks. Hopefully by the time I wake up tomorrow, they’ll be back up. I swear, it’s a miracle that Google hasn’t punished us for all our down-time…guess their crawlers are more patient than I am.

I’m not bad when it comes to editing video, but I truly admire people that have the sense of timing and intuition to make truly superb movie trailers - you know that ones where you end up finding out that the movie trailer was better than the movie itself? These are three movie trailers that take the movies in a completely different direction…much to the delight of anyone watching them. This is funny stuff! [Language Warning]

(That last one would have been even funnier if the announcer’s voice was more appropriate for a movie trailer…)

Like most men that were kids in the ’80s (yeah, I’m over 30 now), I have fond memories Transformers, GI Joe, and other franchises that are now flooding the modern movie market. For the most part, that’s a good thing - I really enjoyed the Transformers movie, even if I think Michael Bay should have been punched in the head for a few of the decisions he made. At any rate, as you might have guessed from the photo above, GI Joe is coming to the big screen…and I’m not sure I should be scared or excited. Will they slaughter my childhood memories with a campy, cheesy movie that will suck? Or will they retain some of the coolness and make it an enjoyable romp? Well see - but one things for sure, GI Joe: The Movie in cartoon form still kicks ass! I just watched it a couple of months ago…

Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t figure it out, that’s Ray Park playing Snake Eyes - the same guy who played Darth Maul. I think Ray Park is great, but someone needs to teach him a new stance - that’s a total Darth Maul rip-off.

All the details are found here, but if you have a Digg account, please do me a favour and Digg this entry. I really want to see this thing explode!

I don’t think I can thank the people at Akismet enough for their amazing comment-spam-blocking technology that they give out to most people for free (sites without ads). Every couple of days I get around 500 spam comments that are completely blocked by Akismet - I’d say no more than three spam comments a week slip through to my moderation queue, meaning that for the most part, Akismet’s system is completely administration-free. That’s truly amazing stuff - thank you Akismet!

I continue to have fun with getting nicely isolated objects that would have previously been hard to extract without using the green-screen scanning method. Even coins are turning out quite nice…now I just need to finish editing all the rest of my Japan photos.