My latest editing showreel is now available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Tim Minchin’s Pope Song. Fuck the motherfucking Pope.

The classic cartoon “Chow Hound”. It’s hard to imagine animators getting away with something this subversively brilliant in a kid’s cartoon these days. Or maybe these cartoons were never for “kids” in the sense we see today.

In the past I’ve called the McCain campaign’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as the senator’s running mate the most cynical move I’ve ever seen. I’m only 26, and I’ve only been paying attention to US politics for the last 5 years, so I don’t think that’s overstating it. She has the fundie Christian bonafides, certainly (just say “I loves me some God and hates me some science!” and you’re there), but so do others in the party who have more experience. She was appointed to the ticket because of Hilary Clinton, and anyone saying otherwise is engaging in willful ignorance (or just plain ignorance). Because the news media has a hard time explaining anything with any force, the Republicans have managed to co-opt the last year or so of Hilary Clinton’s struggle to actually get elected, with Palin. She who was plucked out of obscurity and given her position of power by an old white man. This symbol is supposed to be a positive for feminism how?

So the point of bringing this up? Two things: First, SNL has actually created a somewhat funny sketch. It took a couple of minutes to suppress the wild hatred I have for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but it actually gets funny. And it addresses what I talked about above. Honestly if they did comedy with even this faint level of insight more often, I wouldn’t get so annoyed when news outlets gushingly fawn over SNL’s “importance” in political comedy.

Second, the NY Times has done a piece on Palin’s time in Alaskan office:

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

Talk about change you can believe in.

Apple has announced a media event for next Tuesday, September 9th. They don’t say it explicitly, but it’s new iPods. It’s always new iPods this time of year. More amusingly, the theme for the event is “Let’s Rock!”.

Presumably this will lead to a dramatically different stage presentation by Mr. Jobs.

The porn industry continues to churn out material funnier and more entertaining than 95% of Australian films:

But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

This is hilarious (via).

I have a hard time with telemarketers. I hate the practice, but it’s unfair to direct that hate upon the person calling. They’re doing a job. It’s the jerks hiring these companies who deserve the vitriol. Oh, and my sympathies don’t extend to the callers based overseas who insist that they’re “John from Perth”. Once you start lying to me … well you can guess the rest.

2000 Olympics taekwondo gold-medallist Angel Matos of Cuba is probably going to receive a life-time ban from the sport after kicking a referee in the face following his disqualification from the bronze-medal bout. On the one hand I would agree entirely with a ban. Assaulting a referee in any sport is not on (and I say this as someone who has assaulted a referee: in my defense he was a cunt). On the other hand, this is hilarious. I want to see video. (via).

Thanks Youtube. Thoutube.

Behold Steve Coogan’s latest attempt at finding an American audience. Hamlet 2. With Jesus. Ebert thinks its alright though.

Following from its premiere at Leipzig, Blizzard have uploaded the new Wrath of the Lich King cinematic. I still haven’t watched it, because Blizzard are cheap bastards, and make everyone else transfer their files for them.

In somewhat related news, Mythic recently put up a new cinematic for Warhammer Online. Blah-ish female content aside, the video is definitely well put together and reflects at the very least a somewhat chaotic sense of humour which will work in the game’s favour if they manage to include it beyond pre-rendered animations.

Age of Avatars is available on the SBS site as part of the My Generation series of documentaries. It is a brief but interesting look at a few World of Warcraft players, including one I used to know in my LAN days. It was produced by some Flinders grads.

I could rattle on for a few hundred words about how sick I am of the political attitude that conjures up such bullshit as 2009: A True Story, but I haven’t watched past the first two minutes of the first episode, and I don’t want to watch past the first two minutes of the first episode, so I’ll try to maintain a little intellectual honesty and just leave it at this:

Everybody, just stop it with the “scanlines = video!” bullshit. We all know what video looks like. We all know what TV looks like. We all see it every day. It does not look like that.

Captain Jack Harkness minus the subtlety.

Vimeo have decided that they’re not going to host video game movies anymore. Their service, their rules. As previously a Vimeo fan, it does disappoint me a bit that they’re voluntarily moving their site into a niche rather than letting the community itself decide what flavour of content Vimeo is going to be known for.

Anyway, there’s always WeGame. Or maybe one day Google will actually give YouTube users some decent quality video.

The ABC has launched its version of the BBC’s iPlayer, imaginatively titled iView. To their credit they developed the system in-house, and out-of-the-box it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s a pity then that right now the service is crippled by the general crappery of Australian Internet access. As is explained in nice large letters before you enter iView, it’s going to consume a lot of the monthly download allowance we’re lumped with here.

The ABC’s solution to this (and the solution being pursued by EzyDownload) is to establish deals with ISPs which will allow people to stream from iView without contributing to their download limits. Which is to say, so-called Net Neutrality is currently being dismantled here in Australia.

A source of national pride, no?

Back to iView though, I have to say I hope this doesn’t impact upon the ABC’s rather good record of offering up its shows for easy downloading.

Yahtzee's take on Age of Conan. To Funcom's credit the game is apparently not a worthless piece of garbage, a point previous developers competing with World of Warcraft have failed to address. I'm still waiting for AoC's server instability to evaporate, and for Funcom to start offering trials. Buying an MMO without trying it out first? That would be stupid.