Social Networth

Heretofore, I have been not much of a joiner of online things. My fear is that once information about me is out in the world, it will never go away and can be manipulated and used against me in a vague, ominous future involving large monitors and stern monochrome faces.

But the techno-hermit life cramps my style. And that's becoming the only alternative to having a whole lot of information available about you on the 'Net. Further, I think it's more valuable to be open than closed in this Web we call 2.0. So I'm in.

I'm still avoiding major players (MySpace, Livejournal, Facebook), on the theory that scammers will target the largest networks for annoying, impersonal attacks. But there's plenty of other companies that would like to use my registered existence as an opportunity to sell ads.

Here's my list. If you're on one of these and want to be my pal, let's get in touch. If you're not a member and need an invite or something, leave me a comment.

Gleemax
GoodReads
LinkedIn
Nextcat
Orkut

Eventually, I'll migrate the more popular ones over to the sidebar.

SugarHoused

I try to avoid posting links to current events when my only comment is "Yeah!" or "Nuh-uh!" I owe it to all of us to have something more substantial to say.

But I'm basically in the "Yeah!" camp on this story about our new mayor revoking the SugarHouse casino license.

The mayor reiterated that he is not a fan of the site for the SugarHouse or the Foxwoods casinos. In the case of SugarHouse, he said, concerns about traffic, parking, congestion and more were "brushed to the side" by the Street administration in a process that he characterized as improper. "It was an abuse of a discretion," Nutter said.

Mayor Nutter has not only 135 square miles of genuine problems to manage, but the mile-high, and perhaps unreasonable, hopes of tens of thousands of Philadelphians that he can be the fulcrum for change in this city. He might not achieve everything we hope for him to.

But if he accomplishes little else, I will remember this moment fondly: when Mayor Nutter neatly and plainly overturned the decision of the prior corrupt administration, frustrating a backroom deal that benefits rich and thoughtless people at the expense of those who live in their wake turbulence.

He didn't do it on moral grounds; he did it on professionalism grounds. How novel. How refreshing. Yeah.

They're DOGS! And they're playing POKER!

I haven't flogged my ebay auctions here in a while, which is an awful shame, both for you, the discriminating buyer, and more importantly, me, the indiscriminate seller.

For a couple of more days, I'm auctioning a quality framed print of C.M. Coolidge's A Friend in Need, parodied at right.

It's a lovely piece of Americana, selling, right now, for a quite reasonable price. Please click through to see:

Dogs Playing Poker frame print, dog MOSTLY not included


Update: Sold! to a Canadian!

Monsters, Class of 2007

It might seem as though I stopped working on monsters after Grouphug last year. Really, I just went underground. I was making monsters as Xmas gifts, and some of the intended recipients read this blog, and I didn't want to spoil the surprise.

With Groundhog Day fast approaching, and monsters sent only barely late, the surprise achieved its Best Before date. Thus, pictures.

(l to r) They are [unnamed], Gumption, and ZOMG.

[unnamed]: I sort of forgot to name the guy on the far left, so his new owner, Stan!, has the joy and burden to name him properly. What you can't see very well on [unnamed] is his red tail that matches his red head spikes and red tongue. He's also got three other head spikes that you kind of lose in the Christmas tree in this photo.

The tongue is cute and it works up close, but I forgot one of my lessons from Ulorg, i.e., when you're going to try something, try big. Next monster with a tongue gets a big ol' freakin' tongue.

Gumption: Turned out well, and I understand is doing wonderfully out of corgi range in the home of Monte and Sue.

I dig the nightvision-green buttons I used for his eyes, but they're a little expensive at retail, and I can't find them online anywhere. I also learned about color working on Gumption. He is named truly.

ZOMG: Again, hard to see in the photo, but ZOMG has four legs and a long sticking-up tail. He's probably the friendliest-looking of the trio, and went to Scott.

In addition to quadruped life, ZOMG has the radical difference of TWO buttons on each eye, a black button stacked on top of a white one, if you can even believe. The wide-eyed look contributes to his friendly appearance, I think.


Also, you can see a tag attached to each of them. They say, "Monster by Jeff Quick" and were made by my crafty, crafty, sister-in-law, Alison. Since she took the Handmade Pledge, she got a monster too, but I didn't have it done in time to make the yearbook photo. Here's the after-Christmas phonecam shot:

Might be hard to see here, but Alison's monster has baby blue irises in its gold eyes. One of the color secrets I learned from Gumption is that you can make things more girl-oriented by making them with lighter colors. ALERT THE MEDIA.

The lips were a wild success on this monster. I got good color contrast, and they're awesome-fat so I'm pretty pleased about that.

I forgot to name Alison's monster too. Oops.


I've started a new monster this month, and I have a bunch of pieces cut out for another one that is so experimental, it might be an awful failure. So I guess I'm doing this now.

Between running a nonprofit organization, managing the for-profit freelance aspect of my life, running D&D games, taking on an increasing leadership gig at church, and hanging out with Meredith, I didn't know I had time for a new hobby.

But I guess I do. So the next step is to scrape together money to buy a decent sewing machine, because doing all these by hand takes a freaking long time!

Movies 2007, part 5 of 5

Aladdin
I'm gonna say it. I’m saying it. Disney (not counting Pixar) has not made a great animated movie since this one. There, I said it. The Lion King sucks and has always sucked, in its myriad forms. This movie, on the other hand, is good.

My Name Is Earl, season 1
This is great! Looking forward to season 2 on DVD whenever they get around to that happening.

Pride and Prejudice
The Kiera Knightley version. Watched bits of it when family was hanging around the house watching it.

Wonderfalls
Uneven. Unlikeable protagonist. Not terrible though.

Gilmore Girls, season 3
Still liking GG.

This is Spinal Tap
We watched this because someone used the term “this goes to 11” in a conversation, and afterward, half the group admitted to never having seen Spinal Tap, despite 100% of the group knowing the pop culture reference. I wanted to see the movie again, and I wanted to show it to M.

Elf
Somebody in the group that I watched this movie with called Elf a classic, and it turns out it’s not. Bob Newheart is neat in this movie. Didn’t expect him, happy to see him every second he was on screen. Will Ferrell is not as annoying as I expected him to be. But the cloying love story and the overused running jokes and stock supporting characters... they used to be classics. Now they’re cliches.

A Beautiful Mind
Okay.

FLCL
This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve watched this all the way through, and I think I’m starting to get it. This thing rocks.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas
With a big sled, improbable machinery, and enough make-up for me not to have to think about Jim Carey in the lead role.

Movies 2007, part 4 of 5

Adaptation
Heh. Jokes within jokes. I woke M up later that night to explain to her my theories about this movie. And, this, friends, is why she’s a keeper: Because she actually listened to me before going back to sleep.

Six-String Samurai
Four strings for style, two for substance.

Yi Yi
A Chinese film about people living life. It was quite good.

Ong-Bak
A Thai film about a dude kicking other dudes in awesome ways. It was quite good for different reasons.

The Shipping News
Bleah. I liked the book, whereas the movie was not just a different story, but an inferior one. A weak movie on its own.

The Atomic Brain (MST3K)
You know how this goes.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
I can see now why this didn’t do well at the box office. It has all the elements of a Wallace & Gromit story you might like, but it’s... boringer somehow.

Ringers, Lord of the Fans
A limp, yay-rah documentary that leaves too many stones unturned. Not as wide-ranging, insightful, or heartening as Trekkies, not as actually informative as a straight info-dump Discovery Channel doc. LotR just doesn't (yet) inspire the same mania that similar sci-fi/fantasy franchises do. It's deep, but not loud. The people in Jedi robes talking about it on camera indicate its place as part of a constellation, not as its own star. Which is a shame, because it's awful bright. They just didn't talk to the right people to do the subject matter justice, I suspect.

The Unearthly (MST3K)
MST3K movies are funner to watch in groups. I watched this one alone, but then I discovered that reading the Internet at the same time is a good semi-tasking substitute.

Night at the Museum
For some reason, I didn’t know this was a children’s movie, and dumber than it needed to be. Ricky Gervais was great as the guy Ricky Gervais always plays. Owen Wilson played the character Owen Wilson always plays well. Ben Stiller... I just keep rooting for Ben Stiller, but he keeps playing the character he always plays. I want better for him.

Movies 2007, part 3 of 5

The Bourne Ultimatum
Somebody buy these people a tripod please! Ha ha! Kidding! (not kidding). A pretty ok movie, except that Julia Stiles didn’t have much to do, and the ending was like, “Didn’t we already see this?” How many times must a man have his shocking past brutally revealed to him before he maybe writes it down on a sticky note or something?

Marie Antoinette (2006)
I slept through part of this. Through most of it. I think I liked it though.

Flag Wars
Supposedly a documentary about gentrification, but it followed its subjects jaggedly, and things looked kind of sad for the gay gentrifiers by the end. They made themselves look bad. But the documentary didn’t really come to a head, and make a strong point like you’d like it to.

Extras, season 1
Ricky Gervais only has the one character, but it’s a good character! These six episodes were uneven, especially for American viewers who may not get all the cultural references – and I include myself among them – but the good parts were great. The Ben Stiller episode was funnier than entire movies Stiller’s starred in.

Steamboy
Technology is dangerous, you say? Children will save us? War is bad? MUST BE ANIME.

Sports Night
Aaron Sorkin’s first big foray into network television had glaring errors. The lines were precocious more than witty, and the actors didn’t deliver them like they meant them. And the “moral” of an episode was sometimes delivered as smoothly as He-Man passing out safety tips. I watched about a dozen episodes of season 1, and called it done.

Sidehackers (MST3K)
Another time when Joel and the ‘bots couldn’t heckle a terrible movie into something worth watching.

MST3K Shorts, vol 2
Funny.

Stardust
What a wonderful movie. Kept a lot of characters moving and vital, and had many fun ideas sprinkled throughout. Different than the comic, and you know what, that’s just fine.

Fantastic Four
Fantastically dumb. ("His organs are solid!")

Movies 2007, part 2 of 5

Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End
Like a man chasing a bus, I tried to keep up with this movie.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith
The Hitchcock one, not the Brangelina one. Not a good movie. I expected better, but I guess there’s a reason you hear more about Rear Window than this.

Orange County
This wasn’t the same epiphany experience as the first time I watched it, but it was still solid B-grade material. The teacher is still fucking hilarious though.

Keeping the Faith
M likes this movie about a priest and a rabbi (played by Ed Norton and Ben Stiller respectively), so we watched it. It was ok. Now see, I know I take these things more seriously than anybody else, but what I wanted was a movie that—while being a light-hearted romcom with a religious twist—also dealt tellingly with theology. I know that’s asking a lot, and I know that you can’t reasonably judge art for what it isn’t. But the disappointment registers. Still, a fun diversion.

Street Fight
An absorbing documentary about the 2002 mayoral campaign in Newark, NJ. It’s clearly a documentary, but it also has a (seemingly unforced) dramatic arc that's normally hard to pull off in documentaries.

Also, it’s interesting to hear about Newark politics, because that’s about 90 miles away. So you watch the documentary that seems, at times, like a “based-on-a-true-event” story and then find out that the story is still going on, and you’re all like OMFG!!1! That’s for reals!

A Mighty Heart
Smart, well done, still timely, and heartbreaking. Another M choice, another OMFG-that’s-for-reals flick, and an excellent one.

Once
I liked it, I think. A romance that ends with the romantic leads opting to return to their established relationships rather than with each other. Unusual choice, and a nice affirmation of the value of restoration of relationships rather than cutting ties and beginning again.

Idiocracy
I think this is one of those movies that, as a mildly intellectual type, I’m supposed to enjoy, thanks to sci-fi guffaws based on the stoopidity of modern vapidness. However, the movie wasn’t much deeper than the vapidness it lampooned. It’s ok, but ultimately a one-joke movie with a claymore wit.

Friends With Money
A rich-Californians-have-problems ensemble movie (see Crash, Grand Canyon, et al). For what it is, it’s fine.

The Simpsons Movie
I liked it, but, you know, I didn’t like it-like it.

Productivity Secrets -- Revealed!

I don't know that this is true, but there is a remarkable correlation.

Movies 2007, part 1 of 5

Early January is when I provide unhelpful mini-reviews of every movie I watched last year, except for the ones I forgot to write down. Also, when I say "movie" I also mean TV shows on DVD or documentaries, or whatever. It's not a science.

In 2007 I watched 50 movies, a further giant step down from previous years. I missed the Philadelphia Film Festival due to my own wedding, of all the nerve. I am teetering on the resolution to watch a movie a week in 2008 to bring that up, but I feel myself not quite devoted enough to pull it off.

Remember: I am inconsiderate about spoilers.

Ice Age 2
I thought frozen crap wouldn’t stink.

Signs
I think I liked this movie more on rewatching, once my expectations were properly calibrated.

Waiting for Guffman
An Open Letter to Everybody:

Dear Everybody,

Waiting for Guffman is not as good as you keep telling me it is. I’ve seen it twice now. We can still be friends, but really, it’s not that funny. Those guys have coasted on Spinal Tap cred long enough.

Sincerely,

Jeff

P.S. Parker Posey is lovely, yes, you’re right about that.

Little Miss Sunshine
I didn’t like this as well as I thought I would.

The Incredibles
Brad Bird, I like. The ‘60s vibe didn’t fit this movie as well though. It’s sure likable. But government regulation and unhapiness with day-to-day life are ‘80s and ‘00s story tropes. The ginchy ‘60s spy vibe doesn’t fit that. But a good movie.

300
I sure did like looking at this. This movie was good for looking.

Spider-Man 3

• I’m sure there’s a MORAL to this movie... if only I could... if only someone would tell me what it is....
• I would like to point out to all move makers that one antagonist is plenty.
• The evil Peter Parker was a great part of this movie, even if it had a completely different mood than the rest of the flick.
• Eddie Brock’s prayer was my favorite moment.
• Still not enough airtime for J. Jonah Jameson, who was played as slightly more of a buffoon and less of an unpredictable tyrant, which the first movie captured with succinct beauty.

The Family Stone
You knew how this movie was going to turn out perilously close to the beginning, and the family was just so fucking PRECIOUS. But it had moments. Poignant moments.

The Fountain
Well whoa, that was weird. Something to talk about later, that’s for sure.

Grosse Point Blank
This is the third year in a row I’ve watched this movie. I thought I’d get tired of it this time, or would have seen it all, but still no. I picked up new little things this time too. Gross Pointe is full of witty people. The movie is just a smidge too unexplained... they expect the viewer to do too much work. It’s not impossible, but you don’t know that you’re supposed to give it enough of a chance, really.

This time, I noted that this movie has in common with High Fidelity the idea of a detached man seeking a mending of relationship with women. May be something Cusak’s working out in his own life.