This is a visualization of the top one million web sites in the world according to Alexa traffic data. You can go to Icons of the Web at NMap.org to search for domain names that might be included in the image. Candlelight Stories is there! We are ranked 517,582 in the world! So our tiny little flame logo is buried in there just below the lower right corner of the big CNN logo on the righthand side of the image.
Check it out. It’s fun.
Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine the far-flung past in anything other than black & white because that’s the kind of image we usually see. But here is one of the oldest color film tests from the Kodak company in 1922. Here’s a link to information about the footage.
Via Neatorama
This is the opening cinematic from the upcoming Wii game Epic Mickey. It is fun and has that ever-flowing look of a Disney cartoon. I have one quibble with it. You can’t always do in computer animation what you do in hand-drawn animation. In this case, I think the problem is in Mickey’s hands. They are a little off.
Simon Tofield has another episode of his extremely amusing Simon’s Cat series.
In general, I am deeply suspicious of the web trend for geeks to head toward steampunk, octopuses, and all things Cthulhu. There’s a vague and creeping racism underneath the cute old-fashioned, brass-fitted surface. I’ve also held a certain amount of contempt for H.P. Lovecraft. I think the guy was a closeted white supremacist with a knack for telling horrifying tales that are about white supremacists. I can imagine him as Sarah Palin’s favorite author… if she reads. The Cthulhu stories are genuinely frightening and his writing does contain a high creep quotient. But I’m just about ready to launch DOS attacks on sites that dig every alien octopus that shows its tentacles.
This, of course, is Lovecraft’s Call of the Cthulhu in under 2 minutes. It’s very well done and I like the use of the newspapers to move the story. Declan Moran made it. He also made Dante’s Inferno in Under 2 Minutes.
A film about an attractive spy during a rocket launch. By Clement Bolla, Aurelia Vernhes, and Laurent Gillot.