darw1n.net

First of all, thanks to Jay for suggesting the content of this post. Shame on Shaun for not suggesting it even earlier, and thanks to you, for reading it!

There’s no blog anniversary until March, but on March 3, 2007 the blog will be four years old. That’s pretty exciting in my book (my book doesn’t have much going on obviously). Maybe you are like me and can’t remember (or weren’t around) for the early days of the darw1n.net blog. The first 10 posts give a pretty good summary of the early days of the blog, though there is not much Shaun-related content.

But what about content? What will people of the future think of darw1n.net? Maybe they don’t have time to read every post. Jay suggested running the concordance program on the blog content. Here are some selections from a combination of the posts (which number 104,762 words total) and the comments (which number 84,790 words total). The numbers indicate frequency:
1 jesussave
1 yarrrrr
1 meatpocket
1 sodomize
1 fajita
2 horrified
3 thundercats
3 gandalf
4 bitches
4 goddamnit
4 shame
4 dinosaur
5 feynman
5 martha
5 stewart
6 berlin
6 goldeneye
6 tetris
6 skull
6 minnesota
7 worthless
7 scientology
7 transformers
8 norwegian
8 starcraft
9 nerd
9 chuck
10 military
10 moms
10 salon
10 oldboy
10 beer
11 drinking
11 asshole
11 hobbes
11 hillarious
12 offensive
12 3d
12 misfits
12 fuckin
12 calvin
12 borgir
12 jackson
13 warcraft
13 schenectady
14 shitty
14 vagina
15 geek
15 congrats
17 ninja
18 zelda
19 peter
19 dimmu
19 enjoyable
19 evil
19 language
20 seriously
20 serious
20 onion
20 borat
23 disappointed
24 crumb
24 boston
24 spam
28 humor
27 linux
32 simpsons
32 halloween
33 metallica
34 wikipedia
36 unfortunately
66 nin
67 happy
69 coffee
71 books
74 enjoy
75 shit
102 school
108 google
112 funny
136 college
151 great
152 last
162 nytimes
302 first
367 time
814 shaun
In the trend of becoming even more self-referential, future concordances will include this concordance. Fun.

And if that wasn’t enough for you, this is post number 1,051! Here are the breakdown of some of the heavy-hitting posters:
Josh: 543 posts
Shaun: 275 posts
Jay: 145 posts
Losure: 42 posts
Grace: 28 posts

There are approximately 1,512 comments, but there is some old spam that I need to clean out, making it difficult to get a good idea of who does what.

Lastly, let’s look at some server stats kept by Domain Direct since December 2004.
Successful page requests: 612,118
Average successful page requests per day: 856
Data transferred: 43.94 gigabytes
Unique visitors: 35,683
Total number of times I have tried killing darw1n.net: 3

Holy shit, that’s about enough of that. Thanks for everyone who has posted, commented, read, bookmarked, etc. Remember, it’s all about you.

Update: I just removed a few large chunks of comment spam, which pretty much invalidates about 500 words from the comment count. It also explains why there were so many occurrences of “fetish,” “anal,” and “slut” in the concordance.

My new boss gave me a call tonight and said that someone from a major newspaper wanted to start an online version of the children’s section and would be calling me about samples. She did call and I sent along some of the doodlesheep drawings and some old flash animations as samples. She called back a few minutes later and asked if I had anything “happier,” which I thought I did. Unfortunately they weren’t happy enough and nothing came of it. On the plus side I have absolutely no idea how much to charge for freelance work (and would probably do it for free), though unfortunately I think it is time to draw some happier pictures.

I went to see the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. I wasn’t originally very excited about it. I’ve already seen plenty of Bond movies. I couldn’t imagine a better Bond movie than the one with Denise Richards as a physics girl. So I figured this would be a let down. Then I saw a preview that claimed the movie was “about how bond became a double-oh agent”. Immediately I thought “Batman Begins, but with Bond!” In hindsight, that was exactly the why they tacked on the “origin of bond” scene. The movie contains enough about the origin of Bond to make that preview. Nothing else. It felt more tacked on than a romance-plot. I was a little disappointed. I think I was mostly disappointed in myself for buying the “Batman Begins” selling point twice recently (The Prestige is not Batman Begins either). The previews actually made the movie really confusing. I thought it was supposed to be about the origin of Bond, which to me means the start of the Cold War. But the movie was clearly set in the present day (cell phones everywhere). I couldn’t figure it out. I knew Bond wasn’t born yesterday, but here he is in a deliberately contemporary setting. I was further confused because “M” was played by the same actress as in Goldeneye. Is she some ice queen who does not age? But once I stopped trying to understand and simply accepted the movie I enjoyed it. Casino Royale got rid of almost every Bond cliche – no “shaken, not stirred” or any crap like that. And no gadgets either. Bond was just a badass dude. And stone cold, too. He wasn’t nearly as coy about killing people. It was refreshing. If you go in clear about the beginning you’ll probably enjoy it.

I’m moderately disappointed that The Fountain had no fountain. That aside, I’m not really sure what I make of it. I suppose I agree that it tried too hard. The imagery was amazing (I’m convinced now that the no-CGI mandate was actually beneficial) and the cinematography and so forth likewise. Clint Mansell is by far one of my fav. scorewriters. But I don’t know if it really cohered. I’m rather unhappy in that I don’t feel much like it will work as a studio-financial-type success, which blows as it would’ve been nice for Mr. Aronofsky to have that sort of budget to work with, as he obviously has skills. On the other hand, I don’t know if Brad Pitt would have worked so well as a conquistador. I just can’t see it. Input from Iliana/other watchers is welcome.

EDIT: I bumped some good posts off the front page. Scroll down for more. Also, There’s a good review of it by the editor of rogerebert.com.

From IMDB.com:

As Lord of the Rings fans mounted a protest following word that New Line had dropped Peter Jackson from consideration as director of The Hobbit and another Lord of the Rings prequel, producer Saul Zaentz has given assurances that Jackson will indeed direct the two films. A German website, Elbenwald.de, posted an interview with Zaentz, who acquired the rights to the works of the late Rings writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, in 1976 (the Saul Zaentz Company owns Tolkien Enterprises), in which Zaentz says, “It will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson. … Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company. I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the Rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us, in contrast, he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.” (The preceding quotation is a translation that appeared on TheHobbit-Movie.com from the German interview posted on Elbenwald.de.)

An editor once told me, after looking over my cover letter, that I had a very masculine writing voice.

the gender genie confirms this — my blog posts (it prefers text blocks of more than 500 words for accuracy) come up as female, but all my nonfiction articles come up as male. how does your writing rate?

Jack Chick comics with the Christianity extacted the replaced with Galactus, the marvel comics villian who battled the fantastic four.

Comics

The idea sounded a little suspect before I checked out the link but the gallery, entitled “What the Deuce Are You Staring At!?!”, of Family Guy-inspired art isn’t all that bad. It even makes me want to watch Family Guy again…oh wait, no.

The descriptions of the project are interesting and there are definitely some positive results.

::unoriginal::

Interview with Darren Aronofsky concerning The Fountain. It’s got me excited for it again, I’ll give it that. Whether or not that’s a good thing, I don’t know, unfortunately. Either way, it’s a pretty good interview. Didn’t know he was married to Rachel Weisz, either. Random.

Very quick American Voices from The Onion concerning people splitting into two races. If it’s relevant, blog it, sez I.