- aGLIFF 2008
The Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival kicks off next Wednesday. Austinist is presenting the opening night film, Otto, a gay zombie flick. - AFS Essentials: Contemporary German Cinema
The Austin Film Society's Essentials Series will return on September 9th with a look at contemporary German Cinema. - The Orwell Diaries… In Blog Form
Published each day, 70 years to the day after they were written. - SXSW 09 Badges On Sale
Earlybird badges for SXSW 09 are now on sale. Don't quote me on this, but it looks like the cheapest/earliest rates have gone up about $50 per badge type. If you're gonna buy, now's the time.
FunFunFun Fest Ready to Roll
Austin’s 3rd Annual FunFunFun Fest has a kickass lineup this year. It’s kind of a strange hodgepodge of punk, indie, dance and hip hop, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The highlights for me include:
The National, Minus the Bear (even though each record is slightly less awesome, “Highly Refined Pirates” banks them a lot of cred in my book), St. Vincent (Member of Dallas’ The Polyphonic Spree whose solo record is great), Deerhoof, Dead Milkmen, Bad Brains, Clipse, Dan Deacon, Young Widows, Kool Keith and ALL.
I’m also really excited about the Rival Schools reunion, and the Walter Schreifels solo set. I’m a huge Quicksand fan, and Walter is still a kind of mythic figure to me.
Tickets for FFFF can be purchased here. Complete lineup info is here.
HTML 5 Spec
Browsing the still-in-development HTML5 recommendation is fun.
My favorite addition is the “irrelevant” attribute (which I could wrap around some entire sites I’ve done in the past), but there are all kinds of interesting new gadgets, including a bunch of new dom events, sandboxable iframes, video and audio elements, a “draggable” attribute, a datagrid and more. It’s also worth noting that the “embed” element will now officially be part of the spec, making all kinds of invalid flash embedding suddenly okay.
IE Users
Funniest Venn diagram I’ve seen in a long time. Also, the most accurate. Though it doesn’t differentiate between IE6 and IE7 users, which I feel is a key piece of information.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
This Sunday, the Alamo downtown will present a single screening of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a documentary portrait of the brilliant director and sometime lecher.
Apparently, the film focuses heavily on the infamous, circus-like statutory rape trial that led to Polanski’s self-imposed exile. But it also explores the Polish director’s turbulent early life, including his time in a German concentration camp, and the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family.
Whatever you think of Polanski himself, the guy has led had an amazingly interesting life, and I’m interested to see how he’s presented here.
UPDATE: This will actually be playing a few times next week. I’m dumb. Got tickets for Sunday, though.
[Tickets]
Firebug Freezes Gmail
I’m probably the last person in the world to figure this out, but Gmail hates Firebug–my mail slows to a crawl if I have FB running. Disabling FB completely seems to have worked for me. Though now I need to keep turning it off and on all day, which blows. (And no, choosing “disable firebug for gmail.com” doesn’t help.)
Link Roundup for August 14th through August 18th
- Lionsgate Tries Bipartisan Approach to ‘W’ Marketing
It might just be me, but these posters don't scream "drama". Still, I'm a fan of Josh Brolin, and I'm excited about seeing this. - LAN Party Massacre
Gamerz beware. Via BoingBoing. - Austin Chronicle: Best of Austin 2008
It's that time of year again. Please vote for Austinist in the "Local Non-Chronicle Publication", "Local Entertainment Website" and "Local Blog" sections. - Very Short Stories
Kristin and I were just talking about Hemingway's shortest story, and while I was looking for the exact phrasing, I come across this Wired list of stories written in the same spirit. Some are fantastic. Some are not.
Link Roundup for August 11th through August 13th
- TIFF Midnight Madness Schedule
Wish I couldbe there this year. - Fantastic Fest Announces Second Wave of Titles
There is some overlap between the FF lineup (so far) and the much smaller but equally awesome TIFF Midnight Madness Lineup. They both look great– in fact, Fantastic Fest looks downright amazing this year. - Dischord Records opens Direct Download Service
They announced this a while back, but the Dischord MP3 store is now officially open. The entire Dischord catalog is available for download, with most albums priced at $7. Who needs retail? I love Dischord so much. - Brad Pitt Signs for Tarantino Film
Kinda weird. But I actually like Brad Pitt, so this might be good. - Slackerwood Podcast
Local film fanatic and Cinematical contributor Jette Kernion has started a podcast over at her blog, Slackerwood.
Back Online
If you tried to come to my site recently (particularly if you’re using Firefox), you probably got some crazy warning about how your computer will blow up, or something.
Apparently, I was hacked. Don’t worry though, it wasn’t anything that would have harmed or infected your computer. You’re all good.
Anyhoo, I’m back online now. I guess I should check on this site more often, but now that I’m posting mostly through browser plugins, I don’t often actually see the site any more. Lesson learned.
Link Roundup for July 17th through August 1st
- Get Your War On, the Animated Series
Not long after I moved to Austin, I caught a stage adaptation of GYWO… it was pretty brilliant. This new animated series looks like it might be just as good. - “Nuke the Fridge” is the new “Jump the Shark”
Not sure I like it. - Long-Lost Reels Of Metropolis Recovered
Wow. I can't wait to see this re-released in all its glory. Though I'm pretty sure Metropolis is in the public domain, so I hope someone sees restoring the footage as a worthy investment. - Alan Ball’s “True Blood” Gets Cool Marketing Campaign
Six Feet under creator Alan Ball's new show–about a group of vampires who drink synthetic blood in order to live among humans–has a very cool, very extensive marekting campaign. - Amazon Debuts Streaming Movie/TV Service
Amazon will launch a new streaming video service to select customers called Amazon Video on Demand. The service is different from its Unbox download service, which offers downloads of movies and TV to rent and buy, but only works on Windows machines.