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My friend Kyung (aka Fritz K. Park) drew some awesome aliens.

Gabe Swarr is up to something cool. I can totally relate to the idea.

This is simply magical. I have no idea how to describe it, so I’ll just go with the official line: “True 8-bit Color Cycling with HTML5″. It totally rekindles that childhood feeling of discovering a new place in a point-and-click adventure. HTML5 really does…rock.

[Edit] The artist, Mark Ferrari, is the same brilliant guy who created the old Lucasarts backgrounds. Now it all makes sense! I can’t stop looking at this stuff. Mesmerizing.

I have a special fondness for quite a few films that are considered disasters, and John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of them. I saw it twice in an empty theater when I was a kid, and it had me captivated from beginning to end both times.

Last week I re-watched my old DVD for the first time in ages, and I enjoyed it as much as ever. It’s a mess, but a genuinely fascinating one. Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau is both mind-blowingly crazy and utterly convincing, and the same goes for the rest of the performances, many of which were reportedly improvised. The ‘animals’ are incredible, due in equal part to amazing make-up work by Stan Winston and some extremely freaky performances, especially the Hyena-Swine and Azazello the ‘dog’, the latter played by Temuera Morrison. And through it all, there’s an atmosphere of unraveling chaos that I find perfectly unnerving.

There’s a lot that’s not so great, too, like some truly awful CGI (brief, thankfully), but considering the film’s disastrous production, I find the results remarkable.

The film was met with a great deal of derision when it was released, but one look at the feedback on Amazon shows that it enjoys a significant following of people who share my respect for it. Definitely a movie that deserves to be given a chance.

The same friend who sent me last week’s awesome Tron image sent me this pic yesterday. I’d seen it before, but never in such high resolution. So incredibly cool. Thanks Kyung!

My friend shared this pic with me yesterday at random, and it reminded me once again of what an incredible vision was behind the original Tron. I’m not really feeling the sequel.

I still can’t get over how awesome this is, which appeared at Kotaku a couple days ago. I also can’t get over how awesome it is that “Koopa” came from “gukbap”. Never knew!

Nick from 4cr started a Tumblr to post random sketches, and as a huge fan of all things scribbly (more than finished art, even), I’m loving it. You can follow via Flickr or Buzz, too.

Villains don’t get much better than this.

I love the old Kid Icarus art so much. Click to see it a little bigger.

I don’t like social networks. Just today, I finally got around to deactivating an untouched Facebook page that I’d set up ages ago, and though I keep a dummy Twitter account, I only really use it as a source of links. (And to listen in on the occasional back-and-forth banter of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, which makes me wish DeForest Kelley was still around.)

I was curious about Buzz when it first launched inside of Gmail, but it quickly seemed way too noisy and quite useless. Then some time went by and the Android widget was released, which was so slick that it motivated me to buzz for the first time. It’s a cool little thing.

Upon revisiting the service, I began finding Buzz a convenient way to keep up on a lot of interesting stuff without having to leave Gmail, which I never do anyway. And for me, that’s the whole point: I enjoy some features of social networks — being able to follow this or that person who frequently shares great links, for instance — but I’m not particularly interested in signing up for a service (or even visiting a site on a regular basis) to experience them.

Buzz isn’t the first service to pull in feeds from various social sites, but it’s the only one that’s located in the right place for me, and that hits the right spot. (After proper tuning, anyway, which in my case involved turning off all email notifications, something I feel should have been default.) And on a more basic level, the ultra-clean format simply makes it a great place for reading and discussion in general, including lengthy posts.

Together with the integrated profiles, I get the feeling that one of the underlying ideas here may be to create a practical social network that omits all of the nonsense, something to attract those who are turned off by the massively popular social juggernauts ruling the scene. If that’s the case, it’s an alternative that’s working for me.

I hope the next step in all of this proves to be less a Facebook clone than a positive evolution of what’s already good about Buzz and profiles. They’re on to something here.

This post really struck a chord with me.

I am in total agreement with this. And on that note, a part of me weeps every time I play Star Fox 64 on the VC — it just isn’t the same without the haptic feedback.

Mind = blown.

[Edit] Via one of the sources for the above link, I found my new dream car.