Jump to content
  • entries
    945
  • comments
    4,956
  • views
    1,221,557

About this blog

Mostly Atari-related projects, and other ramblings. Home of the Artie the Atari comic strip.

Entries in this blog

Man of Steel - Spoiler-free review

Yep. Sitting in a theater again, waiting for a movie to start. But this is one I really have no expectations for, one way or the other. I'll admit I didn't have high hopes when I first heard they were rebooting the Superman movies, since after all - it's Superman. How much can you really do with it? Besides, DC's track record for movies is generally pretty bad. But some of the trailers looked pretty good. So in just a few minutes here, I guess I'll find out. The theater is mostly empty though, s

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Star Trek 3... and beyond

Since the Star Trek reboot seems intent on recycling old story elements for their films, I thought I'd help them out with a plot summary for the next one.   Okay… it starts out with a group of space hippies who steal Spock's brain.   Their society (which is based on ancient Rome) is under the control of an intelligent supercomputer named Landru (who talks like a 1930's gangster), and they need Spock's brain to build a weapon to defeat their enemies (space Nazis) on a neighboring planet. And

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Star Trek Into Darkness - Spoiler-free Review

To recap the first film:   http://youtu.be/OTfBH-XFdSc   Okay, so with that out of the way, yet again I find myself sitting in a theater, waiting for a movie to start. In this case Star Trek Into Darkness, which I guess is supposed to be read as a sentence. So we're trekking, into darkness. Or something. Anyway, since I effectively "trekked" to the theater, and am sitting in relative darkness, the title seems somewhat apropos.   Unlike Iron Man 3, where we were hustled into the theater mer

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Real-world Lynx fun

I recently added a Lynx to Artie the Atari. The reasons were twofold: I've had a Post-It note on my computer for well over a year that says, "Atari Lynx whose battery always dies by fourth panel".   . I've had a list of Lynx games I've been meaning to buy from B&C Computervisions for even longer than that. Much, much longer. . I'm not a completist, by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some games I've always wanted to pick up for the system (I own a Lynx II).   Nearly 22

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

A Handy thing to have

(Incidentally, I'm still really irritated by the forum software's inexplicable need to resize images that don't need to be resized. Also the fact that it doesn't indicate that the image has been resized, nor give the viewer any clue that you can enlarge it to full size by clicking on it.)   135 < PreviousIndexNext >

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum in Comic Strips

19th Nervous Breakdown

So, for the 19th year now (not in a row... but that's another story) I've put together the end-of-year shows for the CalArts Character Animation Program. Last year's blog blurb about this can be found here. And if you poke around enough, you'll find blog entries for these going back to 2008 (with a brief mention in 2006). Maybe it's a form of therapy or something. In a weird sort-of way, I kind of wish I'd been blogging about this since the first one I did. A lot of lost memories along the way.

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Iron Man 3 - Spoiler-free review

When Iron Man 2 came out, for whatever reason, I just didn't have any interest in seeing it in the theater. Turns out, when I did watch it on Blu-ray, I liked it well enough to wish I'd gone and seen it on the big screen.   So with Iron Man 3, I decided to go see it in the theater. Some movies, you just gotta. Especially after The Avengers. And the trailers for Iron Man 3 looked pretty good.   I rarely go opening night to blockbusters, since the theaters are usually stupid-crazy-crowded. But

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Getting the Scoop on animation

A few weeks back, I wrote about the death of animation news/opinion site Cartoon Brew, as one of its founders - Jerry Beck - left the site.   Jerry returned to working on his own site - Cartoon Research - with several long-time contributors. Posting cool articles, oddities and rarities relating to animation history.   But news? Not so much. I really didn't want to return to the smoldering corpse of Cartoon Brew, either.   But now, Jerry & company have launched a new animation news and

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

The (almost) return of Starcade

As I'd pointed out in the comments of this blog entry (it'd be really nice if there were a way to link directly to a particular comment... ), the once-great Starcade video arcade at Disneyland had become a sad shadow of its former self. Back in the early 80's, it was an amazing arcade, jammed full of video games, spanning two floors.   When Disney released Tron: Legacy, they opened up Flynn's Arcade as part of ElecTRONica in California Adventure. I never managed to get over and see it though,

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

To-do or die!

Another year, another To-Do List. I actually started this list in February, but it didn't get done because I didn't add finishing it to my old To-Do list. (Is that a Moebius Loop or a Vicious Circle? )   Besides, formatting is still woefully broken in the blogs, and even though it looks good in the editor, once I post it, it becomes a mess. But since I'm not going to wait around forever for that to get fixed, I might as well post it now.   As always, here's a link to last year's. Been there,

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

iBlog 3

No, I haven't already replaced my iPhone 5. Quite to the contrary, I've added another iDevice to keep it company: an iPad Mini.   I recently did some freelance stuff at work, so between that and the Apple gift card I got for recycling my iPhone 3GS, I had enough money to (mostly) cover the cost.   I hadn't really planned to buy an iPad, but the more I tried ones belonging to others, the more it appealed to me. Particularly for using it as a digital sketchbook. Several friends of mine all use

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Disney gets something right

Just to provide a balanced counterpoint to yesterday's post, there is proof Disney isn't entirely evil. (And of course, there's always Wreck-It Ralph. Now on Blu-ray!)   They're producing new Mickey Mouse shorts, and by the look of the first one... they've actually got it right.   A funny Mickey Mouse short... who'da thunk?

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Disney embraces the Dark Side

If you've been reading my blog, you'll know I've been following The Clone Wars animated series pretty closely since it started. It's had its hits and misses over five seasons, but in practical fact it's been nothing short of a milestone both in terms of TV animation, and theatrical-level CG work in a TV series.   It's also done something I didn't think possible - made me care about the prequel-era Star Wars universe and characters.   At the end of season 5, Over the course of the series

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

The death of "Cartoon Brew"

Let's see, what bad things have happened in animation recently?   Well, DreamWorks is reportedly laying off 20 - 25% of their employees.   Rhythm & Hues is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.   And the website Cartoon Brew is dead.   Where did I read about all of these? Why, Cartoon Brew, of course!   Cartoon Brew has been, for better or worse, a central source of animation-related news and opinion for the last nine years.   Co-founded by animation historian and author Jerry Beck a

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

×
×
  • Create New...