Now the news display function is just taunting me. Grrr. I'll show it. Um, sometime. It's on my list.

You know, there's occasionally something comforting in old, really bad cartoons. Little known, but there used to be a BattleTech cartoon aired on, I don't know what, Saturday mornings or something. This was at the very dawn of computer graphics (really bad computer graphics) in cartoons, maybe even before Reboot. I never caught the show when it was on, but I've been watching it lately and, well, I just can't seem to stop watching it. Every single production value it has is rock-bottom, yet there's a certain rightness behind the script (also terribly clichéd) that draws me in. It's clear that the show was written by BattleTech fans rather than scriptwriters who were handed the franchise and told "go study this overnight, we expect scripts by tomorrow".

I guess it's really the same sort of fascination I watch the Shadowrun fan-film projects with (sadly, the Kurzfilme project site seems to have evaporated with the advent of the Microsoft game). They're not really well-done, any of them, at least not by major studio standards, but they are done with a care and lovingness that strikes their own cord with me. I mean, at least as much care and lovingness as you can have with guns and fireballs going off left and right.

Hope those of you in the States had a good Thanksgiving. I know I did. I don't do Black Friday, though. Get up at 3 in the morning to stand in a line in a packed store just for some discounts? Noooo thanks. I wonder what Karl Marx would have written about Black Friday, asssuming that we could somehow raise him from the dead. But then perhaps all he would write is "prolotariate braaaaaains...."