The Film Movement is an idea with a lot of promise: once-monthly distribution of truly independent films on DVD or VHS to subscribers via U.S. Mail. “Film Movement scours the world’s top festivals to bring members 12 outstanding films each year.” One day we’ll be downloading our booty from these kinds of clubs and storing it on massive personal hard drives, but for now, the US$20 per month fee seems like a reasonable price to pay for a hard copy. The first movie ships in December.

This is my second Movable Type post in less than a week, but that’s because this product is amazing. Not being much of a CGI monkey, I paid the folks over at Movable Type to install it for me, which they did in less than six hours and for a mere twenty bucks. That’s terrific enough, but the software itself also happens to be remarkably robust — just take a look at these screen shots. It’s really hard to believe they give it away free. (Actually, the authors depend on a donation system.) It’s been a blast tinkering with it, and it’s definitely set me on the path of redesigning Subtraction.com. Soon.

Since I started running Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar, I’ve become pretty active on the TidBITS Talk, probably the best-moderated discussion list for general Macintosh topics you can find. The other day I came across a nifty feature on the list’s companion Web site: the ability to access all of my posts. I gotta say, I was pretty surprised to find this and it made me think: nothing you send out onto the Internet is ever lost.

Blogger is great, but it has its limitations. So I’ve been seriously considering switching over to Ben and Mena Trott’sMovable Type. The more I look at it, the more impressed I am by this grass-roots content management system, especially by the fact that it’s run entirely by a husband-wife team. The wife, Mena, also happens to be a terrific designer, as evidenced by her beautiful personal site, dollarshort.org. All this has me thinking: it’s about time for Subtraction.com to move up to version 6.0.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics have joined forces to produce Chilling Effects, a Web site devoted to educating the public on their rights within the First Amendment and copyright laws. ?[It] offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.? Have a look at the database of cease and desist letters sent by megacorporations to perceived violators of their copyrights to get an idea why the site has that name.

Yesterday, I took a trip with some friends toSix Flags Great Adventure, where we spent the afternoon riding roller-coasters, something I haven’t done in years. It was a complete blast, a reminder of how much fun roller-coasters were when I was a teenager, and a revelation in seeing how advanced they’ve become in the years since. The best was Nitro, followed not too far behind by Medusa. There’s some great video of the Nitro ride over at the Discovery Channel’s Web site.

The New York Times Magazine, in its seasonal “Men’s Fashions of the Times” issue, found an excuse to profile the legendary British ‘art director’ Peter Saville. It’s a fluff piece, obviously, but Saville is not completely undeserving of adulation, having designed some of the best record covers of all time.

A moment from the Feast of San Gennaro, in its 75th year in New York’s Little Italy.

There are one hundred words that every high school graduate should know. Presumably, everything else can be communicated via hand gestures and grunting.

No doubt a cease and desist letter will soon take this Web page down, but if you can catch it before that happens, it’s a hoot: the Defective Yeti’s hilarious Evite parodyinvites your country to come have a ball and wage war on Iraq.

It’s nothing new to say that “The Sopranos” has got to be the best thing on television, but I have to addmy voice to the chorus nevertheless. Having recently caught up on the first three seasons via their DVD releases and watched the fourth season premiere at a friend’s earlier this evening, I have to say that almost everything written in praise of this show is actually true — it is a meticulously crafted dramatic tapestry, it is funnier and scarier than most anything ever seen on television, and it is just that good. What strikes me most about it is how perfectly balanced it is, how it’s constituted of exactly the right amounts of humor, pathos, drama and violence. Now, if only I had HBO.

Most everything you could hope to learn about 70s-era blaxploitation movies using a Web browser can be found at Blaxploitation.com. My only real complaint is the scans are too small — the rich collection of posters and record covers deserves to be shown in much larger detail.And if you’re fascinated by film ephemera like this, you might also get a kick, as I did, out of the Art of James Bond.

Right now, I’m halfway through reading “The Big Con,” originally published in 1940, and a major source of inspiration for movies like “The Sting” and, reportedly, the playwright, screenwriter and director David Mamet. The book’s author, David Maurer, was a linguist, but his investigation of the lingo of con men led him to write this engrossing account of marks, ropers, insidemen and the bizarro reality of the big confidence games. It reads like part historical account, part how-to manual,and part hard-boiled fiction.

Here it is, Behavior’s latest site launch:  Gain, the all-new online magazine from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Gain started life in the dot-com boom as a journal focusing on the practice of experience design, but in this new incarnation it’s all about the increasingly crucial relationship between the business and design worlds. We’ve been working on relaunching this magazine for a while, and we’re pretty proud of it. Enjoy!

Stay tuned until tomorrow for a new Web site launch by Behavior. This is what’s been occupying much of my time — trying to pull together the dozens of tiny parts that go into a launch, and keeping track of all of them while also trying to get some design done. Not to mention sleep and play. At any rate, it’s going to be pretty fun and I’m proud and excited. More tomorrow.

German art book publisher Taschen has released what I sheepishly admit is probably the perfect book for me: “Computers, An Illustrated History.” The book is a somewhat perfunctory historical account of the evolution of big iron mainframes and unexpectedly powerful ‘micro-computers’ and PCs, but probably no one should consider it authoritative. Rather, its true value is as a quietly lavish compendium of 50+ years of computer photographs, mostly marketing shots of hardware. Nostalgiac kitsch aside, this is a remarkable compilation of coolly alluring imagery, some of which is beautiful, and some of which is frightening — but most all of which seems to promise a kind of precision-controlled, modernistic utopia, if only humans would give themselves over to the digital world.

I am getting back on my feet after a kind of unnerving recent change in my personal life. I often wonder if I should be posting more personal entries in this blog, but for now I’ll continue to refrain. Posts may be intermittent over the next week or two, at least.