There’s some beautiful and clever work at Vooz, a Korean “character system“ of Sanrio-like adorability. Not only are the illustrations gorgeously rendered, but the movies evidence that rare quality: traditional, cell-based animation craftsmanship executed with Flash.

“Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin” is a harrowing documentary about the civil war in Afghanistan, shot by three Italian filmmakers who are nearly as heroic as their subjects. It follows the efforts of a team of international doctors and nurses who set up an emergency hospital for war victims, but takes great care to give voice to the ravaged Afghani population. The movie spares nothing in depicting the brutal reality of its subject matter, and it left me physically distraught. Please go see it.

“This paper attempts to place current principles and debates in computer interface design within the broader context of media and culture using the tools of critical theories.” It’s a nice attempt. Nothing groundbreaking, but it can’t be a bad thing to think of the somewhat arbitrary (and often arbitrarily defined) concept of ‘look and feel’ in a more critical light.

The MIT Technology Review: reports on the community-owned wireless access phenomenon, singling out NYCwireless’s efforts to cover New York with free, 802.11b-based wireless broadband Internet access. There’s even a node in my neighborhood.

PBS’s “Frontline” regularly turns out incisive and fascinating documentaries, each of which is accompanied by an impressively deep microsite. These are more than just brochureware; they feature extended interviews, articles, charts, essays and reference materials. You could spend hours in any one of them, whether you’re interested in Hollywood, the Clinton years or global warming. They’re well-designed and content-rich, and great examples of how old media can get the most out of new media.

Thanks a million to Newstoday and especially Suction for the plug.

The pen alignment on my Palm Vx has been giving me major problems. In trying to repair it, I’ve been using Palm Computing’s Chat Assistant, a Java-based chat applet that lets me talk to a member of Palm’s tech support staff, very much like the services available from LivePerson.We need more of this kind of tech support, if only for the fact that it’s infinitely preferable to hanging on a phone line. The queue for help was much more bearable than waiting on hold because I was actually able to continue working on other tasks. What’s more, chatting online with a technician entails far less pressure than talking on the phone — there’s no sense of being rushed for time, no battle of personalities expressed through passive-aggressive conversational nuances. By the way, I’d still rather have a PocketPC.

One thing that strikes me as incredibly ridiculous is the Republican belief that airport security should remain a private sector industry. Using that logic, why not use private sector companies to guard the U.S. borders to Canada and Mexico too.

The street I live on, Ninth Street in Manhattan’s East Village, is lined with lots of little store fronts, clothiers, record shops, mom-and-pop restaurants. They’re nearly all cute as hell, but two of them have caught my eye lately. A. Cheng designs retro-modernist fashions for women, and Elaine Arsenault (whose in-progress Web site needs a little help — hint, hint) hand-makes remarkably attractive bags.

Television is a heck of a lot better today than it has been at just about any time I can remember. This includes the glory days of my youth when networks actually thought they could pass off the likes of “Matt Houston” as quality entertainment and people would go for it. Everybody loves “The Sopranos” of course, but I’m equally wowed by “The West Wing,” and I’m probably more impressed by this season’s newly initiated “Scrubs” than just about anything else. That said, I really, really have to stop watching TV, because it stills sucks the energy from one’s soul mercilessly.

Subtraction now has search capability, thanks to the terrific technology available from Atomz. Built on the same wonderfully generous consumer ASP model as Blogger, Atomz allows smaller sites to set up fairly powerful search capabilities in no time, and for free! Within a few hours, I had Atomz running and searching content in the Post section. Like Blogger, Atomz allows site developers to completely customize the look and feel of its results, which is a must for me.

Writing in the New York Times on Wednesday in an article called “Summer of the Spinoff,” Rick Lyman takes a look at the impending movie season, which, even moreso than those in recent memory, is chock-full of what some call “the inevitable result of more than a decade of growing influence for studio marketing departments and corporate risk-aversion strategies.” In spite of my growing excitement over next week’s release of “Spider-Man,” it’s alarming to realize that, according to Lyman, at least sixteen films this summer will fall into the category of “sequels, prequels, spinoffs, remakes and franchise films based on comic books, television series or video games.”

The post-Clinton Democratic Party had better fucking get it together if they want to stop conceding electoral politics to the unqualified and the suspicious. I’m really angry.

Nail-biters are exhausting, and I’m tired of them, especially when their resolutions repeatedly favor those that don’t deserve to win. Since Bush stole the election from Gore, it’s been a year of these kinds of nail-biters it seems, whether it was the Yankees losing last Sunday or the apparent loss of Mark Green to Michael Bloomberg in today’s New York City mayoral race. It’s a dark, dark time.

Sunday has got to be most depressing day of the week, and it doesn’t help that, since daylight savings time has been in effect, night falls at a precipitously early hour. It must be these Sunday doldrums getting to me when I can’t help but think that the world has fallen into shadow, that we’re knee-deep into a potentially miserable recession, that the war we’re waging in Afghanistan is a kind of murderous folly, that the business I’ve begun might be a foolish and fruitless conceit, that my girlfriend and I are going to break up, that the Yankees are going to lose the World Series tonight.

The nine year-old in me (okay, and the twenty-nine year old, too) is really excited for the Cartoon Network’s upcoming “Justice League” series, debuting a week from today. Read more about it at Comics2Film. [Correction: Actual premiere date is Sat 17 Nov. ]

As a cynic and general non-believer in the myths of professional sports, I’m nevertheless amused and warmed by the “mystique” of the New York Yankees. Their series-tying win over the Arizona Diamondbacks last night sent a jolt through me, and in the wake of September 11th, I can see that it does mean something very real to the city, something intangible yet very palpable. It’s the kind of emotional resonance that’s hard to argue with.