Bloods Law Of Weblogs: painfully true, especially in certain idiotic communities (no elbow pointing at LiveJournal).

The real life of an absolute nobody is not the most obvious subject for entertainment. Taking that life and turning it into a comic, less so. But that’s what happened to Harvey Pekar.

Trying to leave his mark on the world somehow, he decided to turn his everyday life into a comic called American Splendor, under the auspice that “ordinary life is pretty complicated stuff”.

Now we have the film of the man of the comic of the man.

Pekar is played perfectly by Paul Giamatta. It is, however, a difficult task to make the average man look more interesting than he is.

Ultimately, the film is mediocre, with a few interesting moments. Perhaps it’s best that way; a true reflection of Harvey’s life.

The first random links post of the year, plentiful in size and usefulness:

• Plink – Just what FOAF needed, a pretty looking parser and search service. Nice.
• Speech Reversal – An article on reversing speech in songs, and human perception thereof.
• Smarty For Beginners – A fairly straight forward tutorial on the Smarty templating language.
• Live Comment Previews – Very cool use of javascript to provide a live preview of comments as they are entered. Could get quite complex, dependent on text processing, but great nonetheless.
• Shrook Intervals – A misbehaving RSS reader? Maybe it should be more polite.
• Banished Words – A list of words banished for 2004. None will be missed.
• Gawsh – Google results displayed by host. Could be useful to someone.
• GoogleSynth – A program that pulls 2 random images from Google and blends them together. Mostly crap, but some interesting results.
• CSS vault – A stronghold of CSS tips. Bookmark it.
• Escher For Real – People creating the impossible designs of Escher for real. Absolutely bizarre.
• Google Spellchecker – Using Google to check if a word is spelled correctly. Simple, but very smart.
• Accept Headers Broken – Almost no browsers do Accept headers correctly. Not surprising.

• **[Quick Guide to C#](http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/quickcsharp.asp?target=Quick

  C#)** – Learn C# quickly, if yo already know Java.

And we’re done.

Happy New Year! The Christmas design is gone and it is time to get on with the best things in 2003 post. No reasons or commentary, just the picks.

Best Albums:

1. “Deloused In The Comatorium” – The Mars Volta.
2. “The Neon Handshake” – Hell Is For Heroes.
3. “Once Like A Spark” – JetPlane Landing.

Best Films (starting from the summer):

1. Kill Bill, volume 1.
2. Buffalo Soliders.
3. Igby Goes Down.

Best code:

1. Textile.
2. Magnetic Poetry.
3. Safe HTML Checker.

And that’s all for last year. This year my intentions are to finish at least one of the projects I’ve got in my head (one in particular is hooking me a lot right now, so I need to do it), as well as a major redesign (it’s sketched on paper somewhere, but it’ll take a while to actually do it) and a huge bit of course work for university.

Note: There are spoilers in this review, so look away if you haven’t seen it already.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, Return Of The King is poor, at best. Sure, the giant battles are impressive as always, but even they seem weak compared to the battle at Helm’s Deep. And the way the battle ended at Minis Tirith? Awful! (“Oh, and then a bunch of ghosts saved the day.”)

The acting was atrociously bad. The hobbits, in particular, were painful to listen to.

The ending was also tediously drawn out. I didn’t think anything would be more dull than the endless walking of Fellowship Of The Ring, but the endless ending of Return beat it.

I’m sure that if you like formulaic Hollywood epics then you’ll love this. I didn’t.