Plaintive Mewling

Seen on Google:

Looks like Mr. $267,000 is a loser.

The Online Film Critics Society (bet you didn’t know there even was an Online Film Critics Society) has come up with a list of movies from the 90s that didn’t get the exposure they deserved.

I’ve seen a fair number of them and I disagree with only a couple. Most of the rest are excellent. And many of the ones I haven’t seen yet are already on my Netflix queue!

I actually like this list a little better than some of the more respectable lists like the AFI Top 100s, because (a) it has a decent quantity of weird/cult films such as “Flirting with Disaster” (my favorite Ben Stiller comedy), and (b) each entry links to a brief blurb explaining why they felt it deserved to be on the list.

The creator of the PvP online comic strip has decided to offer his strip for free to any newspapers that want to publish it, after a cartoon syndication company refused to let him keep non-newspaper publication rights. Sounds like the syndicates are pretty much a useless artifact of the past at this point and I suspect he’s right about them going the way of the dodo.

MIT’s Daedalus has an insightful article, “How Not to Buy Happiness,” that addresses the question of why societies whose prosperity levels grow don’t see corresponding increases in happiness. It boils down to keeping up with the Joneses: people tend to overallocate their newfound resources on conspicuous items that everyone else is buying, but that don’t cause permanent changes in happiness. But the good news is that it is possible to change the situation.
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Movable Type didn’t like one of the security fixes I installed on the Web server, so I took the opportunity to scout around for new blogger software. WordPress seemed like the nicest free one around. I’m impressed so far — it’s very clean and fast, and a hell of a lot easier to set up than MT was.