A tender tale involving Darth Vader, the mall, 1978, and a seven-year-old child.

Warning: a cynical sense of humor will GREATLY enhance your appreciation of this anecdote. While I was much too mature to have the same experience as the unfortunate Matthew in 1978, as a willfully childless 37-year old, this story reduced me to tears of helpless laughter.

The Naked Proof: Seattle Filmmaker Does Good

Jamie Hook leans against the coffee shop window, talking a blue streak. He’s been tweaking sound for The Naked Proof, his feature-film directorial debut, discussing the production process on the “romantic comedy.” The film is a comic look at the unraveling – or rebirth – of philosophy grad student Henry Rawitscher, who begins having possible hallucinations of a “Very Pregnant Woman.” A SIFF selection, The Naked Proof premieres at the Egyptian on June 13, at the Cinerama.

Editing notes:

The original title and cutline were “A Priori Knowledge: A brief dissertation on The Naked Proof.”

A well-intentioned cut in the paragraph above left the theater from a showing of the film that preceded the pressdate of the paper, resulting in the confusing impression tha the film will be playing at both the Egyptian and the Cinerama on June 13. It won’t; it’ll only be at the Cinerama.

Here is a link to the other piece I have in that ish, a review of the Canadian film Marion Bridge. This is the review where I apparently did not follow herd practice in the use of a 10-point rating scale.

Newly Digital: Professor Kalsey respectfully requests you submit your birth-of-computing memoir via the magic of Trackback.

Oh, you bet, Adam. But after the fine and sunny weekend.

[via the ever estimable Waxy.org]

I’d be remiss in not noting both Fantagraphics‘ online plea for patronage and the P-I’s immediate front-page coverage.

I’ve also written a news story on this for Tablet and filed it, but, um, it ain’t up yet. I’ll be doing a follow-up for the print ish next week as well.

For those of you too lazy to follow the links, here’s the deal: Fantagraphics is hoping to raise an additional $80,000 over and above their usual monthly revenue. The money is needed in order to pay off some loans taken out a couple of years ago to make up some revenue lost when a former distributor went bust and stiffed the publisher for about $72 grand.

How do they hope to raise the money? By having you, the loyal, discriminating, intelligent lover of the superior comic product buy more than you normally would from America’s Least Businesslike Comic Company! Roughly, that is.

Anyway, that’s the deal. If you figure you might pick up a Fanta title sometime in the next five years, now’s the time to do it. Go to the website, pick yourself out somethin’ nice, and make with the credit card, baby.

Salam’s story: The Guardian brings Salam of Where is Raed? aboard. Congrats, Salam!

An excerpt from skot’s latest masterpiece of verse.

SIFF Reviews: Tablet’s online reviews, to which I am a contributor. Unfortunately, it’s a bulletin-board style site without permalinks, so I’ll be reposting my reviews here as well.

Tablet also ran my profile on Jamie Hook and his film, The Naked Proof, this week, as well as a review of a Canadian film I saw for them, Marion Bridge. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have the new issue’s content online quite yet, so I can’t link.

Rereading the pieces, I was underwhelmed. The Marion Bridge review was 150 words, which is a tough length for film, for me, and since I was of two minds on the film, I felt the review was scattered. also, the format required a numeric rating scale, 1 to 10, and I didn’t know if one should use the scale like an averaged scale, where 5 would be average, or like grades, where 7 or 8 would be average. I decided if they wanted grades, they’d have used grades. I gave it a five, but it seems like everyone else was thinking the other way, as 8 is the average score other reviewers offered. Stupid symbolic ratings.

The Hook piece was OK, but felt very choppy to me, and unfortunately was marred by an editing goof in which one of two dates for the film was partially removed, leaving the impression that the film was playing in two theaters on one day. Ah well, them’s the breaks. Hopefully there won’t be a long line of distraught Jamie Hook and Charles Mudede fans waiting at the wrong cinema come opening night.

Cosmic Encounter Online: yes, that Cosmic Encounter.

This game was one of my favorites, back in the day, partly because the rules forced direct social negotiation to be the basis of play. It was hilarious. The game bears some relationship to Magic, in that you gain and lose gaming capability (“powers”) that affect gameplay via cards (at least in the offline version).

What made it fun, in my opinion, is that the effects and strengths of the powers were very vaguely, linguistically defined, and so everyone in the game had to negotiate the limits and effects of the powers, each time they were deployed. Which led to much bribing, yelling, plotting, stealing, and all the other sorts of things we speaking monkeys do for fun in the off-season.

I have no idea where I got my copy of the game. Did I inherit it from Eric Sinclair? I don’t think so, but maybe.

paper cd case: [via karen marcelo at BB] – karen also notes a perl implementation.

Had a lovely weekend, thank you, and hope you did too.

abe vigoda status: dead? Alive? [via memepool]

Didn’t Fish go off the air when he passed away?

Or maybe he actually wasn’t dead. I mean, I know Jack Soo died, but I thought I heard Fish was dead.

Listen to the song.

(Sorry about the deeplinking – it’s not clearly labeled as a song on the site)