WHAT WE’RE WATCHING : The 2013/2014 Series DARK NET

DARK NET is a Canadian produced series spearheaded by Director/Producer Vincenzo Natali that is about urban myths in the Internet/technological age and it may just be the most inventive and impressive 30 minute speculative show since the original TWILIGHT ZONE over 54 years ago.

In many ways DARK NET does for today’s audience what that show did for its 1960s audience, namely push the boundaries of our assumptions, our conventions and our fears. It is a show about obsessions, and the places sad and tragic, such dark and lonely roads take us.

And what is so masterful about this show is its structure, unwilling to just give us one story this series weaves multiple stories of obsession and unhealthy curiosity into 30 minutes, producing one of the most effective anthologies to date. Wonderfully directed, shot, and impressively performed, three episodes into watching this series courtesy of Netflix and I’m completely sold and enamored of it.

This is a series that screams out for and deserves a beautiful Blu-Ray presentation so it can be enjoyed in the best quality possible complete with Director’s commentary and special features. Grade: A must See!

WEBCOMIC OF THE DAY: GRAVEDIGGER

Today’s Webcomic of the day is GRAVEDIGGER, beautifully drawn noir tinged crime webcomic, starring a character that bears more than a passing resemblance to movie heist hardman Lee Marvin.

Well drawn and engagingly written. Check it out here!

Tech Talk of the Day and…. Lizards?!!

“What good is wisdom, if it gives no solace to the wise?”
— Dark Side of the Moon

I do think, somewhere the military was fighting Godzilla, as we had helicopters in formation, and fighter planes roaring above our heads, in a hurry to get somewhere.

And it could have been my imagination, but in the distance I could just make out a sound that could have been the roar of a righteously pissed off, gigantic atomic lizard. 🙂 .

Well enough with my perhaps peyote inspired dinosaur diatribe, onto today’s tech tips:

If you use Firefox there’s a feature called Pipelining that’s turned off by default. Here’s an article about turning it on to offer a marginal increase in page load times/responsiveness:

Firefox and Pipelining!

A decent read. And so far I’m testing it out, with no issues.

A couple other tweaks…

A few items I had turned on in the Firefox browser by default, that I’m currently testing in disabled mode, as I don’t use fancy high-faluting graphics when I surf, Plus some of them have, like WebGL, known security issues:

webgl.disabled;true
media.webm.enabled;false
html5.parser.enable;false
html5.offmainthread;false
geo.enabled;false

browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash;false

And yes I know HTML5 is all the rage these days, but I’m not really a rage type guy. :). Still toying with it and seeing what it offers enabled as opposed to disabled. So I’ll report back on the effect of these tweaks after I’ve browsed with em for a bit.

Oh and here’s a pretty cool read if you are, like me, a newbie to the Opera browser:

Recent versions of Opera by default have a web server built-in, and TURNED ON. Who does that? The vast majority of people using a browser have no need for it to be broadcasting and requesting information like it is a web-server. So if you don’t need your computer/browser to be a web-server, you should consider disabling the Unite and Web Server functions of opera. Here’s more discussion on the pros and cons:

Webserver in your browser?
thoughts on opera browser

So if you read all that and decide you want to disable Unite/Webserver in Opera do the following:

• Enter opera:config in that browser.
• Expand the “User Prefs” section and turn OFF the checkbox for “Enable Unite”.
• Expand the “Web Server” section and turn OFF all those checkboxes, especially the 2 labled UPnP.

For more details go here!

Okay that’s all for this installment. Hope you’ve found some of that useful.

And goshdarn it… is that sound getting closer?!!! GOJIRA!!!! Ahhhh!! Ahhhh! (Yes I have watched too many Godzilla movies :))

The COMIC STRIP Returns?!!!! THE HOUSE OF DUELING MIDNIGHT #1

Yeah, yeah.. it’s pretty stupid, and horrible. But I have to admit… it made me chuckle. 🙂

As far as why… Well I’ve been meaning to put up a couple strips for a while. And have been trying to network, collaborate with a couple of artists, but I’ll let you in on a secret, artists aren’t really the most reliable bunch for collaborating or networking with… at least the ones I’ve been dealing with.

So rather than wait on people to grow up, I decided to just ‘what the heck’ it, and just go ahead and create and post something that would make me laugh.

Hence this very brief, very juvenile ‘cut and paste’ cartoon courtesy of one of the free cartoon generators out there, The art is crude, but the insane story and words and madness is all me. Hope you enjoyed it. If you do, leave a comment and some likes!

It’s a work in progress experiment, that will improve if you guys will stick in there with me. Thanks!! 🙂

WEBSERIES of the Day: DOMINION

I watched the 1st episode and some of the Webisodes of a series called DOMINION, billed as a film Noir series, and enjoyed it.

I’m not typically a web-series type of guy, but I gave this one a shot and liked it. I’m waiting to hear back from the creators in regards to episode #2, but in the meantime view the existing episodes here.