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This afternoon I made my very first ever Flash movie. I’ve struggled with Flash before, many many years ago, and found going through the instructions supplied with it so frustratingly awful that I gave up and consigned myself to the ‘bit technically dim’ category. But today I decided to confront my demons and go hell for leather, and having discovered a considerably more helpful article at Webmonkey, I can now present some circles, moving. I can’t believe that I am so ridiculously proud of this absurdly simple (and basically broken) piece of rubbish. Sigh.

A month after the film opened, usatoday confronts the burning question of our times: “What the hell was the ending of Planet of the Apes about?”.

I’ve got my hands on a few previews of upcoming American TV series, and I’m planning to plough my way through them over the next few days. First up is 24. Kiefer Sutherland stars in this high-concept piece of TV programming. The series contains 24 episodes, each one is in real time and occupies one hour of one day. In the first episode the Counter Terrorist Unit of LA hears about a potential threat on a US senator, who may or may not have something to hide. In the meantime, our hero’s daughter has gone missing.

Watch out for this series, because it’s pretty damn good. It’s fast-paced, uses a lot of split screen techniques to keep you informed as to what’s happening at any one time and it’s pretty involving. My main anxiety is that people won’t be prepared to spend nearly six months watching one tight and short story – and that we’ll get bored of Kiefer’s clothing.

Grant Morrison’s … unique … take on events in New York contains this comment: “Did we bomb Boston to stop the Boston Strangler ? Did we level New York City to get at Son of Sam ? No we did not. So why the fuck should we flatten Afghanistan just to get at a bunch of murderous bastards who have the country’s people in a repressive death grip?”. [via Darren, the Linkmachine]

An Afghan-American speaks: “What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.”

Needed: a new age of enlightenment: “You’d think that every possible angle would already have been covered by people writing about the events of September 11th. So why am I writing this, and why now? Because in all the media coverage I’ve seen so far, nobody has been asking the right, the important, questions. Like: why did this happen, what circumstances got us into a de facto state of undeclared war with the Islamic world, and what can we realistically do to prevent those circumstances from ever recurring.” [link via Prolific]

Cool: Hadn’t noticed this before. Go to Webmonkey and hover over the little monkey’s wrench!

When you are bored and have nothing to do, you do stupid stupid things. This is actually the result of following a tutorial on teaching oneself complex Photoshop operations (although god knows you can’t tell by looking at it):

Lie of the Day

Today on Barbelith: New York: On the Ground – “I could feel the heat three hundred yards away; everything on four or five floors, people and office equipment, came raining down on the crowd. We all ran north while it fell and got away before it hit because it was high up. As I glanced back I saw the contents of the floors: all on fire, people and building, killed without a second to reconsider their life. George Minarik was in New York.”