Episode 4: Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?
A new week, a new episode! This time, Chris and I cover important, terrific topics including...
this is pretty terrific
Archive of the abandoned This Is Pretty Terrific site from Marie Kare and Chris Maguire.
Introducing: Pretty Terrific Vodcast!
Because we just can't help ourselves, Chris and I are back at it again (anyone remember HCF?) with recording ourselves talking about things and putting those recordings on the internet—this time with video!The Pretty Terrific Vodcast is a weekly Twitch livestream—Fridays @ 10AM Pacific—and/or YouTube video series in which the two of us try to talk about pretty terrific things. In this, our third official episode, those things included...
Read MoreWorld of Tomorrow
Don Hertzfeldt's (Rejected, Everything Will Be Okay) short film World of Tomorrow—the first episode of three—was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 2015 Academy Awards. Here's the full short:
Watch the rest of the series on Mr. Hertzfeldt's YouTube channel.
The School by Donald Barthelme
One of my all-time favorite short stories. An excerpt, plus a link to read the full story on NPR.org, below.
Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that ... you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably ... you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe ... well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander ... well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.
Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.
We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.
[...]
Yarn art by Mandy Jouan
Mandy Jouan—aka MooseBunny—is a multi, multi, multi-media artist working in ceramics, paint, stuffed toys, and yarn. She's also the Global LEGO Model Design Lead. She's pretty terrific.
Little Landscapes by Jessica Leitko Fields
Reddit's Attackronyms
A bit of shameless self-promotion, but I think this game is pretty terrific. attackronyms.redditinc.com. (I created it for work with the development help of Koko Digital and Dave Carr’s art.)
