Keyboards... how quaint.

Laugh. Out. Loud.

Ben Mendelsohn is My Spirit Animal

I watched MISSISSIPPI GRIND recently, solely because of the presence of Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn.

There is something about Ben Mendelsohn that I find infinitely watchable.

He plays these complete loser characters, but he somehow infuses them with a sense of compassion: I can't help but feel for him. Lovable loser, I guess that's a trope. But he takes it to some ethereal level.

You want to hang out with this guy... you want to HELP him. You want to see him catch a break even when you've seen him fall on his face a dozen times.

Even when you've seen him hit ROCKBOTTOM (RENTALS) a dozen times.

It's hard to not feel some empathy for him.

Watching MISSISSIPPI GRIND, I was just thinking, "I could easily just keep watching this actor perform indefinitely."

If you feel the same, I'd recommend "BLOODLINES" on Netflix as an option, though the show may be inherently flawed.

I also admire Ben Mendelsohn because he's just a little bit older. He's been around a while.

Here he is way back in 1990:



(The gif with the annoying text above is something I hashed out in After Effects because I've been overdosing on it. That's my crude, ugly, little 3d text experiment.)

Easter After Effects

Okay, I need to stop messing around with After Effects this weekend.

How Much Time Can Malice Waste Playing with After Effects?

A lot of time.

Jennifer Lawrence in Thriller

Made this in After Effects for a "Photoshop Battle" on reddit.

One of my biggest internet points earners!

Ben Affleck is struck by the reviews of Batman V Superman

Garry Shandling Has a Posse

Garry Emmanuel Shandling
November 29, 1949 – March 24, 2016
A lot of people will remember him for "The Larry Sanders Show" but I was a big fan of "It's Garry Shandling's Show" years before that, which was way ahead of its time.



Also, for whatever reason, I have a distinct memory of him starring in this Pizza Hut commercial:



He died at 66. Massive heart attack.

A lot of celebrity death this year.

Garry Shandling has a posse.

March 23 is my Reddit Cakeday

On "reddit", your "cakeday" is the anniversary of the date you signed up with your account.

Today marks the 4th year of my primary reddit account.

On your cakeday, a little cake icon appears beside your handle and people are sometimes more inclined to upvote you.

Of course, there's currently a technical glitch that's gumming up the entire reddit site so there's not much I can do with it.

BUT... I did use the opportunity to create this angry cake gif in AFTER EFFECTS.

I'm just scratching the surface but it's amazing how much you can do in AE once you start to understand it.

This gif contains a few elements I got to play with. The candle fire is taken from a youtube video. Applied a mask, looped the animation, copied it for each candle.

Then the cake arms I animated using a puppet warp.

I could have done a version of this that would have taken me a whole long longer in Photoshop.

It's very cool.

Random Link Dump!

EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

I've a bad habit of keeping too many tabs open of articles I intend to read and never do.

Here's the latest:

Finding Boshek: search for an uncredited actor in Star Wars.

Cat-lovers track down killer

A brief history of STELLA

Friday the 13th Part 4 is the best one

Abandoning acting dreams nearly killed me

What was it like to be a Nintendo gameplay counselor?

The problem with "10 Cloverfield Lane" marketing

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Gayest Horror Film Ever

WTF Moments of "The VVITCH" Explained

Creepiest Wikipedia Pages

Donald Trump is a Big Fat Moron

Donald Trump is obese.

How is it that Donald Trump ridicules fat people and no one points out that Donald Trump is a tub of lard?

It's difficult to find a starting point for criticizing Donald Trump as a presidential candidate because he comes across as a grotesque parody of a presidential candidate.

Racist, xenophobic, misogynistic... and yet somehow worse than all that, he is a fucking willfully-uninformed, endlessly bloviating idiot.

He's like a child delivering a book report who hasn't read the book. And yet insists that he's an expert on the book.

And the low-information voters are coming out in droves to vote him into office so he can build a Death Star over Mexico.

Low-information voters... LIKE MY PARENTS!

Yeah, I haven't seen my dad in over a decade and knowing that he's a Trump supporter makes me feel a lot less guilty about that.

My mom managed to remarry a man who probably has even shittier politics than my dad. They live in a retirement community in Florida. He watches Fox News all day. He bought a rifle because he's afraid the Moos-Luhms are going to break down his door and change the channel.

My mom is a classic low- (no-) information voter.

Eight years ago, she wanted to vote for Hillary because... because Hillary's an old woman and my mom identified with being an old woman?

Sunday morning, I let my mom know that my sister and I are going to be voting for Hillary this election. My mom's response: "Really...? But... what about the emails? And Benghazi?"

THIS. THIS IS THE PROBLEM. BOILED DOWN.

When I asked my mom about this -- of course -- she didn't know what "the emails" and "Benghazi" even meant!

They have become fucking keywords that FOX NEWS has brainwashed this older, low-information generation into memorizing as "REASONS WE CAN'T TRUST HILLARY CLINTON".

Really, mom, what about "The Emails" are you concerned about? You barely know how to check your own goddamn email!!! Can you even tell me what you find outrageous about "the emails"?

And "Benghazi"? Do you know anything about Benghazi? Is it just an exotic word that Fox News has trained your husband to equate with both "foreign" and "dangerous"?

My mom isn't even getting her "information" from Fox News -- she's getting it fucking second-hand from the racist, xenophobic cretin she's married to. Second-hand misinformation. It's like less-than-low-informed. It's negative-informed.

And the negatively-informed have created a movement... to prove that democracy is a terrible idea! BECAUSE TOO MANY PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE DOING.

Donald Trump may be giving hope to the cave-dwellers and cross-burners but I'm really hoping, if he snags the nomination (and the fucking GOP don't even want that! they're treating his runaway success as if their base has decided to write-in vote for the class clown) that there's no way he can win the general election. I know there are a fuckton of stupid people in this country but they can't possibly be the majority...

(... can they...?)

David Letterman Pranks Richard Simmons, 1994

Today, Letterman's happily retired and Richard Simmons is mysteriously in hiding.

Lest we forget, they had a special chemistry back in the day. You see the prank coming a mile away and I still laughed.

Roger Rabbit GIF

"We toons make act idiotic but we're not STUIPID!"

Billy Corgan on the reunited Guns N' Roses

From this Rolling Stone interview:

Are you gonna see Guns N' Roses on their reunion tour?

I hope so, yeah.

Are you surprised it's happening?

No. I said five years ago it'll definitely happen. It'll just be when and where.

Why were you so confident?

I just think the band, however you want to quantify it, broke up, or the original lineup didn't endure past a certain point, and the world has changed a lot since then. The band is so great and the music is so great, and the chemistry is such a part of what people love — including me — as a fan. It would seem a crime to not be able to enjoy and appreciate the accomplishment in this era.

I guess my fear is that a show performed by people that don't really like each other might not be very good.

Well, listen, I've been on the other side of this coin, where I've had people demand that I get onstage with, you name it, any number of ex-bandmates because that's what they want and they couldn't care less whether or not you share Christmas cards. And I've staunchly said — much to my own detriment — that the only way that would happen is if we were in a place of love and appreciation for one another. I've taken a lot of shit for that as if somehow I'm ruining somebody's generational memory, but to me, it's true of the value system of the band in that we only did what we truly believed in, even when tons of people told us they didn't like what we were doing.

Remember when I used to post stuff like this on this blog all the time?!

How about we do a "Shuffled 5" on the iPod for old timey's sake, Gay Horse??

Malice-Hasn't-Added-New-Music-In-Years Shuffled 5
1. "Intuition" - Keri Hilson, IN A PERFECT WORLD
2. "Allure" - Jay-Z & DJ Danger Mouse, GRAY ALBUM
3. "All Things Change" - Billy Corgan, THE FUTURE EMBRACE
4. "Ghost" - Neutral Milk Hotel, IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA
5. "Strayz" - Billy Corgan, THE FUTURE EMBRACE

Bonus:
"Knockin on Heaven's Door" - Guns N' Roses, LIVE IN BOSTON 12.02.02

Christiansands

Tricky, live @ West 54th Street, 1998.

Whatever Happened to Richard Simmons?

I knew Richard Simmons from his appearances on Letterman back in the day.

It seems like he's mysterious disappeared from the public life:

The Haunted Twilight of Richard Simmons.

It's a really strange article particularly because the source of most of the latest information comes from a really shady sounding character who was leeching money off of Simmons and is trying to push a crazy e-book he wrote and self-published that's a FAIRY TALE version of the "true story". Anyway, the whole thing sounds creepy.

But man... I'd *love* to be able to afford to vanish from public life for 2 years in a mansion...

The Walk of Life Project

Hypothesis: "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits is the perfect song to end ANY movie.

The guy who did this didn't edit any of the footage. Just chose when to start the track in each case.







I highly recommend viewing these videos.

Walk of Life Project

Sacha Baron Cohen's least favorite Ali G interview: David Duke

In this reddit AMA, Sacha Baron Cohen talks about his least favorite Ali G interview subject:

My least favorite was I did an interview with David Duke as Ali G, and it was quite unpleasant because he brought some neo-nazi security with him and my researcher had to spend the evening keeping the security guards away from me. And even though my researcher is Jewish, he had to pretend to be a complete antisemite and neo-nazi in order to keep the body guards attention and let me interview Duke alone. In the end, I never showed the Duke interview, because his views are so extreme and horrifying that giving any publicity to him felt immoral.

The Art of Procrastination

A photoshop battle I posted on reddit got featured in this Gizmodo post!

TRUMP + RUBIO/CRUZ-MASTERBLASTER THUNDERDOME!!!

And here's another piece of randomness I wasted time on this afternoon:


Okay, I need to stop.

Broadcasting from the year ONE... NINE... NINE... NINE...

Remember how scary the ending of "Prince of Darkness" was before 1999?

I mean, it's still pretty freaky as all get out, but it was freakier when "1999" was still "the near future".

("Shit, think about how old we'll be when it's 1999...!")


After 1999, you know that Satan isn't controlling an army of homeless people. Although, if Trump has his way...

Slimer Day

Everybody see the new gender-swapped Ghostbusters trailer? Quite a backlash so far! Check out all the downvotes on YouTube.

I've been nursing a lingering cough that is absolutely exhausting.

My doctor (Dr. Google-Search) suggests that a lingering cough after a cold isn't necessarily something you need to be overly alarmed about. A cough could last 18 days.

It's perfectly fine for extended stretches and then it is HARSH.

Anyway, it's slowing me down a bit this week. Week one of March, my month to get some shit done in life before I dive into another long gig.

Fighting. That's all we can do sometimes. Fight.

Dead Zone: Trump Edition

I made the above "Dead Zone: McCain" gif back in 2008.

Here in 2016, I've just spent far too much time today making a new version, in honor of Donald Trump:


Of course, if Trump used a baby as a human shield, I doubt he'd lose any of his idiot supporters.

The GOP's Opposition to Obama Created Trump

Trump validates the maxim that in presidential primaries, the opposition party tends to choose a candidate who differs temperamentally from the incumbent. Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a child.

Read the full article.