Saturday's amusement

(Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Particles over at Making Light)

Various movie posters and scenes drawn as if they were from medieval Russian illuminated texts.

Page takes a while to load, and a good chunk of it won't make any sense to people who can't read Russian (I'm honestly not sure what about half the movies are, but some are incredibly obvious). But it's worth it, not just for the humor, but because the art itself is damned nifty.

Firefox advice

So, I'm contemplating switching completely to Firefox at home. This is an easier decision at home (where I'm on MacOS10.3.9, and thus saddled with an older version of Safari) than at the office (where I not only have an up-to-date Safari with some solid features, but also need to work in multiple browsers anyway).

So far, not a big deal; the vast amount of extensions available on Firefox has provided me with lots of nice choices (I'm currently running Videodownloader, Adblock Plus, and Hyperwords, all of which rule).

But the one thing I find lacking is a good autofill function for forms.

IE for the Mac had one of the best autofills ever. Simply hit one key combo (command-=, I believe), and your form was filled in with all the standard info (name, email, address, etc). Easy as could be.

Safari has one that's more powerful, if less elegant. Aside from the standard info, it would also remember form data, and as soon as you tabbed to the first field, started typing text, and tabbed to the next field, would autofill the rest of the form. No keystroke or command required. It's a bit too resource-intensive in Safari 1.x, but the 2.x version handles it nicely, even with thousands of sites in memory.

Firefox, on the other hand, makes you tab to every field, and select an autofill option using the arrow keys. This isn't terrible, but it's about a tenth as good as what either of the other browsers use, and as someone who has to fill out a lot of forms, I'd rather have a good autofill than an autofill whose sole benefit is memorizing passwords (which are actually the fields I'd rather never see autofilled, anyway).

What amazes me, however, is that none of the autofill extensions I find at mozilla.org seem to make things any better. Surely, someone out there using Firefox has come up with a good forms autofill function (and if I'm missing something obvious that's built into the system, let me know). Anyone want to point me to one?

(And yeah, I should probably ask this on a weekday, not on a Saturday afternoon.)

Sucktastic Four

So, Cartoon Network's new adaptation of the Fantastic Four doesn't suck nearly as much as, say, recent movie versions of those characters.

It does, however, suck.

The pilot does have some wonderful lines (most of them given to Johnny Storm), along with a plot that is so hackneyed, even Stan Lee would blink twice at it (although he'd still use it, because, well, he's Stan Lee). We get the Alien Trial cliche (which was used early on in the much better Cartoon Network Justice League series), with a touch of the ending of Rocky IV, and some awful, cringeworthy moments throughout. Throw in terrible anime-esque animation and artwork (and Sue Storm throwing lasers force-field beams), and you've got a ball of suck.

But the peak of the suck came early on, when Sue Storm fainted at the news that her brother had been kidnapped.

Yes, folks. Sue Fucking Storm, one of the toughest women in comics, a veteran hero even in the cartoon adaptation, fainted at the thought of her brother (and fellow super-powered being) having been kidnapped.

I swear, if I find out that John Fucking Byrne helped write this, it would just be the icing on the cake.

On the plus side, the voice talent is pretty damned good. But without good writing or art, there's not much the voice cast can do.