TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

If you're a fan of Charlie Brown and Snoopy then The Peanuts Movie should not disappoint. This new 3D incarnation of Charles Schulz famous characters looks both fresh and modern but also feels as if Charles himself still drew at least half of it by hand himself. A large part of that is the film makers paying a lot of attention to how Charles actually drew his characters and incorporating those details into the CGI animation - such as eyes being on the same side of the head from certain angles when, technically they shouldn't be.

David Bowie 2002 All photos sourced from Wikipedia I've mentioned that I'm a David Bowie fan in passing several times in this blog but other than I stated that Bowie's is the only music I still purchase in CD form you're probably not aware of how important his influence is to me as an artist. With David Bowie's passing the answer to the question "What will Bowie do next?" can never be answered again. It's an important question because that was how Bowie promoted himself through the 1990's and early 2000's and that is what drove my interest in him as an artist after his mainstream success from the 1980's began to decline.

I saw Star Wars The Force Awakens just over a week after its release and, since then, I've been reading what people have had to say about it before writing my own commentary. This won't really be a review so, if you haven't seen it and you're a Star Wars fan, stop reading now. Go see the movie. It's awesome, you'll love it and you won't care about any of the similarities with the original trilogy. In fact those things are part of why it's so good. Don't believe those dicks that say the movie brings nothing new to the table, it does, they're dicks, go and enjoy the film.

Dear #Mashable, #Nerdist, #MamaMia and other sites that over use Auto Play Video Ads, Remember back in the early days of the internet when display ads, pop-up ads and pop-unders ads were largely frowned upon but we eventually got used to these things because they helped make content free? Well I can assure you the same is never going to be said for embeded Auto Play Video Ads. Especially when they're used so poorly by sites such as yours.

Note: I originally wrote this article earlier in the year and then didn't publish it as I felt the outrage over the mass shooting that inspired it had subsided and the article no longer was topical. However, looking at this  list of mass shootings during 2015 in the USA   I can't actually recall which one inspired this article (it may have been the Charleston Church Shooting in June 2015).  However, looking at the list I noticed you only need wait about a week or so for the next mass shooting in the USA. Unless of course you follow the FBI's guidelines for classifying mass shootings, in which case data provided by  Mother Jones: A Guide to Mass Shooting in America is far more pleasing to the eye with only four mass shootings in 2015.

In the future when we look up will we see a traffic jam of drones instead of flying cars? Amazon released new and real footage of their proposed drone delivery service this week and it got me to thinking about how such a thing would scale up should it become a successful business model. What if other companies followed suit? What if local delivery of everything from pizza to... well anything you can send through the mail now becomes more efficient to deliver via drones?

 As I write this, late evening, the Mallala fire is still burning out of control just over six kilometers away, north of Gawler, South Australia. Unfortunately the fire has so far claimed the lives of two people (confirmed) and one not yet confirmed along with a number of homes and properties since it started around 2:30pm today.