Just a few points of business:

1. Superman cartoons at IS. 10 PM Saturday. Most of the folks who came to the Tuesday showing seemed to have a good enough time.
2. d_cat_chopra’s contributed some more graphics - this time it’s an Inventing Situations background (175 K) for your desktop. It’s going to be available for a limited time, somewhere between a week and a year. Click here to get it.
3. The “mail a caption” function just underwent an overhaul that should help with the twin issues of junk mail filters being even more suspicious of HTML mail than I am and email clients refusing to show the images. Thanks to snard and UpSky2 for their feedback on the problems. Of course, this knocks the beta test back to the start, so it’ll be a while before it becomes an official feature.
4. If the wallpaper didn’t satisfy your urge for miscellaneous images from IS, I’ve started building a collection of them in my myspace profile. I’m not sure why, but some of the images have been showing up there before they actually run on IS.
5. Don’t forget to vote in the current non-binding unscientific poll about how much of the schedule should be taken up with the “feature film, cartoon, b+w tv, and other less ephemeral programming” collection. I get the feeling people want more of it, but on the other hand, I want to get a feel for just how much more, and the more of it I show, the quicker it goes into reruns.

Is this thing on?
First off, just to prove just how poor my timing is and how totally behind the curve I am: http://www.myspace.com/wastingprecioustime. Go ahead and add me as a friend so people won’t know what a loo-sir I am. Plus, it helps get your friends into capping. Which I suppose benefits me more than you, but that’s how I roll.

Just to toot my own horn, I’ve grown the site’s image collection by over 3,700 pictures since I last wrote about it. I’ve actually added more grabs than that, since I’ve also been weeding out old ones as I regrab some of the films. At this rate, I may add a fourth hour of feature films if enough people want it.

For thos of you without myspace accounts to use to help whore these sites, consider one of the new bumperstickers below, contributed by d_cat_chopra - or one of our other link buttons.

And finally, don’t forget, the first showing of the Superman cartoons is Tuesday night.

To mark (mock? celebrate? cash in on?) Hollywood’s latest adaptation of Superman, Inventing Situations is going to be featuring some of his best Hollywood outings*. Namely ten of the Fleischer and Famous Studios shorts**. I’ll be running them Tuesday, June 27th at 8 PM, and again on Saturday, July 1st at 10 PM. Some of them are even making their premieres at IS.

I suggest you all hop over to the archive and watch Mechanical Monsters, then if you go see Superman Returns, decide if the new film really significantly improved on or effectively added onto the character.
* Yes, yes, they were mostly produced in Miami, but you get the idea.

** We know, the Famous Studios ones weren’t as good. But capping’s not always about quality. Heck, I almost deemed some of the Fleischer cartoons too freaking cool to caption.

In addition to the beta story feed at WPT, I’ve added two more trial rss feeds, one that just shows the newest picture sets available for use: http://sector7g-zz9.com/wpt/sets.xml and another that includes both the latest sets and the latest stories:  http://sector7g-zz9.com/wpt/index.xml. Add one to your aggregator of choice today. (Sorry, no feed with the comments yet).
Meanwhile, on the ’send a caption’ front, I’ve made a couple of small fixes, but am currently mulling over how best to handle the problems of getting the image to show reliably when the mail is rendered as plain text. I knew I should have trusted my basic distrust of HTML email and never started this project. Thanks to UpSky2 for letting me know this problem was as bad as I’d feared.

#1 Another new feature rears its ugly head - the ability to send a caption to a friend. Sure, you could just cut and paste it yourself, but this offers a quick and dirty way to send a nicely formatted copy of a caption to somebody who you think’d appreciate it. (There is a plain text version accompanying the fancy HTML version, but ultimately it’s a little tricky to associate the grab & the caption in plain text). I’m calling it Beta while I wait for feedback from you good folks on how well this renders in people’s various email clients. Just click on the little envelope to the left of the caption to try it out.
#2 As I’m sure you all know, Monday the 19th marks the 109th anniversary of the birth of one of our greatest citizens - Harry Moses Horwitz a.k.a. Moe Howard. To mark the occasion I’ll be running some of his film and TV work at 8 PM eastern -at the very least this will include segments from the New Three Stooges tv show (most never run on IS before) and Sing a Song of Six Pants.

#3 Just added an extra set at WPT - a little bit of Dragnet. Like most of the midweek additions, this one will only be cap-able for a week.

And lastly, we’ll be having another special event on IS at the end of the month to ride on the coat-tails of a big budget movie. I won’t tell you what it is, but I will say it involves Superman cartoons. Ok, I guess I did tell you what it is.