http://www.cinematictitanic.com/

Wow, this is probably the best news I’ve had in ages. (Sad for me). But it does almost makes me feel sorry for Jim’s little effort. Interesting timing certainly. Go sign up for their newsletter.

[Addendum 6PM] Now that I’ve had time to let this wonderful news sink in, I just noticed this project has awfully familiar initials. I guess we’ll have to start using CT! as a retronym for Caption This! to distinguish it from CT.

Remember Tom Servo, Crow, and Gypsy? Well, they’re coming back, in cartoon form. Read about it at mst3kinfo.com, the official mst3k site until this animated thing replaces it.  Original voice of Gypsy, exec producer, and rights holder Jim Mallon is in charge of the project, and writer/performer/not one of the previous voices of Crow Paul Chaplin is also on board as a writer and Crow’s voice. No word yet on who’ll be playing Tom. But the site will also be making material from The Original Series available. Sorry, The Legacy Series. Apparently, it’s a PITA software system that’s only being kept around because it’d be too much trouble to replace.

I’ve finally thrown a bone to the dying breed of people who actually regularly update caption galleries with caps from IS. The new “My Favorites” link in the main menu will display all the captions you’ve thumbed as a favorite in the last two days in a stripped down view that should make it easier to drop the captions into your own pages without leaving all sorts of unwanted time sensitive links back to IS.

While I’m at it, let me just offer up some free advice to gallery keepers. Don’t take it too personally if you’re doing a lot of the things I’m complaining about. Most of them are common mistakes or just pet peeves of mine, and none of them are life and death. What’s more, you can have a good site without doing all of these things, especially if the content is good. (more…)

As part of my new lower effort approach to IS, I’m going to leave it up to you guys to plan the festivities for Halloween week here by scheduling movies from the catalog. Either use the request a movie feature on the right hand side of each movie’s page, or if you’re too lazy to register, just ask for the movie here and hope nobody else grabs your time slot before I can schedule it. Remember, I’m too lazy to fill requests that aren’t in the catalog. A few of the horror and monster movies are already tagged in the catalog, but not being a horror fan, I’m sure there are plenty more that I didn’t tag yet.

Keep an eye on the schedule to see when stuff is happening, and tell your friends to come join in the creepy captioning.

And on an unrelated but still horrifying note, why is it that none of the politicos’ World Series bets involve Rocky Mountain oysters? Is it the charity thing?

Three more features nobody asked for, all of them in the catalog!

1) Tags: It’s now possible to search for movies you might want to request by those newfangled internot tags. What’s more, you can help your fellow cappers find movies of interest by adding tags yourself. Just follow the “now playing” links (where applicable) and add whatever you think might be relevant, whether it be “robots”, “cows”, or “clowns“. In short, do my cataloging for me! It’s the way of the web. (Though I do reserve the right to edit for accuracy/consistency). I’m not sure if making it easier to find all the Sherlock Holmes or Flash Gordon material in the catalog will make it more popular, but then, I’m just entertaining myself at this point.

2) Embedded videos: For most of the cataloged videos that are available at archive.org, you can now view them without clicking all the way through to the archive. I’m sort of on the fence about keeping this feature since (a) it’s not that much tougher to follow the link to the archive and play the movies there (from a wider variety of formats, no less) and (b) a lot more of the movies than I anticipated aren’t showing up properly; they require even more data than I have stored to embed properly. Unless there seems to be some enthusiasm for this feature, I’m tempted to just scrap the feature rather than convoluting the catalog further or leaving it broken.

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