The Blogg


Festivalus Interruptus

Hey Burggers,

There'll be no more new Festivals on The Burgg for the time being. That doesn't mean we're giving up on anything, though - it just means I'm gonna stop pretending I can update 'em regularly until the mythical Burgg v2.0 debuts. The car accident I got into, the holidays, and the subsequent backlog of work at the ol' day job ganged up on me (i.e. YADDA YADDA), but we hope to be back on track before long.

Please feel free to hang out and keep drawing in the meantime... we'll be coming back at ya real soon...

Thanks as always,
Bernie

Comments (23)

Posted by bernie, Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:49 am

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I'm back from Cali

Sorry everyone for missing the last few new Festival updates, but last week Elaine and I took the kids out to the West Coast for a family funeral... that and a(nother) critical week at work meant my hands were tied.

But I'm back now, and the new Festival for today, Wednesday, is one that MrLunchTime suggested. Note the pee your pants connection from the Halloween festival. You can thank Lunch for that. The twice-a-week new Festival schedule will resume on Tuesday, Nov. 20!

Comments (0)

Posted by bernie, Wed Nov 14, 2007 12:40 pm

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Gears in motion again

Now that I'm finally crawling out from under the crushing weight that was my latest project at work, I've got a bit more free to work on this site at last. Development has resumed in earnest on The Burgg v2.0... hopefully we'll have an alpha version of it working in the next 2 or so months, and of course you'll be the first to try it out.

If you're a regular here and you want to know what the hell "v2.0" is all about, e-mail me at bernie@theburgg.com, and I'll give you the gist, in the form of an AIM conversation I had recently with MrLunchtime.

Stay cool Burggerz!

Comments (2)

Posted by bernie, Sun Oct 28, 2007 1:20 am

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Moderatus Operandi

Just a quick note to announce that matt! and MrLunchtime have been promoted to the office of Moderator. All this means for now, basically, is that 1) they'll step in if any comments on drawings or on the forums get out of hand/inappropriate (rare), and 2) they'll be helping me get rid of the spam threads that show up occasionally on the forums. Eventually they'll be able to help me with some of the other technical/administrative tasks involved in running this site, but for now, they're just gonna be making sure the forums are a great place to hang out for all of you.

Matt and Lunch were chosen for their dedication, talent, movie chops, tenure on the site, and all-around swellness. Please treat them as if they were your own moderators at home.

Comments (0)

Posted by bernie, Tue Sep 04, 2007 1:19 pm

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Aliens & Predator vs. Requiem: The Trailer

By now you've probably seen the first official trailer for Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (warning: graphic violence. No seriously, GRAPHIC VIOLENCE). Personally, I love it. It's got just about as much violence as the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan... only this is way more realistic. All I really want out of an AvP movie is A's and P's layin' into each other, and this one trailer already delivers more than the entire first film. Faces getting melted by acid? Check. Young girls getting stuck to walls by gigantic blades? Check. And it's even got Michelle Dessler from 24! I KNEW she wasn't dead!

The movie comes out on Christmas Day this year. We'll leave out some milk and cookies, Brothers Strause!

Download the high-res trailer.
For news and everything else AvP, go to PlanetAvP.com.

Comments (12)

Posted by bernie, Wed Aug 29, 2007 2:46 pm

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What's Up

So... we've been busy.

I've been travelling a lot this summer and working on something huge for work, and Jason's got, like, a girlfriend now, so we haven't been able to do much work on The Burgg lately. Sorry I've missed a few Festival updates and that you keep staring at the same featured drawings for weeks at a time... it's been freakin crazy around here. As always we gotta thank all of you for continuing to stop by and turning out some awesome movies.

I wanted to let you know that we've got some big plans for The Burgg, if we can get our asses together (and I don't mean in the Jennifer Connolly sense)... let's just say that eventually you won't be drawing just movies. The movie thing'll always be here; it's just that we're thinking of expanding our possibilities. Anyway, I just wanted to say STICK AROUND! We'll be going places.

Notes:
- Sorry 'bout the spam problem. I finally turned on email validation... hopefully that'll help?

- You may have noticed that in addition to going from 3 new Festivals a week down to 2, to give 'em more time to breathe, we've switched from Mon/Thu. to Tue/Fri. - cuz that gives you all of Monday to draw any movies you saw over the weekend (especially for those Friday Festivals that are based on new movies).

- I haven't forgotten about all the features on the site that are "under construction". I'm just... too busy.

- Did I already say you guys were awesome? And scary.

Thanks,
Bernie

Comments (9)

Posted by bernie, Wed Aug 22, 2007 7:00 pm

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The Burgg on TV Tokyo's Webtama

Here's something pretty awesome and surreal. The Burgg was featured, and I mean FEATURED, on a Japanese TV show that covers cool websites. The producer of the show was kind enough to mail me a DVD of the half-hour episode and now (after a bunch of problems with my DVD software), here it is for ya! The clip's 8 minutes long, but if you're a fan of The Burgg, or of amped-up Japanese people, it's totally worth it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=f8ql3Yr-ZCo

The audio is way out of sync with the hosts' lip movements (it starts out a few seconds ahead, then seems to get worse as it goes along), but hey, if you don't understand Japanese and grew up watching Godzilla movies like I did, then it'll probably seem perfectly normal to you. That said, I'll try to fix it and upload a new version when I can.

My map of WORLDWIDE DOMINATION:
U.S. - check
Czech Republic - check
Japan - SUPER HAPPY EXPLOSION CHECK FUN

Comments (19)

Posted by bernie, Tue Jul 17, 2007 2:04 pm

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Gobots in Disguise

I went and saw The Transformers. I knew exactly what I was getting into, the bad story, the ridiculous action and effects, lots of Michael Bay swirling the camera in circles. Everyone said it was gonna be a love it or hate it kinda deal... if you want your movies to make sense, you'll hate it, but if you go into it just for the action, you'll crap your pants, and I figured HELL YEAH I wanna crap my pants. I'm the exact target audience for this movie - old enough to have grown up loving the TF, but not so old that I don't still love big robots and video-game-like action.

And I liked it... but unfortunately I didn't looooove it. The problem with it wasn't that it was STUPID. Some stupid things were said, and some stupid attempts at character development were needlessly made, but no one cares about that. The problem with it was that the plot was BORING. Boring is muuuuch worse than stupid. There was no DANGER involved. They explained that if the Decepticons found the "Allspark", the earth would be doomed, but they didn't show you that or make you feel that. Show, don't tell, guys! So it was like, "Don't let them get the Allspark!" when instead, it should've been "OH SHIT they just blew up the White House!!! And WHAT THE-- our missiles just bounce off their armor!! And they're causing tidal waves, the earth's core stopped rotating, they're killing lots of women and children and babies and more women and THEY CANCELLED THE SOPRANOS!! WHAT DO WE DO???" At least War of the Worlds (the Spielberg remake) and even Independence Day got that part right. At least in those movies, other deficiencies aside, I felt something big was brewing.

So I'm not saying the story has to be good. I'm saying something at least has to be going on, even if it's stupid. Then, the TF are fighting for a reason. Otherwise, it was like, "Round One. FIGHT! Autobots. WIN."

As for the fighting... yeah it was cool. Cool enough that I'm probably gonna buy it on DVD when it comes out. But it'll be more out of admiration for the technical craft, and not cuz I crapped my pants. Which I really wanted to do, believe me. The CGI effects were flawless and the direction was technically competent - some of the slo-mo shots of the TF making their moves were excellent, actually - but I just think it could've been choreographed and staged better. Most specifically, everything was shot so close up (to provide the you-are-there, holy shit these robots are big, experience) that you had no picture of the scene as a whole. A few wider, establishing shots would've gone a long way. Also, a little subtlety/strategy in the battle would've been welcome and would've even added to the hugeness of the scale - because when everything is big and loud, then really nothing is big and loud - so... things like taking cover, or strategic positioning, or even deception would've been cool. INSTEAD IT WAS LIKE THE MOVIE EQUIVALENT OF TYPING IN ALL CAPS NO PUNCTUATION AND EXCESSIVE USE OF EMOTICONS

Heh, Emoti-Cons. YOU HAVE FAILED ME AGAIN, BI-POLAR-BOT

But that's just me. Everywhere I've seen people are crapping their pants over it so if you've been wanting to go see it and haven't yet, then go. It is pretty cool.

What'd you guys think?

(TF forum @ The Burgg)

Comments (1)

Posted by bernie, Wed Jul 11, 2007 3:56 pm

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New movie features

More new features!

- You now have a "Favorite Movies" section you can add movies to. To do so, go to that movie's page (either 1. use the search box on the sidebar or 2. click on the movie title of a drawing of that movie) and click "Add this movie to Your Favorites". On "Your Favorites", you can see the 5 most recent drawings for each of your favorite movies. You can see anybody's list of favorites by going to their Profile.

- As mentioned above, there's a new search box on the sidebar now that you can use to find either users or movies.

- The "New Drawings" page now shows the 100 most recent drawings, and you can now page chronologically through all the drawings in our history.

Other notes:

- Sorry the "Featured Today" sidebar hadn't been updated in a week. I get lazy.

- Jason fixed the guess difficulty stats. They're on a 20-minute update delay for now, but soon we're looking into 1. updating 'em more often, and 2. counting "peeks".

Comments (11)

Posted by bernie, Mon Apr 16, 2007 9:59 am

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Movie discussion

We've started to set up areas where you can chat about specific movies - notice that when you're shown what movie a drawing is, there's a new link that says, "Talk about this movie", which takes you to a discussion forum dedicated to that particular movie. What's cool is that a given movie's forum can hold an infinite number of topics so you're not stuck with one generic topic on the movie.

Also, if you click on "community" in the top nav to go to main forums index, you'll see the 5 most recently discussed movies at the bottom, if you wanna browse that way.

Another also: you can now click on any movie title you see to go to that movie's main page, which shows you all the drawings made for that movie so far. Note that for now, if you wanna start a discussion about a particular movie that you can't find in the forums, you have to find a drawing of that movie first and click on it to start the new movie-specific forum. We're working on an easier way to search for your favorite movies so stay tuned.

Did all that make sense? Basically, start chatting more about movies!

P.S. Oh yeah, heads up: For the last few days we haven't been calculating and displaying guess difficulty for drawings, because that process was a bit too heavy for our database; Jason's working on fixing it so keep your pants on. Thanks...

Comments (3)

Posted by bernie, Thu Apr 12, 2007 12:51 pm

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