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Re-watched some classic cartoons yesterday.  It started when we were talking about Duck Dodgers at breakfast, and wondered when it had been made.  That led to an IMDB lookup, which mentioned it was #4 on a list of 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time from 1994, and that had me looking up “One Froggy Evening” to verify that it was in fact the cartoon with the singing, dancing, Michigan J. Frog… and that had a link to the cartoon on YouTube.  And YouTube brings up a list of related videos at the end of each clip…

By the time we stopped, we’d also watched “What’s Opera, Doc?” “The Rabbit of Seville” — absolute classics — and a couple of World War II propaganda cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Donald Duck (the latter in a cartoon based on “Der Fuehrer’s Face”).

At the other end of the spectrum, a week ago I watched 2 DVDs worth of 1967 Filmation cartoons starring various DC super-heroes.  I wanted to do a write-up of the Flash, Justice League and Teen Titans cartoons, and figured I might as well watch the whole thing and do a review. They were seriously cheesy. They were played straighter than Super-Friends, but can’t stand up to the Bruce Timm-designed Justice League series.

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Google Chrome seems to be a multi-threaded open-source browser based on WebKit (with some code from Firefox as well), focusing on making a browser that will work well with web applications.

It’s got built-in support for the Gears API (not surprising). And, like Firefox 3, IE8, and Opera 9.5, it’ll do full-history search & auto-suggest in the location bar. Interestingly, they’ve adopted a couple of UI elements from Opera, including thumbnails of your most-visited pages when opening a new tab (like Opera’s Speed Dial, though in this case the list is automatically generated from your browsing behavior), and putting the tabs above the main toolbar — something that Opera has taken a lot of flack for.

According to the blog post, the first preview release should be out for Windows tomorrow, with Linux and Mac following.

Oddly enough, I found out about it through comics blogs (A Distant Soil, specifically), not tech blogs, because Google hired Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) to explain what makes the browser different in comic-book form.

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A post on 20 things I learned at Dragon*Con [edit: no longer available] reminded me of something Katie and I noticed at Comic-Con. During the screening of the musical Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Once More With Feeling,” it seemed like half the audience would boo Dawn, and would shout out things like, “Shut up, Dawn” when she spoke, or “No!” when she sings, “Does anybody even care?”

Okay, I get that you don’t like the Scrappy… but shouting “Shut up!” when she’s spilling the beans about Willow & Tara’s fight? That sorta implies that you don’t want Tara to find out that Willow has been altering her memories. That’s psychological abuse by any standard. Is it better for Tara to stay in an abusive relationship than for Dawn to be the one to open her eyes?

Or how about when she mentions to Sweet that her sister is the Slayer? That sets the rest of the story in motion — in fact, it sets the rest of the season in motion. Not only does it make it possible for them to “beat the bad guy,” but it sets up that Buffy/Spike relationship, and I’d bet 90% of the people booing Dawn just lurve “Spuffy” to death. (Excuse me while I gag.)

It’s hate for the sake of hating the character, even when she does things you like — or things that are necessary.

Personally? I couldn’t stand her through most of 5th season. I’m not sure what turned me around, but it was during the last episode, “The Gift,” that I decided, y’know, she’s okay. Katie, who has a younger sister, found Dawn to be the best characterization of a younger sister on television…and couldn’t hate her for that reason.

Perhaps it was the realism of that sister relationship, seen through Buffy’s eyes, that made so many viewers dislike her. Well, that and the Scrappy effect.

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A word to the wise for anyone planning to set up paperless billing: make sure the notices go to the right email address.

Last night, while paying bills, I realized I hadn’t seen a bill for our internet access in quite a while, and noticed that my bank showed the last payment had been sent in June. That didn’t look promising.

I logged onto the U-Verse website, and sure enough, our account was set for paperless billing. I hadn’t gotten the bills because they were being sent to an AT&T address which had been created as part of the setup process, but which I’d never used. So I paid the overdue bill, set up auto-pay so I wouldn’t have to worry about it again, and then set about making sure I’d actually get the statements. I thought about changing the address listed on the U-Verse profile, or forwarding it to my regular address, but settled on just setting up POP access to the account.

The weird thing is, I’m not entirely sure how we ended up with paperless billing. My filing system’s a mess right now, but I distinctly remember getting one bill on paper. (We signed up in May, as soon as we moved in.) I can’t have marked a checkbox on the bill, though, because I paid it through my bank’s website, not by check. My best guess is that I chose it during the setup process and forgot, and they just sent the first bill on paper.