Links Of Interest - Prelude to Holiday Shenanigans Edition!

Man, there's a ton to catch up on here.

* - First off, all the cool artists are doing it so everybody reading this draw and submit a happy partying creature for the Party Bueno project!  The deadline's November 30'th so get to it.  Details and submission instructions here.  My little guy is Party Member 359!

* - Second off, go download All Your Yesterdays if you haven't already.  Make a donation and download lots of copies!  Give them to all your impossible-to-buy-for people this holiday season!

* - Third off, I hate being kind of a shill but TODAY ONLY if you use the promotional code BLKFRIDAY983 over at my Zazzle Store, you can get half-off mugs and t-shirts! Go get an Awesome Overload shirt for all your other impossible-to-buy-for friends!

* - Fourth off, Mental Floss managed to score an interview with Bill Watterson!?

* - Fifth off, Dr. Bob Bakker is blogging for the Huston Museum of Natural Science and wrote a lovely tribute to the classic "World We Live In" issue of Life.

* - Sixth off, now we know what Deinocheirus looked like!  Now we know what Deinocheirus looked like!  NOW WE KNOW WHAT DEINOCHEIRUS LOOKED LIKE!!!???!!!

* - Seventh off (I will stop doing this), I spent much of the summer catching up with the lovely Tobolowsky Files podcast and lo and behold there is a new episode fresh on the feed.

* - A sobering message from DinoGoss: We're all drawing dinosaur feet wrong.  Probably.

* - If you met R. L. Stine, would you think to ask him about his involvement in the Nick Jr. show "Eureeka's Castle"?  Well, thankfully, the Onion AV Club did, and everyone is the better for it.

* - The entire series of essays from the Dissolve's Movie of the Week features for both "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" and "Kirikou and the Sorceress" are terrific, but my favorite parts were the staff's reminiscing of favorite strange movies discovered at the video store and favorite unusual animated features.

* - And for fans of the late, lamented "My Year/World of Flops" series at the AV Club, Nathin Rabin's new series "Forgotbusters" (basically, movies we all assumed were flops but made the top 25 of their year) is outstanding, especially the "Space Jam" and "Jack" entries.

* - Danny Horn of ToughPigs traveled to Japan in search of unique Muppet-related stuff and discovered, among other things, that somebody at Universal Studios Japan learned about Duffy the Disney Bear and evidently thought, "We need something just like that -- but how can we make it more unintentionally unsettling?"

* - Forbes ruminated on the long, strange history of Dreamworks animation.

* - I got a serious Where the Wild Things Are vibe from this Hyperbole and a Half comic.

* - The way Disney markets its animated films these days is pretty confusing, but at least it isn't as insane as this promotional song for "Robin Hood".

* - Tony DiTerlizzi reminisced and posted a gallery of the Joanne Scribner cover art for the Dell Yearling editions of Beverly Cleary's books.

* - And Tim Brayton finished his review of every single direct-to-video Disney sequel and managed to come out the other end (mostly) in one piece!  All of his Disney reviews, including those for the sequels, are listed here.

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Sketch of the Day! I thought, "Hey, everybody else is drawing Deinocheirus, why aren't I?"

OK, Let's Talk About That "Lost" Finale.

Now that I've had some time to process everything (and a few things to drink), and you've had at least a week to watch it once or twice, here are my thoughts. Vast galloping herds of unmarked SPOILERS ahead. You've been warned.

I liked it a lot.

I didn't *love* it. I'm having a slight case of "That's not what I would have done!"-ness. (Let us henceforth call this odd sense of fandom-entitlement "The 'Matrix Reloaded' Effect" [though I was fine with that ending too], or even better, based on Neil Gaiman's wonderful essay on the subject, The "George R.R. Martin is not Working for You" Problem). But I really liked it.

Part of the reason why I really liked this finale is simply because it made a lot of people angry. This is a show that never did the expected or "easy" things; characters could be downright unlikeable for large swathes of time, story arcs went down unexpected paths, weird stuff was introduced and never again addressed (there is now a small, steaming crater now where TV Tropes' Big Lipped Alligator Moment page once was.) I will admit, I am human and I would have liked a few more explanations (no, seriously, why were there so many ancient Egyptian things on the Island, what the hell was going on with Walt, and just what the heck *was* Smokey?) A lot of people said they feel as though the writers screwed them over by not addressing many of the stranger plot twists and have even started to resent the series as a whole. (Seriously. Take a shot when you run into a comment like, "They didn't address my pet mystery so now the whole series that I have been 100% on board with for longer than most people spend in college sucks and we hates if forevers!") My thinking is, if "screwed over" means six years of terrific television with smart science fiction and some of the best characters I've ever had the pleasure to meet, then I would like to get screwed more often.

That came out wrong... O.o

I like how some people will be debating those final ten minutes for weeks. I like how those final ten minutes are destined to be misinterpreted -- even though, and I don't mean to insult anyone, if you didn't understand what was actually going on there, I am in no position to help you. (Tellingly, a LOT of negative comments online are from people who just watched this last episode out of curiosity or otherwise didn't pay much attention to the series as a whole. It's pretty much your own darn fault for not liking it.) I've been on this ride since season two (my curiosity about the series was piqued when I saw the late, lamented "Best Week Ever" summarize the season finale), and I'm going to miss my weekly visits to The Island.

Listen, I was doing fine until around the twenty-five minute mark. Then it got really dusty...

(Oh, by the way, I totally called it. In a manner of speaking.)

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Sketch of the Day! This has nothing to do with "Lost", but it's still funny.