The first job listings for Pixar’s future studio in Vancouver, British Columbia have appeared on the web (here and here) at two independent websites (they’re not yet posted on the careers page at Pixar.com).

The positions Pixar is seeking to fill are Manager of Information Systems, Production Manager, and Layout Artist. The Production Manager will report to the general manager of the Vancouver studio and their producer in Emeryille.

Each of the listings term the satellite studio Pixar Canada, a “wholly-owned subsidiary of Pixar Animation Studios”. As we’ve known since the project was announced, “the Vancouver studio will produce short-form animation focusing on legacy Pixar characters from films such as Toy Story and Cars”.

A well-placed source confirms that the new campus will be up and running “sometime in 2010″.

[VIA Pixar Blog and Facebook (thx Roger)]

Pardo & Woods - the world's worst Vaudeville team. I didn't realize until later that Scott Adsit from 30 Rock was in the background. Ha!

I’m always impressed with people who can maximize a festival, particularly the ones that go longer than just a day or two – like the Vancouver Film Fest or Global’s growing comedy festival. But, I do what I can and go when I can. Yesterday, Chris from the Speedway Squad podcast invited me along to a taping of Never Not Funny live. LA comedian (warm-up man for the Tonight Show) Jimmy Pardo and company sat down in a conference room at the Westin and yukked it up for well over an hour. Chris got to talk to Pardo et al, as well as get some words in with surprise arrivals like Scott Aukerman, and I got to clunk up the show by taking them serious when they said “What’s Weird Al’s real name – let’s look it up.”

It’s not my fault I have an iPhone. It’s… Fido… no, sorry, it is my fault.

The episode of their podcast that was being taped should be up next week – I’ll make you wait until then to find out what Al’s real name is. You will be disappointed. The rest of the episode, fantastic. And it’ll be just like being there, only you weren’t and that means you didn’t give Jimmy any money, you jerks.

I’m not sure how many people would consider themselves comedy fans, other than everybody insisting that they like to laugh, but if you’re not inclined to hit the Yuk Yuk’s every once and awhile, you should consider the Comedy Festival, seeing as it’s a one week period where a lot of heavy talent from around the world come to Vancouver to play.

The festival wraps up today, with David Cross, Steve Martin, and Carol Burnett – however, there’s a second show added for Carol Burnett this coming Tuesday, where the audience gets to ask her questions. A great evening for anyone over 40 or idiots like me that watched too much TV as a kid.

Celabrate Literacey! C'mon... that was funny.

This Sunday, September 27th, the 15th annual Word On The Street festival is happening at the Vancouver Public Library downtown. As usual there’s a lot going on, from book readings, Q&A, a tent where you can write a postcard of encouragement to Canada’s Winter athletes, and even a stage where the Vancouver Comedy Festival is sponsoring some funny musical comedy and sketches. Basically, the block the library is on will be covered in tents filled with people, by people, for people, that like books and magazines.

But the best kept secret, is The Word Under The Street, which is the gathering of local comic and ‘zine creators and publishers in the Library basement – DO NOT MISS IT! If you’re planning on going down, don’t leave without swinging by.

Comic books and the internet seem to go hand and hand.  In fact apart from debating who was the best captain of the USS Enterprise it’s almost as if the net’s primary directive is to bring people together to argue about Grant Morrison.  Pretty much everyone who reads comics has a comics blog, even I had one for a short bit before I realized that even less people read it than my personal blog.

However despite my combined love of comics and interest in blogs I have never really pimped one of Vancouver’s better blogs and certainly one of the top local comic book blogs.  Truthfully it’s the only local one I’ve read but if I’m missing one let me know in the comments.  Sadly maybe it was my lack of link love that lead to this month’s shutting down of Between the Staples [bts].  Or maybe not.

Either way Between the Staples is one of a number of interest specific blogs around Vancouver that never quite get the attention that they deserve.  I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as a few select blogs tend to sort of talk in an echo chamber about themselves and kind of ignore that there’s thousands of other people writing around Vancouver. 

I have to go now, some idiot in this chat-room keeps insisting that Janeway was the best.

Part of being a public figure is that sooner or later people are going to say things about you that you don’t agree with.  It comes with the territory, and the longer you’re going to be in the spotlight the more that’s going to happen.  Hell these days just having a blog seems to be enough for people to give you their opinion on every facet of your life, and that’s fair because if you choose to share it then you’re inviting comments.

The quickly written unauthorized biography is a staple of the music world.  Collecting previously published interviews and then hammering those into some sort of narrative structure to capitalize on someone else’s success.  Want to find out the real story of Trent Reznor, that unauthorized biography of him that I bought certainly did not tell it.  Though to be honest official biographies, or autobiographies, are rarely any more interesting or accurate.

It’s understandable that having an un-official biography written about you would be annoying.  However it’s free speech and anyone is allowed to say almost anything verbally or in print, no matter how badly written or poorly researched.  Matthew Good was never going to be happy about Eric Blair’s Ghosts in the Machine [am], but having his fans remove all mention of its existence from Wikipedia was disappointing [mg].

As much fun as people poke at Wikilality, Wikipedia is a wonderful resource and one that is generally self-regulated to provide accurate information.  The fact is that this biography exists, and while it’s proper to point out that Matthew Good was not interviewed and doesn’t support the biography simply pretending it doesn’t exist runs contrary to the principals of Wikipedia.

From the Wikipedia History of the article on Matthew Good [wp]:

An unsactioned (sic) biography of Matthew Good was written in 2008 by Eric Blair entitled “Ghosts in the Machine”. However, Mr. Good has formally denounced the book, stating that “I wasn’t interviewed or contacted, no member of my family was interviewed or contacted, nor were any of my friends”. Further, Mr. Good states that “I don’t sanction it whatsoever as any representation of me, my work, or my personal history.”

That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement of the book, nor even a particularly good advertisement.  It seems fair and balanced, acknowledging the books existence while not calling the author gay, a thief or otherwise libeling him.

The truth is that the book exists.  For all anyone knows it actually might be brilliant, though more likely it’s rubbish.  Removing it from Wikipedia doesn’t change that.

If you remember back during the summer much was made of Hasbro’s new Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition game opening up voting for cities to become properties on the board.  Though it sort of loses the original intent of Monopoly, since you clearly can’t own an entire city (someone needs to check the continuity of the Monopoly-verse), it got the game a lot of publicity for a few weeks as citizens of numerous cities tried to get their home town on the board.

Vancouver got on along with Montreal [mbm] and Toronto [mbt][cbc], with Montreal landing the coveted role as the Boardwalk property.  Don’t take too much away from that, Belgrade is a higher priced property than Vancouver and well they’re still getting over being the centre of NATO bombing during the Kosovo War.  Well, maybe they do deserve it more than we do.  The point is we did beat out Toronto.

The new iPhone version of Monopoly is based on the Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition and has our city included and once again we’re better than Toronto.

The Vancouver Sun

One of two local dailies owned by the same company, yay Canwest, the Sun has always had a shitty website.  Their previous attempt seemed like it was designed before computers by someone who was either blind drunk or drunk and blind.

The Good:

• Clean layout.
• More access to stories that appeared in the print version.
• Blogs.
• Videos.
• Someone told them about Twitter.

The Bad:

• Complete douche bags comment regularly; the same ones who write letters to the editor.
• It’s still The Vancouver Sun.
• Giant keg of Heineken pops up every time a page loads.
• It kind of still feels like watching your grandfather try to Moonwalk.
• Someone told them about Twitter.

Conclusion:

A nice step forward for the media institution, however it’s still got a ways to go before they’ll really be a great source of online news.  Currently there’s still a usability versus monetization balance to be figured out, and they should spend a bit of/more time studying the Guardian [lg].

Scout Magazine

A new local online magazine?  Will it be a bastion of local reporting like The Tyee [ty], or is the business plan to sell domain name to the Cub Scouts in a few years.

The Good:

• Slick layout.
• Local focus.
• Lots of potential.
• Who doesn’t love all blogs unconditionally?
• Nice layout, fairly easy to navigate.
• Room to grow.
• Nice photographs.
• Good focus on local restaurants.

The Bad:

• Like NowPublic [np] news articles are just large chunks of quotes from actual media outlets.  That’s not reporting, it’s copy and pasting.
• The writing is uneven.
• Seems to be more interested in finding a lucrative target market than finding something worth saying.
• Interviews seemingly conducted via email meme: ie. everything seems to be a “What’s your favorite food.” type question, the kind of thing your friends forward you to post on your blog.
• A Facebook group, really what is it 2007?
• Does Beyond Robson [br] know that their layout was stolen and run through a Maxim-filter?

Conclusion:

Done right there’s probably a place to be staked out somewhere between the granola crunch of The Tyee and the major newspapers online.  Scout Magazine tries too hard to find that position.  A lot of the decisions seem to have more to do with tricking Google than providing content, quoting news stories does not mean you have a news section.

Though for one of the most obviously commerical aimed blogs/websites online, the ads are as prevalent as on the Sun’s site, it’s hard understand what they mean by ” Our readers are optimistic about our city and the world without being blind to its problems.”  Aiming for left of centre readers tends to work better if you’re not also describing them as the perfect target market in the next sentance, “They are ‘influencers’…”

Maybe that’s a little cynical, and every publication takes a while to find their feet.  The next couple of months will give Scout Magazine a chance to define itself, and to find a voice.

Saturday December 6th, there’s a lot going on at The Rio Theatre (Broadway and Commercial), all of it part of Cthulhupalooza (kuh-too-loo-pah-loo-zah) – I’ll see if I can break it down for you.

For starters, there’s a Rock Band contest, sponsored by the game creators, Harmonix – if you’ve got some pals, and think you can rock it out, the contest is open to all attendees. Finalists get to rock it out on stage, and the winners, besides winning sweet prizes, can perform with The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. The Thickets have a track on Rock Band, so that’s the connection.

Then later there will be a screening of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s Call of Cthulhu (which is done as an old-school, silent movie) along with other visual fun.

And then the evening is capped by a performance by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets! Lead singer and chief instigator Toren was recently a guest-host on CITR’s We All Fall Down, helping to get the word out and drive some funds for CITR’s on-going funding donations (listen here.)

Besides being a barrel of monkeys, the event is helping to raise money for Child’s Play, which helps provide hospitals around the world (including BC’s Children’s Hospital) with video game systems, toys, and other fun things that make time spent in a hospital that much less sucky.

There’s a website for the event, which has information on where to pick up tickets (RX comics, Elfsar comics, Scratch, Red Cat, Zulu, and Neptoon records, etc. plus online sales via PayPal), how to enter the Rock Band contest, and more as the day of the event gets nearer!

Please spread the word, as the event benefits from having as many people as possible in attendance!

Full disclosure – I am helping to organize this event. It’s a charity event, so I’m not sure if you give full disclosure on that sort of thing. But let’s just say I a lot of my heart invested in this event, and I wish it to go well. Hope to see you there.

I was talking with a few people the other day about how Vancouverites, and we included ourselves in that category, always get excited when we get a mention outside of Canada.  Especially when Americans even acknowledge our existence it sends us into twitters of excitement. 

Maybe it’s just our Canadian inferiority complex, or maybe it’s just we’re kind of vain and self-absorbed.  I can’t imagine New Yorkers being excited about having their city mentioned in a CBC show, but boy was I excited when the Vancouver Canucks and their ‘95 playoff run got an extended mention on the show How I Met Your Mother last week [stc].

It’s certainly probably one of the best Canadian references, aside from The Simpsons‘ nearly constant jabs at our country or Jon Stewart calling the Conservative Party the equivalent of the American “Gay Nader Lovers For Peace Party”. 

What’s your favorite Canada, or Vancouver, reference on American or European media?  The Lumberjack sketch comes to mind.