This week the lovely ladies behind A Beautiful Mess have made a great little iPhone photo app! What’s great about it, though, is that it’s more than just for adding filters to photos. It’s like a scrapbooking app, where you can take pre-existing images and add great doodles, orders, and text.
Hello!
The app has some pre-set phrases in Elsie’s adorable handwriting (like the Hello!) above, as well as an assortment of borders, arrows, flowers, hearts…super cute stuff. All of it.
Sometimes the best way to gauge the true impact of a film is to see it after that big first weekend that nowadays seems to define if a movie is a success or a flop. I saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter two weeks after its initial release, and was pleasantly surprised to sit in a full theater at the Lake Creek Alamo Drafthouse on a Friday evening. Clearly this movie has done something correctly, or at least struck a chord with moviegoers.
Abraham Lincoln is probably the most romanticized and mythologized president in America’s history. There may be no better president to use as a vehicle for fighting a war with a powerful cell of bloodthirsty vampires. The idea is so preposterous that it makes perfect sense. The facts of his life—studying law, meeting/marrying Mary Todd, the Gettysburg address—are played straight and with great love and care, which is to the film’s benefit. read more
This year for SXSW, Hill Country Weavers hosted a really fun knit-a-long with live music! We were so lucky to have Liz Gipson swing by and show us some of the awesome new knitting needles and crochet hooks from Knitter’s Pride. Fun fact: the lovely gentleman behind the fantastic lines of knitting needles and crochet hooks at Knitter’s Pride is the same man that helped create Knit Picks’ needles. If you’re familiar with Knit Picks’ interchangeable sets, circulars, and straights, you’re pretty much guaranteed to love Knitter’s Pride.
While Liz was in town for the show she recorded some footage of me giving my opinion of Knitter’s Pride aluminum crochet hooks. (Spoiler: I love them and hope HCW carries them in the future!)
I’m no expert, but maybe I am? Check them out if you like to crochet! The handles are so soft and feel great in your hand.
In a former life I was a video game reviewer, and I recently found this little blurb I wrote that never saw the light of day. So here it is …
OCTOBER 2007 Splatterhouse for Arcade (Namco 1988)/Turbografx-16 (NEC 1990)
This really is a perfect Halloween game. A bloody sidescroller, Splatterhouse puts you in the shoes of Rick, a masked Jason-like psycho searching through a mansion for his girlfriend. As the game progresses you’ll find yourself facing some of the most twisted and grotesque creatures ever seen in a video game (at least back in 1990). Corpses fall from the ceiling, chained bodies spew green vomit, giant slugs burst out of chests, and “living” monsters attack you from behind.
Bosses include The Body Eater, The Biggyman, Evil Cross (from the arcade version, better known as Evil Sleep & the Nightmares in the Turbografx-16 Port), and Hell Chaos. You’ll be okay, though, because you are well-armed with shotguns, harpoons, cleavers, wrenches, knives, and two-by-fours. Each room offers a new task, and there are many shocks and scares. The graphics are surprisingly good, and the background music is perfect. Worth noting are the game’s two sequels, Splatterhouse 2 & 3, on the Sega Genesis. This was also the first game to ever have a parental advisory disclaimer when released in arcades in 1988, four years before Mortal Kombat.
A few weeks ago I was approached by Mary Beth Klatt, the mastermind behind Yarn U, to review the app she developed. As someone that works at a yarn shop, I was very interested to see what the app had to offer, and if it could be of use to us at the shop. read more
