housekeeping

a new year, a clean set of bookmarks.

1) Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the official movie site. If you haven't seen it yet, GO. NOW. The site is designed extremely well, does a huge amount of justice to the movie and the books, and is simply very entertaining. The movie's pretty spectacular too: gorgeous to look at, funny, and with an outstanding soundtrack from the normally predictable Thomas Newman.

2) In Lemony related links, check out an unfortunate new holiday story by Mr. Snicket himself. For happy endings and warm fuzzies, look elsewhere:

The holiday season is a time for storytelling, and whether you hear the story of a candelabra staying lit for more than a week, or one about a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision, these stories often feature miracles. Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them, you find more than you ever dreamed you'd see, and this holiday story features any number of miracles, depending on your point of view.

3) Chromasia was named the best photo blog of the year, and let me tell you, it deserves the award. Very beautiful stuff.

4) Angry Alien and its Bunny Productions made the holiday season just that much brighter with their 30-sec version of It's A Wonderful Life. Not to mention, if anybody's seen the new Fox series House, Jen Shiman (your friendly neighborhood bunnies animator) did the animated end credit for Bad Hat Harry Productions, Brian Singer's production company.

Speaking of House, it is my newest favorite show. Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard can diagnose me anyday.

5) Purple is the new pink. Just FYI. Also note: websites can have highly refined color schemes. [via colleen's open notebook]

6) John Campea's Top 10 Worst Films of 2004. I heartily agree, with the exception of #10 being The Village. I don't think it ranks with the awfulness that was Troy, but that's just me.

7) Everybody's doing top ten lists for 2004. And here's one the best, from Gapersblock.com. [via bookslut]

8) Help the tsunami victims.

9) I'm signing up for the 50 Book Challenge this year [via bookslut]. The challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to read 50 books over the course of 2005 and blog about them on your website. I don't know if I broke 50 this past year (and it counts the books you re-read, aren't they sweet?) but I'd like to think I came close. So I'm gonna give it a go and see what happens.

I got lots of nice reads for the holidays to get me started: To Lie With Lions, The Time Traveler's Wife, Foucault's Pendulum, The Orient Express, America: the Book, and Quicksilver. Ooh, warm fuzzies just thinking about my quality reading time...

10) Karen Salmansohn is waay too cool to be a self-help writer. And her site is well designed and funny to boot.