nate beaty

I recently had a drunken spree of watching old westerns, starting with the classic The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. While “camping” last weekend, I watched it again with my 12-year-old nephew Aaron who initially scoffed at the obviously-overdubbed dialog, “THEIR MOUTHS ARE OFF!” but he slowly got into it. It’s so classic that even with long, drawn out, often silent scenes, it manages to capture the attention of a modern-day, Mountain Dew swizzling, Nintendo DS addled pre-teen. I was stunned.

The big budget spaghetti western made me yearn to get lost in more stiff old portrayals of The Old West. I started roaming around IMDB looking for high-rated westerns. The first that caught my eye was The Magnificent Seven, which introduced me to Yul Brynner, playing an oddly endearing cowboy android. It also shared a younger Eli Wallach, playing a similarly slimy-yet-likeable villain as Tuco and Charles Bronson looking like a beefed up Alfred E. Newman.

From there it was quickly downhill with the western meme. Somehow I ended up watching The Searchers, which features the Native American hatin’ John Wayne. Besides bearing a striking resemblance in stature, dress and speech to Willy Vlautin, I couldn’t find much to like. However, I was pleased to spot The Elderly and Senile Room Service Waiter from Twin Peaks, the one who brought Agent Cooper his warm milk after he got shot. Nearly fifty years prior to Twin Peaks, Hank Worden was sporting a very similar shtick.

If I’ve not blathered to you in person about it, we recently at my dayjob relaunched holamun2.com. This was the culmination of an 8++ month operation pulling out the wildly (manmade) cancerous and expanding Wordpress innards and replacing them with a Drupal intestinal tract. The primary New Thing is user accounts and profiles and all the social hooha that goes with that; but the rest of the site has also been restructured pretty heavily.

Our design and development cycle feels much like a newspaper. That is, pretty much perpetual barreling forward movement with rapid deadlines and constant creative output. This doesn’t allow much time for the many OCD hands in the soup to perfect anything to our satisfaction, be it cronjob or Drupal module or CSS stylesheet or gif-cropping code. (Woa, I just saw some eyes go glossy.)

Despite the perpetual Marx-bros-esque coding fiasco, we’ve managed to put together something that, as the dust settles and the hundreds of kids a day (!!) sign up and abuse it, I’m beginning to be pretty proud of. It’s a goofy-ass looking kid who was born a bit early and is stumbling along the first stages of life, but we’re scrambling to get caught up with our 1,200 to-do tasks in the queue.

During the relaunch, we’ve still managed to put out some great content. Of particular interest lately is a glitter set of mutant piñatas by Laura Park which is equally cool as her first set of cannibalistic fruits. Joseph Robertson has been making videos to illustrate mun2 pools (sorry about the music, and for the Starburst ad that I designed and coded into our goddamn video player, sigh). Our inhouse team interviewed and made a great slideshow of Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets. It didn’t connect too well with our kids (L@t1N0 t33n5 r b0r3d), but I think it would with most folks I know.