Get Started with Graph Paper

If you need some graph paper... you already know why you're here. incompetech has the best graph paper generators available, and they're all easy to use!

Get Started with Music

If you need free music for your YouTube videos where you get to keep the ad revenue...

If you need music for your film or video game...

If you need music for your presentation or commercial...

Someone need to sing-along?

I’m just finishing up a pile of sing-along Christmas pieces for a stage production. Being seasonal, I decided to get them out as soon as possible.
Super-peppy sing-alongs! Right now, they are the first four pieces on this page. “Up on a Housetop”, “Jingle Bells”, “Deck the Halls”, and “Oh, Christmas Tree”.
Cheers, everyone!

American Gangster

Denzel does it again. Seriously. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one — I’m not really a Russell Crowe fan, for one thing, gangster movies aren’t really all that interesting to me in general, and it’s two hours and 37 minutes long besides. But it didn’t feel nearly that long (well, except for my backside getting sore), it isn’t quite a traditional gangster movie, and while I still don’t think Russell Crowe’s anyone I’d want to meet, he turns in a good acting job.
He’d have to be good to compare with Denzel, of course, though on the other hand, they don’t have many scenes together. For most of the film, you’re watching two movies. Denzel is Frank Lucas, a North Carolina boy who ended up in New York as driver and bodyguard to a Harlem crime boss. When the boss dies, every hood around tries to step into his shoes — but it’s Frank who succeeds. He learns a lesson from the big discount chain stores (which I think were probably pretty new in 1968, when the movie starts), and cuts out the middleman.
He travels to Bangkok, finds the guy who runs the poppy fields where the heroin comes from, and cuts a deal with him directly. Now Frank can afford to sell nearly pure heroin, and undercut all the other dealers. The other dealers don’t like this, of course, but after Frank shoots one of them in the head in broad daylight on a busy sidewalk, they don’t complain very much. That’s the really weird thing about this movie — Denzel’s kind of… evil. I mean, the first scene shows him setting a man on fire. He smacks his own brother’s head into a car window repeatedly. He’s a hateful, bad-tempered man. But somehow you don’t mind as much as you should.

gang.jpg
One of the few times Denzel and Russell actually share the screen, so look closely.

In the other movie, Russell Crowe is cop-turning-lawyer Richie Roberts. It seems he’s one of about eight non-crooked cops in New Jersey. While following a bookie, he and his partner discover a huge pile of cash — $987,000, to be exact. But his partner doesn’t want to turn it in, because then all the other cops, who apparently routinely keep whatever money they find on the job, won’t trust them anymore. Richie turns it in anyway, and sure enough, the next time he calls in for backup in the Projects, there are mysteriously no units in the vicinity. I mean, really — if there aren’t cops there, what in the world are they all doing? I hope police forces have changed a lot since the sixties. Even the state district attorney uses some nasty racial slurs.
Anyway, because there are only eight honest cops, they all get put into the same unit — a new federally organized anti-drug task force. They don’t bother with street pushers or small amounts of drugs; they only want the suppliers and big bosses. So from that point, you know Russell and Denzel are fated to collide, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch it happening.
The rest of the cast is great. There’s Ruby Dee (“The Stand”) as Mamma Lucas; Josh Brolin doing a frighteningly good job as the King of the Crooked Cops; and my old friend Idris Elba (28 Weeks Later, The Reaping) in an unfortunately small part. I suspect some of his lines hit the cutting room floor, and probably the same is true of poor Cuba Gooding, Jr., who gets one substantial scene where he whines and complains, and spends the rest of the film appearing in the background now and then. It’s a fun scene, though — Frank compares his brand of heroin, Blue Magic, to Pepsi and General Mills in terms of brand recognition. I wonder if companies actually pay for that kind of product placement…?
The point is, it’s a good film. Four and a quarter idols of good, in fact. I’m still thinking about the last scene, which manages to make a huge impact without even any dialogue. It does that in a few places, actually, and I think those are the scenes that are going to stick the most, for better or worse. Most of those scenes aren’t for the squeamish, unsurprisingly, but they’re really powerful. And in spite of his almost offhand cruelty, you never quite give up on Frank, which might easily have happened with any other actor. At least he’s nice to his mother… though personally, I’d be afraid not to be nice to Ruby Dee.

Note-Taking X4!

For those of you who wanted the note-taking paper in other orientations – those options are now available in all varieties… lined, graph, and music notation!
Need the summary on top? No problem. How about the cue area on the right? Easy to do!
Enjoy!
(Thanks to Ivan who actually did all the work on this update.)

Perspectives


It must have been dozens of times you’ve come to this site looking “just the right kind of perspective grid” for your project… Well, after years of requests… and several headaches induced by API2 module documentation, it is finally here.

Configurable Single Point Perspective Grids!
Now I’m going to go have a celebration cupcake.

Short Update

I’ve been doing lots these last couple weeks. But not much made it up here… including 2 musicals. But here’s a small pile of things…
NewsSting – a simple news-y intro
Eyes Gone Wrong – an intense but reserved transition
Disco Sting – 1980’s Style intro
Darkness Speaks – unsettling transition
Bama Country – Taken as a request for a super rural country tune. It is listed as “Unclassifiable” just because I have only one country piece available. Nice fiddle, though the tremolo run didn’t turn out as well as I’d have liked.
Vibe Ace – Cool, cool hybrid
Folk Round – Sort of… medieval campfire-like.
Colossus – Ahh… this one’s cool… in that theatrical epic sense. You need to listen at least through one minute 52 seconds.

New Triangles

Variable Triangle PDF Generator. Still experimental… in that it should work, and appears to – but I’ve no real way of testing it. If you need some isosceles triangles that cover a plane, but something other than the equilateral-type… this should be for you!