commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

Futurama returns! Two years after being cancelled by Fox, new Futurama content is realised in the form of the first of four feature length, straight-to-DVD (and torrent) episodes. Fox are satirised brutally (and in no subtle way - Planet Express are described as having been shut down by the “Box Delivery Network”) in the first few minutes of the film.

In the story, Planet Express (and later, Earth) are taken over by Internet-scammers, who in the process discover a method of travelling back in time. This produces a convoluted series of events involving multiple versions of several characters (most notably Fry, who essentially has two plotlines), but everything ties together beautifully by the end. None of the familiar style of humour is lost, although there is possibly less real-world satire.

I was also impressed with the number of references to previous episodes and the number of previous (often rather minor) characters featured. A selection: Scruffy, LaBarbara, Dwight, Nibbler & the Nibblonians, the space god, Barbados slim, Hedonism bot, Bubblegum Tate and the Globetrotters, Elzar, Michelle, Al Gore, Seymour, Mr. Panucci, Horrible Gelatinous Blob, Morbo & Linda, Tinny Tim, Robot Santa, “welcome to the world of tomorrow” guy, the Robot Devil, Leela’s parents, Hypnotoad, Richard Nixon & Agnew, Kwanza bot, Zapp & Kif, Cubert, Sal^w and the Robot Mafia.

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I found the Standards schmandards website via Fangs - a plug-in for Firefox which produces a text version of the speech output delivered by JAWS. But there is a raft of other content here, including this list of government guidelines regarding accessibility. What really sold the site to me was this snippet from the about page:

…we will not bitch about web standards all the time. You already know it is good for you. Also, we will not go fanatic on you and say that you can’t use Flash or that your web site sucks if it doesn’t display properly in Lynx…

Disclaimer: I realise my own site doesn’t meet most guidelines, changes are afoot though.

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