Hurricane Ivan is about to go ashore. It’s a category 4 hurricane, with sustained wins of 135 miles per hour. Two people in the U.S. are reported dead so far. Hope everyone within the sound of this weblog gets out of the way and stays safe.
Updates on weather.com.
It’s sometimes important for me to remember that working for Pixar Animation Studios does have its perks: today we were blessed with a preview screening of the new movie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and were also blessed with a special guest appearance by its director Kerry Conran, editor Sabrina Plisco and production designer Kevin Conran.
The movie begins in the New York of old: the New York of the 30s, the New York of Zeppelins and Radio City Music Hall. Six scientists have disappeared, and reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) is trying to crack the story. She meets a mysterious scientist in a movie theater, and he tells her that he is next.
And then the robots attack.
I’m not going to go into more of the story. It is a comic book adventure story, and if you go for that kind of thing, you’ll enjoy it. The real amazing bit about this film is just how beautiful it looks: it has a very classic “old-film” look, and yet has amazingly beautiful sets, creepy robots and exciting combat sequences, all inspired from black and white photography of the period. Go and drink it in: I don’t think a more innovative visual look has been developed since The Wizard of Oz.
The Q&A we had with Kerry was great: he was genuinely intimidated by the Pixar crowd, but everyone was blown away at the innovation and the achievement. This movie began as a very budget independent film, and was ten years in the making. He graduated from Cal Arts with (paraphrasing) “only a marginally greater chance of being able to direct a film than when I went in”, so he set out (literally in his own apartment) with developing the technology, look and script. It was really a very shoestring affair, with many of the scenes shot nearly entirely in blue screen, and many animators who were “literally high school students”. He tried to incorporate many of the ideas from traditional animation to give his film a unique style. I was enormously impressed by his humor, his humility and his talent: it is a stupendous achievement.
Go see it. It’s fun, and marvel at the beauty. I can’t wait to see the DVD with extras, or the article from Cinefex.
Project Gutenberg has also begun to publish music in many formats. Try Project Gutenberg – String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major Opus 127 by Ludwig van Beethoven, which is available in PDF, Sibelius, MIDI and XML forms. I used timidity to convert the MIDI to this (rather strange sounding) mp3 file.
Oh good God. I think I’m glad I can’t understand Japanese. The idea that I might “get” what this is all about just numbs my already enfeebled brain.
Thanks to the gents at Metafilter for crowding my brain with this.
Apprently Microsoft can occasionally dimly see the light ahead: witness Yahoo! News – Microsoft Sings a New Tune With Windows Media Player 10. After years of dragging their feet about including MP3 ripping in their Media Player product, they have finally caved and made an encoder freely available. Of course it doesn’t rip variable bitrate MP3s (sigh) and includes only four quality settings (double sigh), so it appears that they are being drug kicking and screaming into the future.
Hey Microsoft, what are you guys thinking? Do you really want to get to the point where everyone looks at your competition at Apple and says “You know, we’d be better off with them?” Apple and ITunes are kicking the stuffing out of you, and it is time to stop trying to appease your media slavemasters and give the consumers what they want. People want to be able to RIP mp3 cds, so they can play them on the largest variety of devices. If you don’t give them that capability, they will adopt products that will.
I must admit, I’m intrigued by the stories being reported about a secret group setting up movie theaters in the catacombs beneath Paris. Damn, and I spent all my time taking cruises on the Seine and trudging through the Musée D’Orsay staring at impressionist art. Silly me.
There have been a number of followup articles, which appear to credit their appearance to a group calling itself “La Mexicaine de la Perforation”. According to founder Lazar Kunsman, they are trying “to create areas of free artistic expression away from the consumerism of the surface”.
Rock on, Lazar.
Today’s audio blog recapitulates the days major events, at least as viewed by me. My rememberences of Sept 11, the North Korean “nuclear test”, and my brief review of Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
A couple of technical issues: my bumper music is too loud, sorry about that, and if you hear some clicking in the background, it is because I left the door to the laundry room open, and I have stuff drying. Sorry about that, I’ll get the hang of this stuff in the next couple of tries.
The news is reporting that a large blast and mushroom cloud has been sighted over North Korea. Apparently the explosion was large enough to have been noticed by satellites. Speculation is that the Koreans may have been engaged in some kind of nuclear testing or that the explosion may have been accidental.
Scary stuff.
Well, today’s weekend movie extravaganza was the long awaited (at least in the VandeWettering house) Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
For those of you who have been living in a hole for the last decade, the Resident Evil franchise began as a popular videogame series on the Sega Dreamcast and Sony Playstation. I must admit that I have spent a few dozen hours myself trying to shoot and evade zombies, so I was already a fan. This movie is the second installment of the burgeoning movie franchise, and pretty much takes up where the previous movie left off.
Alice (played by super model Milla Jovovich) returns in the state she ended the previous movie: wearing only a flimsy hospital gown and carrying a shotgun in the middle of Racoon City. The infamous T-Virus has escaped the Umbrella Corporation’s underground bioweapons lab, and zombies are walking the earth.
Cool.
This movie is pretty much a cliché, but it’s one that the videogames helped popularize and promote. We have the evil Umbrella Corporation, willing to test bioweapons on innocent civilians and ultimately to kill them. We have the former security officer for Umbrella who now is trying to take down the corporation. We have the scientist whose daughter is caught inside the perimeter of the infectious zone, who tries to make a bargain with a band of rag tag survivors to get them out. And we have zombies: lots of ’em, with lots of chomping of various minor characters.
Let’s face it, if you are going to see this movie, you know what to expect and what you want to see, and I suspect you’ll agree that this movie delivers. It isn’t destined to be the classic that Night of the Living Dead is, but it’s a good, solid, exciting and at times even scary story. The one major drawback is the cliffhanger ending, which no doubt sets up the already planned-for Resident Evil: Battle Beyond the Stars or whatever they are going to call the third installment.
I rank it a good 8/10. I had a great time, jumped in my seat on at least two occasions, and generally enjoyed the flesh-chomping action. If this is the genre that floats your boat, go see it. If you aren’t thrilled by zombie movies, don’t bother going, because I won’t be interested in hearing you complain about the lack of character development or emotional growth on the part of the main characters.
I must admit, it snuck up on me a bit. Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the terrible events in New York, at the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania where nearly 3000 lost their lives.
On that morning, I was in my car driving my son and my wife to school and work respectively. As I always did, I turned on the radio to get the traffic news, and immediately found news that one tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed. I was dumbfounded, but still dropped my son off, and then went on to drop my wife at her place of work in downtown Oakland. When I had reached Pixar, the gate guard said that people could consider work optional, and could go home if they wished. I went in for just a brief time, checking the news with the few others who where there, but then got a call from my wife. Her building was close to the federal building downtown, and they were being evacuated. I decided to call it a day, and went to go pick her up. As I arrived, police were busy erecting barricades and closing the roads surrounding those buildings.
For the next several hours, I remember watching the second tower crash, the discussions of the possible death toll, and just feeling bludgeoned by the loss of life, especially among the brave fire and police crews who responded to the disaster.
About 2:00pm in the afternoon, I was overwhelmed, and turned the TV off for the rest of the day. I remember how quiet it seemed, and then realized there were no airplanes in the sky.
My continued sympathies go to anyone who lost someone close to you on that day.
That’s what I was doing that day. There are of course a huge number of websites describing the events from others perspectives. Many of the best ones are linked and archived at 911digitalarchive.org.
As I mentioned in my audio blog today, I was diverted from my mornings appointments by this little guy who appeared on my windshield as I was about to drive off. I just had to fetch my Nikon 4300 and snap some pictures of him. Try clicking on the thumbnail to the right to get a higher resolution of him, or you can look at this Quicktime of him breathing for extra creepiness.
Well, this is my first attempt to enter the glamorous world of audioblogging. I’ve brutally hacked the wp-rss2.php script to output enclosures whenever you add the appropriate custom fields, and we shall see how this works.
The audio was recorded on my cheapy HP laptop at 64kbps, so no promises on the quality.
What more of an intro do you need to this link?
Fairy’s Strange Junkfood Tribute: How to Make Fried Oreo Cookies!
In trying to find an image to go with this (I purloined them from foodsubs.com ) I googled for images and found that all manner of dogs, cats, rabbits, polar bears, ferrets, and guinea pigs are all named “Oreo”. Go ahead, try it.
Slashdot had a link to Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley. The abstract reads:
Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and have applied the economic insights of Harold Demsetz and other property theorists to condemn the use of intellectual property by others as free riding. In this article, I argue that this represents a fundamental misapplication of the economic theory of property. The economics of property is concerned with internalizing negative externalities – harms that one person’s use of land does to another’s interest to it, as in the familiar tragedy of the commons. But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning of the market. From this core insight, I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances where curbing it is necessary to encourage creativity. I explain why economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property.
I’ve lately tried to amend my own mental sloppiness in referring to illegal music downloading as a form of theft. In fact, stealing a CD from a store is a vastly less serious crime than downloading the same CD in the your own home. One is theft, the other is copyright infringement. It behooves one to keep the differences in mind, especially considering their relative penalties.
I have to give credit where credit is due: the name “brainwagon” was first suggested by Tom Lokovic, based upon the theory of jamming two common words together that were easy to spell. Interestingly enough, when I did a web search to find other instances of the words “brain” and “wagon”, I found that a gentleman named Colonel Goethal had worked on the Panama Canal and had named his railcar “The Yellow Peril” (because of its color) or “The Brain Wagon”.
Too cool.
