Future science is magic!
I’d like to direct your attention to the below video, where YouTube is now letting users turn on a BETA version of their Closed Captioning service. It’s attempting to do on-the-fly transcriptions from the audio stream. While it’s not perfect by a long shot, it IS providing some amusing “all your base”-style sentences. Anyway, on to the video.
(EDIT: you’ll have to click through to YouTube to see what I’m talking about apparently – it’s not included in their embedded player yet.)
Posted in general, observations.
– 2010/03/10
I’m going to continue trying to watch three Netflix movies a weekend until I’m caught up on the queue. That’s saying a lot since I’ve got around 500 movies waiting in there. I go through and clean it up a bit, for the most part it has remained unchanged.
Beowulf
I didn’t really consider how much Avatar was a game-changer until I watched Beowulf for the first time this past weekend. It was touted as the greatest example of digital animation, that the actors were photorealistic and lifelike and they didn’t have the dead eye problem you got in Polar Express. And I also knew that it was a stylized take on photorealism, and that aspects of the movie were meant to appear cartoonish, as this was a legend and legends take on supernatural aspects. And it was all those things. It was well told and well shot, but in the end it felt like a video game cinematic in places – people didn’t move quite right, some characters weren’t rendered as well as others. It just makes Avatar look that much better.
Beowulf was a better story by far, of course. 
Rambo
I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. Following Rocky Balboa from the week before, it was a bit of a shocker. It has a low budget and you can see that, but every penny is on the screen. The ridiculous gore and violence of it worked for me. I loved First Blood and have no real desire to see any of the other films, but this was great. Julie Benz was awful in it, though. Just … just awful. Man, I couldn’t wait for her to die, and it hurt that much more when she didn’t.
I see that Stallone is making a Rambo V now. Good for him. It sounds like he just had more fun making those movies than the Rocky movies.
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
AH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH
The Oscars
On a side note, I tried not to watch the Oscars, because I hate the idea of 10 best picture nominations, and acceptance speeches are always dumb. I really only cared that Christoph Waltz won for his role in Inglourious Basterds, and I hoped that District 9 would walk away with something. A little surprised to see Sandra Bullock snatch the Best Actress award, but I haven’t seen the movie (and won’t – I hate inspirational movies, they always come off saccharine and make me squirm in my seat), so more power to her. Glad that Avatar didn’t sweep the night – it’s a good movie, and it’s important, but I wouldn’t make it Best Picture. Winning for Cinematography and Visual Effects is more appropriate.
Posted in movies.
– 2010/03/10
I love when I completely forget about a comic strip and then remember it and have over a month of new strips to read. I love Chainsawsuit, even though I’m sure it pains Kris Straub that it’s become more popular than his other strips. I haven’t given Starslip much of a chance, so maybe I’ll take the opportunity and read up there, too.
As should you all.
Posted in comics.
– 2010/03/08
We’re down at Lava Lounge in Belltown. Having a lager and a Dewar’s rocks.
Posted in adventures in drinking, general.
– 2010/03/05
I’m going to make an effort to get the output from the writing exercises we have every other Thursday. This last exercise was a prompt I came up with:
Write a scene about a struggle. It could be a fight, or someone trying to put on a pair of pants. I’m interested in seeing sense of surroundings, the geography that describes where everything is in a consistent manner.
Anyway, you’ll need to click through in order to read, due to length and also probably a good idea to block content from the front page. Continued…
– 2010/03/04
I watched another group of three movies from Netflix this weekend. Here are some thoughts:
Rocky Balboa
I’d heard this was good, and it was. I think Stallone is one of those guys who makes a really, really good movie once every ten years, and then spends the years following just producing garbage. Now that he’s really too old to be an action hero, it’s interesting to see the choices and chances he’s taking. I think he’s an intelligent man with the ability to be a good actor. Watch the first Rocky, First Blood, Copland, Judge Dredd (okay, that last one was a joke), and you should agree. I think he’s a good writer, too. But still, he’s written a few good movies and a lot of really shitty ones. Anyway, it was a fun movie to watch, and brought the 80s training montage back a little and the fight at the end was well shot. They didn’t go cheeseball with it, and the ‘love interest’ was well done.
The Queen
I expected a British biopic. What I got was a week in the life of the Queen of England and PM Tony Blair, centered around the death and fallout of Princess Diana. A great bit of storytelling. Only thing weird for me is that I have a huge, huge crush on Excalibur- and Long Good Friday-era Helen Mirren. She’s a wonderful looking woman at her age now, but man, her Morgana drove me crazy.
Dead and Buried
This is another movie that took me a while to figure out what it was doing on my queue. A little research showed it was written by Dan O’Bannon, who co-wrote the original Alien. Alien it was not, but it was a pretty cool Lovecraftian zombie story. Small east coast town where people who visit end up dead, killed by the townspeople, and then suddenly reappear as new citizens who’ve ‘been there all along’. Cheesy and dated, but fun.
This weekend I’ll be watching the new Rambo, Beowulf, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Wish me luck.
Posted in movies.
– 2010/03/04
I’ve been meaning to get in here and post, but I’m such a nerd I just spent the last twenty minutes refactoring a bunch of JavaScript using the newish HTML5 <canvas> tag into a reusable method to DRY it up. For fun. Not even work-related, really.
I should also be coming up with details on how my resolutions are going. I’ll keep this simple, too:
Not eating meat has been a bit of a bust. I’ve reduced my intake, but I’m nowhere near where I was even a month ago. I’m not reading comments on sites, except for on the weekends. That feels weird, but even then I don’t spend much time online, so no real worries. I’m still social networking site-clean, two months in. I’m trying to figure out what good those sites will do me when I eventually start using them again. I can see a benefit to them, but everything in moderation. I finished a short story last night. I haven’t touched the novel in a while. Definitely not since last I talked about it. No open source work. I keep writing more music, but none of it’s getting recorded. That’s a bitch. No new languages (although I was afraid for a moment I might get thrust back into the frightening world that is PHP), and Europe is still on the other side of the Atlantic – no closer am I.
I’m going to be dumping a few more posts here tonight, rather than work on a secret work project. Which I should be working on, because I can’t work on it at work. Intrigued? It involves potatoes. I’m not even kidding.
Posted in general.
– 2010/03/04
I’ve fucked off down the pub. I thought about going to starbucks to get this miserable short story that’s been festering in my brain the past few weeks done. There’s a sentence for you. Anyway the thought of writing in a coffee shop really chapped me so I stopped in at Jersey’s. It’s close and small and I’ve enjoyed it here. Got the story done (first draft) and now I’m heading home.
Posted in writing.
– 2010/03/03
Outside of SoulFood
Devin Townsend played a coffee house last night. If you’re not familiar with HevyDevy then this might not mean much to you. Devin started his professional career as the lead singer on two Steve Vai albums, and soon after formed his own band Strapping Young Lad. SYL has been a major influence on me over the past nine years. So a free show in a coffee house in Redmond as he takes a break from an international tour in support of his latest album. As it turned out, I wish Dena and I had gotten there sooner. The above image should give some indication, but the shop was at maximum capacity and there were maybe a hundred people standing outside.
At one point a manager at SoulFood got on stage and asked for people to ’share the experience’ and let others have a turn because ‘what comes around goes around [sic]‘, which became a great lesson in the effectiveness of feel-good hippie rhetoric. No one budged.
I used the opportunity to try out the voice recorder on the iPhone. If we’d been in there it might not have turned out so well. You’ll have to ignore some various douchebags in the background – two young dorks in front of us kept talking during the entire show. Yes, we know it’s from Ziltoid. Yes, that’s a great reverb system. No, we don’t care what you think about Addicted.
Here’s a snippet from the track ‘Coast’ off the album ‘Ki‘:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And a good chunk of ‘Solar Winds’ off of ‘Devin Townsend Presents: Ziltoid the Omniscient‘:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Finally, an unreleased track he called ‘Radial Highway’ that was as he described it ‘a lot like Trainfire [also from Ki] but creepier’:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
That last one annoyed me most. There was a woman who showed up right before this song who started bugging everyone there about who this was and why her favorite store was clogged with people. She just wouldn’t shut up. She hung around after it was clear she wasn’t interested in the music and kept initiating conversations with random people. Very frustrating. I don’t go to live shows to socialize with people, I go to watch musicians perform.
Anyway, here’s about the only shot I could manage of the stage. I’m not even going to try to point it out. This is really all I could manage:
Can't quite make out the stage...
Posted in live shows.
– 2010/02/28
There are movies on my Netflix queue that were added on a whim so long ago that I don’t remember why I added them in the first place.
The opening cards for Shinobi: Heart Under Blade tell me all I need to know:
Sounds good to me. So far it’s silly fun, all the more silly because it seems to be taking itself seriously.
If it’s at all possible to put the following words together without losing my mind: I have now seen a magical ninja with a teased mullet in a fantasy period piece.
They’ve referenced Hattori Hanzo. Cool beans.
Yeah, it was a silly movie. Not too bad, and some cool ninja action.
Posted in movies.
– 2010/02/21
