Pixar manages to blend outstanding animation technology with some of the best story tellers in the movie business. The first thing you see when watching a Pixar movie is the animation. Toy Story was groundbreaking in it’s use of computer animation, but Pixar has moved beyond that. Sure, Ratatouille debuted incredible new fur rendering techniques, and there are shots in WALL-E that are indistinguishable from a photograph, but that is not where the magic in these films lies. No, Pixar films feature stories that are new, and different, and they use all that fabulous technology to bring them to life. WALL-E is a tearful romance, with no dialog or human characters for the first 45 minutes! Ratatouille takes the rat, scourge of the kitchen, and turns him into the greatest chef in all of France. That leaves, of course, the latest Pixar feature, released a few weeks ago in theaters (and, if you haven’t seen it, hopefully still is playing), Up. Perhaps the most amazing part of the entire film is the first 10 minutes. Continue reading
Turn Signals
Use them. Also, stop signs. Stop at them.
Ever since I started driving I’ve noticed how often people don’t follow the rules of the road. Come on, it’s for your own safety. Thousands of people die in car crashes and from getting hit by cars every year. That’s more than 9/11, or the Iraq war, or SARS, or Swine Flu or any of the other big headlines. Slow down, use your signals, for god sake don’t drink and drive and we can all get where we’re going safely.
End rant.
Ender in Exile
Science fiction is wonderful. It gives the author the power to create a world exactly as they’d like it and it gives the reader all the worlds in the universe to dream about. At the same time, science fiction is about us, in our world. Every story is a possibility, a glimpse into the future, or a new perspective on our past. Where did we come from, where are we going. Ender in Exile, the latest manuscript by award winning author Orson Scott Card fills the gap between the first instalment of the now famous Ender series, Ender’s Game and the sequel Speaker for the Dead. As a midquel, Ender in Exile has a lot of ground to cover. Before reading it I expected to hear about Ender’s transformation from the boy who won the Formic War to the Speaker for the Dead. In the beginning of Speaker for the Dead we are quickly introduced to a lot of the changes that have occurred during the intervening centuries. With this book I hoped Card would go back and fill in some of the juicy details. I was not disappointed. Continue reading
New Theme
I picked up a new theme. It’s called pixel. I’ve made some slight modifications to suit the format to my liking but it’s otherwise unchanged. Tell me what you think.
Chuck
I missed this show when it first came out, thanks to Rafi for pointing it out to me later. Chuck combines a good techy comedy (ala Dilbert) with the thrill of the spy show and a good mix of romance and drama as well. The main character, Chuck Bartowski finds himself implanted with all of the U.S.’s most top secret intelligence through some sort of subliminal encoding computer known as the “Intersect.” As far as I can tell the idea is that this system was designed to “intersect” information collected by the different U.S. spy agencies. He is guarded by agents Sarah Walker and John Casey of the CIA and NSA. Those familiar with Joss Wendon’s Firefly will appreciate the return of Adam Baldwin, as his familiar trigger happy character. Quantum Leap fans will also appreciate the surprise appearance of Scott Bakula late in the series, no spoilers though. Continue reading
Google Wave
If you haven’t been, you should watch the keynotes from the, currently in progress, Google I/O conference. Keynote 1 covered a lot of features that have been added in HTML 5 and allow much more dynamic and interactive web applications. In keeping with it’s motto, Google has done an excellent job pushing browser makers to adopt these features as standards which are also being implemented by the other major browser manufacturers.
In keynote 2 the key announcement is Google Wave, the next generation of email. Those who know me know that I hate Facebook and social networking/forum sites in general because they tie you into a particular site for all your communication and since you use more than one, it just becomes inefficient. I prefer established standards for email and messaging like SMTP and XMPP (Jabber). Not only are the capabilities of Wave amazing, just watch the demo, but this new system will be open and vendor-neutral. So, I can run my own open-source Wave server and communicate with all the other Wave users out there. FANTASTIC! How do they do this? Not only is Wave a Google Apps webapp, it is also an API for embedding content in other sites and a protocol for communication between Wave systems (based on XMPP).
So, big round of applause for Google. Update: And there’s a command line client, woot!
Sequential Art
I was hanging out on IRC and someone posted a link to this comic from Sequential Art. So far I seem to be doing well in the finding good web comics department. Sequential Art is the story of Art, a graphic designer for an advertising firm, and his two room mates; Kat Vance a catgirl and photographer, Pip McGraw a penguin and comic book guy and Scarlet, a squirrel girl with a manic personality, but who seems to possess a detailed knowledge of science and technology; when she is not distracted by shiny things. I’m only on comic 200, at some point there are 4 squirrel girls. Either Scarlet finds some friends or gets put into a cloning machine, either would be par for the course with this webcomic.
Similar to MegaTokyo and Ctrl-Alt-Del this is a comic set in a gamer’s world. (Which explains the cat and bunny girls.) Along with dealing with the normal slice of life adventures one encounters when living with a catgirl, a perverted penguin and a lunatic squirrel girl, there seems to be a developing plot involving a small black evil thing dropped off by a random nerd in the first couple dozen strips.
That’s all for now, I have more to read. Stay tuned for a review of D.C. Simpson’s new comic / graphic novel Raine Dog.
Goodbye AnimeBoston
Post-graduation unpacking was put on hold this weekend for AnimeBoston, the largest anime convention in the north east. What a zoo it was. I remember marveling at the attendance to Katsucon 2008, the first large convention I went to, but it was nothing compared to this. Thank goodness the Hynes Convention Center is enormous. Highlights include:
- Getting to see Mookie at the ConnectiCon booth and getting my signed copy of “The Battle for Barthis.” Also, kudos to the Dominic Deegan cosplayers I saw, you guys are awesome and Mookie, you’re awesome for inspiring them to be awesome.
- Meeting up with some old school friends.
- Seeing Kalafina (a Yuki Kajiura band) live in concert. I especially enjoyed the part after the main performance where Kajiura-san came out and played the piano accompinament to her own songs live on stage.
- Also, the opening act performance by VGO was awesome, but not enough Zelda music!
This is probably going to be my last anime convention. As I found out, there’s not much to do unless you’re with friends. There are only so many times you can wander about the dealer’s room looking at all the merchandise (which is for the most part useless). I did buy some manga, which is a first for me, and I’m definitely not done with anime. This is just it for conventions.
Learned A New Word
Thank you Chinese spam. I learned a new word today: obtrude. It’s a synonym to “intrude,” but sounds weird. I’ll probably never use it.
On Blogs, From Ozy and Millie
Back when I started this blog I commented a bit on what I thought I would do with it. Would it be a venue for my random thoughts, reviews of things I was interested in, or just one more rehash of the day’s news. Blogs will probably be the most historically interesting things to come out of the Internet. Despite what traditional media says about them, they are akin to the diaries and journals which have been instrumental in understanding people’s lives from history.
Anyways, enough philosophy from me, go read this series of comics from Ozy and Millie exploring the topic.