Siteseeing

Ah, back to the original purpose of this blog... links!

- Silent PC building guide
- $1000 Apple 20" Display = $400 Dell model
- Compfused home of the Neverending Fall and Cursor Snatcher
- Dr MegaVolt!

Willy Wonka

Weird fixation on movie entries lately, sorry about that. I promise my life has much more going on in it than that. It's just, for some reason, I can't convince myself that the whole idea of blog-as-personal-diary is anything other than incredibly stupid, so I limit myself to the fantastic and bizarre and ultimately, those experiences that can be shared.

Saw Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory with some good friends the other night, and couldn't help but be very intertained by this completely average movie. There is a lot to criticize: the fantastic visuals lack restraint, the pacing is hackneed, and the film fails to create a sense of wonder and magic that I found in the book. There are snippets of it here and there, but also plenty of moments that kill the momentum.

I thought the comparisons of Johnny Depp's performance to Michael Jackson were unimaginative and half-baked. It literally boils down to "they both have white skin. there are kids around" but that's it. Depp's Wonka is a strange disconnected man who doesn't exactly like kids, and lashes out at them like a big child himself.

The addition of back-story flashbacks to Wonka's past and his overbearing father do just what I thought they would do - derail the film and send it in directions it doesn't want or need to go. Although I love Christopher Lee's performance, in fact the side story itself is perfectly ok, but it just doesn't fit into the rest of the film.

But none of that matters. The best I can say about the film, its ultimate strength, was that it made me feel like a kid again. ALL of my friends said pretty much the same thing. It wasn't that I was watching it in a theater full of children, I was, but somehow I didn't hear them until the movie's weaker 2nd half. No, Depp manages to capture a child-like quality that Jacko could never have, Depp's Wonka might be cut off from the world but he still holds a child's fascination.

It's kinda weird, I've read enough reviews that suggested this film wasn't kid friendly, that's Dahl's original vision and Burton's adaptation are too dark. But sitting in a theater full of them, listening to them laugh and talk excitedly afterwards, and I couldn't help but wonder if our society was just a little off about the whole thing.

A Trip at 30 frames per second

Movies and/or snippets of movies I have caught in the last, oh, 2-3 months.

-The death scene in Throne of Blood, the ferris wheel scene in The Third Man, the ending of Chinatown, the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan
-Banannas and Manhattan, both for the first time
-Street Fighter, a strange kung fu film whose central hero my friend refers to as "that nice rapist"
-The Forbidden Zone, Danny Elfman's first
-The Forbidden Planet, introducing Robbie the Robot!
-Incubus, otherwise known as "Esperanto, the Motion Picture"
-Peter Jackson documentary collecting Tolkien's references to Finnish and Welsh epic poetry in his elven languages
-Only 1 episode of Family Guy
-The one and only show of FolleyVision with special performance by "that guy from police academy who makes noises with his mouth."
-THX 1138
-The Aviator
-F for Fake (Howard's Revenge!)
-Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
-Batman Begins (surprisingly good!)
-another Folleyvision staring a perfectly proportioned 3 foot tall james bond
-A Double Life
-Tao of Steve
-The Seventh Seal
-Ian McKellan's performance at the end of Moulin Rouge
-overrated season 2 of the Sopranos

Revenge of the Sith

Crap.

What's that doing on my computer?!?

So I just installed Tiger, Apple's next Big Thing, and I'm playing around with it, all the new toys, but there is only one thing I really want to see, Spotlight. Dashboard will explode, iChat is cute, Automator and Safari RSS are nice for how limited they are. Spotlight will change your life.

My hard drive is just big enough that I don't know what the hell I got on it. There's weird shit all stuffed in forgotten folders, creative writing or even code, things I haven't looked at in months, years. Spotlight is like Google for your computer, search for something and it's found instantly. Even as you start typing, stuff pops up. "Austin" for example, by the time I typed "a u s" I saw pictures from australia, a friend born in Austria, etc. I finished austin and I get the pictures from my last camping trip, a map of Texas with Austin on it. Worst of all, I see about 15 girls I've dated in the last year. Yeah, spotlight is like that. You can believe that shit is gone now.

Continuing with the geography theme, I do "St Louis", but few results. I find my taxes from a few years back. Nothing from high school, but then again, I only had a Commodore 64 back then. I listen to Lewis Black's "Fuck Fall" routine hoping that maybe just maybe he actually says "St Louis" in his skit (he doesn't, his name was misspelled). As I explore I keep the music going, and I'm mildly amused that the next songs in my iTunes library are 4 live versions of "Fuck Her Gently" by Tenacious D, then 18 songs about funk, then Fur Elise. "Italy" finds happier results, including old pictures of my parents, colors faded like old polaroids from the 70s.

So I get a little crazy, when you're really bored and type random shit into Google. "Women." I get every screenplay I ever wrote with a female character in it. "Kim" finds all the music my sister has sent me over the years. A twisted search for "Rachel" only finds a single picture of my ex (the only thing I keep of her). "Fuck Here Often?" finds the 9/11 report, of all things. "Meaning of Life" finds some of my philosophy writing, and my film reviews. "Monty Python" finds more ex-dates. "Catherine Zeta Jones" finds nothing, but "Zeta Jones" finds a great paper on publishing math formulas, the fonts and copyfitting, etc.

Mozart's Bell Song is playing, and I'm going to bed. I wish I had a bigger hard drive.

Enchanted Rock

I took a trip to Enchanted Rock, the closest thing Texas has to mountains. Enchanted Rock has 3 huge stone bowls, mini-mountains that curve down in every direction. The edge you see in the photo is tricky, you think you'll walk to it to see over, but you never reach it, that's how smooth the curve is. The park itself is tiny, you could probably see the entire thing in one afternoon if you booked it, but packing in the activities isn't really the point when you camp. The wind was the coolest thing I've experienced in a long time, just the right temperature that we could stand in it for hours and feel complete invigorated. My dog rode in my backpack the entire time, her little head sticking out of the top. One the end of the first day, we were on the 2nd rock looking at the biggest one, when we saw a tiny white dot on the face. We hiked over there and found a wedding shoot, I showed the photographer the blurry shot I got of them, and he sent me this amazing picture of the bride with huge orange clouds behind her, stunning. Be sure to check it out.

Important cases in the Supreme Court

The highest court in the Land heard arguments for two important cases today, both having to do with tech, both having to do with big business trying to maintain control. Oh, and both are stupid.

The first, more important of the two, is the record and film industries' attempts to sue the companies that run Peer to Peer file sharing programs like Grokster or Limewire. The RIAA and MPAA are well aware that they are losing millions to file sharing instead of paying, that so many people do it that it has become common place, almost passe. The people are laughing at their attempts to control us! So the RIAA want to sue any company that creates a tool that could be used to help do these things. The argument is that P2P services are used for 90% illegal activity, their intended purpose is illegal, therefore they should go away. And it's a stupid argument. What do you buy a gun for? A tool is a tool, it's the user that is accountable. And you can't sue millions of people. Especially not in a democracy. As the population grows up, the voters will gradually turn against the RIAA.

I can kinda see the reasoning here. Sure, J Lo ain't gonna need the extra money, but the "little people" like song writers and one-hit wonders are certainly hurting. They're like trust fund babies banking of their one or two songs, and I know they are missing their income right now. But it's income based on a stupid system, one that is inherently flawed, and one that computers have freed us from. Computers are here to stay, so there will ALWAYS be ways around this. People move their music to a format that gives them freedom, freedom to listen to what they want without control. If the RIAA had it's way, there'd be a chip in your brain that would charge you every time you even heard a song. Fuck 'em. The reason why Apple was treated with such mistrust and distain at first is that it's a channel outside of the RIAA's control. They're called "record companies" for a reason, they control distribution. They don't control iTunes Music Store, not right now. The record companies don't make CD players, they package music, and with the iTMS artists can sidestep the record companies all together. No more stupid over-produced pop music from young "musicans" who can barely carry a tune, the puppet masters won't exist to support them. At least not in the form they exist now, anyway...

The other hearing is beyond retarded, I'm surprised it made it to the Supreme Court, in fact, Wired.com mentioned that the justices were pretty bored with the arguments. Cables companies, who offer phone and internet service, don't want to play buy the same rules are phone companies, who have to rent out their lines at government set rates. The FCC, in typical Bushian politics, has sided with the big dogs, stating that the Cable Companies don't technical offer the same services. Wired called it a grand "shell game" and I agree. If you offer phone service, you need to play by the same rules.

We'll get the court's rulings on both cases around June.