You are currently browsing the Productive Procrastination weblog archives for February, 2007.
February 27, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
I already commented on Zappa’s Baby Snakes but I just saw Comic Book, The Movie which brought this up in my mind again.
There is a genre of cinema which basically says, “here are my friends doing crazy things.” Which is great if you are a friend or fan of the director and know those crazy people. It’s not so great if you are not in on the joke. Mark Hamill plays a geeky comic shop owner and fanzine editor who tries to influence a film adaptation of his favorite character, Commander Courage. Some of the best parts of the Comic Book, The Movie involve Hugh Hefner, Kevin Smith, and Stan Lee giving deadpan commentary about a fictional WWII comic book artist. The protagonist’s dismay that Hollwood wants base the movie on 21st century jingoism rather than WWII jingoism makes for some interesting moments.
But large chunks of the film are filled with mugging cameos by animation voice talents and comic book writers. There is a quick inside joke of Hamill being snubbed by Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) and Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett) which was completely incomprehensible to us without looking at the voice credits. Often the extended improvisations are more baffling than funny. After watching this on DVD I realized that I’m not quite geeky enough to really get it.
Posted in movies, comics | No Comments »
February 27, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
I’m a download junkie. Sometimes I find a tool that takes some twiddling to discover what it is good for, and sometimes I open up a tool and find an immediate use.
GrandPerspective is a disk space visualization tool for OS X that shows you how much space is taken up by individual files and directories. Immediately when I opened it up, I noticed a big, obsolete VirtualPC disk image that was taking up 15Gig of space. Among other things it gives you a nice idea of the relative size of various files.
Posted in software | No Comments »
February 23, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
A current catalog for an optics company has caused a stir by featuring a woman in a tight red skirt on the cover. Which is frustrating that a vendor in a career field which has some pretty serious issues with gender come to light over the last few years should know better.
Posted in research, opinion | 3 Comments »
February 23, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
A surreal and funny web-comic that shows mastery of the one-panel format. The Book of Biff is one of my latest addictions.
Posted in comics, Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 20, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
Ars Technica reports that a study on video-game violence finds methodological problems with previous research.
Posted in research, games | No Comments »
February 18, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
Laura loved it. I thought it fell somewhere in the middle as far as movies go. I didn’t think in was so bad as to justify the hate heaped on it. But it didn’t enchant me either.
This is on my list of movies that I have to see once a year. Audry Hepburn, Carey Grant, and an excellent supporting cast in a movie that combines great banter with a parody of Alfred Hitchcock.
“A movie about people who do stuff that is not normal.” I don’t usually do concert videos. Chunks of the film include surreal clay animation by artist Bruce Bickford. An even more surreal moment comes near the start when you see a tiny animated Zappa, standing on a film editing device watching Bickford’s animated films. Bickford’s art uses clay to morph figures from castles to faces and back again, and the interviews with Bickford and shots of Zappa conducting the soundtrack.
However, most of the film focuses on two back-to-back concerts in New York City which highlights Zappa’s diverse musical styles from satirical humor pieces, spoken-word performance art, complex instrumentals, backstage goofing around, and audience participation. At the height of the concert, he invites select members of the audience on-stage to reenact his feud with Warner Brothers, and engage in a dance competition to a composition with a constantly shifting meter.
While it’s all in good fun, it’s not for the easily offended. The movie left me longing for a bit more Bickford, and it drags at points in spite of Zappa’s incredible on-stage showmanship. If you are not already a fan of his music, you probably should skip this one.
Posted in werid, movies | 1 Comment »
February 6, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
Pan’s Labyrinth is a fantasy movie for adults, in a movie industry that often considers fantasy a genre only for children. In that respect it is much more similar to City of the Lost Children, Otesánek, and Brazil than it is to Harry Potter. The film blends a story about wartime resistance, with a fantasy about a girl looking for a missing father.
In 1944, Ofelia travels with her mother to meet her stepfather, the sadistic Capitán Vidal. Vidal is setting a trap for one of the republican resistance cells that continued to fight Franco from the relative safety of the mountains. He invites his wife and Ofelia into the trap out of a desire to attend the birth of his son. His maid and manager of the household, Mercedes, is secretly a spy attempting to protect the resistance, including her brother.
Ofelia escapes into a fantasy world where she discovers she is the lost daughter of the king of the underworld. To open the gateway home, she must succeed at three tasks given to her by an extremely aged fawn (performed by Doug Jones and voiced by Pablo Adan) who appears to grow younger with each appearance. The sound design shines here with the fawn’s movements matching the creaking of dead trees in the wind. The movie progresses in parallel with Ofelia working in secret to complete the tasks given to her, and Mercedes working in secret to deliver critical supplies and information to the resistance.
Vidal is a deceptively simple and brutal ogre. He instigates some of the most brutal violence in the film, and appears to be unfeeling and arrogant. The script only reveals Vidal’s foiled father-quest at the conclusion of the film. The forces that drive Vidal to both deny and attempt to succeed his father are almost too subtle. Perhaps there is a missing scene, or perhaps it’s purposely left quiet.
Although much has been said about the violence of this movie, most scenes did not strike me as worse than a typical episode of CSI. With the exception of a few extremely graphic moments, the film shows much less than you see in the mind’s eye. Likewise, it leaves the conclusions and moral of the story open to the interpretations of the viewer.
It seems that many people have different reactions to this film depending on what you expect going into it. If you walk into the film expecting a full-out fantasy in the same manner as the Henson movie Labyrinth or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe you will be disappointed. On the other hand if you leave your expectations at the door, you probably will be pleased. The previews seem to be especially misleading.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 5, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
Sometimes I find lazy spam unintentionally funny:
%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER Subject: %SUBJECT Sender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME %MESSAGE_BODY
Ok, that’s really effective.
Meanwhile, I’m a Mac lover and love this Mac-hating rant.
Posted in werid | No Comments »
February 5, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
This is an argument I’ve gone around with other people about over on TerraNova, and other places. Why are language and text still important? Spinning off a question over at the O’Reilly Mac blog questioning why programmer’s love editors if typing is such a barrier to thinking and problem solving.
My answer to the question is that language and text are still important because they are cognitive alchemy.
Language is critical because it is one of the ways in which human beings communicate about the real world using abstractions. We appear to be hard-wired for language, with the process of learning language starting before birth and a large chunk of the actual (as opposed to the written formal) grammar mastered before we go to school. Advocates of “post-literacy” will of course point out that we have equal cognitive facility with graphics, and can communicate other things graphically. I won’t disagree, but will point out that visual literacy is different from linguistic literacy and have different powers.
Encoding language onto some sort of a persistent medium provides a different type of power. You can now start linking short utterances together into more complicated structures: sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, chapters, and books. You can use this persistent text to make arguments and claims that are difficult to convey in a single conversation and lecture. For better or for worse, you have created a record of that thought process that does not depend on a shared and reasonably quiet location in space and time.
I think this explains both programmer’s love of editors, and the persistence of asynchronous text messaging systems over long periods of time. The ability to copy and paste paragraphs or portions of code is the ability to change the basic logical concepts expressed. Asynchronous messaging systems such as mail and bulletin-boards create knowledge that can be reviewed and revised at a later date.
Posted in edtech, opinion | No Comments »
February 3, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.
The procrastination exercise for today involved converting my thesis into a more readable form than requested by the graduate school. I find double-spaced text and narrow margins to be rather irritating to read. And the surprising lesson of the exercise was that good typography and margins does not necessarily save you much in paper. What you save by single-spacing is lost to the sensible margins. (I could go even more sensible, but I really don’t want to plow through and reformat all the tables and graphics.)
In the process I found TeXniscope which is a nice pdf/dvi viewer for OS X. It automatically reloads changed pdf files, an issue that drove me crazy with OS X Preview, and it has functions that allow to click on a section of a PDF document and automatically open the LaTeX source file. There is also a function that will automatically open a PDF file to the proper section from an Emacs LaTeX buffer. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite work out of the box with Aquamacs. I hacked together an alternative configuration file (11KB zip) that should do the trick. Unzip and follow the directions in the txs-search.el header.
Posted in software, geekstuff, the dissertation | No Comments »