Transformers

I never played with dolls, sorry, "action figures". And so I was never a Transformers fan. I saw the old Transformers animated film a few months ago because it's well regarded and some of the great voice work was sampled in one of my favorite songs, Decepticons. But I didn't much like it, it was and stayed a childrens animated film about toys.
But it is clear that the upcoming live action film will be much different. At least visually, it's very sophisticated. Amazing in fact. (Not that it's an indication of quality, but they say that the robots have more individual parts than anything done before.) Unless it gets terrible reviews, I'll probably see it once it comes out on DVD. ("The killer robot is really distracting!" Hehe.)

Interview with Neil Gaiman

Interview with Neil Gaiman.

Compression

In the past couple of days, I have re-compressed around one hundred thousand pictures...
That took a while...
But it saved me over fifty gigabytes of disk space!
It's a strange world. My first computer, in 1995, had *half* a gigabyte of disk space.

Pascal tells:
A few years ago, former French President Jacques Chirac was visiting a computer show, and wanted to show he was savvy: "Oh, yes, one clicks here on the rodent, right?"
This is authentic. "Je clique sur le mulot" became the national joke for months.

Air Travel

Airlines are suffering because more people want to travel? As some commentators like to say, WTF? I can't see why normal market forces are not handling this? For example, if everybody are fed up with poor service, raise service and prices, and those who are most fed up will go to you.

By the way, whatever happened to the Internet taking the load off commuting and business traveling?

In any case I praise gawd every day that my travel to work is twelve meters. (It used to be three meters, but I have a bigger place now.)

Sound policy

It's easy to fall into listening to only one genre of music. But I try to treat my ears to all kinds of things. Just a sound policy.
As it were.

Sunflowers

I just got a bunch of my favorite flower from a lady friend of mine, signing herself "your number one fan". How kind it is, and how pretty those are.



ttl said...
Nice vase too.

eolake said...
Thank you.
I almost never buy knickknacks, but when I saw that vase in the store a couple of years ago, I just had to have it. It's stunning.
And it's bigger than it looks in this picture. (The sunflowers are really big.)

Virtual actors

Tom Charity wrote:
"At a time when Celine Dion can sing a duet with Elvis Presley on prime time, Gerald Butler can battle it out with 'uber immortals' and a reanimated Laurence Olivier can co-star with Jude Law, will authenticity come to seem out-moded, or more important than ever?"

Yes, it'll be interesting to see what Hollywood films will be like in 20 years. Right now I am at the point where I don't even think to speculate whether action scenes are physical or CG or miniatures. It's impossible to tell, and I don't really care. Will the same be true of actors soon? I don't see why not. And does that matter much, except to the actors? Is Toy Story II less art because no flesh was filmed?

Takagi Masukatsu

Takagi Masukatsu visual music (watch the video lower on that page).

This is one of the clearest pieces of evidence I've seen that the computer allows us to create worthwhile art which could not be made in any other medium. I think his work is beautiful.

rPhone

rPhone
... If parody is flattery...

James

Excellence does not require perfection.
- Henry James

Finally a perfect quotation.

How to lose a sale by charging too little

How to lose a sale by charging too little.

B-person

In Danish we have the terms "A person" and "B person" ("A menneske" og "B menneske"). The former likes to get to bed early and get up early. The latter likes to stay up late and get up late. (I'm the latter.)

My Danish-English dictionary claims that the terms are the same in English, but from online dictionaries and use, this seems not to be the case. Does anybody know if there are terms in English/American for these concepts?