Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • The Avatar of politics

    James Cameron’s AVATAR is the kind of film that moves the industry forward – and not necessarily just the movie industry. The movie’s 3D technology makes Gollum look like Max Headroom. The scope of Cameron’s ambition in terms of redefining the baseline for movie-making technology is utterly breathtaking; this is the kind of stuff that George Lucas or Steven Spielberg should have been doing with their sacred franchise cash cows’ spoils. This film was something Cameron wanted to make decades ago but was restrained by technology; the story goes that he saw Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy and realized, “the time is now”. And Jackson will surely step up his game in response – but this isn’t just a game of techno-wizardry, it’s an arms race from which every moviegoer will benefit from in terms of how movies are made, filmed, and most importantly, viewed.

    So of course, some people are mad because the film hates America. WTF?!?!

    GOOD GRIEF FOLKS. These are MOVIES. This one is set on an alien planet, with 10 foot tall blue natives and (regrettably the only non-original aspect of the film) a generalized Earth Military which could have been ripped straight from Starship Troopers or the Alien trilogy. If there’s a message here, it’s Pocahontas, not The West Wing.

    Not every army on film is a metaphor for the US military. In fact, as is the case with Heinlein, sometimes it’s a metaphor for something else. And AVATAR is above all, a love story, and about an individual who questions the dogma he’s lived by and embraces his own conscience and beliefs. What’s more conservative than that?

    What we need is a entertainment-industry equivalent of Sigmund Freud, to make the arch-observation “sometimes a movie is just a movie.”

    And what a movie it will be!


    Official Avatar Movie

  • Garfield Minus Garfield: The Book

    gminusg.jpgI’ll admit it – as a kid, I went on a Garfield binge. I had every single Garfield book from #1 onwards, until around #30 or so, at which point the exponential decay of the quality curve became apparent even to me. Luckily by then I had discovered Calvin and Hobbes which was basically Garfield, but funnier, genuinely intellectual, and with characters I could actually relate to. In other words, the opposite of Garfield, and just in time for my transition from childhood to adolescence.

    I dunno where all my Garfield books are now – probably in a box in my parents’ garage – but after ~20 years there’s finally a Garfield book I want to buy again – Garfield Minus Garfield, which has been endorsed by The Jim Davis himself. I previously raved about the sublime introspection that the concept of G-G brings to what used to be inane and vapid nonsense, and G-G figures prominently in my dwindling RSS subscriptions. But now we can enjoy it the way it was meant to be. The use of the same form factor as the mainstream Garfield books is a nice touch.

  • and I thought the Shoe Event Horizon was satire

    apparently, Douglas Adams was on to something:

    For months now, consumers have been hunkering down in an economic storm, buying only what they need to survive, like groceries, diapers, medicine — and shoes.

    Shoes?

    The American public, it would seem, cannot carry on without new shoes. Boots, booties, sneakers, pumps — for the last few months they have all been selling well as the broader economy struggles toward recovery.

    … Among the more curious explanations proffered for the relative strength of shoe sales is that women — who make up the lion’s share of the American shoe market — get an emotional lift from shoe shopping in a way they do not when trying on jeans and cocktail dresses.

    As a reminder, I actually am enough of a H2G2-geek that i transcribed the entirety of the Shoe Event Horizon bit from the Radio Series a while back. Read it again, and note just how eerily prescient DNA was about this whole thing in light of the excerpted article above.

  • Wii will rock you

    Is the Wii’s wild ride over?

    “It is unrealistic for any company in the entertainment industry to believe they can sustain aggressive growth,” Jesse Divnich, director of Analyst Services for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) told Ars. “The appetites of consumers change too frequently when it comes to how we entertain ourselves. The same pace at which an entertainment product can grow is the same pace at which the product can retract.”

    We’ve already seen the Nintendo Wii fall from its lofty heights in the United States. Last month the PlayStation 3 outsold the Wii by 29,000 units, an achievement that would have been surreal even six months ago. The Nintendo DS was still the number one selling piece of hardware, but only by 32,400 units.

    It’s not much better worldwide. “Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly numbers, said it sold 5.75 million Wii machines around the world during the period, far short of the more than 10 million sold for the same six months last year,” the Associated Press reported.

    anecdotally, I had to drive down to Peotone, IL from Madison WI today (and learned something about Iowa in the process). While stopping for coffee, I noted a huge line outside a Toys R Us – all waiting to get their hands on Nintendo Wii in stock. Granted, I’ve seen Wiis in stock at my local Target every day, but clealry there are still regional shortages and plenty of demand. Especially now that the price has dropped to $200 (grr) I think that this holiday season, there’s a lot of potential for a comeback.

  • socialists and zombies

    strange musing I had about an allegorical film where zombies attack a town in the usual fashion, and are killed doff by shotguns by the usual rouugh types, but for some reason everyone in the film never uses the word “zombies”, instead they call them “socialists” – and instead of brains, the zombies go looking for wallets. The shotgun-wielders all have cool names like Galt and Laffer and they name their shotguns things like Chicago School and Trickle Down.

    In a flashback, we can see the origin of the zombies – a virus caught by ordinary folk who are sitting around in a poost-apocalyptic landscape (quite different from the clean rural chic of the heroes’ home towns), unemployed and ill, gathered around the iconic television on fire from the original Terminator movie.

    At the end, the small band of heroes is surrounded by the zombies (er, socialists) in an old farm, and all looks lost when all of a sudden the calvalry, dressed in crisp trenchcoats, white gloves and black boots, comes swarming in from out of town and smashes the zombies into pulp with truncheons. Then they usher the grateful citizenry towards their nearby semi-trailer for a hot shower. Credits.

  • digital downloads gone wild

    I can’t wait to see what Shamus has to say about this sordid mess.

  • Microsoft realizes Family Guy is controversial!

    well, looks like that whole thing has been called off. Wise move, but also disappointing; I was kind of looking forward to the train wreck.

  • Windows 7 Guy

    Does Microsoft really want Peter to be the face of Windows 7?

    Microsoft and FOX One have announced a marketing collaboration that will see Windows 7 in a new special with the working title “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show” airing Sunday, November 8, at 8:30pm EST and PST. It will star Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show as well as his Family Guy co-star Alex Borstein (voice of the series’ Lois character).

    Well, Stewie is probably more appealing (and remains the only reason I ever watch the show. There, I said it. I watch the show. Want to make something of it? Because I’m not ashamed. I’m not. Maybe you watch it and you’re ashamed. Maybe you’re projecting your shame on me. How do you like that? Turnaround is fair play, right? Doesn’t feel so good, does it? Are you feeling a little embarrassed right now? A little red in the face? Tight in the knickers? How do you like them apples? Are you sick of this paragraph yet? Isn’t this exactly how the monologues on Family Guy go? On and on forever? With no end? Long past the point where the joke was even remotely funny? Firmly into tedious territory? Now that I’ve made my point, don’t you wish I would drop it? I mean, is it really necessary to keep flogging this? Oh wait, you get it, that’s exactly the point, right? By making my point, about how unfunny Family Guy’s taking-the-joke-too-far shtick is, and then continuing to make the point after I’ve already explained once what I’m doing, is really making the point, right? Isn’t that clever? You don’t think so? Could that be because you’re a nekulturny philistine oaf? I mean, isn’t that more likely than The Family Guy not being the most hilarious show on television ever? Did you like how I dolloped in some Russian in there? Do I have the patience or the willpower to comtinue this interminable exercize? No.)

    AT ANY RATE – Family Guy is one of those shows that has it’s flaws, to say the least. Stewie and Brian, when they are together, are the only thing watchable about it. I find the reaction by some that this amounts to “selling out” by McFarlane to be hilarious – as if the show had any artistic integrity to preserve. It’s a blunt instrument (and for those who failed to understand this, McFarlane created American Dad to really hammer the point home. Apparently even this was too subtle for some people, so he followed up with Cleveland.

  • what if we were lied to? a sci-fi bleg

    I am racking my brain and memory to no avail – I need to recall the autor and name of the short story set in an alternate history where the Nazis win World War II. The Germans roll over Europe, conquer Britain, win in Russia. The Japanese expand into China and Asia, and the two axis powers swallow the entire globe. Then they turn on each other, and fight World War III, and the Nazis are ultimately (barely) victorious. At this point the Nazis break out the old Holocaust Instruction Manual and turn the resources of the planet towards genetic purification and the glory of the Aryan race. And they succeed. And centuries after World War II, the true Third Reich becomes a pure race indeed on white-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired people. As the centuries pass, the Reich liberalizes, moderates, and eventually becomes a Republic. True learning and democracy again flourish as the homogeneity of the Aryan race – now the entirety of the human race – ensures peace and prosperity and minimal conflict. The horror of the past centuries is increasingly edited out and ultimately forgotten entirely, lost in myth. A new history emerges, one scrubbed clean of any messy reference to wars or races, and after a few generations this new narrative has become set in the collectve stone of human memory.

    And one day, a full millenium after the dark prehistory that gave rise to what has now become a human utopia, two students at the University of Tokyo, Hans and Franz (names may be different from my recollection) are eating lunch. Hans turns to Franz and asks him., “do you ever get the feeling we were lied to?”

    if you thought that was a cool summary, the original was 10^6 times better. Help me figure out who wrote it! I think I might have read it on one of these, but I’m not sure.

  • Kindle gets cheaper, again

    Good grief, Amazon just dropped the price of the Kindle 2.0 by another 40 bucks! New price: $259. And they are introducing a GSM-enabled version for only $20 more so you can download books worldwide, not just in the US. This is unbelievably aggressive, and probably partly motivated by Sony’s recent refresh of its own ebook line.

    I still think that the Kindle DX is the one I want, though – the better PDF support is critical for me. But with the price drop on the mainstream Kindle, I am even less likely to buy a DX now; the price on the DX has to come down sooner or later. The only reason I need PDF support is because I will use the Kindle heavily for my academic journal reading; if not for that I’d probably have bought the Kindle the last time it dropped in price.. and be cursing about it now.

    Of course, I’ve also been doing some actual reading of late, and am now a few hundred pages into Quicksilver. I can easily see how owning a Kindle would accelerate this habit. I am genuinely conflicted at night between WoW and these analog pursuits!