You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Names, Pics, Austen, Letters

We've been messing about setting up a connection to the States so we can transfer the entire movie digitally, but since this is the sort of thing that it's important to be belt-and-suspenders about, we've also bought a bunch of firewire drives and cases, so that we can put a reel on a bunch of disks, put it in a Pelican box, and have someone fly it over to the States as hand luggage. (Viva la Sneakernet, yo!) The reason I thought readers might be interested is the naming convention we've used. I've talked about naming schemes before, but I've not been able to talk about specifics -- however, I can't see any security concerns about people outside Weta finding out that we've called them after My Little Ponies(tm).

I guess the question that most of you are asking is -- which ponies? According to my notes, in the event of a critical infrastructure emergency, the giant ape may end up relying on Sprinkles, Bubbles, Starflower, Peachblossom and Sugarbell to spring into action!

(Well, they're distinctively different from all the other machine-names around here, they're not going to offend anyone at Universal, and they're easy to type, pronounce and memorize. And now we'll never, ever end up using them to name a series of desktop machines.)

***

Here's an odd idea that seems obvious once pointed out -- real life/magazine juxtaposition. I mean, now that digital cameras have made taking pictures essentially free, why not do stuff like this?

The thing that this reminded me of was that ad campaign for camera phones, where you could place you head in the middle of some cheesy scene (and so fill an empty space with an empty space, so to speak); but what that campaign said to me was, "We can bring all the fun and class of a run-down 1970 British seaside resort right into your pocket!" Whereas doing this sort of stuff recontexualizes the things in magazines we've often trained ourselves to tune out completely.

Yeah, I said "recontextualizes" in a blog post. What are you gonna do, send the anti-PoMo guerrilla mimes to take me down? I figure that there is plenty of post-modern pretension in LiveJournal for them to deal with; and if they ever get around to me, well, I'll just show them how I'm in a glass box, and make faces at them, at which point they'll sit there with the mimed assult rifles and nunchuku, biding their time while I run out of air, until they get tired of waiting and fall asleep.

Er, I think my train of thought got derailed somewhere back there.

***

I've just finished watching the BBC adaptation of Pride & Predjudice, soggy Colin Firth and all. (I was actually underwhelmed by Firth's manly charms, but I doubt I'm the target audience.) I'm sure it will startle precisely no-one that I very much enjoyed it, though I felt quite sorry for the awkward middle sister (Mary?) and the next-to-youngest child (Kitty). I wouldn't be at all unhappy if I ended up like the father. ;)

One of things that I found interesting is how much they actually managed to retain in Bride & Prejudice, while making it distinctively Indian -- substituting the piano/singing for that crazy snake dance, for example. Thinking about this led me to wonder: how many modern Jane Austin adaptations are there? I know of B&P, and Clueless is an excellent adaptation of Emma; are there any others?

***

I've finished getting the second letter to an acceptable level, so the second pair of letters have been published at the same place. I hope that the next one goes up with a similar rapidity, but I somehow doubt it. :)

Only 26 days until all the work has to be out the door, and I've got to finish the new database infrastructure before then. I should really start working weekends again.

Posted by svend at October 31, 2005 11:52 PM