You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Patience, 48, Knitted Daleks

Goodness, it has been a long time since I've updated.

I'm currently doing my best to cultivate patience at the moment, as I'm waiting for two things to arrive. The first, which will still has a few weeks till it arrives, is a set of shelving -- we went with Off the Wall Shelving to get a wall and a half outfitted. I hope that 35 meters or so of extra shelf space will give me a bit of breathing room, thought C makes doubtful faces and talks about "weeding". Le sigh.

The other item is a new laptop -- a necessity, since my current box decided to die on the weekend of the 48Hour Film Competition, and has been up only intermittently ever since. (It looks like it might be some sort of graphics card problem, but I'll have to take it to a repair shop to be sure.) The biggest downside to ordering my new computer online is definitely the gap between parting with my precious, precious cash and the new toy arriving in my hot little hands. But I ordered it last Friday, and the invoice says, "Allow 10 working days," so I live in hope that it will suddenly appear, and allow me to satisfy this weird craving to play Railroad Tycoon that I've suddenly been afflicted with.

Er, not that I'll be using the laptop for anything except work-related matters, of course. If my accountant or the IRD are reading this. ;)

* * *

As I implied above, we just completed another 48Hour Film Competition -- we were very lucky, and avoided the "Musical/Dance" again this year. Instead, we got a variation on last year's genre, "Monster/SciFi". There were a large number of interesting ideas thrown up in the brainstorming session (including the suggestion that we do a sequel to last year's entry), but we eventually settled on a travel show segment for slug-like alien parasites, called "Destination: Earth". Thanks to having someone who can actually throw together good diagrams at speed, as well as an excellent composer, we managed to put together something that looked and felt very close to a (twisted) holiday travel show.

The screening was a bit nerve-racking, since it's hard to tell how funny/good something is without a bit of distance. But the final film seemed to go down well; unfortunately, it played directly after an excellent Unnecessary Sequel to March of the Penguins (called Les Promenades des Moutons), which was much more oriented to the visual gag -- I think this made our short seem wordier than it was. Maybe it was more TV-oriented humour? It certainly wouldn't have been out of place in a decent sketch show.

Anyway, we were runner-up People's Choice for our session, which I think counts as pretty darn good.

* * *

Speaking of movies, I've just had my leave approved for the Wellington Film Festival. Should be fun.

However, there are a number of films that I probably won't get to see. For example, Fox has only just obtained the rights to a movie version of The Sims; since movies based on games are always awesome, I'm sure this will be great. From the write-up, I'm guessing that they're looking at the player, as well as the game?

Or there's the great Turkish epic, The Man Who Save the Earth; it was made in the 80s, but given this awesome YouTube clip, doesn't it look like it deserves to be remastered and re-released? I mean, you don't get fight scenes where the hero beats people up by jumping up and down any more...

Other "great" lost-in-translations that have popped up in YouTube -- an Indian Superman, and the secret-agent stylings of the Weng Weng Rap. And when Mr T is putting out commercials of this quality, I think it's a crying shame that no-one has given him his own movie.

A movie I actually wouldn't mind watching is Flatland. I find it incredible that something like this can essentially be made in a garage now, and if I wasn't buying computers and shelving, I'd seriously consider shelling out the $20US to have a look at it.

Slightly closer to home -- there's this article from Variety about how the visual effects industry has become more squeezed because War of the Worlds managed to get done on an unprecedented timescale. But I mostly link to it because of this line:

"But only a few shops in the world -- ILM, Sony's Imageworks and Weta Digital among them -- have the technology and experience to develop the never-before-seen jaw-droppers studios have come to rely on."

I still find it weird that the company I work for is regarded as one of the three best in the world.

* * *

We've been trying to keep up with various tv shows. We just finished the first season of Bones, C has just started on House, and we're trying to watch Doctor Who as it becomes, erhm, "available". (Sidenote for knitters -- the Extermaknit! website, if you're wanting to give your loved one a knitted version of one of the Doctor's most feared foes.)

Now that Heroes is finished for the season, it seems like an appropriate time to point people at the excellent director/producer's blog that has been being maintained. This is where I found out that Hiro's father's limo had a license-plate that matched the USS Enterprise's call number. (This is probably a good time to point at these amusing Star Trek summaries, since I don't know any other time I'll point to it. Oh, and there's Lol-Trek, which I kinda assume everyone has seen.)

* * *

Finally, some cool stuff. :)

I thought that people might like this series of not-quite-children's books.

Or there's this YouTube clip about Solid State Aeroplanes that it quite fun; it sorta links to this Flytech remote control dragonfly, in that it flies by flapping.

Or for all those who appreciate the "window on life"-ness of PostSecret and the like -- Passive-Aggressive Notes collects little missives from all over the world that try to change people's behaviour by showing how annoyed yet completely reasonable the writer is.

There's the news that a Chinese court has ruled that the operators of The Legend of Mir 2, a massively multiplayer online game, were not allowed to delete an item that they deemed too powerful, and that they had to give it back to the user that had it. This has all sorts of weird implications.

Oh, and before I forget -- some of the original pictures used in cat macros can be found here. You know, if you feel that you could do a better job. :) And to complete the cuteness quotient, a duckling feeding koi, a slideshow of Cute Animals, and Puppy vs Kitty.

Yeah, I've got lots more links, but maybe that'll motivate me into posting again before the big burst of Film Festival posts... ;)

Posted by svend at May 31, 2007 7:01 PM