January | 2008 | A Series of Tubes

Jan 26 2008

New Star Trek Movie In The Works

I’ve always been a Star Wars fan, and saw it as the ultimate king of Sci-Fi. Any other Science Fiction movie I viewed as lesser than it, and some I even refused to watch, considering them to be not even worthy of my time. The Star Trek saga was one of those. I simply refused to admit that there was any merit to it, because I viewed it as competing with Star Wars. I maintained that attitude until I realized that the plot (at least, of the old show) is somewhat similar to that of Dr. Who. Space Travellers, landing on alien worlds and doing stuff on them. Aliens are met, fights had, problems solved, red shirts die, everyone beams back to the Enterprise. Good stuff. Even with my change of heart, I still never watched it, because like Dr. Who, there’s just so much of it. Where do I start? How can I watch it?

Well, after seeing this trailer for the new Star Trek movie, I know where I’m going to start. The movie is directed by J.J. Abrams, the producer of Lost and more recently, Cloverfield, so I’m sure this is going to be a good movie.

I think my friends, who still maintain my original attitude towards Star Trek, are going to disown me for seeing it, but it really does look like $8.50 well-spent to me.

Tagged Life in general, Movies, News, Star Wars, TV

Jan 21 2008

Life in general

Cloverfield

I saw Cloverfield today, the new J.J. Abrams movie, about a monster attacking New York (what an original idea!). All in all, it was a pretty standard giant monster movie, though it was also very similar to The Blaire Witch Project, because the whole thing was made to look like it was filmed by one of the characters in the movie (Hud), using a hand-held camcorder. There are no establishing shots and basically nothing that couldn’t be filmed by hand (no crazy panning, pretty much no completely stable & sharp shots, except for the beginning at the party).

About the blurry, shaking camera work. I get it, it was filmed by a panicking clumsy guy with a hand-held camera, but still. I had a headache by the end of the movie, because it was so hard to tell what was going on. I’m sure the attempt to make it look messy left the production company with a very low special effects budget, since there are only two or three clear shots of the monster for the entire film. The mini-monsters get a lot more screen time, and they look somewhat like giant spiders with fangs and maybe more legs. They move very fast, so it was hard to get a good look at them.

Meanwhile, the big monster is seemingly indestructible, and is still up and moving after being repeatedly bombed. It is a very well-made monster, plenty able to realistically pull down skyscrapers and such.

It was an ok movie, not something I’d see again, but I’d say it was worth my $8.50 to see what the monster looked like…

Tagged Life in general, Movies, Releases

Jan 19 2008

Life in general

Messing with iPod Apps

I hacked my iPod Touch the second day I owned it, so that I could put new applications on it. So far, my favorite by far is Lights Off (an awesome game where you have to turn all of the blocks dark), and my second is iPhysics (a physics simulator where you can create objects and try to get one object to a goal).

I tried to use Stack, which puts Leopard-esque stacks on the iPod Touch, and was very cool but it had this annoying problem where it stays on top of other applications once they’re launched. So I tried to uninstall it, but it kept telling me to remove the stack before uninstalling. I tried that, but it didn’t work, so eventually I had to use ftp to remove them.

Oh well…Still, a lot of good stuff…Yes.

Tagged Computers, Life in general

Jan 01 2008

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Life in general