I don’t update this thing anymore.

I think this blog is over. I’m going to (maybe) make a new site (eventually) and if you poke around, there’s already something very unfinished on the server.

Thanks for reading.

FIVE PROBLEMS WITH SUPERMAN RETURNS
1. Superman is incredibly lame.

Superman is a boring character. He’s close to being utterly devoid of personality and he’s too strong for any character who doesn’t have a contrived method of hurthing him. This doesn’t matter because Superman gets in what I believe to be less than one fight in the whole movie. This brings me to my second problem.

2. Superman doesn’t fight anyone.

There are scenes where people fight him, but he does little and often nothing in terms of retalliation. It’s kind of a waste of such a muscle-bound character to not have him kick ass. It’s almost an insult in this case that Superman’s baby kicks more ass than he does.

3. The Flasback Scene, wtf?

Completely unintroduced, in the first quarter of the film, there is a flash back scene with Superman first beginning to discover his powers. It makes no sense in the context of the film and is confusing. It really makes me wonder why it was in there.

4. Inconsistent Tone

The film starts out with a great serious bit with Kevin Spacey expertly playing Lex Luther. As soon as Lex walks out of the room, he scares a little girl and it’s hilarious. You’re taken straight from a nice serious bit into a nice comedic bit. Both segments worked well but having them together like that just jars you right out of the movie. If the whole movie stayed serious, it would have worked and if the whole thing was more lighthearted it also would have worked.

5. It’s really long and in the end, nothing really happens.

THREE REDEEMING FEATURES OF SUPERMAN RETURNS

1. Kevin Spacey couldn’t possibly be a better Lex Luther.

He mixes egotism with intellect in the best possible way, making him an interesting and mildly despicable character. He’s a villian you can simultaneously hate and enjoy.

2. Two Pomeranians are implied to be eaten in this movie.

That is more Pomeranians I’ve seen eaten than in any other movie.

3. CGI was truly amazing.

I read a long article on CGtalk about the CGI in Superman Returns. Pretty much every shot where Superman is flying is completely rendered on a computer. It’s amazingly realistic and subtle. The little bits like that help you to not feel jarred out of things when they do more far-out CGI. It’s the kind of attention to detail that truly amazes me. It’s the kind of attention to detail that the script and physics in the movie are completely devoid of.

1. Lex Luther has an extremely detailed toy city he built in an old lady’s basement.

It looks extremely silly in the movie and in one part where parts of it break, there are lots of little details on the insides of the models that just scream that it was designed to break in those specific locations.

2. Physics are all over the place.

You can’t expect any rules or consistency from this movie. What will break and what won’t are pretty much just decided by what is convenient for the plot. How much kryptonite that Superman can take is also something that has no real set value.

That was fun. I think I’ll do one of these for another movie.

Since I have friends and family who are 56kers, I am not going to embed the video, just link to it.

Wafa Sultan on YouTube.com

And for the benefit of those who are on 56k or just don’t want to watch/download a video, I have for you, a textual transcript I got from this site.

Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

[…]

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.

[…]

Host: Who came up with the concept of a clash of civilizations? Was it not Samuel Huntington? It was not Bin Laden. I would like to discuss this issue, if you don’t mind…

Wafa Sultan: The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: “I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger.” When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to stop this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels.

My colleague has said that he never offends other people’s beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once, he calls them Ahl Al-Dhimma, another time he calls them the “People of the Book,” and yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the Christians “those who incur Allah’s wrath.” Who told you that they are “People of the Book”? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them “those who incur Allah’s wrath,” or “those who have gone astray,” and then come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?

I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others’ right to believe in it.

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran…

Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you.

[…]

Wafa Sultan: Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don’t throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people’s beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs.

[…]

Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

Powerful.

In weak effort to put comment, let me show off the most recent amazing work by a friend of mine, Adam Saltsman.

I’ve seen the way he set up that model. It may look like a fairly simple creation but the way he set it up, it has an amazingly complicated texture setup and modeling means. Each section of the model is a separate part with a different texture to it. Absolutely none of the shading in that model is done by a computer. All you see in that image is the texture at fullbright lighting.

If you have any appreciation for what I just said, then you know that it is a truly amazing piece of work.

He’s got more stuff on his web-site and I recommend checking it out.

AdamAtomic.com

I took a bunch of pictures. Everything there is under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5. Enjoy them and make good use of them.

I haven’t seen the first two I listed but I just watched The Island. It’s a very interesting and original take on dystopia. It’s also a highly highly flawed peice of cinema. I am going to review it but also analyze and recap it. What follows is going to be spoileriffic. In order to discuss the movie, I’m assuming you either haven’t seen the movie and don’t intend to or taht you’ve already seen it. If that is not the case, I suggest you try and ignore the parts I’ve put in a block quote.

A recap of the complicated plot can be found on the Wikipedia page for The Island.

Quick note: When I say you do something, I’m just assuming. I really mean to say what I think the audience would be feeling based on my own opinions.

There are a lot of topics which are “discussed” in the film. Most prominent is the idea of using a clone as an organ bank. This is not a truly original idea and has been used in many pieces of fiction including the excellent book, House of the Scorpion. It’s an interesting thing to ponder. Is it right to create a living being to destroy it?

Another one of the film’s issues, though much less up-front was this idea this idea of a clone killing its sponsor.

When the police/military/army/whatever tracked down Lincoln and his clone, there was a classic, “Which one is the clone?” kind of scene where a police/military/army/whatever was forced to try to decide which one is the original and which one needs to be shot. Despite the cliche, this is probably the most interesting segment of the movie. It presents the viewer with a little bit of an ethical dilemma. Either the main character or a relatively innocent person is going to die. Which is the lesser of these two evils? Of course, if the film had been doing things right, then you’d empathize with the clone easily, but as the film was, you bonded with the original Lincoln much mroe than you bonded with his clone.

I haven’t watched with the audio commentary yet, but I think that Michael Bay’s intention was that the viewer would hope for the death of an innocent person. A little later, the clone-making company contacts Lincoln (or at least they think it’s him.) and says they’re sorry for the inconvenience that the clone might of caused him.  The inconvenience it casued him was that he lost everything. He died because of a fucked up prdouction line in a system that has questionable ethics to begin with. It was very disturbing to me.

The film had the capacity to be as good as sci-fi action classics such as Total Recall but fucks up in it’s premise weaknesses, pointless segments showing off technology, uninspired action, plotholes, and hard-to-like characters.

The premise is quite strong  but it has bits of the hard-to-swallow in it. One of them is quite critical. The customers of the Clone-Makers are told that the clones are kept in persistive vegetative state and are not at all like people. Apparently, they can’t actually do that because without life, the organs don’t work. As unbelievable as it is on its own, it’s contradicted within the movie itself. If the organs didn’t work without life, then how could the clones live once they’d been hatched? (They’re born into adulthood.) If their organs didn’t work, then they could never be hatched. A better solution to why the clones have to be kept conscious would have been that the clone-makers used them for true labor. If the clones were in some sort of manufacturing plant, making clothes or something for the people of the outside world, it’d make sense as an extra source of revenue for an evil corporation.

The action scenes are pretty borign and according to critics who have seen other Michael Bay movies, rip off another Michael Bay movie. It’s a lot of barely justified mass-destruction and death. It makes it hard to blieve hyow evil the Clone-Makers are.

The pacing was also pretty wrong. It didn’t balance action and plot well. The first hour of the movie contains barely any action at all. Then there’s a too-long action sequence, some nice expository plot development, and some more crappy action scenes with plot mixed in. In order to make a good action movies, you need a balance between action and story.

I wish I had written something more coherent, but I don’t feel like continuing to write this and I also don’t want to come back and reorganize it. Too much work for a blog that no one actually reads.

BEHOLD FOR THEY DO NOT SUCK!

Some people try to tell us that we’ll burn.
In Hell, we’ll suffer for the freedom that we yearn.
IN Hell, we’ll burn after we die.
But we’ll burn like the sun shines.

I’ve never seen a brighter brighter time.
Old colors fade away like the summer time.

The archaic can not last.
Hail to iconoclasts.

I know one thing that is sure.
I’m not gonna burn but if I do,
I’ll burn like the sun shines.

THere’s nothing wrong with our padded culture.
We are building a grander structure.
Don’t you fear that it’ll be great.
We know we’ll make our own mistakes.

Whatever they, break we can fix.
Up our sleeves, we’ve got some tricks.
There is no sin we’ll recognize.
The old religion surely dies.
Burn like the sun shines.

Burn like the sun shine!

These lyrics are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

Well, I’ve got something.

The outdoors are at their most beautiful around 5:30 am.

Lately, I’ve been sleeping mostly during the day and being awake at night. It’s sort of what I looked forward to all through out the school year. It was a tremendously lame thing to have to wake up 7 and then go to bed at 11 or 12 in order to be awake at school. The problem is that my sleep cycle doesn’t seem to like the 8:16 ratio of sleeping to waking hours. It prefers something more like 8:20. I’d lie awake for hours and fall asleep a lot later than I’d go to bed and that’d suck because when I’d wake up, I’d only have had like 4 hours of sleep.

During the summer, I let my sleep cycle do what it wants because I have no obligations. As a result, my sleeping keeps on getting pushed back and here I am at 5:40, outside with my laptop awake looking at the way the light works on things.

It’s really something in my opinion.

Cool blue light tints everything with ambience that looks haunting and elegant. However, the sun is just barely bright enough at this point so that shiny speculars get very close to their full white blur. It’s really wonderful lighting to me. I’m waiting for the sun to rise. It’s somethign I’ve been meaning to see for a while and somehow have been missing consistently.

If you’re up at 5 am some time, go outside. If you appreciate light, you’ll thank yourself. I guess the thrill would be lost on a lot of people though. Most people aren’t really very interested in lighting quite the same way I am. Light is the most beautiful thing I think that nature has to offer.

Sometimes, it’s worrth going outside for.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Ayavaron/VagrantStoryScreenshots

More screenies may or may not be added later. I don’t really like the game very much aside from its graphics.

Enjoy the screenies!

Bonus points if you can guess what score it got.

Scott Campbell English
The Novel The Lord of the Flies follows a traditional plot structure. The main conflict is that a lot of boys from England are stuck on an island. Ralph, the main character and their elected leader, and Piggy, the fat kid who is basically the only smart one, are the only ones who seem to realize it. Most of the other boys just think its cool to go hunting for pigs. When Ralph said they needed a fire, everyone got excited and ran to the top of the mountain to build it. Though they had the fire, they couldn’t keep it going because the night watchers of the fire just went to go hunting.
The climax was when Jack and his hunters got everyone who was tired of Ralph to come join Jack’s group. Ralph, Piggy and a couple others were the only ones left on Ralph’s side. That was just the beginning. The real climax was when Jack attacked Ralph’s group and Piggy got his head broken open with a boulder. The resolution was when the officer came in the boat and rescued them. There were a lot of mini conflicts like when they had to actually start the fire, and even in the first chapter when they had to get everyone on the island to group up. Another conflict was when the “beast”, who turned out to be Simon, a kid, was scaring all the littler kids.
The major characters are their leader, Ralph, Piggy, the smart fat kid, and Jack, the “bad guy”. Even though Jack isn’t that bad at the start he still turns bad at the end. There were other characters like the twins, Sam and Eric, who, since they did everything together, every one called SamnEric, as just one person.
The novel takes place on an island. The book doesn’t say which island. On the top of the island and on the base of the island. I don’t think it said the time. It does have planes and big boats so not that early. Maybe during, or after World War Two.
The novel has an omniscient point of view. The author knows everything as if he were there but he isn’t. The omniscient point of view adds to the effect that they are in danger but they don’t realize it. The author feels that Ralph is right, Jack is wrong, and even though nobody really liked him, Piggy was the only real smart one. The book uses irony when Piggy turns out to be smart, because I didn’t expect for Piggy to be the only smart one, I thought that he would just be the fat and annoying kid who would eat everyone’s food. The book also uses irony when Jack goes off on his own, because in the beginning Ralph and he are trying to impress each other, then they start hating each other.
The whole book is symbolizing the inner savage that every human has. After Jack and his hunters start killing pigs they start to like it and they do it more and more. They attack Ralph’s camp and they become like barbarians and just want to kill and burn and attack. They get a primal rage. Also Piggy symbolizes smarts, Ralph symbolizes good, and Jack symbolizes power and death. The conch shell symbolized harmony and peace and togetherness. It was something they all respected, unless Piggy had it. The Lord of the Flies is the Devil, and the hunters worshiped him. That’s what I think made them evil.
The theme of the book is basically the same as what it symbolizes, the inner beast in everyone. This is shown by how they acted when they were stranded on an island. when the Lord of the Flies possessed them and helped them become evil. I liked this book. I liked when they took Piggy’s glasses to light the fire. I woulden’t have thought o do that that fast.

Now what does it look like with just the highlighted parts?

“The climax was when Jack and his hunters got everyone who was tired of Ralph to come join Jack’s group. … The real climax was when Jack attacked Ralph’s group and Piggy got his head broken open with a boulder. … Jack, [is] the “bad guy”. Even though Jack isn’t that bad at the start he still turns bad at the end. … The novel takes place on an island. The book doesn’t say which island. On the top of the island and on the base of the island. I don’t think it said the time. It does have planes and big boats so not that early. Maybe during, or after World War Two. … g, and even though nobody really liked him, Piggy was the only real smart one. The book uses irony when Piggy turns out to be smart, because I didn’t expect for Piggy to be the only smart one, I thought that he would just be the fat and annoying kid who would eat everyone’s food. … Also Piggy symbolizes smarts[.] … an island. when the Lord of the Flies possessed them and helped them become evil. I liked this book. I liked when they took Piggy’s glasses to light the fire. I woulden’t have thought o do that that fast.

Haha! Ha-larious!

Oh, and he got a 100% on it, because it was a “You did it, or you didn’t do it.” kind of grade.