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  • interesting ld vs. dvd a.v.l thread

    after you get past the first few posts, anyway…

    covers some usual ld vs. dvd stuff, with some dvhs stuff thrown in and even a couple chinese formats… also interesting are some good numbers about compression of audio formats on dvd, superbit dvd, dvhs, and ld, which is a very important point of comparison in home video formats…

    i still say laserdisc is very worthwhile, dvd is a transitional format, hd-dvd will be here eventually and that format will be much more worth having than current dvd… dvd will be remembered for its faults… dvd will be like discovision is to the modern laserdisc…

    if hd-dvd hurries along, dvd may some day end up as “obscure” as ld (in the mass-market mind)…

  • my gd-rom drive… went… grievous…

    well, another one down…

    let’s see, i think that is either five or six in three years… sheesh…

    it had been making some odd noises for a couple months and refusing to boot once in a while, but, last night, the screensaver kicked on, which meant reading the disc, and i hear a bit of a grinding noise…
    and then i heard nothing but the cooling fan…

    poor little thing puts in 12-hour days, every day, and the disc it runs 99% of the time is a burned dreampassport premier cd… not the best-made burn, either… and all the loading of japanese fonts, etc., takes its toll, little by little, until it finally screams “you can’t fire me, i quit!” and gives up the ghost…

    i borrowed miss mary‘s drive for the moment… (we stopped putting the screws back in long ago, so, it is a quick operation…)

    among all our spare parts we don’t have a single healthy gd-rom drive (though, we have a few dead/sick ones), so, we are going to have to go track one down… should be simple enough and it keeps getting cheaper every time this comes up…

    i know i used to post at dcbg every time i blew a gd-rom drive, i wonder if i could go find those posts… would be interesting to see a timeline…

  • my gd-rom drive… went… grievous…

    well, another one down…

    let’s see, i think that is either five or six in three years… sheesh…

    it had been making some odd noises for a couple months and refusing to boot once in a while, but, last night, the screensaver kicked on, which meant reading the disc, and i hear a bit of a grinding noise…
    and then i heard nothing but the cooling fan…

    poor little thing puts in 12-hour days, every day, and the disc it runs 99% of the time is a burned dreampassport premier cd… not the best-made burn, either… and all the loading of japanese fonts, etc., takes its toll, little by little, until it finally screams “you can’t fire me, i quit!” and gives up the ghost…

    i borrowed miss mary‘s drive for the moment… (we stopped putting the screws back in long ago, so, it is a quick operation…)

    among all our spare parts we don’t have a single healthy gd-rom drive (though, we have a few dead/sick ones), so, we are going to have to go track one down… should be simple enough and it keeps getting cheaper every time this comes up…

    i know i used to post at dcbg every time i blew a gd-rom drive, i wonder if i could go find those posts… would be interesting to see a timeline…

  • horror night

    seems every time we meet someone that actually has a real interest in movies, it is always horror… usually cheap, sleazy, b-grade horror… we try to be open-minded and go with the idea that maybe there is just something we don’t know and perhaps it is simply a matter of broadening our horizons, so, we decided to try a couple of horror classics to see what might be there that we never saw in horror before…

    so, we have the criterion laserdisc of halloween and a standard laser release of the omen and we watched them both the other night…

    first up was halloween, the film credited with starting the “slasher” genre…
    and, it was not long until we were wishing it would hurry up and end…
    of course, after starman, the thing, escape from new york, and now this, i think we are ready to really and truly give up on john carpenter…

    the only good thing i have to say about it is that the music was very good…

    one interesting device i noticed was that, as the movie built up to the climax, it seemed to me that the director was intentionally using a lot of shots to show the time of day… no indoor shots without plenty of windows and most shots prominently showed the placement of the sun, like a ticking countdown to nightfall… in fact, at one point, it is suddenly and abruptly night, which gave me a feeling of “it’s night already!? they’re out of time!”…
    while this kept me (almost unconsciously) estimating how much time was left, i really could not care less if these people were actually going to survive or not… we were hardly told anything about them, so, they really did not seem like real people, just actors doing what the director told them to…
    and, as is always the case, the characters seemed to behave in very unbelievable ways… i know this is a staple of the genre, but, that is one of the things that alienates me from the genre… too much of having to give up reason to follow the story… not that there is usually much of a story… i often hear horror described as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but, to me it seems more a sub-genre of action… any film where you can relate pretty much everything it covers as just “this happened, then that happened, etc.” is an action movie… no concepts to ponder, no characters to get to know better, no reason to care WHY things are happening, most of the time… all of that comes in scarce tidbits, which is why, to be totally coherent, you need a whole series of films… maybe by die hard 3, i might care what happens to john maclaine, maybe by halloween 9 i might know why michael myers killed his sister and all these others…

    if they were better movies, i might take that journey…

    or maybe i will listen to the commentary on halloween and see if john carpenter can reveal to me the subtle intricacies…

    then, with a bad taste in our mouths, we took a chance on the omen…
    this one was much better, but, there was very little action, just lots of dialogue and concepts… it was more like a mystery to be solved…
    now, i must say i thought the dialogue was very weak… it got the point across, but, there was no personality, no cadence, no art… with good dialogue, you can take a line out of context and, if you know the characters, you can usually deduce who said it… and this is true of life as well… the omen is one of countless movies where you could have mixed and matched the dialogue between characters… the characters were definitely not defined by how they said what they said, they were just telling us what we needed to know to advance the plot… in a movie filled with dialogue, you need more personalized speech to really carry it, or at least to keep it interesting… (cf. david mamet, btw…)
    but still, it was a good movie… pacing was good, i was never really bored, the material was great, and the music was superb, even though it was mono… the actors were varied; the kid was great (not that it was a demanding part), the various clergy were good, and the nannies were great, but, too many other parts seemed totally interchangable…

    we liked it… it does not go on “the shelf”, but, i will definitely watch it again sometime to look for other nuances… i just don’t expect much from donner in that area…

    i just have a hard time calling it “horror”… it was more of a mystery, as i said above… yes, there were horrific IDEAS, but, again, that makes it a movie of IDEAS, not actions…

    as far as “horror” goes, we have only really seen a few and disliked most of them… (btw, remember, we pretty much only count what we have seen since we started into the world of dvd and home theater, since we now “see” movies differently than we used to… i have seen literally thousands of movies, but, i know a lot more about movies now and feel i need to give them all another chance…)
    i will briefly touch on a few and try to avoid sci-fi horror, like alien, forbidden planet, or event horizon, just to try to prove we are capable of contemplating another genre…

    we have seen a nightmare on elm street and wes craven’s new nightmare and only new nightmare was any good to us… i guess because it was likeable even if you scoffed at the genre… hell, it scoffed with you… but, even new nightmare is in “the pile”, not on “the shelf”… it was good once, may be again, but, we are not in any hurry… the next viewing would probably be for the commentary…

    poltergeist IS on the shelf… now that is one creepy film… the chair-stacking scene chills me every time… in fact, there is so much good about that movie, i will not even get started lest i go three paragraphs…

    then, there is that “m. night” dude or whatever… we have seen both signs and sixth sense and disliked both of them… and there was very little that we found disturbing, creepy, and very very little that was anything like scary… sure, a few disturbing concepts, no action movies here, but, still, they are old concepts and the films really brought very little, if anything, to the genre that we had not seen before…
    and, btw, we generally despise surprise endings… in fight club, it explained a lot, in sixth sense, it seemed just a gimmick… (iow, with the former, you want to watch it again more to understand the symptoms better now that you know the cause, in the latter you want to watch again to see if the film is internally consistent with the ending…)
    [must’ve re-written the last two sentences twenty times to ensure it was spoiler free :P]

    now, one horror movie we really liked was the others (and, no, not because it had our beloved nicole in it, though that doesn’t hurt it any)…
    that was one SCARY frickin’ movie!
    i mean, it was disturbing!
    and, one of the best uses of surround that we have ever heard…
    we were jumping, cringing, hoping that what we knew must happen next would not happen; i think the others, so far, is the only movie to actually put a fright in us…
    it was just plain well-directed… the kids, the rules of the house, the cinematography, including the overall look, the time setting, it just starts pulling you in to an alternate reality, so, you already have no idea what to expect and it unhinges your mind from the everyday, emptying it, so it can fill it up with what the director chooses, hopefully freeing you from expectations of normality… like misdirection… and the unfamiliarity
    means it will be more unpredictable, which means it has the potential to be scarier… and the director did not disappoint, though, admittedly, the first half of the movie is much much better than the second half…
    it is a dvd, not a laserdisc, so there is no “shelf vs. pile” issue (all our dvd’s are in one place), but, if there was a choice to be made, it would go on the shelf…

    so, anyway, next in our horror education will probably be clive barker… we have nice laserdiscs of the serpent and the rainbow, hellraiser, and lord of illusions (or is it the frighteners? can’t remember)… i read the great and secret show and loved it (though, more fantasy than horror)… i found it to be very original, creative, and interesting, so i figure i will like more of his stuff… having seen some clive barker long ago, i think it is safe to assume it will be truly horrifying stuff, with more in common with event horizon than the other stuff i have been covering here…
    hopefully in a good way…

  • mp3 blogs

    ok, i am posting this here for my own future reference, i would like to check these out, since i am flirting with the whole mp3 thing…

    i got this list from here, and he got it from somewhere else, so, i will leave his credit intact, since this is just a c/p anyway… (so, on that note, remember that any comments about each one are his, not mine, as i post this, i have not visited a single one of them, nor have i edited this list…)

    btw, he has invited people to post more mp3 blog links in the post’s comments thread…

    via nevercamehome

    now that i think of it, i saw one earlier, somewhere, A Million Love Songs…

  • How Film Is Transferred to Video

    How Film Is Transferred to Video

    i dug this up since it covers the whole original aspect ratio vs. pan&scan thing covered the previous post…

    some damn good info and pretty much covers all one needs to know, though, as usual, i am not sure it adequetly explains the point of anamorphic video…

    in a nutshell, your tv only has a certain number of scan lines to display the image… and those scan lines cannot come anywhere close to matching the resolution of a frame of film…
    widescreen films on video have black bars at the top and bottom, taking up sometimes as much as half of your screen and thus half of those precious scan lines that weren’t enough to properly show film even when you were using all of them…
    now, you COULD ditch the bars and use all the scan lines, but, then you lose the shape of the image… in other words, you basically zoom in on the image, but then, of course, you either have to cut off the sides or distort the image, stretching it vertcally…
    hence widescreen tv’s and “anamorphic squeeze” buttons on standard tv’s… the proper shape is kept, with little to no scan lines wasted on nothing but black bars…

    meh, it might make more sense if you read it again after you read the article at the link… it is not the easiest thing to explain without examples…

  • the end of whining about “those black bars”?

    i doubt it…

    this article is much more optimistic than i am, though, i agree that a large part of the battle is educating the cinematically ignorant…

    Last year, something remarkable happened in the world of cinema. Blockbuster Video, the country’s dominant rental chain, announced that from that point on it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan (also known as “full screen”). For those movie buffs who had been eagerly watching this battle, the news came as a shock. In the fight for the hearts and minds of viewers, widescreen and its film-geek adherents had won an unexpected and glorious victory. Just a few years earlier, Blockbuster had discouraged widescreen DVDs, on the grounds that customers confused by the letterbox format thought they were defective. Now, the chain was conceding what cinephiles had argued for years: that widescreen was the superior way to watch a movie at home, even if it left black bars at the top and bottom of your television screen.

    Anyone who scrounged for widescreen tapes during the VHS era will understand the historic nature of the announcement. Back then, widescreen tapes were tucked in obscure corners of the video store. When film buffs advanced the moral argument against pan-and-scan—that it butchered the filmmaker’s vision and cut out as much as half of the picture—they were met by a blank stare from store clerk and casual fan alike.

    the rest is here…
    How Widescreen Won – The way we watch movies at home has changed. What happened? By Bryan Curtis

    (it even mentions laserdiscs and Criterion, properly crediting the format and company with the initial victories in the original-aspect-ratio-vs.-“foolscreen” war…)

  • Dallas once again No. 1 big city for crime

    HoustonChronicle.com – Dallas once again No. 1 big city for crime

    Associated Press

    DALLAS – As expected, FBI statistics for 2003 show Dallas has the highest overall crime rate among the country’s largest cities for the sixth year in a row.

    City and police officials have known since last summer that Dallas was on track to keep the top crime spot. Since then, they have instituted new crime initiatives, fired the police chief and replaced him with a proven crime fighter, former Arlington Police Chief David Kunkle.

    incidentally, arlington is the suburb where we lived…

    more info at the link…

  • virtual worlds, virtual drugs

    http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,63578,00.html
    damn fascinating…

    here are some excerpts…

    The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.

    The designers of Achaea, one of the biggest online text-based games, have recently introduced a virtual addictive drug — known as gleam — as part of a story line in which a crime ring has been attempting to infiltrate the game’s cities. And some players can’t take it fast enough.

    Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly — suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game’s players are angry about gleam’s introduction into their world.

    and then, there are virtual performance-enhancing virtual drugs…

    In A Tale in the Desert, players discovered that by dosing their characters with a potion called Speed of the Serpent, they could gain extra waypoints, a valuable attribute allowing for instant travel across the game’s wide three-dimensional globe.

    Speed of the Serpent was poisonous, though, and required the ingestion of an antidote within 30 days, or the character would die. If a player took the potion a second time, the antidote was needed within 29 days; a third use meant 28 days and so on.

    Eventually, as players succumbed to their desire for the extra waypoints, the interval between potion and antidote was short enough that even the hard-core couldn’t keep up. According to Andy Tepper, the game’s lead designer, 18 players’ characters have died from addiction to Speed of the Serpent, more than from any other cause in the game’s history. Unlike in many multiplayer online games, where death means little, in A Tale in the Desert, a character’s death is final. It means starting over from the beginning, no small price for dabbling in a little performance-enhancing potion.

    meanwhile, elsewhere in the virtual multiverse…

    But even the larger games have elements some consider akin to addictive substances. For example, in Galaxies, smuggler-class players traffic in spices, spells that increase characters’ skills.

    In an article in RPG Expert called “Life of a Smuggler,” the author wrote that spices can offer terrific benefits, such as increased strength. Yet there are also side effects, like lowered strength and vomiting, that last as long as the high.

    Given the side effects, though, one might ask why the risk is worthwhile. [the eternal addict question, eh? -i_p] The author’s answer sounds just like it came from a real-world drug dealer.

    “OK, who will buy and use your spices? Almost everyone that tries them a few times gets hooked,” the article read. “Free samples are good for business!!”

  • damn, missed towel day again

    http://towelday.org/
    the site explains it for all strags out there…

    and, since it is a classic quote and it partially explains it, here is something from the site…

    To quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,

    A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine soredly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a brush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

    More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.