the text-only link i use in the title will be dead in a week or less, after that, try this one…
Tag: favorites
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movie-related amusements
i have been meaning to post these for quite awhile… will probably add them to the side bar at some point…
first, there is Invisibles…
fun little thing where a frame from a movie is shown with the actors in the frame removed, but with their clothes still standing, ala the invisible man… name the movie…
new group of them every week…
a nice mix of really easy and really tough…then there is movie trivia on funtrivia.com…
fun site, user-made trivia quizzes, a huge range of topics and specific movies, and it keeps score of how you do to rank yourself with other players… (nothing to download, btw…)
funtrivia.com has a lot more than movie trivia, but, i have yet to try anything else out, too many good movie quizzes…
i am playing as “i_plots” and i cannot figure out a way to link to my stats page, but, it says:You have played 74
quizzes and have scored 7470
points.Your score ranks you as # 43,083 of
300,000+
playersYou have answered 747 of 940 questions
correctly.
Your accuracy is therefore 79%You are a Trivia Rookie
Renton: Well, he’s always been lacking in moral fiber.
Swanney: He knows a lot about Sean Connery.
Renton: That’s hardly a substitute!/trainspotting
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When DVD Spells B-A-D
When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Timesa great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…
for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…
Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…
If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…
Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…
i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…
laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen… -
our beloved nicole
today, Nicole Kidman is 37…
she is, without a doubt, first choice on our list of favorite eye candy girls… (milla and charlize would probably round out the top three…)nicole is simply perfect… we first fell in love with her in Moulin Rouge, and have since seen her in Eyes Wide Shut, The Others, Far And Away, Malice, and To Die For and thought she was just yummy in all of them…
(oh yeah, and she is a good actress as well 😛 her best performance i have seen so far is probably To Die For…)
last week we even bought two 8×10 photos of her in moulin rouge costume from that cool movie poster/stuff shop in nob hill and miss mary picked up frames for them today and has them over in her corner… (for the record, we didn’t know her b-day was coming up when we bought them, we aren’t THAT fanatical, we found out because it was on today in sci-fi history this morning… they are also talking about her on fark, btw…)to borrow a great line i once heard used to describe someone else, she has been the cause of countless gay men and straight women to question their preference for over a decade…
and we try not to think about the whole weirdo tom cruise thing o_O
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opening Kubrick’s boxes
Stanley Kubrick’s films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery – this is what he found
and here are some excerpts giving you a hint of the weirdness within…
starting with a bit of background…
nine years had passed since Kubrick’s last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans – or a “secret lair”, according to a Sunday Times article of that year – behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He’d gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph.and…
“The good news,” wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, “is that Kubrick is a hoarder … There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Droogs and Jack Torrance.”
and then, inside kubrick’s world…
There are boxes everywhere – shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.
Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.
“Is it the library now?” I ask.
“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.
I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”
“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.
I do.
“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”“Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”
“Who made up the cards?” I ask.
“Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”
“How long did it take?” I ask.
“Years,” says Tony. “The late 1960s.”
In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS – Portman Square, EWS – Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS – Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner’s, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, “Hooker doorway?”
“Huh,” I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin.
The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front – Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on – and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F-P” on the positive ones and “F-N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F-C”.
“Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”
“What?” I ask.
“Stationery,” says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. “His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink.” Jan pauses. “He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”
I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped. -
marrying mary
so, as i write this, it is almost june 6th, our wedding anniversary…
well, that and the 7th…allow me to explain…
and since i am in no hurry, i will start from when we met…
in 1995, i was living in an apartment on hermosa beach, california… (btw, i hated it, the smell and noise of the ocean were horrible…)
late on november 6th, my best friend, skully, came over with his girlfriend at the time, jade, and her best friend, mary…
mary and i took to each other immediately, and she even wrote in her diary that night, “tonight, i met the man i am going to marry”…in the following months, the four of us did a lot together and it was not long before mary and i started saying we would get married at our nearest opportunity… being from vegas, i kept us reminded that all we had to do was take the four hour drive and shell out a few bucks…
so, since we were open about this, a pact was made… skully made mary and i swear that if we ever ran off and got married, we would page him with a special code, “77777”, immediately after, no excuses… he introduced us, he demanded to be the first to know and we agreed he deserved it… if we had a normal wedding, the plan was for him to be my best man, but, that never came up…
it was around june 1st that we finally got around to deciding to go to vegas… there was a day or two of preparation and, if i recall correctly, we arrived in vegas, in a rented plymouth breeze, about the 3rd…
on the night of the 6th we were deciding what to do with the evening and one of us said to the other “how about we go get married?” and the other said “well, it IS what we came here for” and off we went, down to get our license… there were an awful lot of people in there, considering it was probably 10 or so at night… vegas is the only truly 24-hour city i have lived in, you can do pretty much anything, anytime… even 24-hour wedding chapels… though, i think the license place was going to close at 11pm…
i remember the clerks did not have the burned-out look i expected, they looked like they were dispensing miracles… somehow, they had not lost the romance of it all, it seemed…
to this day i wonder how many other couples that were in there that night are still together…after the license, it was time to decide where to get married… skully always said we should do the drive-thru elvis impersonator wedding… and we always said ummmm, no… however, as we looked around, the cheapest and easiest was “the world famous little white chapel” on the strip and they had a drive-thru…
we just wanted to be married (though, elvis need not be involved), so, we went there…
we pull up and the window is on the passenger side (my side, some people are born to drive, some people are born to work the radio, and i am the latter) and there is a bell… so, i ring the bell and eventually a woman came to the window and started us on paperwork… after we filled out a few forms and gave them their money, we had to sit a bit and wait for a minister…
as we sat there, i had a revelation…
“you know what? we are GETTING married! no, i mean, for months we have been INTENDING to get married, and here in a bit we will BE married, but, at this moment we are GETTING married!”
then, suddenly, all the traditions made sense…
“this will only happen once! geez, i kinda’ wish someone was here to see it, maybe take some pictures! in fact, we could have dressed up for it! or maybe even been well-rested and sober!”i decided i would at least put my cigarette out…
so, as we waited, we noticed it was getting late… see, we met on the 6th, so, we thought it was going to be cool to have been married on the 6th…
the preacher (Pastor Jesse Diaz, the certificate says) showed up a few minutes before midnight… he leaned quite a bit out the window and asked if we had rings… well, in fact we did, but, we had already had a private and special moment of putting them on each other’s finger months before, so, we told him we would not be re-exchanging rings, as it were… he seemed to think this was odd, but, continued anyway…
he told me to look on my bride and repeat after him and i said my vows to mary…
and then it was her turn and then he pronounced us man and wife…and we noticed the time…
it was a few minutes after midnight…
so, the pastor jesse diaz leaned out and began our wedding some time before midnight, june 6th, and he pronounced us some time after midnight, june 7th, and this dawned on us and we thought it was actually pretty cool…
we decided at that very moment to forever celebrate both days as our anniversary…(for the record, our marriage certificate says june 6th…)
now, if only we could buy that rental car we were in at the time…
anyway, if you have been paying attention, there is still something left to be done…
yes, we left the little white chapel and went over to the excalibur hotel and casino, my favorite place of employment ever (and the place where my brother married his bride), and went to the payphones just inside the back entrance… i dialled skully’s number, put in a whole bunch of change, and entered 77777…
skully was watching tv with his parents when his pager went off… his voice in the darkness said “oh my god!” and he looked at his mom and dad and declared “zane and mary just got married”…
we were well-liked by his parents, so, there were a total of three people happy for us that night, not counting us…and no one else in the world knew yet…
so, anyway, yes, we got married eight years ago, in the middle of the night, in a drive thru, in a rented plymouth breeze, on the las vegas strip, and since our wedding spanned midnight, we have two anniversary days…
and we think that is pretty cool…
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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… -
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!!”
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My LJ Feeds Link
i would just like to call attention to this link, since i get a daily kick out
of it…
over there on the menu on the left of this page, under “Links”, is a link that
says “My LJ Feeds”…
this is part of the “Friends Page” features on LiveJournal…for those not familiar with the concept of feeds, it is a way to gather
content from a site, without going there… this blog of mine has an atom xml
feed, so, you could get my posts in your favorite “feed aggregator” (along
side feeds from other sites), rather than stopping by to see if i’ve posted
anything new or signing up for the email notification…
at livejournal, people set up xml/rss/etc. feeds for various sites, or use
feeds already offered and you can add those feeds to your lj friends page for
a public online aggregator… there are hundreds of choices, everything from
daily comics like garfield and dilbert, to news, weather, movie reviews, all
sorts of stuff…
you just have to see it to appreciate the sheer coolness of it…
since i have few lj friends, i fill it up with these feeds and then i get
stuff from sites i would not otherwise go to everyday, in one convenient
trip… so, you can see the stuff i am interested in and, if you share those
interests, it can make for a good daily visit…here are the feeds i have on there currently…
some post several items a day, some once a day, some once a week or once a
month, some post rarely, which makes it even handier to have it appear on my
feeds page… and some may be broken, so, i am still waiting for them to post
something…firstly, i get posts at “syn_promo”, where people publicize cool feeds they
have found or have made…astronomy photo of the day
ask yahoo
answering trivia and imponderables, using yahooblog of death
sort of a big, far-reaching obits pageboingboing blog
coming soon
a movie news sitedictionary.com’s word of the day
engadget
gadget news, reviews, etc.filmadd
news of movies added to the Internet Archivefilmtease
an unusual movie trailer review sitefound magazine’s find of the week
unusual objects people findaaron swartz’s googleblog
a blog about googlegoogleblog
the official blog of google.compenniphile
the writings of penn jillette, mostly new entries to “road penn”word spy
dealing with new terms, slang, etc. as they enter the languagequote of the day
not as good as refdesk.com’s quotes of the day, but, they have more than one
per day, so it sort of balances outsnopesrecentadd
one of my favorites, posting urban legends as they are added to snopes.comthinkgeek
various merchandise of interest to those involved in modern technologyand wordsmith’s word of the day
oh, and almost forgot, i also get “ljnifty” where people post various fun
things you can do with livejournal, such as adding feeds to your friends
page…and i add cool new ones as i find them… and occasionally remove the ones
that get annoying or boring…anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, as i said, the link is on the menu
on the left side of this page… “My LJ Feeds”
i stop by at least once a day and it is a pretty good collection at this
point, after some tweaking…now if only i could get scifi.com’s “today in sci-fi history” on there, which
is almost always interesting to sci-fi buffs… (there is a link to this, as
well, over there on the left…)
i would add the fark.com feed, but, it does not have comments links and the
comments threads are at least half the fun of fark…btw, geez, it seems today is list day on my blog…
admittedly, i am trying to come up with posts to make so i can knock that huge
“april pics” post off the front page… -
250 or so movies we have seen
that is, the movies we have seen since we entered the world of home theater
(or, RE-entered, in my case)…
this is another list i was mentioning to someone the other day, so, wanted to
post…ok, so, the story is something like this…
may 25th, 2002, we got a free dvd player… at this time, our tv was mainly
only used for video games and nasatv during shuttle missions, we had a vcr but
didn’t use it for much…
coincidentally, this is also the day we got our first dreameye, so, the dvd
player was ignored…then, some time in november 2002, someone loaned us three dvd’s (reservoir
dogs, a beautiful mind, zoolander)… we decided to see what all the fuss was
about…
eventually, we bought a couple of our own (fight club, the matrix, wargames,
which is also the first commentary we listened to), later on, we got a
“ht-in-a-box”, then in june of 2003, we started seriously building a home
theater…just on a whim, back in the first days of all this, we started actually
jotting down each movie we watched… we have continued to add to this list,
every movie we watch, then, at some point, we started dating each entry…
this is all kept in a database that we each have a copy of on our psion…so, here is the list… there are about 250, a little less or a lot less,
depending on how you choose to count them (different versions of the same
movie, etc.)…and, btw, i will refrain from adding other comments in the database this list
came from, such as what we thought of the movie, why we saw wanted to see it,
what format and aspect ratio it was in, which ones we own, etc…. you will
also occasionally see one labelled [him] or [her], which means we did not
watch it together… and there are one or two marked with the name of a movie
theater in brackets, which means we actually went out to see it…the dated entries come first and the rest are alphabetically listed…
2004.05.06 – caddyshack
2004.05.06 – vacation
2004.03.30 – AI
2004.03.29 – the big lebowski
2004.03.29 – mixed nuts
2004.03.26 – better off dead…
2004.02.22 – hard eight (aka Sydney)
2004.02.15 – lost in translation
2004.02.15 – love liza
2004.02.09 – raising arizona
2004.02.09 – star trek 7 – generations
2004.02.09 – time after time
2004.02.08 – back to the future
2004.02.08 – back to the future 2
2004.02.08 – back to the future 3
2004.02.06 – jerry macguire [her]
2004.02.05 – a few good men
2004.02.05 – rush
2004.02.05 – true romance
2004.02.01 – biloxi blues
2004.01.25 – fargo
2004.01.25 – pirates of silicon valley
2004.01.20 – arthur
2004.01.20 – fletch
2004.01.11 – hook
2004.01.08 – the apostle
2004.01.06 – seven
2004.01.05 – the life of david gale
2004.01.04 – alien 3
2003.12.27 – the american president
2003.12.25 – a christmas story
2003.12.23 – it’s a wonderful life
2003.12.21 – lord of the rings 2 – the two towers
2003.12.20 – star trek 10 – nemesis
2003.12.17 – braveheart
2003.12.16 – 28 days later
2003.12.16 – frequency
2003.12.14 – scrooged
2003.11.13 – conspiracy theory
2003.11.09 – alien – director’s cut [amc grand, dallas, theater 8]
2003.11.08 – truman show
2003.11.05 – shanghai knights
2003.11.02 – ed wood
2003.11.01 – matrix reloaded
2003.10.18 – spaceship
2003.10.16 – galaxy quest
2003.10.16 – trekkies
2003.10.13 – Magnolia
2003.10.11 – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
2003.10.10 – spawn – director’s cut
2003.10.05 – book of shadows – blair witch 2
2003.10.04 – addams family
2003.09.28 – shock treatment
2003.09.27 – event horizon
2003.09.23 – city of lost children
2003.09.12 – the jerk
2003.09.11 – blair witch project
2003.09.11 – stargate – director’s cut
2003.09.10 – 12 monkeys
2003.09.10 – outland
2003.09.10 – psycho
2003.09.08 – from dusk til dawn
2003.09.07 – leviathan
2001: a space odyssey
2010
9/11
the abyss – special edition
Addams Family Values
Akira
alien
aliens – director’s cut
almost famous
almost famous – untitled director’s cut
Amelie
american beauty
apollo 13
as good as it gets
backdraft
basketball diaries
batman
beauty and the beast
being john malkovich
the black hole
blade runner – “director’s cut”
boogie nights
boyz in the hood
brazil
a bronx tale
buckaroo banzai
a bug’s life
the cell
Chicago
chicken run
Citizen Kane
close encounters of the third kind
close encounters of the third kind, collector’s edition
close encounters of the third kind, special edition
clueless
contact
dances with wolves
Dark City
the dark crystal
Darkman
the doors
dr. strangelove
dune
e.t. – the extra terrestrial
escape from new york [him]
eyes wide shut
finding nemo [parks mall amc]
far and away
fear and loathing in las vegas
the fifth element
fight club
final fantasy: the spirits within
a fish called wanda
flatliners
forbidden planet
Forrest Gump
friday
full metal jacket
get shorty
the game
gattaca
ghostbusters
glengarry glenross
the godfather [him]
the godfather – part two [him]
Goodfellas [him]
the grifters
Grosse Pointe Blank [her]
harry potter 1
house
the hudsucker proxy
the hunt for red october
i spit on your grave
independence day – director’s cut
Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Iron Giant
It
jackie brown
Jacob’s Ladder
Jaws
jfk
k-pax
krull
L.A. Confidential
l.a. story
labyrinth
ladyhawke
the lawnmower man – director’s cut
leap of faith
legend of drunken master
Little Shop of Horrors
Logan’s Run
lolita
lord of the rings – fellowship of the ring
mars attacks!
memento
men in black
minority report
monsters inc
monty python and the holy grail
the mosquito coast
Moulin Rouge
mulholland drive
murder by death
natural born killers
night of the living dead
nightmare before christmas
a nightmare on elm street
the one
oscar
the others
phantasm
pi
pink floyd – the wall
poltergeist
the princess bride
pulp fiction
Punch-Drunk Love
Quiz Show
red dawn
requiem for a dream – director’s cut
reservoir dogs
the rocky horror picture show
Romeo + juliet
the royal tenenbaums
rushmore
say anything
secret of nimh
the seven samurai [him]
Shadowlands
Shanghai Noon
signs
silence of the lambs
Silverado
the sixth sense
Sneakers
south park movie
Spaceballs
the spanish prisoner
Sphere
spiderman
spirited away
The Stand
star trek – the motion picture – director’s cut
star trek 2 – the wrath of khan – director’s cut
star trek 3 – the search for spock
star trek 4 – the voyage home
star trek 5 – the final frontier
star trek 6 – the undiscovered country
star trek 8 – first contact
star wars
star wars 2 – empire strikes back
star wars 2 – empire strikes back – special edition
star wars 3 – return of the jedi
star wars 4 – phantom menace
star wars 5 – attack of the clones
Starman
Strange Days
suicide kings
Taxi Driver
terminator
terminator 2
the thing
this is spinal tap
three colors – white
three colors – red
time bandits
titan a.e.
titanic
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
trainspotting
tron
uhf
unforgiven
wag the dog
the War of the Roses
wargames
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
what dreams may come
who framed roger rabbit
