Is it me or are there virtually no McCain bumpers stickers out on the road right now? I cannot remember seeing a single one. This occured to me this morning so I paid very close attention while running a bunch of errands this afternoon. Sure enough, I didn't spot a single McCain sticker in the sea of Obama bumpers. Granted I live in a liberal area but I swear I have seen more cars with Bush/Cheney '04 stickers than McCain '08.
Last Friday night (5/3/08) around 12:30 I was playing Mario Kart on the couch directly underneath the large and old skylight in my apartment when we got hit with an intense hail storm. It was unbelievably loud. M. Nature gave me a pretty serious pelting when I ventured out to recover the handful of hail pictured here.
Luckily the hail stones survived the week in my freezer because I kept forgetting to bring my calipers home from work. The largest one was just under an inch in diameter (9/10ths). Definitely the biggest hail I have ever seen, but pretty small in comparison to some of the photos from the area. A lot of people had golfball sized specimens.
Cloverfield -
I finally saw Cloverfield last weekend. What a complete piece of garbage.
Back in January I was genuinely excited to see it, which is odd because I am neither a big monster movie nor JJ Abrams fan. In retrospect it seems I succumbed to the "viral" marketing campaign. It's hard to argue with the Statue of Liberty head flying down the street, and the idea of a new monster was exciting.
The bottom line is Cloverfield is boring as hell, which is really saying something since it's about a monster ripping through NYC and its 84 minutes long. The main characters are so lame I actually found myself anxious to witness their demise. Plus I figured the movie would be over when we were rid of them(turned out to be true, surprise!). The monster was also really disappointing. It looks nothing like the whale-esqe drawings that piqued my interest initially. Instead, it resembles the nondescript monsters you've seen in every lame video game from the last 20 years.
Since I found the movie thoroughly uninteresting I wasn't compelled to read many reviews. Most of the criticism I did see focused on the steady cam work and/or the undeniable similarities to 9/11. As far as I am concerned the camera work fit perfectly with the narrative style of the film (however flawed), and I will leave the 9/11 commentary up to the residents of Manhattan. From my perspective the principle problem with the movie was its attempt to rethink the monster movie genre.
The main idea is that Cloverfield it would be the first monster movie shot from the perspective of the people getting squished rather than the monster doing the squishing. That seemed like an interesting approach at the time, but ended up falling pretty flat. The reality is the people on the ground (in this film at least) are not interesting, at all. I spent the whole movie wanting to see more of the monster, wanting to know where it's from, wanting to know what the military was going to do about it. Every other monster movie lets people in by giving them this info. And they make the MONSTER THE STAR! I spent the whole time wondering why we were following this preppy dumbass around Manhattan when there is an awesome Monster to watch?
Lesson learned? Sometimes conventions are classic for a reason, because they work.
Obama's cut the BS approach is a large part of why I voted for him in the NC primary this morning. Let's hope he wins huge in Carolina today and we can get on to winning this thing in the fall.
Iron Man -
Yes, I went to see Iron Man on opening night. And yes it was awesome. As long as you can forget anything you happen to know about physics, or science in general, it's a lot of fun. One quick shot of RDJ wearing a Wonder Woman suit under the Iron Man armor could have made it perfect. I guess they are saving that for the sequel.
Favorite hilarious moment?
"TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE! WITH SCRAPS!"
"We want to react against the organic, improvised expression. We wanna do a more synthetic, weird and non-organic expression. Within the artificial expression new moods and spheres arise. Electronic music is absolutely the music of the future. Machine music is good."
Zimbabwe holds the record for the worlds worst inflation rate, 100,000%. (NYT) At that rate a bag of rice that cost $2 a year ago would cost just over $2000 this year. With instability of that magnitude making any type of meaningful economy impossible it should come as no surprise that the unemployment rate is over 80%.
Zimbabweans voted today in an attempt to end the presidency of Robert Mugabe whose mismanagement of the country has left it in such a sorry state.
UPDATE:
Looks like Mugabe is making a deal, he will step down if granted amnesty.
Wire ran a cover article on Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay, Uusitalo, Luomo) last month with some shots of his awesome studio.
Interviews have been scarce, so it was very interesting to see how reliant his music is on hardware. If you're familiar with him there's bunch of stuff you would expect to see, a Nord, Space Echo, and bank of MoogerFoogers. But I have to wonder what he's doing with that fish finder on his desk.
Check out the other photos here, here, here, and a larger version of the cover here. If you've never heard Vladislav Delay listen to the first track from The Four Quarters [2005], you can download it for free here.
For the nearly three years since its availability, I have really wanted an Xbox 360. I haven't bought one because I've been way too cheap, and scared of how much time I might spend playing. But, two weeks ago I caved and bought one.
Here's what happened.
Friday:
Made the purchase, excited, brought it home and played Bioshock for a few hours, FUN.
Saturday:
Friend in town, kept my cool, showed it off for maybe 20 mins.
Sunday:
Luckily no work, played Half-Life 2 ALL DAY LONG, in pajamas. The first thing I notice it's dark outside and time for 60 Minutes. And the worst part? Half Life 2 is not even a real 360 game, it's an original Xbox title.
Once again I've changed the code running this site, so if there are some bugs for the next few days please excuse them. I am back to using my own engine written in PHP which I like. It is extremely simple and currently weighs in at 224kb (I think I can cut out a bunch more javascript). I am actually surprised more programmers don't write their own blog engines.
I had been using Simplelog for last year or so which is great, but doesn't seem to be moving forward. Before that I was using an older version of this code that I was too busy to update. Hopefully now I will stop screwing with the code and start finishing all the post I've started.
UPDATE: I just switched hosts back to MediaTemple from Joyent, so let me know if anything is broken. Sorry Joyent, I hate to go all Twitter on you, but 30% of the time I would go to my site it was down.
Last Friday night (5/3/08) around 12:30 I was playing Mario Kart on the couch directly underneath the large and old skylight in my apartment when we got hit with an intense hail storm. It was unbelievably loud. M. Nature gave me a pretty serious pelting when I ventured out to recover the handful of hail pictured here.
Luckily the hail stones survived the week in my freezer because I kept forgetting to bring my calipers home from work. The largest one was just under an inch in diameter (9/10ths). Definitely the biggest hail I have ever seen, but pretty small in comparison to some of the photos from the area. A lot of people had golfball sized specimens.
