What's he up to, eh?
So… Final Cut Pro X, eh? Lot of chatter about it. Lot of controversy.
I bought it the day it came out expecting to jump in and find an editing Nirvana. Instead I found something that made my head hurt. I believe this reaction was not unique. Being slightly busy, I resolved to keep an open mind and give it a proper go when I had the time. Turns out that time is now: six months later! Continued…
Categories: editing, Personal, Recommendation, Work.
I was alerted to the fact that this is St. Andrew’s day by the fact that people kept commenting on a video I posted years ago of some Scottish celebrities (such as they are) talking about it. It’s a fun we film, and I’m glad it’s turning out to be perennial. It’s also a rare chance to see Scottish hermit, Leon Jackson, so I humbly present it here:
Categories: Personal, Recommendation.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Nina Burleigh has a great article in the New York Times in which she tours Italy, seeking out the locations of gothic English and American novels.
The original gothic writers were much inspired by the duality in the bel paese. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and other masters of the romantic and horror genres set some of their most famous works in Italy.
“Italy was the Gothic writers’ favorite background,” wrote Massimiliano Demata, a professor at the University of Bari, who has made a study of the form. The country’s baroque portas, ruined castles, eerie reliquaries and catacombs were a gateway to the uncanny, possessing, as he put it, “a labyrinthine and claustrophobic architecture that was the novels’ perfect physical and psychological setting.” Today, these same books can serve as unconventional guidebooks for tourists who tire of the sun and want to explore the country’s macabre past.
Categories: Recommendation.
Dannsa hits Episode the Third with a trip to Taynuilt, near Oban. Well, relatively “near”: Taynuilt isn’t near anywhere, which is sort if the point of Ballet West. In idyllic surrounds, the ballet degree students have few distractions, other than the odd stag sticking his majestic head through the studio window to enjoy a rehearsal.
Categories: confession, editing, Personal, Recommendation, tv, Work.
Following on from last week’s blog, here’s what I have to say for myself regarding the music choices in Dannsa, episode 2, which is on tonight at 10pm, BBC Alba.
This week, we concentrate on the Fusion dance group in Aberdeen, with a brief sojourn with Livingston’s b-boyz (and girl), the Heavy Smokers, kicking off with… Continued…
Categories: confession, editing, Personal, Recommendation, tv, Work.
A new show TV started last Monday, 10pm on BBC Alba. It’s called Dannsa[1] and you’ll all be able to get it, because BBC Alba has just become available to anyone with Freeview. That’s you[2]. I recommend the show to you, because it’s rather good. I know this because I worked on it, along with a string of extraordinarily talented people.[3] And frankly, we all worked damned hard. I don’t want to give too much away, but one aspect of the post-production that I feel I can discuss in some detail is the choice of music. Obviously, the dancers featured dance to something, so music choice was a primary concern.
The show follows six dance groups from all over Scotland with wildly varying ages and dance styles, from classical ballet to contemporary, an over-60s group to a breakdance crew. There’s something for everyone, and it was a joy spending time with them all, particularly when they start coming together later in the series. Episode One introduces us to them all, whereas subsequent editions focus on one group at a time. So this introduction to them all is, itself, a kind of compilation album, a mix tape, a playlist. So the music better be good.
Categories: confession, editing, Personal, Recommendation, tv, Work.
Here are the Amazon DVD reviews of one Mr. M. E. B. Woods “markbernard1981″ (Bristol, UK). There are three of them and they warmed my cockles.
Some choice observations (apply a sic to everything):
From Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot: “Stalone thinks he’s hard cos he plays a cop who doesn’t play by the rules. Big deal. Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson didn’t played even less by the rules better.”
From Shallow Hal: “Someone told me that Steven Siegal was in this movie as a cameo, I watched it three times and there wasn’t a single reference to him.”
From My Giant: “A lot of the times Billy Crystal has more lines than my giant which is ludacris.”
I assume that Mr. M. E. B. Woods “markbernard1981″ (Bristol, UK) is perfectly sane, lucid and just having a wee laugh, but they tickled me.
Categories: Recommendation.
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When the free version of an app becomes one of the few that you use every day without fail, it's time to shell out the £2.99 for the full version. Despite good reviews, I balked at the price initially because of its relative highness [1] and the fact that I knew how soul destroying an RSS app could be if it's interface doesn't fit you.
Byline Free's icon
Byline is an RSS reader, you see. For such a simple technology, it seems really hard to get aggregator software to work intuitively. I've never been too impressed with Apple's efforts, for example. You can read RSS feeds in Mail (which seems like a strange place to put it), and Safari's got a weird system where everything but the text can be stripped away, so you're not distracted by the rest of the site (never really been much of a problem, frankly). No, RSS didn't become an integral part of my life until I discovered the right software for it: Shrook. Recommended in Mark Frauenfelder's book Rule the Web, it offered a very pleasing interface and, crucially, syncing between a desktop app and a browser, so it never asked you to read the same post twice. This came at a price, though, a monthly or yearly subscription, without which they'd both have all the feeds you'd subscribed to, but wouldn't know which ones you'd read on the other platform. I took out a month for a couple of quid, liked it enormously, and paid for a yearly subscription.
When the free version of an app becomes one of the few that you use every day without fail, it's time to shell out the £2.99 for the full version. Despite good reviews, I balked at the price initially because of its relative highness {{1}} and the fact that I knew how soul destroying an RSS app could be if it's interface doesn't fit you.
Byline Free's icon
Byline is an RSS reader, you see. For such a simple technology, it seems really hard to get aggregator software to work intuitively. I've never been too impressed with Apple's efforts, for example. You can read RSS feeds in Mail (which seems like a strange place to put it), and Safari's got a weird system where everything but the text can be stripped away, so you're not distracted by the rest of the site (never really been much of a problem, frankly). No, RSS didn't become an integral part of my life until I discovered the right software for it: Shrook. Recommended in Mark Frauenfelder's book Rule the Web, it offered a very pleasing interface and, crucially, syncing between a desktop app and a browser, so it never asked you to read the same post twice. This came at a price, though, a monthly or yearly subscription, without which they'd both have all the feeds you'd subscribed to, but wouldn't know which ones you'd read on the other platform. I took out a month for a couple of quid, liked it enormously, and paid for a yearly subscription.
Categories: complaint, Personal, Recommendation.
Since updating to OS X 10.6.6 and having available the new Mac App Store, I have acquired yet another book app: Amazon’s Kindle for Mac. There have been, and are, others, none of which have the killer function that I look for in an eReader. Continued…
Categories: complaint, confession, DRM, idea, Personal, Recommendation.
Despite the late night, Brussels beckoned on the morning of our first full day. One of the deciding factors in choosing the Scandic Grand Place was its inclusive buffet breakfast, at which we could shamelessly stuff our bellies to save money on food later. So stuffed, we trotted out into Bruxelles, data-less on our phones thanks to crippling roaming charges, but armed with the cheap map gifted to us by the reception clerk. The generosity was soon understood when we noticed that instead of directing us to landmarks of historical and social interest, its key was devoted to the “RN Make-up For Ever” boutique and “La Parmigiana” restaurant.
It was certainly useless in locating the Mannekin-Pis, a statue of a cherub who urinates realistically, albeit ceaselessly, into a fountain to the delight of all who bear witness. When researching the trip, websites designed for tourists in Brussels would list very little apart from the chance to “giggle” at this display. Click on the ‘Nightlife’ tab and we were invited to giggle at it at night. It adorns the side of all the public buses, appears in numerous guises (a guitar photoshopped over his modest member to advertise a rock festival; an Uncle Sam costume and “Yes We Can” placard to honour Barak Obama) and seems very much the official mascot of the city. For us, it would serve as a token piece of touristy sight-seeing before we hit the bottle.
Categories: complaint, confession, Personal, Recommendation.
Last week I heard in the news that Twitter had bought Tweetie and turned it into their official client. “Tweetie…” thought I, “is that one I’ve tried?”
Like most people, I found the idea of Twitter, when explained to me, thoroughly uninspiring. I believe it was this post by the legendary Wil Wheaton that convinced me to set up an account and give it a whirl. At first, through a browser, my initial prejudices were confirmed — waste of everyone’s time. I was intrigued, however, by that little widget that advertises client software —little programs that organise your Twitter life outside if the browser.
The first one I tried was for the desktop, and its name escapes me now. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the browser, and it gave me my first taste of Update Anticipation.
It was when I got one for my phone that I really started to get hooked. I could whip it out my pocket and casually see what @GreatDismal or @doctorow were on about at any given moment. Plus I could tweet on a whim. Monty’s bowel movements became a matter of public record.
Categories: complaint, confession, Personal, Recommendation.
We had our new coffee machine wake us up with a fresh pot this morning. I’ve never been much of a coffee-drinker, but now I’m beginning to feel like I did when the family took its first foreign holiday (to Rimini, Italy) when I was fourteen or so and I discovered that I did like spaghetti. Up until then I had liked the look of spaghetti; that and the fact that it could be bought in the shape of whatever the toy fad was at any given time. I’d made my mum buy me dinosaur spaghetti, Transformers spaghetti, He-man spaghetti and a million other kinds, only to spit the first mouthful back onto my plate and demand that she make me something else. My problem had been the disgusting tinned pasta that Heinz and others thought somehow would ‘do’ and the lazy way they used the same tomato sauce they used for their baked beans. Then, in the restaurant of our Rimini hotel, when there really had been nothing else I could stomach the thought of on the menu, I had surrendered and asked for spaghetti bolognaise. The joy of al dente pasta and a sauce that someone, somewhere had given a shit about flooded my being. I was in love with pasta instantly, and my passion has never waned.
Now, having picked up a coffee-maker in the post-Christmas sales — reasonably priced and coming without the advertised instruction manual and measuring spoon — I’m discovering that freeze-dried, instant coffee isn’t really coffee at all. Mo tells me it’s not tolerated by anyone in the United States and I’m immediately ashamed that there are millions of the people who can simultaneously vote for George W. Bush and hold more sophisticated tastes than I.
This new coffee is a revelation. I’m already an addict, and proud of it.
So, this morning the timer on the machine had coffee ready for us at 9am. Mo poured it and brought her mug and mine back to bed. She also made the first run for refills, I made the second, and after our third cup I was so awake that I wondered why I’d waited over three decades to start the day with this jolt of awareness. It struck me that half the planet starts the day this way, so I’ve really had no excuse not to give it a try. Now, now I can see their point.
What other wonders await me? Do I really not like tuna? Can the eight tenths of the world’s population that smother everything in mayonaise all be wrong?
As these radical ideas bravely burn new pathways in my extra-alert brain, I realise that my cup is empty. Mo offers to refill it, but I claim the chore for my own. For one thing, I’m getting restless just sitting here. Honestly, how much of my life have I spent at rest? How could I have tolerated it? I’ve got to move around, dammit. There’s also the fact that the coffee machine is my new toy, and I want to play with it. If they made coffee-machine-shaped spaghetti, I’d probably go and buy some right now.
Cup refilled, I ingest the goodness. It’s been over a week since I last had a beer, but I’ve a new monkey on my back, and he’s very friendly. Next time I see you, I’ll introduce you. Name’s Joe.
Categories: confession, Personal, Recommendation.
Started a show today featuring the formidable Margo MacDonald, MSP. I was aware of Ms. MacDonald before most other MPs-that-weren’t-on-Spitting-Image because my mum had gone to college with her, back when in Scotland you had to go to Aberdeen to learn how to be a P.E. teacher. My mum would never miss a chance to tell us when Ms. MacDonald was lying about her age; I was just chuffed she knew someone semi-famous.
I’ve only digitised and logged the footage so far rather than cut any of it, but the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Lothians is not only formidable, it turns out, but very funny, pragmatic, passionate and caring. It was she, after all, who campaigned for prostitute-tolerant zones in Edinburgh having worked directly with the girls and woman (mostly drug addicts) caught in the oldest profession — “seen the whites of their eyes,” as she puts it — only to have her bill rejected by the “moral” majority in parliament, whose morals were academic, distant and, in the end, no help at all to the victims of the situation. Her views on drug policy are equally practical, sensible and, of course, unpopular, borne of the desire to actually help people and reduce the problem, even though it precludes the lofty superiority of those less bothered by engaging with the reality.
In short, she’s the kind of gutsy, down-to-earth, yet highly intelligent heroine who gives Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep the chance to win Oscars. She cuts through the bull as a matter of course and can smell the shite in anyone else’s argument a mile away. She also cheerfully admits to lying about her age whenever she can.
I’m looking forward to this one. I always look forward to an edit, sure, but it never makes it less exciting to look forward to an edit. I just hope I can do the woman justice.
Categories: editing, Personal, politics, Recommendation, tv, Work.
Occasionally, when I have only a little money left to my name and it’s getting me down, I might be tempted to blow it all on a silly purchase of purely entertainment value. It reaffirms that although I may be poor, I’m still in the category of people who can spend money on silly things of purely entertainment value. So it was that, a while ago, I was standing in Sauchiehall Street’s HMV, upstairs in the Comedy section, admiring a box set of Absolutely, a sketch show I used to watch when I was in high school. Back then, it was universally acknowledged to be the best since Monty Python, and we were all lucky to have it. There, in HMV, I seriously considered blowing forty quid I didn’t have on this paean to my formative years, when I first had a TV in my room and could watch whatever I damn-well liked. (In a side note, I’d like to thank the French film industry for featuring so much nudity in their output, and to Britain’s Channel Four for showing so much of it after my parents had gone to bed.)
I didn’t succumb, though. It was too much money, and I, like most folk, have come to realise that much of the time the memory of things is better than the reality of them. Then, the other day, I sauntered onto YouTube to find an oversized banner ad for 4oD (Channel Four on demand, see?). Included with the temporarily available new shows were permanently available older programmes. Among them was Absolutely.
Not only can I report that the show is just as brilliant as it once seemed to my teenage self, putting all subsequent sketch shows to shame, IMHO, but that I discovered to my delight and astonishment that I’d begun watching the show originally from the last episode of the first series. Which meant I had new Absolutely to watch!
All of which is great except for a few things. As YouTube and Channel Four have arranged it, the ads which play before and during the show seem to be independent of the show itself, presumably to keep them replaceably current. A result of this system of dynamic video in the middle of static is that I can’t watch it on my phone. Plus, if I stop the playback for any length of time and try to resume, I get an error message and have to reload the page (and watch the ads again). These could just be teething problems with the new embedded video ad system, but it means that, regardless of content, the videos of amateur uploaders are better than this classic TV. It’s inferior YouTube, from a customer point-of-view. Not the best idea.
Still, better that this great series is available than otherwise, and if I get fed up with Pepsi Max and Sony Bravia ads crashing my browser, I can just ask for the DVD boxset for Christmas, can’t I? Now I know I’m not fooling myself and Absolutely remains the best Scottish comedy since Stanley Baxter went to LWT.
Categories: complaint, confession, Recommendation, tv.
The WordPress app for my phone never used to recognise this blog, and now it does. This pleases me, and to celebrate, I’m blogging directly from my phone for the first time.
The problem, boredom-seekers, lay with my xmlrpc.php file. Understand that before installing the WordPress app, I had no idea what an xmlrpc.php file was, but when I tried to add this self-hosted blog to the app it informed me that not only was I the owner of one, but that there was a problem with it. It seems rpc stands for Remote Procedure Call, and the file uses XML as an agreed format for allowing things like the WordPress app to affect the blog on my server. Or something. The problem is that my host, Namesco, doesn’t let anyone access the xmlrpc.php file as a matter of course because they’re afraid of hackers. I asked them to make an exception in this case, but they responded that none could be made, and if I really wanted to I could change the name of it manually (to something like xmlrpc_fart.php) and tell whoever was wanting to make procedure calls to my blog what I’d called it. Well I didn’t bother doing that. Can you imagine? “Hi, WordPress! Could you recode your iPhone app to look for xmlrpc_fart.php instead of xmlrpc.php just for me please? Ta.”. It turns out, though, that that’s just what they’ve done.
First with an update to v1 of the app and then with a separate app called WordPress 2, when it can’t find the xmlrpc.php it asks you for the new name you’ve chosen for the file. (I’ve cleverly misled the hackers by not calling mine xmlrpc_fart.php!)
So now I can use the app to blog. And I believe I just have.
Categories: Personal, Recommendation.
A lovely way to start Saturday: an email from Tony C. Smith, editor (and captain) of the StarShipSofa, one of the finest SF podcasts around, quoting an email he’d received from a fan that singled yours truly out for praise. I’d narrated a story for one of the ‘Sofa’s Aural Delights episodes, and if you’ll forgive me blowing my own trumpet, here’s an excerpt from the feedback:
There have been far too many exceptional pieces to start naming some of my favorites, because invariably i’ll leave out some of the greats. That said, i do have to give a major shout out to Adam Roberts for the story “Remorse” in episode 30, and to your friend, Kenny Park, for that stunning (and terrifying) narration. I’ve become hooked on audio fiction in the last couple of years, but that has to be the first piece i’ve listened to almost a dozen times…the story is wonderfully horrifying but this is a perfect example of what an excellent narration can do for story enhancement. It was a bar-setting job of narration, and Mr. park deserves an award. And some distance-wow was that creepy! But again, excellent!
Here’s a link to the episode. (And thanks to Mark Hancock for the kind words.)
I became a fan of StarShipSofa years ago, back when it was just Tony and his pal Ciaran chatting about a different SF author every week. It was an informative and frequently hilarious show, friendly, low-key and informal. At the time I had an inkling to do a series of videos interviewing podcasters and YouTubers, as well as their listeners, to highlight the far reach these hobbiests had achieved (and to meet some people I had grown to admire). So I contacted Tony and asked him if I could come and film them doing a show and interview them.
He couldn’t have been nicer about it. I drove down to Newcastle where Tony put me up for the night (as he always did for Ciaran the night before recording a show, which they did every Wednesday before work). In the morning I filmed them doing their thing, which was a hoot, but didn’t have time, in the end, for the interview, meaning I’d have to go back. Before that could happen, though, another situation developed. It turned out that Tony had been talking to none other than the legend that is Michael Moorcock about doing an interview for the ‘Sofa over Skype. Having seen my sensational filming skills first hand, though, he’d evolved the idea into something more substantial. The next time I heard from him it was to propose a trip to Paris, where Moorcock would be for a few weeks, to film an interview in his flat there. How could I refuse?
So we duly flew ourselves over to France, met the great man, had the world’s worst curry and came home. Here’s the result:
Moorcock had donated his excellent story London Bone to the podcast, which began a series of occasional fiction readings between the regular author profiles. These became increasingly popular, and eventually Tony scooped all the Nebula Short Fiction nominees prior to the voting, got Boing-Boinged and StarShipSofa was on the map. Eventually, real life took Ciaran to London and Tony had to make a decision about what to do with the podcast. He opted to continue it, but rather than replace Ciaran (impossible) he mutated the show into a full-blown SF audio magazine, with each episode featuring editorials, fact articles, fiction and even poetry. It even spawned sister podcasts, the StarShip Sanitorium and the Sofanauts.
Right now, Tony is an internet superstar and the StarShipSofa is rightly lauded as one of the greatest SF podcasts around. I haven’t narrated a story for him in a while (I took my usual sweet time to get them recorded and sent to him, not ideal for the production line), but I still love the podcast. Go check it out.
Categories: Acting, Recommendation.
No I never met him, and he hadn’t a clue who I was, but I had a relationship with PJF, and now that he’s passed — at the can’t-complain-age of 91 — I want to write a few words about him and me. Here they are:
When I discovered SF literature, and found that it wasn’t all just Arthurian fantasy and naval adventures in space, but could actually be literature — serious, provokative, important — I crossed the Harlan Ellison event horizon and fell irrevocably towards his anthology, Dangerous Visions, as surely as I would into a black hole. Everyone in the field, it seemed, alluded to it continually, and as far as serious SF reading was concerned, Ellison might as well have called it Start Here¹. Trouble was, there were no current British editions, so the best I could do was hope for American imports, or second hand copies.
At a comics convention in Glasgow, I struck gold. It was an old paperback edition, sold in three parts. The good news was the vender only wanted 50p for each of them, the bad news being he only had the first two to sell. (To this day, I’ve only read two thirds of Dangerous Visions, which may go a long way to explain the major gaps in my reading and personality.) It was a firebrand of a book, a rabble-raising, subversive, trouble-making work. And at the heart of it was Philip José Farmer.
In his introduction to Farmer’s story, Riders of the Purple Wage, Ellison plainly stated that it was his favourite in the collection, and I had read nothing even remotely like it. It was mesmeric, ingulfing and, yes, dangerous. I couldn’t believe I’d never even heard of Philip José Farmer. I had to have more.
So instead of keeping an eye open for Dangerous Visions in the second hand shops, it was PJF I was looking for. Over a year passed before I saw his name on the cover of a book. It was in the long-gone John Smith’s Bookshop on St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, and it was on a large paperback anthology called The Road to Science Fiction Vol. 3: From Heinlein to Here, ed. James Gunn². The Farmer story was not as revolutionary as Wage, but it was charming and clever and did nothing to dull my interest.
Then I did a really smart thing. I went to my local library. They had a full-length novel by this man, Red Orc’s Rage. In it, a young guy in a mental asylum is offered a radical treatment where he projects himself into the fictional World of Tiers. There’s nothing remotely SF about this set up — it was a therapy that had actually been tried, and it was all done through psychological means, no silly technology or anything. The SF element was in those chapters where the protagonist is embroiled in the fantasy world. The fact that in the real world, the real real world, the World of Tiers is a series of Philip José Farmer novels just adds self-referential fun to a fascinating novel. The moment I found it in the library, though, was a defining one for me. I picked it off the shelf and read its first line³ wondering if this would be a maelstrom like the Dangerous Visions story, or just a fun, well-written romp. It read: “Jim Grimson never planned to eat his father’s balls.” I was in love.
From then on, I had far more luck. An Edinburgh second hand bookshop had all but one of the books in the Riverworld series. By the time I got to the missing volume, Borders in Glasgow had American imports of them all, so I bought an actual new copy to complete the series. Since then, I’ve bought every novel, short story collection and anthology with him in it that I’ve come across, and he’s been marvelous company.
Back when I had first discovered Dangerous Visions, I had been in high school. I was in university when reading the Gunn anthology, singing cabaret in a Rothesay hotel when ploughing through the World of Tiers and by the time I was half way through the Riverworld saga, I was at drama school. Specifically, I was in a play, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean by Ed Graczyk, and between my scenes I’d sit in the dressing room (which I had to myself, being the only male in the cast) and read my newly minted copy of The Dark Design. I was very content in those moments.
Though I never met him, never knew him, I’ll miss Philip José Farmer; the same way I miss Stanley Kubrick. People die and people are born, but Philip José Farmer will never be replaced.
Thank you, Phil.
Notes
¹ One in particular that sticks out: I was reading a great deal of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction and his “The Story to End All Stores for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions” was a particular favourite, despite not being the Dick story that was actually in Dangerous Visions.
² This is a very good history of SF book, and I ended up buying the next two volumes, From Here to Forever, and The British Way. Recommended.
³ Not so much anymore, but I used to be obsessed with first lines (which is probably why I’ve always had a hard time getting past them). Slaughterhouse Five is another favourite.
Categories: Personal, Recommendation.
John Scalzi commented on his blog last Sunday that the problem with the editing in a 3D film like Coraline is that the eye must refocus.
I’m dying to see if 3D can become more than a novelty this time around, mostly because I’d love to see how the language of film will change to accommodate it. Scalzi’s is the first sensible discussion along these lines that I’ve come across.
And to address his point, it’s part of the process of cutting from one image to another to be aware of where in the frame the audience’s attention will be (or most likely be) at any given moment. Off the top of my head, think of the cut at the beginning of Bladerunner when Leon shoots Holden for the second time, sending him and his wheeled chair hurtling back. We cut abruptly just as he hits a table to an aerial shot of flying police cars in downtown LA. Where the crashing Holden has just been is now the space between buildings where flies just such a car. Ordinarily, our eye could be drawn to the geisha on the billboard: it’s the biggest object in the frame, most animated and most colourful. But in the previous shot, we can’t help but look at Holden because he’s in motion, and we’re genetically predisposed to look at moving objects over stationary ones. So when they cut to the cityscape, we’re forced to look at the car.
This technique was developed a century ago. Hopefully 3D filmmakers will heed Scalzi’s warning, and learn to consider the Z-plane when designing sequences, filming (or rendering) them and finally cutting them.
This is an exciting time for film making; let’s not screw it up.
Categories: editing, Recommendation.
Rick was just in Dublin, filming U2 for an upcoming Culture Show special. Apparently, Bono expressed his frustration that the metadata of mp3s isn’t exploited nearly enough. He wondered, for instance, why the cover art couldn’t change mid-song, or feature lyrics or just do cooler stuff.
He may be a saint, but he’s a bit behind ole’ Ken on this one, as this blog post demonstrates. So the message is, don’t listen to Bono, listen to me!
P.S. I know now that the pronunciation is Bono, as in “Bon (Jovi) -o” not Bono, as in “Give a dog a Bon(e) -o.”
Categories: Personal, Recommendation.
Checking my stats today I found that someone came to this blog via a simple search for one of the most ubiquitous words on the internet. Doing the same search, I found that my humble blog was, indeed, on the first page of the results.
So how could this mostly unread and ignored corner of t’internet end up in such a prominent position within Google’s Great Map of the Web? Simple: through the awesome power of misspelling! In this case Wikepedia instead of Wikipedia. The typo directed the poor soul (who’s from Aldershot, apparently) to this post on George Clinton.
Now I’d normally go back and edit a spelling mistake having had it pointed out to me. This is to better maintain my image as a wordsmith of at least average skill. This time, however, I will leave the error in place in the hope of luring more unfortunate users into my den of sub-standard english.
Aha, aha, ahahahaha!
Categories: confession, idea, Recommendation.
Here’s a video from the shouldn’t-like-it-but-I-do Buns and Chou Chou, included here for their eloquent treatise on a hairstyle that I’m too old to have and therefore hate and fear.
Categories: Personal, Recommendation.
Here‘s the trailer for Dreamworks’ upcoming film, Monsters vs. Aliens. Didn’t think much of the synopsis, but the trailer genuinely made me lol.
What is it with me lately? I’m supposed to be a serious film buff, and here I have going gooey over commercial fluff. I’ll justify it with the following: I’ll keep a record of how good I think films look and compare it to the films when I see them. It’s really an exploration of how misleading trailers can be, I guess.
Case in point: I thought the latest Indiana Jones movie was utterly terrible, and when I think back to the trailers, I realise that I thought they were a bit shit too. And still, when I went to the first screening, five past midnight on Thursday morning, I was looking forward to it and expecting it to be good.
So all this is to find out if I should have more faith in trailers. Stay tuned…
Categories: complaint, confession, idea, Personal, Recommendation.
I like movies. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’m a bit of a buff. In fact, I’d go further still and say that I’m a film snob. I hate most of what gets made for a mass audience, finding it cynical, misogynistic and insulting. I just saw a trailer for a film co-produced by Nickelodeon which should have me ready to vomit. What can I say, though: I’m a dog kinda person, and this pushes my buttons. So help me, I can’t wait to see it.
Am I bad?
Categories: complaint, confession, Personal, Recommendation.