Why Cloverfield Will Suck

January 13th, 2008

Don’t get me wrong. I’m going to see it, I’m excited as hell, and I’m pretty sure they’re gonna show the monster in all its glory — but I know the movie’s going to suck. Here’s why:

  1. There will be no buildup. My guess is that it starts out at the party, and goes from there. How about five minutes of strange incidents from around the globe, à la the viral videos already released? I don’t want to come into the movie and miss half of it because I’m too lazy to waste time clicking through tie-in websites that pretend to give you vital clues to the plot.
  2. There won’t be a plausible reason for the monster to attack NYC. Perhaps some suspension of disbelief is in order, but the fact that the film is a ‘realistic’ documentary will not play into the plot. Obviously, a gigantic creature that lives underwater will head to NYC, with a million buildings in the way and irritating explosions, to spawn/have fun/feed. I’m pretty sure there’s more food available in the ocean — including that tantalizing Slusho ingredient!
  3. We won’t get more info than what’s on the ‘recovered’ tapes. I love back story, and the shit we’re spoon-fed on the viral marketing websites won’t explain anything about the monster. So we’ll never know if it’s an alien, or a mutation caused by man, or something else. Some will say that this enhances the ‘mystery’, but I’ve had enough uninformed fan speculation from the lead-up to the movie. I want some goddamn answers, not more fanboy theory. I want to know A) what it is, B) why’s it’s pissed, and C) how they stopped it.
  4. There will be an epilogue, but it will leave more questions than answers. This is, after all, the product of J.J. “Lost” Abrams.
  5. They’re gonna waste time on the ‘parasites.’ You know, the little creatures the main monster exudes? The ones that are probably taking a bite out of that chick’s neck outside the medical tent from the 2:00 trailer? I don’t want an Aliens-style crawlspace suspense terror-fest — I want a Godzilla-style smash-the-buildings monster movie.
  6. Is anything more cliché than “I’m going into the city, I don’t care about the 100 story-tall freakazoid, but she’s there and I have to save her?” Stupid romantic subplot detracts from awesome Statue of Liberty-munchin’.

I guess I’m just being pre-irritated by all the hype. I could be wrong; I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

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R.I.P., Pushing Daisies (Prehumously)

October 13th, 2007

Hmmm… a show that is funny, yet dramatic, creatively visual, and has a quirky premise. How many episodes is Pushing Daisies going to last? Four? Seven? Probably, the network execs (ooooh… those vilifiable executives!) will decide that the show’s budget is too high for the ratings it gets, and will push it to… I dunno… Thursdays at 3 a.m.? Or they could kill it outright by moving it to the Friday night death slot.

And then, of course, the inevitable articles lamenting its death, and possibly pointing to the fan outcry as a possibly means of resurrection. Fifty bonus points to each journalist who ‘creatively’ suggests that maybe the should could make a comeback if only it could use the main character’s power on itself!

Or, they could let a show thrive. I’m not brilliant network executive, with private jets and 3-martini lunches, so I can’t interpret the show’s ratings. Maybe it’s doing spectacularly? It would be a sin to kill a show that started so strong, and has so much room to grow.

It really makes you question the nature of death. Can there be a God when a vile, wretched show like Desperate Hosewives will live, probably forever, sucking the blood of the innocent and sinless shows in its wake, while something as cute as Pushing Daisies is almost certain to kick the bucket.

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Blocking JScrollPane arrow keys

October 3rd, 2007

I’m implementing a JPanel inside a JScrollPane, and I want the panel to respond to arrow keys. Unfortunately, pressing arrow keys resulted in the JScrollPane scrolling. If you’re pulling out your hair trying to block JScrollPanes from responding to arrow key events, check out this:

Swing – Disabling of JScrollPane key binding.

Implement this message, and you can prevent the JScrollPane from automatically scrolling.

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“She Looks Like” by Ten Foot Pole

July 2nd, 2007

… is currently what I believe to be the Best Song EverTM. Excerpt:

And I bet she likes dogs and would never hurt a creature
She’d snowboard so high that I almost couldn’t reach her
She’d never tell a lie and she’d leave her friends to be with me

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Mark Knopfler Mondegreen

June 29th, 2007

A mondegreen is a misheard phrase; the canonical example is probably “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”, a mishearing of “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Anyway, my boss Jess thought that in the Mark Knopfler song “Hill Farmer’s Blues” (from The Ragpicker’s Dream), the narrator proclaims “I’m goin’ into town, LOL.” The actual lyric, apparently, is “I’m goin’ into Tow law.” But I think the mondegreen is better.

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A note to TV show producers

April 6th, 2007

You may post new episodes of shows like Battlestar Galactica and The Office on the iTunes store, but you have to do it faster. I can usually find a new episode of such a show from the BitTorrent network an hour after it airs, and can have it downloaded before the night is over. If I miss my show, I want to see it ASAP, not 24 hours after it airs. Get your shows up faster, because I’d much rather pay for and download a new episode right away with the iTunes store instead of waiting for my P2P download to finish. As long as I can get it faster via P2P, I will.

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Wickedpistia

February 6th, 2007

I constantly find reasons never, ever to trust technology enough to become an astronaut.

Reason #1: The iPod-cum-brick. Today, there was an Adobe User Group meeting. On the way across the oval (which has recently become an uncrossable sea thanks to constantly freezing and melting ice sheets which once were snow. It’s pretty neat, because your shoes simultaneously come into contact with 1) water 2) ice and 3) mud, which means that you can get your shoes muddy, soak your feet, and fall on your ass, all at the same time!), I was listening to it just fine. Full charge, no problems, no skipping, nada. I put it away for the meeting. On the way back, the damn thing wouldn’t do anything! No apple screen, no iPod-sticking-his-tongue-out, nothing. I tried to fix it at home, first plugging it into its power adapter. No dice. Then my laptop’s USB. Still, nothing. Reset, reset, reset — zilch. The ‘5 R’s’ yielded no results. So now I apparently have a dead iPod. The worst part is that this isn’t the first time this has happened! About a month ago, I actually had to call tech support. For some reason (and this is before I got through, so the tech-guy-gadget-fixing-auro wasn’t in effect yet), on my twentieth attempt at restarting it (hold-on, hold-off, Menu and Center pressed and held together), it started working. Oh, yeah, and this isn’t even my first iPod! My first one died one day for similarly inexplicable reasons. Gee, Apple, you’d think for a grand total of $650 dollars I could possibly not by an unreliable piece of crap… twice.

Reason #2: Retarded torrents. For some reason (possibly the alignment of the moons), every time I’m downloading sweet TV shows via BitTorrent, nothing works. Usually, setting my client’s encryption to forced or enabled (whichever it currently is not set to) cures the problem. Not tonight. I tried four or five times, then snagged a torrent I knew would have seeds, all to no avail. So I got started on Reason #3 (see below) and came back to it after half an hour when — voilà — it started downloading. Of course, my episode of Heroes was going at 100 k/sec last night, but now, with only a third left, it was going at 20 k/sec, despite having the same number of seeds.

Don’t you love that? It seems that, regardless of your method of illicit p2p download (BitTorrent, Gnutella, even ancient Napster), you always wind up having 5 minutes left on your download for at least an hour, often more time. I assume my seeders are all d-bags who coordinate their efforts to frustrate me just enough so that I come back for next week’s episode.

Reason #3: Tried to write a paper about Python (the language, not the aeronautical beast). Finished it. Tried to upload it with the shitty Blackboard upload applet (that’s right! Start the JVM to accomplish something that can be done with a plain old HTML form!). Guess what? FireFox crashed! Tried in IE — now the whole box crashes! And I’m not running a bunch of crap software, as far as I know. After the restart, it went right up. But I found it amusing that submitting the paper took about 3% of the entire time spent on the damn thing.

Wait. It wasn’t amusing. It PISSED ME OFF.

By the way, while writing this I must have clicked out of the form text area and tried to delete something, because I hit backspace and immediately navigated away from the page. My blood boiled for half a second as I realized I might have lost this entire rant. To Blogger’s credit, it did warn me. But I’m so used to irritating popup messages that I typically click through familiar ones without thinking them through. Thankfully, I’m paranoid enough to copy and paste (
just did it) after ever sentence as a poor man’s save.

And I was going to try to install Windows Vista on my computer tonight. With my tech karma right now, the setup would probably error out so immensely, so enormously that I’d wind up reformatting my Mac’s hard drive, too.

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Four Years Old

January 31st, 2007

By the way, this blog is around four years old today. As we all know on the Internets, four years is an eternity. In light of the stupidity in Boston, I think I’ll listen to some “Spirit Journey Formation Anniversity”, but definately not Carl’s favorite song, “More Than A Feeling.” I want nothing to do with the band Boston, or the city.

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Pissy-Pant Pusillanimous People in… Boston

January 31st, 2007

Have you heard about the bomb scare in Boston? Advertisements for Aqua Teen Hunger Force were placed in 10 locations around the city, in a ‘guerilla marketing’ campaign. They feature the Mooninites, and, according to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, each device “had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires.”

A battery. And wires. Soooooo scary!

Christ. I own so many things that could be mistaken for bombs, I must be a threat, too. We better outlaw all Lite-Brites in Massachusetts, too!

What really gets my goat about this whole thing is the overreaction. Even after Turner Broadcasting has admitted that they’re advertisements for their show, the authorities are still taking them down. So as the bill for a simple bomb scare climbs into the ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ (according to the Boston authorities), they’re still wasting money when they know there are no bombs. The article even mentions that NORAD is watching over things. That’s good, in case the Mooninites form the Quad Laser, right?

Boston’s mayor called the campaign “outrageous”, and blaming it on “corporate greed.” Come again? In this context, then all advertisement is about corporate greed, right? After all, having a product (in this case, a TV show) and wanting to sell it is a greedy thing to do. It sounds to me like the Boston authorities are being the greedy ones. If they can, they’ll try to get some money out of this from Turner. All because of their overreaction to perfectly harmless light boards!

Edward Davis, the Boston Police Commissioner, had this little nugget of wisdom to comment on the scare: “In the environment nowadays … we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened.” If there is an ‘environment’, then I’m thinking it’s one of fear. Terror… even. So, if we react to terror in such a pusillanimous way, aren’t the real terrorists (the ones who kill innocent people to scare others) getting exactly what they want?

This has me so angry, I’m going to watch all of the ATHF Mooninite episodes back-to-back-to-back. I just hope that nobody sees Ignignokt flipping the bird through my window, or they might call in a bomb scare!

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Back From the Bo-Zone / inside

January 17th, 2007

Just got back from Bozeman a few hours ago. Jesse, AJo, Andy, Cullen and I went there to check out how their ResNet program compares to our DirectConnect program. It was informative, despite the fact that we spent twice as long traveling (eight hours) as we did doing what we came there to do (four hours). They’ve got complete control of their network (we don’t), so they can do stuff like VLAN switching and bandwidth control much easier than we can. Their web-based tools aren’t as pretty as ours, however. This is a result of my design-first, code-second philosophy.

We stayed at the Western Heritage Inn, which sounds like a front for a white power group (“Free racist mint on every pillow!”). We all played Mario Kart 64 until the wee hours of the morn; this includes my boss Jesse, which pretty much makes him the coolest boss ever.

On an altogether unrelated note, last weekend I finished vocals for inside, the new record that I’ve been working on for two years. Tracks:

  1. I Miss You – slow, moody homesickness song.
  2. This Could Be Any Day – uptempo piano pop with strings.
  3. Fret – a worried dirge.
  4. Temperamental – frenetic song about changing moods at the drop of a hat.
  5. Mary’s Plea – A synth-folk number about abortion.
  6. Jenny Lewis Will Never Go Out With You – The name says it all. Power pop.
  7. Here There Be Monsters – A riff-heavy song with horns and strings.
  8. Let’s Get Away – Lolling folk about hitting the road, Jack.
  9. Written Off – An angry folk song about cowardly homophobes.
  10. Soap – A peppy song about a shower (more philosophical than prurient)
  11. Torn – A synthy yet rocky song with beats.
  12. Polarize – Quasi-raggae horn-infused polemic.
  13. Glut of Food – Synthy
  14. The Highway – Folk-rock about Interstate 90.

It sounds pretty good. I’ll probably have CDPrintExpress run up copies again, considering the fantastic job they did on Pick Your Poison. I also have plans in the works for an EP by Page Fault, my hardcore pet project. It’s an EP called Two Minute Hate.

But first, I plan to record some B-side vocals over the weekend while I’m visiting my parents. A country song about finding god (“Lifted Up”) is first on my list. I haven’t really found him (perhaps he’s hiding under the covers), but I find songs like it beautiful. I would also like to re-record the vocals for “Synth Pop” (not its final title), a former album cut for inside but now relegated to B-side status. I might also do a ‘stripped’ version of “Written Off”, with just vocals and acoustic guitar.

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