Green Anchors and Red Streams

It's a good thing Scaroth had Leonardo da Vinci paint seven of these.

I liked last week's Doctor Who, I liked this week's more, and not just because there wasn't a kid in it. "The Girl who Waited" used an interesting, very Sci-Fi concept to effectively discuss what people mean to each other, and the inevitability of some people losing.



Rory's angry line to the Doctor about how the business was turning him into someone like the Doctor was slightly an awkward line, but it was useful as it brought us to one of those moments where we see how the Doctor sees the universe, how he sees potential realities and people and how he's learned to live with making decisions that result in some people not just dying but never coming into existence.



It was maybe milked a little too much at the end, but the elder Amy's selflessness along with the very clear indication that she wanted to survive heightened the terrible catch 22 of the story.

The episode also had a very nice look, sort of superflat. A good model of how a low budget episode that doesn't take place on Earth could work, though I imagine the impressive aging makeup on older Amy cost a pretty penny.

The Right Fake Object to Trust

This freebie mermaid tail from Curious Kitties is the first mesh item in Second Life I actually wanted. Mind you, it's only the tail--the rest of the outfit is bits from Bare Rose's Droi outfit, mask is by Illusions.

Mesh is a form of 3D, cg object most people are quite accustomed to seeing in most video games, but Second Life has always instead worked with prims. I'm not entirely sure what the pros and cons are of the two systems, but mesh seems to be much bendier, while I've noticed prim flexi hair generally looks a lot better than any hair I've seen in any video game, which almost always, unless it's very short, looks like a wad of clay.

But it's in things like mermaid tails I can see meshes might really shine--old mermaid tails had to be made of solid segments. Meshes will also be an improvement for those who want thigh high boots, as meshes can bend at the knee, and maybe people will finally be able to make decent regency style gowns--gowns where the skirt portion begins at the chest. Prim gowns of the sort tended to look bad once your avatar started walking as the whole lower portion of the body went right through the material.

The main drawback of meshes right now is that only Viewer 2 based viewers support them. Second Life's Viewer 2 is notoriously buggy, bloated, and hampered by an awkward interface. This led a lot of people, like me, to use Viewer 1 based third party viewers like Phoenix which accommodate a lot of Viewer 2's system upgrades without a lot of the Viewer 2 mucky GUI. Unfortunately, not even Phoenix can handle meshes at this point. The same people who made Phoenix have made a Viewer 2 based viewer called Firestorm, which I'm using now. Which is better than a vanilla Viewer 2, but still features a lot of the pointless changes from Viewer 1.

Even as I am getting used to Firestorm, I'm still reluctant to put mesh items on my avatar as I know half the people I come across will see in place of my av enormous walking spheres and boxes, which is how meshes appear in viewers that don't support them. I guess it's a contest to see whether Viewer 1 viewers or meshes will become obsolete. I guess I'm betting the viewers will.



Twitter Sonnet #301

Poison clovers killed the government yam.
Wayward bees aged with pollen saddle bags.
Pop-O-Matic dice can only speak slam.
Thimbles were unjustly reduced to rags.
The wrong trilby reveals a Yankee girl.
Horse pill salt burdens a tiny olive.
Pangaea marble's more than God could hurl.
Mesh tonsils grant you an extra octave.
Happy coyotes careen in blue streets.
Some confused candles blush the odd window.
Walking canines know when a night wind eats.
Red noses smother in oil rainbow.
Blitzed wolves whitely scratch McDonalds' forehead.
No-one's quite sure what the power man said.

Back from the Middle Ages

Whiskey and Solitaire by candle light. Not as romantic as it sounds. But not bad. Not as different from whiskey and World of Warcraft as you'd think. I actually spent more time reading while the power was out--reading Oliver Twist (which I started a couple weeks ago) I felt oddly like I was bonding with a story written in a time when candle light was the normal illumination at night. Never mind I was reading it off my Kindle.

I also broke out books on the Middle Ages and the Victorian era to look for recipes and methods of cooking. I was scheming about how I might cook a stew because word was this power outage was going to last probably until Friday night.

It sure caught me unprepared. At first I thought the power was out in just the neighbourhood, so I decided to drive to a mall in another part of town for lunch, hoping things would be fixed by the time I got back. But as I drove further and further, noticing stoplights off at greater and greater distances, I kept driving, thinking I could get ahead of it. I stopped in a shopping centre around 30 miles from home where none of the stores were letting people use the bathroom and it wasn't until I got to the Denny's across the street that I was able to talk someone into letting me pee.

Traffic was nuts, of course. It took forever to get anywhere, and I had only half a tank of gas and a one dollar bill--it wasn't like I could use an ATM. All the businesses were closed except for the independent, foreign restaurants. Places that weren't run by teenagers crippled without cash registers. It really is a shame I didn't have more cash and it was a long time before I got lunch, but I can't complain as I know this has to have been a lot worse for a lot of other people. In case you haven't read about it, the power went out in large parts of Arizona, southern California, and northern Mexico. I'll be very surprised if I hear there weren't fatalities.

Of course, I didn't hear about the extent of the power outage until my mother finally got through to me on my cell phone when I was on the freeway heading north--cell phones had been unreliable all day. I was trying to get to north county, fifty or so miles away. I'd thought at first, "Maybe the power's out up there too." But I'd laughed at myself and thought, "Come on. That's paranoid thinking. There's no way the power could be out all the way up there." It wasn't until I got home that I remembered the more than hundred year old invention called "radio" that's installed in my automobile with which I may have been better informed of the scale of the problem. It really is lucky my mother got through on my phone, or I'd have been stuck.

They're saying now it was a guy switching out a faulty piece of equipment in Arizona that caused it. Which sounds just a little wacky, if you ask me. How can that cause so many independent power grids to all go out simultaneously? I'm hardly an expert, I'm not even an interested layman, but I can't help thinking there was more to this.

If Happy Little Egrets Fly Above the Sewage

After heavy rain the night before, yesterday was a cloudless and extremely hot day, which I thought would make the wildlife interesting. Mainly it seemed to have brought out a lot of bees and enormous dragonflies, no mosquitoes for some reason.

I was planning on walking to the store but I found walking just a short distance in the heat exhausted me. And it was only 95 degrees. What happened to the me who stood in line at Comic-Con in 111 heat? Maybe it helps to have a bigger object in mind.

No time to-day for a really proper entry--I suppose sooner or later I'll get the hang of school days.

Where Men Yell

I dreamt last night I was travelling with Rory, Amy, and the fifth Doctor, for some reason, not the eleventh. Our current adventure involved Amy and Rory accidentally blowing up an office building with a bomb made out of a Pepsi can and an investigation into the filming of the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie which for some reason required the Doctor to wear a black sweater and a denim micro-miniskirt.



THIS IS TWITTER SONNET #300!

Gleaming muffins of hardened dough stand up.
Pride grits white teeth in clouds of mouthwash strobe.
Brown fur makes the chosen athletic cup
Of the homoerotic homophobe.
Ketchup coloured capes cover the big men.
Piled skulls play an unholy Jenga.
Bulging balls of eye slap to the hard win.
Berserker Roo screams from the mad Kanga.
Sexist Scots skewer the straw man shogun.
Photogenic minstrels slowly orgy.
Anachronistic orcs join Al Jolson.
Death awaits the mild and the podgy.
Elephants sob to see tomato hell.
Such sauce rains where the naked man tits fell.

That video took a lot more effort than I thought it would. I started out trying to make a new world space in Oblivion, but when I realised how long it was going to take placing individual rocks to get a decent landscape, I just modified an existing cell, changing the weather to constant thunderstorm. I got an idea of how tedious it was to make decent landscape--it's no wonder modern video game developers are notorious for slacking off.

Tim told me a couple weeks ago how flagrantly critics are being paid off by video game developers--the most extreme example apparently is Dragon Age II which, on Metacritic has an average score from critics of 82 while the average user score 4.2.

Anyway, once I got the A.I. working on the Spartans and Persians/ninjas, I was actually able to get quite a lot of footage. I could've gone on all day. I love the radiant A.I. of the NPCs in Oblivion, it's just so weird. I have no idea why that guy decided to touch his chin thoughtfully at the end. Early on I had a couple ogres among the Persians and all the Spartans ganged up on one ogre who for some reason decided not to fight back. They all pushed him into the water, not unlike the scene from 300, except all the Spartans followed the ogre right into the water. Maybe I should post a video of outtakes. I could use the last take of my reading where I was trying to get louder and make my Scottish accent sound less Jamaican but my voice gave out halfway through. Maybe I shouldn't have been recording while drinking my morning coffee.

Incidentally, I wasn't controlling any of the men in the video. My character was a safe distance away from the nonsense.

Our Would-Be Elves

How racist is the cover of the Globe to-day? On so many levels. I can't believe even the most foaming at the mouth nutjob would still be going after the citizenship angle, but that's just one part of the Easter basket of bad, cartoonish manipulations going on in this cover. First of all, "Cops probe Obama"? And the picture makes it look like reporters tracked Obama to a Florida safe house.

I saw this at the grocery store and I wasn't the one who pulled it out of the rack, suggesting someone waiting in line perused it. Hopefully it was in amused disbelief.



I walked to the grocery store despite the fact that it started raining to-day--spurts of big drops accompanied by distant thunder. Maybe it would feel like summer had abruptly ended with August except it was still incredibly hot to-day, stifling under the overcast sky. It was Miig'Jaiach weather.



Last night I had a dream that started out bad but then just got strange. I was eating at a restaurant that doesn't exist in Parkway Plaza shopping mall, which does exist. I was eating with three friends who don't exist, two men and one woman. The men didn't look familiar, but the woman looked like Sarah Silverman in a blonde wig. When we finished eating, we went to the mall parking garage and could not find the car we came in, which was a big car with hard angles, like something from the 1970s, painted a pale, bright, pinkish purple. We searched all four floors of the parking garage before we realised we had to search a nearby office building. We asked a five year old boy who lived in there, in a bedroom covered with bright green astroturf, if he knew where our car was, but he only sniffed, shook his head, and curled up in a ball. Finally, I came across a tall man dressed as an Oompa Loompa. I asked him if he, by any chance, repainted random cars in the parking garage while their owners were away. He said he did, and the reason we hadn't found our car was that it was now red and on a different level of the garage.

Taking Pictures in Glass Houses

I'm definitely not a professional photographer. I find myself irritated lately at my lack of knowledge about photography and the uncertainty of where to begin looking for information. I suppose I could actually go to a library, huh? I was looking through books on photography at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago and even the slimmest volume is well outside my price range.

It seems to me that we live in an economic system that functions almost entirely through robbery. There's this basic idea supposedly behind capitalism that money represents the value of a certain amount of hard work, that you earn a certain amount. I'm not sure anyone ever really thought, "What work or contribution can I make to the human race to justify me and my family continuing to live?" People quite naturally think in terms of what they can do to survive, and beyond that, what they can do to secure a future. I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with that--I don't think we should expect everyone to be heroes. But it's a system of theft--there's no real, objective way to measure whether people receive precisely the amount of money they "deserve". Maybe it's partly because of this we sense basically everyone makes more or makes less than the amount of money reflecting their contribution to society and/or reflecting what they need to survive.



Anyway, one bit of the essentially free pieces of knowledge about photography I picked up was from Peter Bogdanovich's DVD commentary on my copy of The Searchers where he recounted a story of a young Steven Spielberg meeting John Ford. The photographer who writes this blog recalls seeing the same story told in a documentary made by Bogdanovich;

Told by Ford to look at a series of Western paintings on the wall and tell him what he saw, the young Spielberg saw only narrative — an Indian on a horse, etc. Ford told him to look at the composition, look at the horizon line — it was low in one picture, high in another picture.

"When you can decide that putting the horizon at the top of the frame or the bottom of the frame is better than putting it in the middle of the frame, you may, someday, make a good picture maker. Now get outta here."

So this is one rule I generally adhere to when taking pictures. It's very easy to see that Ford's right when I see pictures taken by photographers who frequently put the horizon in the centre of the frame--in addition to the plainness of the horizon being in a sort of default position, it creates a disconnect from subject and often, particularly in pictures taken on a clear day, leaves a lot of dead space. Not enough sky to create an impression of an overhead, overwhelming emptiness, too much sky to not seem like it's part of the picture. It works out to be noise.

Here are some pictures I took at San Diego's Old Town on Friday;









An oven. It was really hard to get pictures of the inside of the oven--I wish I'd set the exposure lower, but it's hard to tell sometimes when the sun's blazing on the camera's viewer.




An office inside the old print shop. I didn't have much flexibility for angles in these rooms--I was poking my camera through little slits under glass windows that created a hopeless amount of glare.




Of course, I couldn't help thinking of Vertigo.



This was the last picture I took before my new battery ran out. Maybe I should've charged it before using it.

From Across Civilisations and Red Things and Stuff

I somehow went a whole week without watching Doctor Who--the first time since I started watching the show in April last year. Which I think made me appreciate the new episode, "Night Terrors", a little more. It's not a bad episode, though I had some problems with it, two of which are mentioned in this review--

a) Enough with the kids. I, too, remember hating it when shows and movies gave me the POV kid to relate to. The last thing a kid wants to relate to is another kid. I remember it almost always felt patronising and made me feel oddly competitive with the kid on screen. I liked Time Bandits, but I especially liked the end of Time Bandits.

b) No-one questions the fact that a little boy has a dollhouse with peg dolls? I'm all for kids exploring non-traditional gender roles, but it's unusual enough still you'd expect characters to ask questions about it.

Also, I'm tired of the Doctor proclaiming, "I'm the Doctor!" all the time. You know, from now on I think whenever I put forth an argument I'm going to conclude with, "and because I'm Setsuled!" especially if I'm talking to someone who hasn't heard of me.

According to Wikipedia, using a radio interview as a source, "Night Terrors" writer Mark Gatiss said "he had always been scared of dolls, and was surprised that Doctor Who had never used them before." Which surprises me too, since I remember seeing an episode with this guy;



And these guys;



I guess I dreamed those, like I dreamed there was a mostly missing serial about deadly toys called The Celestial Toymaker.

But the dolls in "Night Terrors" were pretty effective. I thought Amy and Rory should've figured out what was going on as soon as Amy found a wooden pan painted to look like copper, but then, who would expect such a thing not to be made out of plastic in this day and age? I suspect we saw more wood and less plastic due to budgetary issues.



The episode explores childhood stress related to alienation and fear of abandonment. In a clever way, it acknowledges truth in the child's feeling alien while also pointing out that whether or not a kid is alien shouldn't shut down a parent's love. So, that's good. But I'm glad next week's episode looks like it won't have a kid.

Twitter Sonnet #299

Dry water stops a snowy nutrition.
Stripes extend school hours past their virtue.
Pretty late students learn by contrition.
Harmless Simpsons bring penis to statue.
Ears only authorise your audio.
Sound rains like old bricks on a canvas throne.
Armadillo paste holds the rodeo.
Soft shelled horses to-day can make no bone.
Cannons intimidate green liver spots.
Ghosts determine museum ticket prices.
The glib new hacienda slowly rots.
Wrought iron men have pipe cleaner vices.
Forgotten soldiers surround Gulliver.
Happiness corrodes a cherry liver.

Cutting Valentine Patterns

Howard Hawks is famous for being able to direct any kind of movie, from a noir like The Big Sleep, to a Science Fiction film like The Thing from Another World. The 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the first comedy musical of his I've seen, and mostly I was reminded of his earlier screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby. There's even a rather explicit nod to the earlier film when Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell steal a guy's pants and put him in a frilly girl's bathrobe. The movie's not quite as ingenious as Bringing Up Baby, but it's a fine film. It goes down smooth--for most of it, I was just content to keep my eyes on it. It's decently shot and edited, the writing doesn't make me want to claw my brain out.

Some people might find the shameless pursuit of rich men by Monroe's character to be dated and ugly. I'm not entirely convinced it's either--certainly it's not dated in a world that continues to glorify conspicuous materialism.

As for ugly, I don't know if Monroe was capable of ugly. Of course her character's shallow, but as she sort of points out, it's the shallow who survive in this world. Which might be more depressing if the musical number that hammers the idea home at the end weren't so wonderful.



The movie's good, the musical number is great. Monroe seems to come rather brilliantly alive in it, something mirrored by the intense pinks, reds, and blacks.



Jane Russell has one by herself earlier in the film which is not half as effective. I don't think the woman in black slacks with a bunch of nearly naked guys dancing has quite the vibe it was meant to have.



It looks like the lunch lady supervising gym class. Being sexy next to Marilyn Monroe may be a hopeless task--Russell's character provides an interesting counterpoint in that she's sharp and sassy compared to Monroe's sleepy amorality. Which is a change from The Outlaw, the only other movie I've seen Russell in, and which also had Howard Hawks as director until Howard Hughes fired him because he wasn't making the movie salacious enough. One can learn a lot from the fact that The Outlaw comes off as crude and unintentionally silly with its broad eye winking THE CHARACTERS WHO WENT OFF SCREEN ARE GOING TO HAVE SEX NOW while Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is effortlessly sexy by comparison. The latter film benefits from not having the tone of a thirteen year old boy giggling at a mannequin in a lingerie store window.



This bit where Monroe is stuck in a porthole is surprisingly sexy. I bet a lot of guys wished they could've been the porthole.

For some reason Charles Coburn gets third billing. That's this guy;



Probably not the first, or even third, face that comes to mind when people think of this movie, but hey, he was a great character actor who'd been around a while. And he got to cuddle with Marilyn Monroe, so good on him.

What Makes a Hood

I found the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro surprisingly underwhelming. I guess after enjoying The Black Swan, I assumed Tyrone Power's more famous swashbuckler would be an even better film. Instead, I was surprised to find a movie that borrowed heavily from the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, in many ways the plot being only a combination of Robin Hood and the 1920 Mark of Zorro, of which the Tyrone Power movie is a remake. There are two actors, Basil Rathbone and Eugene Pallete, from Robin Hood cast in essentially the same roles. Eugene Pallette even wears almost the same costume.




Almost every significant difference between the 1940 and 1920 films can be traced to Robin Hood--emphasis is placed on people oppressed by heavy taxation in the latter film while the 1920 version seems to refer less specifically to an "oppression" of the "natives" and priests, sometimes shown in the form of beatings by Mexican soldiers. The 1940 version also sees Zorro robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.



The similarities highlight the superiority of The Adventures of Robin Hood. One of the reasons I was excited to watch The Mark of Zorro was that I'd read Basil Rathbone had said Tyrone Power was a much better swordsman than Errol Flynn. This might be true, but the climactic duel in Robin Hood is still a vastly superior scene. If I were to compare live duels, one between Rathbone and Flynn and another between Rathbone and Power, I might consider the one with Power the better--Power's much faster, much more accurate. But what counts in making something work in a film is good filmmaking.

Obviously, the fact that Robin Hood is in Technicolor and The Mark of Zorro is in black and white is one issue. But there's also the fact that the Zorro fight is confined to one relatively small room while the Robin Hood scene ranges throughout enormous castle halls, and up and down staircases. Both scenes make use of candle slashing and furniture tumbling, but Robin Hood has things like the characters moving off-screen and their shadows cast huge over a column.



And there's a great use of close-ups in Robin Hood--I agree with Fred Astaire's philosophy that in a good dance musical you want to see the dancers full frame in takes as long as possible. The difference is that Fred Astaire's really dancing, while the swordsmen in these films are only actually pretending to fight. Power and Rathbone is a technically great pantomime of movement, but the important thing is the characters and what the encounter means to them. Robin Hood better communicates this feeling, not just because of how the particular scene was shot but also because the personal conflict between the two men is set up much better. We had seen Robin Hood mocking Sir Guy to his face many times, we'd seen him humiliate him by ambushing him and taking his clothes, and this is followed by Sir Guy smugly cutting off Robin's smart remarks after he'd caught Robin at the archery tournament. There's a high stakes pissing contest between the two throughout the movie.

In The Mark of Zorro, Rathbone's character dies without even knowing for sure Don Diego and Zorro are the same person. As far as Captain Pasquale is concerned, he's never had a real conversation with Zorro.

The 1920 version is shorter on swordfights, and fencing seems to having gotten drastically better in the 1930s. The 1920 film features a lot of guys just sort of smashing their swords against each other at the same angle. More focus is given to Douglas Fairbanks' skills as an acrobat.



The influence on Batman is quite clear, particularly in a scene of Zorro swinging from a rope to evade and attack his pursuers. Douglas Fairbanks had oddly bad posture for an acrobat, but it is amazing to watch him effortlessly leap over walls, donkeys, and fences. I marvelled as he picked up the female lead, ran with her, leapt over a wall and ducked into a house. The last time I tried to lift a young, skinny woman who'd passed out from drink I could barely move her a few inches*. Fairbanks didn't even break stride. Yet he looks like such a little guy;



I liked how you see him in the Zorro costume a lot more often than you see it in the 1940 version. Though Fairbanks had a far less masculine figure than Tyrone Power. In the final analysis, I'd have to say the Fairbanks Zorro is more effective than the Power Zorro simply by being much odder. Fairbanks' odd posture, his manic grin, and cigarette smoke make Zorro seem more like a creature.



*Yes, I am weak.