fine whine

I’ve been playing with POV-Ray again, making 3d models and rendering them. It’s the program I used back when I was rendering LEGO models, and I had even used it for a college class to make some very impressive prototype mockups, but I haven’t touched it in over a year and thought I was getting rusty. The POV-Ray Scene Description Language isn’t exactly difficult, just complicated.

I write it all by hand, of course. Figuring out how to easily turn primitive shapes and solids (cones, spheres, boxes, planes) into interesting objects is just half of the challenge: the other half, of course, being the typing them in without making too many mistakes part. There are programs out there that can do it all visually on screen, all CAD-like and cool, but that’s just not my bag, baby.

So what was my project this time? Pac-Man. I wanted to be all authentic, so I tracked down an arcade ROM* and a program to emulate it (thank you XMAME) and then set out in my quest to have a pixel-proportionate copy of the game screen, minus the titular character and ghosts.

Well, for now minus them. They’re not exactly so complicated that I couldn’t duplicate them with some more simple shapes…

So this is what I have, more or less. The key is turning it into something cool.

* Actually the ROM I ended up using is the original Japanese Puck-Man, but when Namco brought the hallowed game to our shores somebody smart noticed that the name (in big bold letters on the side of the cabinet) could very, very easily be changed to something not quite appropriate for an arcade full of impressionable kids.

Incidentally, I wasn’t really ever that big a fan of Pac-Man. I never played it in an arcade. We had it for the Atari 2600 (say what you will about that not being a true port, it was the best we could get) but it was the first, and only, game cartridge that has ever died. Pac-Man has brought me little but trouble all along, I guess. The reason I ended up with Puck-Man was that I was having some minor difficulties with XMAME reading the correct pacman.zip, so I gave up and went with what worked. It’s the same game anyway.

Instead of my usual exciting start of the workday, this morning I was up bright and earlier, and just sitting around. In fact, I sat around from about eight thirty until just before noon. I was waiting around because Jessica was having foot surgery.

I miss out on all the excitement.

She got through it fine, by the way. With the anesthesia she didn’t even know it was happening until it was over.

I, on the other hand, was forced to endure those three hours more or less awake, in the waiting room with nice-looking (i.e. expensive) chairs that weren’t all that comfortable for long term occupancy and a television blaring the Fox News channel.

The channel gets a bad rap, I guess, but by not having cable and not watching television in general, I don’t run into it very much and haven’t formed much of an opinion. From what I’ve heard their programs are rather abrasive and biased or worse.

Today was a special day, though, and instead of their regularly scheduled programming the channel seemed to be in live crisis mode.

To be honest, the last time I even saw more than a channel flip’s worth of Fox News they were in crisis mode, back in September of 2001. They haven’t gotten any better at it.

This morning’s crisis was across the pond, seemingly a re-hash of the mass transit bombings a fortnight ago. From what I heard, that was quite the tragedy and many lives were lost. All in all, a bad thing. And that’s about the extent of my feelings about it. Call me callous or self-centered or whatever but what I feel won’t change one bit of those people’s lives for the better (or the worse).

But that’s last week. Today’s crisis was seemingly a series of diversions, detonators detonated without explosives exploded. Of course, at the beginning, we didn’t even know that much.

When we first arrived in the waiting room the screen was showing street-level footage of cars, buses and people, interspersed with a map of downtown London with one or two tube stations marked.

Two hours later, that map hadn’t changed except that the arrows now pointed to little blue red and white Underground icons, not just points on the map. Woo hoo.

Of course they weren’t just showing the map; they also had rivetingly boring footage of the same streets over and over. Occasionally they framed a British station, complete with its own ticker, clock and other eye candy, inside their own ticker and so on. The footage was the same, just an extra border or two.

The real action was in the voiceover. The ‘host’ was talking to anybody he could find, apparently, some on the scene and others just watching the show. He was asking the people such hard hitting questions as “What do you hear?” and “Do you smell anything?”

This focus on the senses struck me. Obviously there was nothing they could show us, so was this an effort by the news folks to get us to somehow experience some of the chaos and confusion? Difficult to say.

An oft-repeated litany was “We don’t know”. Nobody seemed to know anything for the hours of the broadcast while I was there. Some people had smelled and heard odd things, and some reported seeing a suspicious tall African American or Asian wearing a hoodie with wires hanging out the back. He eluded the bobbies, but the news people, despite knowing nothing about him other than that “tall African American or Asian wearing a hoodie with wires hanging out the back” so they just repeated that over and over, like some kind of moronic chant, an invocation to call this suspect out of hiding.

That was the main thing that bothered me: they had nothing to tell. Live coverage is only significant if something is happening, and largely, during the hours I heard the show, most everything was unknown or under control. It is a testament to London’s emergency response teams that most everything was buttoned down and everyone largely safe.

Anyway, I didn’t stick around long enough to get any real facts, so I don’t know what actually happened. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. Very little that happens in the subways of London is affected by me and what I know, and very little that happens there affects me. I know that terrorism cannot be tolerated anywhere, and it is important to know that something has happened, but I don’t need a play by play, especially when nothing’s happening.

I think I’ve begun to lapse into saying “actually” too much again. Perhaps I pad my words because I come up with little worth saying or writing lately.

Next up? “um”s and “like”s, methinks.

When information about people is publicly available it changes the dynamic of communication between people.

Not to say that the whole internet thing didn’t change the communication dynamic, but that’s rather a bit obvious and yet uninteresting to discuss.

Anyway, this leads me to a question: if somebody you know is hospitalized, and somebody else is faithfully posting updates on his condition, should you still call to see how he’s doing? I’m sure the gesture would be appreciated, but does the fact that I even ask this preclude a time later when even such a thing would be considered redundant or pointless? Probably not.

We Douglas Adams fans have been waiting a long time for a big-screen Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy adaptation for a long time, and I waited just a bit longer for it to hit the cheap second-run theaters.

Was it worth the wait, and the (reduced) ticket price? More or less.

There will never be a way to fully adapt a book to a film, let alone ones so literarily funny like the Adams oeuvre, but they made a decent attempt. This is a body of work that has appeared as a radio show, a series of books, computer games, a BBC series, and now a movie.

Well, somewhere along the line there was a picture book, but I don’t believe that it has been truly accepted as canon even as much as the short story “Young Zaphod plays it safe” has. The visuals here and there looked a little bit like the movie, but that might just be what I’m remembering of the wall-to-wall white decor of the Heart of Gold, the stolen space ship on which much of the action takes place.

For some reason I’d always pictured the Heart of Gold to be, well, a bit pointier. That wasn’t the only thing not quite to my expectations. The guns brandished here and there were all smooth and friendly looking, the very opposite of the Kill-o-Zap blasters described in the books as looking evil, with an end in front of which the target clearly and obviously didn’t want to be. Either the production designers wimped out or this just fell by the wayside.

A lot of incidental bits fell by the wayside. Never does Ford Prefect (played adequately enough by Mos Def) explain the importance of knowing where one’s towel is, nor even why he curses “Belgium” under his breath at one point. The filmmaker’s attempt to explain his name (having him attempting to shake hands with what looked like a Mini speeding toward him) and the joke therein (he picked the wrong dominant species, name-wise) was a nice attempt, but a bit lacking in the thought and execution departments.

On the other hand, turning it into something of a love story between Arthur and Trillian was acceptable, given that the books don’t lend themselves well to a single narrative that would clock in under four or five hours. I’m thinking that there’s a little bit of the puppy-dogged moping and unrequited love/lust to be found in the books (that I just wasn’t looking for when I read them) but it was certainly cranked up a notch or two. Bully for them, it basically worked.

I’m going to get into more of the meat of things, so if you don’t want things spoiled don’t click on the “more” link below. Suffice to say I think I got my money’s worth out of this film and will look forward to seeing it again on DVD, provided there are tasty extras. I know the producers hoped for the opportunity to film a sequel, and I for one welcome the opportunity to watch one.

(more…)

I don’t know why I should have, but I really, really enjoyed watching The longest yard.

It’s brash, it’s misogynistic, it’s dated, it’s too long, it’s shallow and clichéd, it’s inconsistently edited, it’s violent, it’s got criminals for the heroes, it’s no longer a critical darling, and I loved it.

I knew very little about it before I watched it. A couple years ago I’d seen the first few minutes (the ones before Burt beats his girlfriend, steals her car, drives drunk, and leads a police chase and resists arrest) and not been hooked. I taped over my copy of it with something else I probably haven’t watched, and didn’t give the film much thought until I heard, not so long ago, about this year’s remake. Being something of a reverse remake fan (in that I like to check out the originals first, if I ever watch the remakes at all), and still something of a fan of real special editions of DVDs (or at least expanded re-releases), once I discovered that the library had procured the so-called “Lockdown edition” (and moreover that it was widescreen, the real criterion I was seeking), I reserved it on what might resemble a lark from a distance.

From a distance it’s difficult to make this sound like a worthwhile movie. It’s about an admitted point-shaving drunk ex-footballer guy who’s violent to women and apathetic about pretty much anything. He gets thrown in a jail run by a sadistic warden (Eddie Albert of Green acres, very much against type) who’s as mad about football as he is about discipline. The warden wants Reynolds to give his guards and their semi-pro football team some pointers, but he refuses.

He doesn’t want to give in to anybody. It’s an anti-establishment statement, after all.

After some goading, and the requisite awkward bonding with a few of his fellow inmates, Reynolds relents, somewhat, and offers a challenge to the warden and his team in the form of an exhibition game. To the guards it looks like it’ll be an easy win, and to the inmates it’s a chance to get away with some brutality against the guards. Eventually he recruits enough of them, even the reluctant black players, having sought out the meanest, the biggest, and the best actual players. Then begins the training section of the movie, a rollicking bunch of scenes with the misfit murderers, thugs, and would-be linemen and the ways they can inflict the most possible pain, and so forth. More plot happens, and then the game begins, comprising a sizeable chunk of the last third of the film (in which happens all of the interesting camera work, incidentally). The game is brutal, and Reynolds’s character comes into question, the game swings precariously, and, well, you can pretty much guess what happens.

But predictable or not, violent or not, stereotypical or not, implausible or not, it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to see just what they thought machismo meant in the mid 1970s. It’s also a great look at the state of the anti-establishment at the time, in that this is a movie where we are supposed to sympathize with multiple murderers and rapists in a violent game against the upholders of the law and the protectors of liberty and justice, or something like that. It’s one obvious extension of what Bob Aldritch had done years before with The dirty dozen’s ragtag gang of lesser criminals, just kicked up several notches all over. In that respect it’s almost a sequel, if only in the inspiration.

I’m not sure why, but I was reminded of the brief bit in Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Sleepers where they do an inmates/guards game. In there they approach the game as a way to even the field, to meet the guards on their own terms (”On Saturday we can hit back!”) and to maybe get a little taste of the childhood the four boys have had torn from them. It’s not so quotable, but the narrator (mind you, this isn’t a movie about football but a movie with a bit about football in it) recollects the game thusly, “For ninety minutes we took the game out of the prison, moved it miles beyond the locked gates and the sloping hills of the surrounding countryside, and brought it back down to the streets of the neighborhoods we’d come from. For those ninety minutes we were once again free.”

How noble and nearly poetic. Yard is neither nor does it aspire to be. These inmates aren’t looking for freedom, they’re just out for blood. After all, it’s just a movie about football and fighting the powers that be, and damn it, it’s a good one.

Not that this matters to any of my readers, but today, Wednesday the 13th, the number of this post is 666. Of course having a number for the posts is only useful for the database, so I don’t do much with them. Just thought you might want to know, since I’m posting this well after the actual Wednesday the 13th.

I did something today that I haven’t done many times before - I injured myself playing with fire. My previous mishaps with the dancing orange devil lost me just my dignity and a little hair, but I think I might have a first-degree burn this time.

So what I was doing? Lighting fireworks. Potentially illegal fireworks, though the dangerous bit wasn’t them, but the book of matches.

You see, despite all my other abilities and general dexterity, I’m no good at lighting paper matches. the conventional way. So I’m of the ‘flip the cover and use that for extra friction’ school, which, I might add, works great almost every time.

Except when the matchbook is old (or just odd) and the black striking line is on the same side of the book as the rest of the matches, in which case the entire book lights up, and I drop the flaming book and start swearing in the presence of my friend’s parents and some young, impressionable children.

Oops.

Back when I was in high school, and carried a lighter or two (didn’t smoke, just liked to light things) I never once even slightly burned myself. Now that I’m ‘grown-up’… well, that just makes it all the more embarrassing.

And it hurts. Not just my pride, but the palm of my hand, too.

Bull Durham is a chick flick.

It’s not really even that entertaining of a chick flick. Susan Sarandon likely has done better chick flicks. Tim Robbins has certainly done better chick flicks (well, you must admit I.Q., predictable though it may be, amuses). And as for Kevin Costner, well, I’m just not going there.

I’m probably in the minority in saying so, but Bull Durham is overrated. Maybe I just don’t love baseball, but I sure didn’t love this film.

It was too heady, too steamy, too long, and, well, too long. Kevin was too much a veteran, Tim too much a rookie, and Susan too much a philosopher.

Sure, there were amusing bits here and there, but far too few. I’d rather watch Baseketball again.