4 days, 20 hours ago
bladerunner, movies, reviews, sci-fi
Replicants, more human than human robots do humanitys dirty work. Given time, they will develop their own emotional responses. To prevent revolts, they are given only a four year lifespan. When they’re a hazard, Blade Runners are sent to “retire” them.
Blade Runner has been through its share of troubles. The first one with the voice over was marred by producers wanting to control the young art director, Ridley Scott, whose experience hadn’t yet been proved (not even by Alien). The second version, “The Directors Cut”, felt rushed and the DVD release was grainy and VHS like. The Final Cut has finally been given the proper treatment. Tweaks and fixes have been made and a near-perfect, cleaned-up transfer make this the ultimate version of Blade Runner.
Blade Runner works on many levels. There’s the gorgeous dystopian design. There’s atmosphere oozing from every sound of Vangelis’ soundtrack. There’s the vision and the philosophical aspects: life, death, the time we’re given. They don’t make movies like this anymore and Blade Runner is the peak of a period. It’s an absolute delight to marvel in the polished and crisp picture and to notice details like the eyes of replicants reflecting light differently. Who’s replicant and who’s not? And does it matter? And what’s that about a unicorn? Find out.
6 days, 18 hours ago
inspiration
This saturday was spent delving through old comic-book stores in Copenhagen. Among other things, I found these gems:
This is retro retro futurism. That means it’s retro futurism from the 80ies. Storm by Don Lawrence, details the adventures of Storm the astronaut and his time-travel-gone-wrong adventures in a distant future where society has regressed into a barbarian steam-punk with oversized critters and mounts culture. Excellent.
1 week, 2 days ago
movies, reviews
Tony Stark is a billionaire inventor, industrialist and weapons manufacturer. After seeing first-hand what his weapons do, he decides to don a crime-fighting metal cape.
It’s hard to fault Iron Man as it has very few shortcomings. It’s Hollywood at its best: finely tuned action, expensive special effects, golden-haired girls and entertainment made for the big screen. On the flipside, it’s really not a deep movie; in fact it’s all surface. For what Iron Man tries to be, however, such depth is moot.
Iron Man works in all the ways Spider-Man 3 didn’t. It’s well paced, entertaining, believably unrealistic and with a story that doesn’t feel like it’s quilted together in the last minute. Robert Downey works well in his role and surprisingly: so does Gwyneth Paltrow. Now watch out for a cameo early on by director Jon Favreau. In the mean time, I’ll wait patiently for the sequel. Added note: I’m told there’s an extra scene after the end-credits.
2 weeks, 5 days ago
diary
Avid readers of these snacksized portions of pointless stuff might have spotted a change in writing style around here. Bitter and arrogant as I have become, I dare say my writing has improved. Compared to one year ago, you’ll now find more text (not substance), profanity and mework details. You’ll find more odd synonyms than before and once in a while you’ll encounter words like poppycock and ooze.
I attribute this torrent of text to Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe, the comic alter-ego of Jerry Holkins — author of said web comic and master of fine words. In the minute chance that you do not already know of aforementioned author, I point you now to his pet project: ELotH:TES wiki. The Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga is a virtual smorgasbord of intellectual satisfaction and a fine example of the razorsharp — forged in fire — Tycho style of writing.
The ELotH:TES wiki is but one, brilliant, example of his writing style, but the Tycho School of Writing — the school that I’ve been attending these past few months — requires delving into the semi-daily scribbles on the Penny Arcade frontpage. This is where Tycho details the process of distilling, no: concocting their wittiness, their anguish, their sarcasm and their friendly hate into comics. This is where one might uncover the nuggets.
To properly fathom the Tycho style of writing, one must understand what it means to write frontpage material for a massively popular website, and doing so several times a week. For years. Under such circumstances, unwritten rules crystallize, processes and methodologies unfold. Mistakes are made; corrected, learned from. I’m sure of it. The pen is sharpened into a scimitar.
I’m sure that there comes into play a number of mental ground rules in order for the process not to be excruciating and impossible. Rules such as allowing quality and length to vary; allowing wittiness to seep into even serious writing to polish the edges; forcing oneself to substitute dull words with more elaborate synonyms such as plethora and trachea. More importantly, below it all, there is an understanding that reading pixels just isn’t working out and that this is mildly alleviated by emphasizing that which matters most.
I have come to an acceptance. I have nothing to say and when I do grab the pen anyway, my words lack any shadow of substance. I’m now trying to take that lump of non-clay and turning it into something worthwhile and I attribute any successful attempts to Tycho. It is with great humility and sincere respect that I try to mimic his style. I believe my meager attempts at infusing my words with faux substance has worked and I believe the above text is far more interesting for that reason alone. It is mere bile compared to the actual substance oozing from the crevasses of Tychos masterfully woven works of text. Thanks to aforementioned, however, it is now bile almost worth reading. Completely unlike anything stemming from Rupert Murdoch.
3 weeks, 5 days ago
browsers, css
WebKit, the browser engine that powers Safari, now supports CSS gradients. For the unenlightened, Safari also supports drop shadows and rounded corners. If you’ve ever built a website using CSS, you’ll know how many headaches this would save you. Woo hoo, right?
Well, yeah, except Firefox and most importantly Internet Explorer doesn’t support it. Alright so the new Firefox does some mighty fine rounded corners, but the browser the public at large uses, Internet Explorer 6 (yes, some people — enough people — still use that archaic tangle of muck) doesn’t. Essentially that means advertising this great new feature is like dangling the proverbial carrot. We can’t ever reach the carrot, much less eat it.
By no means should this mean that browser vendors should stop innovating shoehorning features into CSS, make no mistake, I would wholeheartedly support a wet floor effect in CSS. So why this tirade? Well, somewhere in this enigma, lodged in between two creaking cog wheels, is a tiny wedge called What The Hell. Written in tiny print on the top of this wedge are the words:
Too little, too late.
Let’s explore the meaning of those words. To do that, we’ll need to take a grander look at the interweb as a whole. Since Al Gore invented it all, have websites really changed? Not really. Sure, some are more userfriendly, some are less userfriendly, Amazon makes a profit and generally there are more websites than back when whoopteedoo.com was open for registration. It’s still all mostly text and pictures, though.
So what will CSS gradients do to ameliorate this molasses? Not a whole lot, in fact. Ever heard of the broken windows theory? In a nutshell, it means you’re more likely to throw a rock at a window in an abandoned factory building if some of the windows are already broken. Right now, the internet — although not abandoned — is full of broken windows. There’s a plethora of unfinished specs for HTML, CSS, SVG, XHTML and lots of other smart sounding acronyms. Adding gradients to CSS is akin to throwing yet another rock at a window. We’re no closer to a situation where web designers can actually use these fancy new technologies.
Some of us (not me, I never saw The Lawnmower Man) expected the web to move on to virtual reality at the end of the nineties. Well that didn’t happen and possibly that’s okay — I don’t see Wikipedia becoming that much more useful in three dee. Even so, most of us thought we’d be farther by now. There should have been an event that changed everything. There should have been one standard, and we should have been pointing and laughing at browser vendors that didn’t adhere to it. We should be clapping when that one standard moved ahead with new features and giggle as our browsers — shortly thereafter — automagically updated to adhere to it. Instead, right now in a parallel universe in which it doesn’t suck to be a web designer, CSS gradients are being tauted as the new black.
3 weeks, 6 days ago
movies, reviews
The latest from the Coen brothers, No Country For Old Men, tells the story of a drug deal gone bad. When bystander Llewelyn Moss comes upon $2M in drug money, what follows is a game of cat and mouse when Moss is hunted by hired psycho-assassin Anton Chigurh.
I wouldn’t normally go watch a movie like No Country. Sad, you might note, as this is a rather good movie, but usually the plethora of pseudo-intellectual would-be Oscar films simply saturate the market. The bulk of them bore me out of my skull. There exists a very finite limit to the number of ways in which one can poetically spell out — punch label even — the dire straits of our society.
No Country, however, oozes cool from every crevasse. From the beginning, and for most of the movie, it’s even engaging and entertaining in ways that are theoretically impossible. It’s quite an impressive feat and it bears the mark of genuine skill behind the camera.
Alas, it’s only most of the movie that’s this good and in the end, No Country does suffer from some of the same problems all the other ones do.
April 7th, 2008
movies
Have you been to the movies recently? Have you noticed how everyone gets killed off by the end of the movie? No, I’m not talking about any movie in particular, I’m talking about most of them. To be fair, I won’t mention by names exactly which movies spurned this; rest assured their bitter, cheap, pseudo-artful endings will remain intact by the end of this mouth off.
Well except for one movie which is rather old. Do you remember Deep Blue Sea? They all die. Or maybe the not-hero survives, I can’t remember. Suffice to say that’s when I first noticed the trend. Killing off the entire cast in a surprise ending doesn’t and shouldn’t wow people; even if it’s an attempt at seething political commentary on our times, even if it makes for a cheaper sequel. I don’t care. It mostly means there’s something wrong with the script. Mostly.
What happened to Star Wars and Indy and that Ron Howard movie that was written by George Lucas? What about Labyrinth? Even the first two Alien movies had a few heroes surviving the slaughter. The eighties had it right.
Well, I do accept that there exists themes too complex for being told through classic eighties storytelling and then-not cliches. I can even understand when entire casts have to be killed off to make a point in the movie. The recent ones do not fit into that either of those genres. Years: 2007-2008 — I’m looking at you!
There’s nothing clever about comedically impaling a character you’re emotionally invested in. It doesn’t help if you use the flamethrower instead, or if you have them bit apart. It’s not artful nor is it awesome. In fact, it’s full of suck and it’s a splash of water in your face. Cold water. I go to the movies for many reasons, none of them being pretendertainment with elements of soapbox satire. It’s as though, because we live in what some consider dangerous times, that danger has to seep into the movies. Why? Is it not enough for the fraidycats to be scared everywhere but in the theatre? Must the last vestige of imagination be erased for the sake of “realism”?
Perhaps that’s why I’m so looking forward to seeing Indiana Jones 4. I’m almost certain that Indy, his companions and everyone else won’t be dead by the end of it. Some of them, sure, but not all of them.
March 31st, 2008
posters, scifi, Work
Just a few weeks ago, my favourite science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke, passed away. As a tribute to the hours and hours of reading enjoyment and plethora of wonders he’s projected into my mind, I was compelled to commemorate the event.
Clarke, by most known for his book: 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a visionary and a pragmatic. At the core of his books were always genuinely unique ideas, but wrapped around these ideas were stories that were neither longer nor shorter than the idea warranted. Always deeply personal and with a protagonist filled with the same sense of wonder that you or I had been, had we been there.
While not necessarily hard reads, his books were filled with complex themes. What seeped from his books into my younger self were themes of life and death and universal purpose and meaning. Clarkes’ books gave me an understanding of our universe: that in all it’s complexity and sheer scale, it’s so full of wonder that one can derive meaning and purpose from simply that. I remember this, whenever I’m overwhelmed by harsh facts of life: peace of mind is no farther away than outside. A gander at the stars and I know: this is all bigger than me or you. We’re all but tiny flecks of dust and vermin on the cosmic scale.
For letting me in the know about this powerful strength from the stars I owe Clarke and his books my sincerest respect, because unlike all other institutions that claim the ability to heal souls, spirits, thetans and what-have-you, Clarkes’ way is universally free and available to anyone who needs it.
Clarke was not a religious man, so when he said:
I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.
… I dare interpret it to mean simply that: lift your gaze from the ground to the dark of space above the clouds, you’ll see that there’s plenty of purpose in that vast ocean of nothingness. Rest in peace, Arthur, and thanks.
March 26th, 2008
diary
Twitter surprised me. There’s nothing dull about talking to no-one in particular, that no-one most often being the ether. Contrary to my initial assumption, tweeting is not about the odd fascination with exposing oneself. Well, maybe it is, but something much less tangible keeps people there. Twitter is a new way of being “in the loop”, almost literally. There’s a certain feeling that your banter will be picked up by people, even if it’s limited to groggy “Hello Coffee” morning-chatter.
More importantly, there’s a very odd opportunity for to-the-point conversations, unlike email and soon instant messaging. Email came and went, bogged down by a harsh mistress called spam. Instant messaging hasn’t quite left the stage yet, but being logged on indefinately feels like being on-the-phone all day, an unsettling sensation. Twitter hits a hidden sweetspot between the two: it tickles the urge to being in the know; it’s not bogged by spam (yet) and it doesn’t insist upon itself like your favourite IM app does. Probably most usefully, Twitter allows people to get in touch with you in an unintrusive way and forces them to be concise: write me 140 characters or don’t write me at all. It’s email without the suck.
I see a corporate use for Twitter. As I’ve learned from studying scrum, textual is the worst form of communication. Mostly I find that people have a hard time getting off their asses and actually doing the writing, but when they finally do, they write way too much. While I do see the occasional need for emails longer than 140 characters, I also marvel at the delightful brevity of tweets. Perhaps Twitter and corporate communication are starcrossed lovers; perhaps they just haven’t met yet. I am sure they’d be great lovers.
Hey you! With the turtleneck and square black Buddy Holly glasses! You wanted to know how to streamline your web/advertising company for that report you’re doing? Jot this down: quick, brief, simple communication — good.
March 17th, 2008
design, diary, posters, sweden
Once in a while, I invite a few friends up to our family house in Sweden for a weekend. We enjoy the fire in the garden, good usually cholesterol-laden food and alcoholic beverages. Sometimes, even music. Most recently, my dear sister whom is also a proprietor of our fine house, has purchased a phonograph. Convinced that such a device is all it takes to mount a successful expedition to said location, I have not only acquired a fine selection of gramophone records, but I have produced a poster to celebrate the occasion. The poster will also function as an invite-to-be-sent. Eventually.
Feel free to bask in my awesome taste in music.
The process is relatively simple and painless. Twirl stuff in Illustrator, paint and compose in Photoshop and then pile on layers upon layers of dirt.
The full gallery is available in my photostream.
March 13th, 2008
movies
Hulk is being rebooted, with Ed Norton portraying the not so jolly giant. There’s a trailer which shows this is clearly not like anything Ang Lee would have made. In fact, it looks like every other superhero movie out there. Increasingly dull and done.
March 7th, 2008
usability, wikis
I partake in maintaining a wiki. It is an obscure — to the naked eye dull — wiki about comic books. In this realm of nerdity, we discuss Tintins lastname, or why europeans seem to prefer Donald Duck over Spiderman. While I haven’t found definite answers to either questions, I’ve learned that the wiki system is an ingenious device for writing hypertext.
Writing a wiki is nothing like building ordinary webpages. The most clear distinction is how pages are created and how they are linked to. In fact, on wikis, those two concepts are symbionts. On normal websites (normies, as I like to call them) you’d write a single article and possibly spice it up with a few hyperlinks — internal or external. Working on a wiki-article, the spicing-up process would simply mean wrapping deserving keywords in brackets.
For example, Tintin is drawn in so-called ligne claire style. Writing an article on Tintin, one might type: the style, [[ligne claire]], is characterized by outlines all sharing the same thickness. When saving the page, the wiki motor will find the brackets and make ligne claire link to a page entitled “Ligne claire”. Should the page exists already, the link will be blue, if it doesn’t the link will be red. Following red links, you’ll be taken to an editor, ready to edit and save said page. It’s like when Neo’s choosing pills.
This way of linking articles and potentially creating new pages at the same time might not be intuitive, but it is mindblowingly useful for a number of reasons. Since the dawn of hypertext, a lot of things have changed — some of them in the not quite userfriendly direction: hypertext (as characterized by simply being text with hyperlinks) is not so simple anymore. The gentle art of applying underlines and blue to text after the writing is done, has been replaced with annoyingly useless click here links and styling that does little to improve readability. The textual decay is palpable.
Working wiki-style one is encouraged towards writing good hypertext. Mind-numbing “click here” links require effort whereas writing simple descriptive hyperlinks is the easier path to follow. The tangible usability of Wikipedia is no coincidence, even if it’s written by the very same population that so love to name all pages on the internet “click here”.
Authoring the internet there’s no getting past the writing. No matter how simple we make our interfaces, at some point, we have press keys in the right order. The linking of keywords could be improved, though: a simple text analyzer could trawl through your text and suggest words to link up. Based on a blacklist of dull words, the trawler could suggest to instead autolink the first occurrence of every interesting word. Combined with a tolerance for case sensitivity, you’d automatically have your article link to content on your website — be it a wiki or otherwise. For it’s a damn shame that such an ingenious invention: the hyperlink without the hyperlink, goes unused in anything but wikis.
March 5th, 2008
design, Projects, Work
With barely a tweet, I’ve launched a wallpaper website entitled Deskvu. Yes, part of the name is because the .com was available.
Deskvu is available for your viewing pleasure and it’s full of wallpapers ready for your gentle application to your respective desktops. Wallpapers are scheduled to appear continously. Hopefully, some wallpapers will be supplied by you; if all goes well, some form of multi-user support is in the pipeline. Aspects are still littered all across the drawing board, but for now, Deskvu is simply a website featuring free wallpapers, Google Ads and a surprisingly useful RSS feed.
In other news, all of the wallpapers previously featured on this here website have mysteriously disappeared! In place is a new section entitled “photostream”. Odd, odd coincidence.
Update: Deskvu now supports iPhone resolutions.
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