Link Dump

Another installment of links I found interesting on the internets:

• Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer: Brilliantly skewers Oscar bait movies and trailers. Particularly notable in light of recent posting and also a recent link dump.
• The Video Game Bosses’ Lament: Classic. Dracula’s voice is the best.
• Press X to Jason: I suppose this is a bit of a spoiler for anyone who wants to play Heavy Rain, but I have to admit that it’s pretty funny (besides, you won’t really get it until you play the game). I eagerly away the inevitable sequel: Press X to Shaun.
• Why DRM doesn’t work: Yet another variation on the theme. Also of note.
• Actual PC Games: Well, to be honest, Stalin vs Martians sounds pretty awesome.
• Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter?: Tammy Erickson takes the not-so-original assertion that “most people’s tweets are neither interesting nor fun to read” and makes an interesting argument about what kinds of tweets actually do work. In short: “Individuals who are most skilled at using this peculiar 140-character medium are those who do notice the small details of life, who capture the moments that others of us miss, who slow down to watch and listen while most race on, and who personalize the events they see.” She makes use of a great anecdote along the way. In case you were wondering, I’m not especially interesting on Twitter.
• Cinema 4D tutorial – Balls Mapping on Vimeo: Sometimes you read a headline and think you have to be misinterpreting what it means. In this case, your mind might not go there, but the video certainly does. And it is hilarious.

That’s all for now. See you Wednesday…

Entertaining material from the web, or lazy blogging? You decide!

• The Trial of Han Solo: Funny but perhaps overly long video that delves into the whole Greedo shot first thing. By the end, some good points are made. (Related: What If Greedo Really Shot First?)
• Best Action Scene of All Time?: I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty awesome (and pretty damn funny too). Alas, it does not appear to be available on DVD. Damn you internets! Why do you torture me so!
• The Losers Looks Like a Winner: As CHUD notes, “The Losers looks like a better movie version of The A-Team than The A-Team movie.” That sounds about right. On a related note, does anyone else think it would be funny if Katee Sackhoff was hired to play Face in the forthcoming A-Team movie? No? Just me? Huh.
• That’s no moon, it’s a space station… : Scientists told then president Eisenhower that Phobos, a moon orbiting Mars, was actually an ancient abandoned spacecraft.
• My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement: An interesting look behind the scenes at record companies.

That’s all for now…

I’m wiped out from playing football in 2 feet of snow this morning (going to be sore all week), eating all day, and gambling on trivial things during the Superbowl (I correctly chose the under in the “mentions Hurricane Katrina” but that got offset by taking the over on “number of times Archie Manning appears onscreen” and I ended up losing by 1 point in the overall contest). So here are a few things I’ve seen recently. Enjoy.

• How To Report The News: Newswipe’s absolutely brilliant takedown of the conventions of the television news story. It’s only got 1 million views! But it fits with some of the other links in this post, so there.
• This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post: Not quite as spot-on as the previous link and it’s about blogging so the audience is more limited, but it’s still pretty clever.
• The One and Only Right Review: Shawn Elliott’s sarcastic video game review is pretty funny. On a slightly related topic, I’ve recently discovered the GFW video game podcast archive, which is something of a treasure trove. In it’s heyday, it was an amazingly fun podcast. In fact, it probably deserves it’s own bullet point:
• GFW Radio Compilation: This is a pretty good place to start, and it’s 4 hours of good stuff. Going through the archives at 1up is a bit difficult (note that most of the best talent had left by the end, so the ones that show up when you subscribe in itunes or the like are mostly not the best episodes), but once you get back to 2007 and early 2008, it’s pretty great (not that I’ve listened to all of those, but still). While ostensibly a video game podcast (for PC gaming, no less), that only really represents a fraction of some episodes. They joke around about tons of topics and other geeky culture. It’s very great stuff. Geekbox is ok but not quite as great as GFW, and Out of the Game is also pretty good, but they don’t seem to post those very often (last episode was in early December).

Well, that’s all for now. Top 10 movies of 2009 will probably be posted next week, if I can manage it…

Interesting stuff seen on the web recently:

• My Neighbor Robocop – For fans of Robocop and Anime.
• Good Copy Bad Copy – Interesting documentary available for free online. It’s about copyright and remixing and mashups and whatnot. It’s got some interesting info in it, but it kinda trails off into different areas as it proceeds… but those areas are interesting too. The Brazilian mashup scene seems to be quite interesting in its own right, but that’s probably a different documentary than what this one is trying to focus on…
• Death Metal Rooster – Not much to say here, it’s a Death Metal Rooster. Behold its glory.
• Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal – A few years ago, I posted about this story of the guy who figured out that the seemingly random blinking lights on the Press Your Luck gameshow were actually not so random. He ended up winning over $110,000. This 11 part documentary goes into detail on exactly how he did it, and is a fascinating watch.
• I don’t know how to describe this without giving the joke away, but I want to go on a mission to institute something like this in my work cafeteria.
• In Defense of the Fistfight – “It was Jerry’s bad luck that I had resolved to start punching people again.”
• Disney’s James Cameron’s Pocahontas Avatar – I’ve seen Avatar twice. The first time, in a regular 3D theater, I found myself enjoying it despite a lackluster story. The second time, in IMAX 3D, I found myself much less willing to forgive the story. I don’t want to make this post a review of Avatar, but I think this is a movie that will depreciate over time, especially once we get used to the effects. A lot of critics will be eating crow over this, I think. Interestingly, critics who waited a while before posting their thoughts on the film seem to have a more considered reaction to the film. Dennis Cozzalio’s review is one of the best I’ve seen, and he addresses this subject in his post too. To me, it’s not that the film is derivative (so was The Matrix, and I loved that) and it’s not that I don’t necessarily agree with all the politics. It’s just that it’s all executed so poorly. Gah. I should write a proper review at some point, but I fear I won’t get around to it.
• Is it ethical to eat plants? – Whenever I talk to someone about vegetarianism, I would always make a half-hearted joke about how plants are alive too and that the only real difference is that they’re rooted in place and unable to even attempt escape. Well, it turns out that there is a rather nuanced argument to be made that if you don’t eat meat on ethical grounds, you also need to account for the ethics of eating plants. Plants act in a surprising way to external threats, often engaging in activities you would normally only ascribe to more intelligent animals:
  

  Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

  … Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

  It’s an interesting article. (via Schneier and Collision Detection too)

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the start of Kaedrin Movie Awards season…

Just a few interesting links I’ve run across recently:

• This review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace has been making the rounds everywhere, but it really is brilliant stuff. Clocking in at around 70 minutes, the review goes into every detail, meticulously and hilariously tearing apart the story. I wasn’t sure what to make of the funny voice and the dead wife references, but by the time I finished the review and went back and watched his reviews of the next generation Star Trek movies (which are uniformly bad (update: the movies are bad, not the reviews)), I think I kinda like it. In any case, this guy has clearly done a lot of work on these reviews. The amount of archival footage he pulls makes me wonder just how much time he’s spent watching the extras on various DVDs. In a lot of ways, the Star Trek reviews are even more impressive in that respect, as he pulls from the entire run of the TNG series, in addition to the movies. Anyway, the other notable thing about these videos is that I now crave pizza rolls, for the first time ever.
• A couple of other funny reviews of bad Christmas movies: Santa With Muscles (which has to go on my Holiday Horror list next year) and Santa’s Slay (which I actually enjoyed… clearly moreso than the reviewer, though I wouldn’t call it great or anything).
• 5 Star Wars Status Updates: I kinda wished Porkins would show up at some point, but whattaya gonna do? Still, pretty funny.
• Let me tell you about Demon’s Souls: Funny review of the apparently difficult game:
  

  I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.

  I go back and forth on whether or not I want to play this game. Reviews like this (and there are a lot of them) make me think I’ll immediately hate the game. Other times, like during the recent Brainy Gamer podcast, it feels like I’d love the game. Perhaps I’ll just wait for the price to come down or rent it or something.

That’s all for now. Happy New Year!

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Update: It appears I forgot to actually include the link to the Demons Soul’s review. It’s there now. Also, added a quick clarification about the Star Trek reviews…

Time is a little tight due to the Phillies making the World Series (Go Phils!), so here are a few links I found interesting recently:

• The Fightin’ Phils Polka (mp3): This is rather awesome. Let’s go Phillies!
• How habitable is the Earth?: Charlie Stross attempts to argue that a planet like the Earth would not be considered habitable from the perspective of prospective interstellar colonists. The point of the post is a good one (Earth would only be habitable to humans for a fraction of its existance), but the specifics of his thought experiment are rather dumb.
  

  I want you to imagine that, instead of being a perplexed mostly-hairless primate reading a blog, you’re the guiding intelligence of an interstellar robot probe. You’ve been entrusted with the vital mission of determining whether a target planet is inhabitable by members of your creator species, who bear an eerie resemblance to H. Sapiens Sapiens. To gauge the suitability of the target world you’ve been given an incubator that can generate decorticated human clones — breathing meat-machines with nobody home up top. When you get to the destination you’re going to transfer them to the surface and see how long they survive. If it can make it through 24 hours (or one diurnal period), congratulations! — you’ve found a potential colony world; one so hospitable that a naked and clueless human doesn’t die on their first day out.

  His first strike against Earth is that 78% of the planet is covered in water, and that randomly dropping “meat-machines” on the planet will cause most of them to drown. Is it just me? Am I the only one who thinks that’s dumb? Prospective interstellar colonists would be looking for a planet that looks like the one they came from. Human beings have well established conditions for comfortable living, that’s obviously what we’d look for. The planet we’re on now seems to work reasonably well, so if we found a planet where a small percentage of the surface is really habitable, that’s still pretty good. Also, he finishes off his post with a note that there’s only a 1% chance that a prospective interstellar colonist would consider Earth a good planet. Well, isn’t 1% ok? Sure, it’s astronomically small… but we’re talking about astronomy here! Ultimately, he’s making a good point, but the rhetorical strategy here… I just didn’t care for it…

• Wallowing in Misery for Art’s Sake: A.O. Scott takes the New York Film Festival to task for its schedule, and in so doing, he coins a new term that I rather like:
  

  The cumulative picture of the human condition that has emerged since opening night is dominated by sadism, guilt, violence and despair, a panorama of pessimism notable for its exhausting rigor and relentless consistency. …

  This year’s New York Film Festival can be understood as an unusually powerful and disciplined presentation of an aesthetic ideology we might call festivalism. There is some irony in the name, since a central tenet of festivalism is an abiding skepticism about the nature and value of fun. That’s not what movies are for!

  But the festivalist mentality does not simply rest on a taste for depicting or witnessing human misery — social, sexual, economic and psychic. Rather, the embrace of such harsh thematic content reflects a commitment to a dogma of artistic obduracy. T. S. Eliot said of modern poetry that “it must be difficult,” an imperative defiantly reflected in a program, harvested mostly from other festivals, that pushes the boundary between the challenging and the punitive.

  “Festivalism.” I like that. Rather, I like the word. I don’t really enjoy what it represents. The only thing it doesn’t really capture is how “Independent” films also seem to traffic in the same sort of thing. I really miss the middle ground films that had mainstream appeal, but were independently produced by genuinely talented artists. We catch glimpses of this sort of thing from time to time (Paranormal Activity is a recent example), but they seem to be much less frequent.

• A Conversation on Blogging Ethics and Online Film Journalism with C. Robert Cargill, Devin Faraci, and Peter Sciretta: Great audio conversation that was originally planned to be a 20 minute thing but which ballooned into a 2 hour epic. I think the one thing missing from the conversation is, well, not to belittle the industry, but there isn’t really that much to report in the movie business. People read these sites more for commentary than just news. Finding out who is cast in the next Twilight picture might be news and it might bring in hits for your site, but ultimately, that’s not a big story and it doesn’t take as much effort to uncover than, say, an intrepid reporter who breaks a story on the Police pushing drugs at a local beach. That reporter has to go undercover, investigating the beach, taking trips to Utah to follow leads, impersonate doctors and maintenance workers, and so on, to get the story. I love Devin Faraci, and he does set visits and travels to film festivals and whatnot, but the types of stories he makes out of that sort of thing are entertaining more because of his perspective than the actual facts of what he reports. There’s a big difference between that and the beach drug story… In any case, it’s a fascinating discussion, and well worth a listen (they get into a lot more than I’m talking about here).
• Video Games Video: Interesting little video covering, well, kinda sorta the early history of video games, with original animations and set to technoey music. A fun watch.

That’s all for now. Go Phils!

Update: Well, shit.

Just a few links I’ve found interesting recently:

• Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Movies Since 1992: In preparation for Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino helped program a week of movies on Europe’s Sky Channel. He hosted the series and talked about movies, including a list of his 20 favorite movies released since he started directing:

  Battle Royale (incidentally, I would never have pronounced Fukasaku properly)

  Anything Else (really?)

  Audition

  Blade (note: no, it’s not that Blade, this one.)

  Boogie Nights

  Dazed & Confused

  Dogville

  Fight Club

  Fridays

  The Host

  The Insider

  Joint Security Area

  Lost In Translation

  The Matrix

  Memories of Murder

  Police Story 3

  Shaun of the Dead

  Speed

  Team America

  Unbreakable

  It’s an… interesting… list. Some no brainers in there, and some really odd choices too. But odd choices are what makes a list like this interesting and worth compiling in the first place, right? I’m positive most of these movies wouldn’t show up on a list that I compiled, but then again, I’m not an amazing filmmaker. On the other hand, when considering how many movies Tarantino no doubt watches, I find it hard to believe that this list would not change drastically from day to day. Heh.

• Fast Food Mafia: A group of sketches that imagines fast food mascots as if they were notorious crime bosses. Ron “The Don” McDonald looks like an alternate design for the Joker.
• Don’t Press the Red Button: Pretty much speaks for itself.
• The Wrath of the Killdozer: This guy must have been a big fan of Theodore Sturgeon (incidentally, Sturgeon’s book? It’s about exactly what you think it’s about.)
• Great Moments in Physics: Even though I know most examples of this type of story are probably false, I love reading about them…

Just a few links to stuff I’ve enjoyed recently:

• What If Greedo Really Shot First?: It doesn’t get much geekier than the Star Wars fan outrage over Greedo shooting first in the special edition Star Wars films, but somehow this IO9 post manages that feat with no problems (via Batrock).
• The Farewell Dossier: I’m always fascinated by those Cold War espionage stories, and this one’s a doozy. Essentially, the Soviet Union needed some software to run their newly procured oil pipeline hardware. The US had such software, but wouldn’t sell it to their rivals, so the Soviets simply stole it… not realizing that the US had sabotaged the code.
  

  The orchestrated subterfuge was one of the most successful US inter-agency efforts ever undertaken, and it was executed with such skill that it was never detected. Some condemn the deliberate explosion as thinly veiled terrorism given the lack of an open war with the Soviet Union, while others insist that ill-gotten goods are the plunderer’s problem. In any case, it clearly demonstrates that software piracy can have very serious consequences.

• A little while ago, Yahtzee reviewed inFamous and Prototype, two similar games, by comparing them to one another. In the end, the two games ended in a tie, so Yahtzee suggested a humorous and presumably rhetorical tie-breaker: “which of the two studios could produce the best image of the rival game’s main character wearing women’s lingerie.” Amazingly, the two game studios in question complied. The results are… funny. Take a gander.
• Speaking of inFamous, the developers apparently released a series of interesting statistics and fun facts about the development cycle for the game. A couple examples:
  • Number of babies born: 10
  • Number of diet Coke cans consumed: 17,472
  • Number of diet Pepsi cans consumed: 13,104
  • Number of trips to Starbucks: approximately 18,200

  Once again, Coke beats Pepsi. Score. There are some other interesting stats included as well

• How to Hack Your Brain: This is apparently part 1 in a longer series… this one focuses on sleep and how inefficient our standard schedules are (most of the time spent in a standard 8 hour sleeping session is not spent in REM sleep, which is the most important part). I would love to try the extreme Uberman polyphasic schedule, which calls for a total of only 2 hours of sleep a day (but evenly spaced in 20 minute increments throughout the day), but it does not seem feasible in a normal working schedule. I suspect there’s something more to this subject though and it probably warrants closer examination.
• Asian Poses: I’m not sure a lot of these are uniquely Asian, but then, some probably are. I particularly enjoyed Nyan Nyan. (via Kottke)