Link Dump

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)

A few interesting links I’ve run into recently:

• Easy Solutions #1: This is easily the most brilliant yet demented thing I’ve read in a long time. My favorite part is the subtle ways in which the devious story you concoct are supported by longstanding film franchises. For example: “If she questions this flaw in your time travel logic, because you cannot change the past, simply reference Back to the Future.”
• Eternal Monsters of Filmland: Devin Faraci makes an argument that the current rash of horror movie remakes is not new and is indeed indicative of a modern set of eternal monsters, placing Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Kreuger alongside such horror mainstays as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy (this classic trio has literally hundreds of movies to their name, including dozens of remakes and reboots). The big thing holding back the modern trio? Copyright. An interesting idea.
• KHAAN! The Greatest Syllable Ever Told: This article about a “15-minute meticulously re-spliced creation in a never-ending loop” of William Shatner’s infamous cursing of Star Trek villain Khan features a 2 minute excerpt from the film that is mesmerizing…
• What does “The Usual Suspects” mean?: The ending of The Usual Suspects is generally a topic of contention in film nerd circles, but this interview with writer Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer adds a new wrinkle to the debate:
  

  McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.

  “I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t,’ ” recalls McQuarrie. “And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives.”

  He continues: “One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”

  I think I’ve always considered it more of a mostly true, peppered with little lies, but the neat thing is that it probably works either way…

• 50 Films You Can Wait to See After You’re Dead: Perhaps a bit harsh on Death to Smoochy and The Boondock Saints, but otherwise an interesting list. On the other hand, why subject the dead to such horrors?

That’s all for now…

A few links for your enjoyment:

• Aliens Board Game: Ok, I admit, this is pretty much the reason I’m doing a link dump tonight instead of something more substantial. Longtime readers know I love this game, so cut me a break…
• Tank! – I wonder how many people will get the reference.
• Patrick Duffy Compilation – There are no words.
• LoadingReadyRun – Watchmen Watching: Who watches the watchers of the Watchmen?
• Texts From Last Night: It’s like bash.org for people with cell phones.
• Business Card Fail: This is… awesome? This can’t be real.
• Kevin Smith Part 1 : Sellling Out And Salty Language: What can I say, I’m a sucker for Kevin Smith interview type stuff, and there are several followups to this one. In addition, I love those Evening With Kevin Smith DVDs and have watched them multiple times (the first set is brilliant, the second is not as much, and the third, well, he spends like 45 minutes answering a question about his dogs, which started to grate at about the 20 minute mark. Anyway, the first Evening is highly recommended if you like Smith’s brand of raunchy humor.)
• Carousel: Utterly amazing short film by Adam Berg (no credits on IMDB at this time) consisting of “an epic ‘frozen moment’ cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings.” It’s kinda hypnotic… amazing stuff.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more Friday the 13th madness on Sunday…

It’s actually been a few months since a link dump, so here are a few interesting links:

• Uncomfortable Plot Summaries: This is everywhere lately, but it’s very funny. My favorites include LotR (“Midget destroys stolen property.”) and how every Neil Gaiman movie features pretty much the same plot summary. Actually, these remind me a lot of the classic Rinkworks Movie-A-Minute ultra-condensed movies.
• Playing Columbine: Interview with Director Danny Ledonne: A followup for my review of Playing Columbine is this interview with the director who is also the one who created the game at the center of the film.
• Video Game Documentaries: They Keep On Coming: Speaking of Playing Columbine, it seems that video game documentaries in general are becoming more and more common. This post at Spout features a bunch of upcoming documentaries, some of which sound very interesting…
• The GAF Collection: The folks over at the NeoGAF video game forums have a photoshop thread where people post photoshopped game covers in the style of the Criterion Collection (perhaps continuing a trend from a few months ago). Some great stuff here, including several great covers for Shadow of the Colossus, Flower, and Metal Gear Solid, among many others.
• DeepLeap: A mildly addictive single player word game (along the lines of a scrabble, but without a board). My high score is only in the 400 range or so, but it’s a lot of fun…
• Craig Needs a Friend: I’m not sure how to describe this one, but this Craig guy is hilarious, as is his mode of communication.
• Quadruple Saturn Moon Transit: 4 moons caught crossing the face of Saturn in one photo. Amazing stuff.
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: Clay Shirky’s musings on the current state of the newspaper business. I can’t think of the last time I actually read a newspaper. I remember at one point last year, someone bussed some inner city high-schoolers into my neighborhood and guilted us all into buying a subscription to the Philly Inquirer (apparently, the Inquirer would help pay college tuition for the high schoolers based on how many subscriptions they sold or something). However, I generally found myself grabbing the paper right from my doorstep and placing it in the recycle bin on my way out (i.e. most of the time, it didn’t even make it into my house).

That’s all for now. Coming up on Kaedrin, it seems I haven’t gotten over the whole Six Weeks of Halloween horror movie marathon, so expect to see some more slashers and SWH style posts in the near future (not six weeks worth, but just a few to tide you over for the next half year or so).

Hooray for link dumps. Everyone likes link dumps! Right? RIGHT?

• 6th Annual Oscar Liveblogging on Sunday! Yes, I know, the Oscars are a boring, essentially meaningless awards show in which a bunch of self-congratulatory Hollywood insiders pat themselves on the back for making crappy movies. But that’s precisely why I liveblog it – it’s much more interesting that way! I suppose the fact that I get drunk every year helps too (it’s not my fault, really! Have you ever seen those music performances on the Oscars while sober?). It’s also one of those rare occassions where a live event coincides with my blogging schedule, so I feel obligated to oblige. Anyway, feel free to drop by and join in. Previous installments are here: [2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004]
• What’s the deal with all the fake, retro-style book covers for other media like Movies and Video Games? Not that I don’t love them, but it’s just odd that they just started kinda happening lately… Here are two of my favorites. The Highlander poster is hysterical, while the Mirror’s Edge poster calls to mind the old-style Criterion Collection art.

  

• Man in the Box – Star Wars vs. Sports: I’ve always maintained that sports nuts are just as nerdy as star wars geeks (or any other nerdy faction). Seriously, sports nerds are probably better at statistics than most star wars geeks. Of course, I say this as I approach the constitutional amendment phase of my fantasy baseball league.
• Alternate History Search Results: John Scalzi does a live reading of his story, and it’s pretty funny! It reminded me of Wikihistory, a hilarious story written in the style of an online message board for time travelers.
• A Dialogue With Sarah, Aged 3: In Which It Is Shown That If Your Dad Is a Chemistry Professor, Asking “Why” Can Be Dangerous: I think that’s pretty self explanatory, but it’s funny too.

That’s all for now, see you on Sunday!

I try not to make a habit of just throwing up a bunch of links, but when time grows short, it’s difficult to give certain subjects the thought and attention they deserve. I’ve started a couple of posts, but they’re both turning out to be monsters. One is a review of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Anathem, which I finished this week and have been thinking about a lot. It might take me a bit to sort through it all. The other is a discussion of ratings systems for movies – a subject that seems relatively simple at first, but which grew more complicated the more I thought about it. Unfortunately, I was traveling for most of this weekend, so I didn’t have much time to devote to either of these ideas… and this week promises to be busy as well. In the mean time, here are a few things I’ve run across lately that are worth watching or reading:

• The Website is Down: This is a hysterical 10 minute video that featues a bunch of supposedly true stories from tech support hell. Supposedly a sequel is in the works, but this one is pretty funny in itself.
• The Last Lecture: Ostensibly a talk about achieving your childhood dreams, this talk wound up being much more (the childhood dreams angle is what he’d call a “head fake”). It’s actually quite heartbreaking when I think about it. The talk is given by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specialized in Virtual Reality. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer about a year before he gave this talk, but during the presentation, he is extremely upbeat and humorous, choosing instead to focus on his message rather than his medical situation. He died this past summer, which is why watching this video now is a bit heartbreaking. It’s a long video, but it’s well worth a watch.
• Authors @ Google: Neal Stephenson: While promoting Anathem, Neal Stephenson stopped off at Google for a Q&A that turns out to be quite interesting (as usual)… Another long video, but interesting if you’re a Stephenson fan.
• The Dukes: A new indie heist movie? Why have I not heard of this until now? It sounds great though… Consider this near the top of the list I posted about the holiday movie season. Hopefully, I’ll find some time to go see it this week…
• Crosstalk: The state of horror cinema: Noel Murray and Scott Tobias of the Onion A.V. Club discuss the state of horror cinema as of October 2006. Things haven’t changed too much, but I’ve been thinking a bit about the state of modern American horror films (another potential post that I haven’t spent enough time thinking about and researching), so I found this discussion interesting.

So there’s at least two and a half hours of compelling video content there as well as some light reading. Light posting will probably continue through Wednesday’s post (which I believe will be a recap of a ridiculous discussion I had with my friend Roy at a discussion board – let’s just say it involves aliens and breakdancing)… Next Sunday’s post may be a bit light as well, but we’ll see. That’s all for now.