Marie Antoinette

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How very odd this is — odd, though, in a way that gives me a grin. The first trailer for Marie Antoinette, a new film by Sofia Coppola (from whom Lost in Translation came to the screen). It’s a period piece starting Kirsten Dunst (yum!) as the ill-fated queen…and the trailer is all set to New Order‘s “Age of Consent“.

Odd…but I think I like it.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Update: I keep seeing places linking to this (interruptorjones, kottke, and others) describing the soundtrack as ‘indie rock’. Since when is New Order — especially New Order circa 1983, when ‘Power, Corruption and Lies‘ was released — ‘indie rock’ instead of ‘new wave’ or ‘new romantic’? Bad enough that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the various genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres that have been concocted for today’s music world, but retrofitting today’s labels to music that’s 23 years old just makes it even more confusing.

Let it snow!

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Heh — cool web toy of the moment (if you have a webcam — without a cam you can read about it and see the sample images, but the effect just won’t quite be the same): Webcam Snowstorm.

This experiment simulates a snowfall with 400 snowflakes on screen, each with random size, rotation, speed and blur (using BlurFilter). Each of them is independently affected by wind (as partially controlled by your cursor’s x position). That Flash can run it all fluidly is impressive in itself, but of course there’s more. It’s also monitoring the webcam input, detecting edges, and making the snowflakes settle gently on any horizontal surface they encounter – pretty cool.

If you don’t have a webcam, you can still see the snowfall, and I’ve appended a picture of it in action below. If you do, try playing around with it – one of the neatest things I think is to let some snow pile up on your head or shoulders and then brush it off with your hand… virtual dandruff!

If you’re on a Mac, you may need to tweak the Flash player settings a touch to get it to work. Right-click on the flash movie, choose “Settings…”, switch to the webcam tab (fourth along the bottom), and set it to a different video input (for my iSight, it ended up being “IIDC FireWire Video”).

(via TDavid)

Going Going Gone (And I Did Nothing Wrong)

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My feet aren’t terribly thrilled with me this morning…but the rest of me is quite glad I finally got a chance to go out to the_vogue last night.

Normally I tend to be out dancing at least every other weekend, heading out every weekend when I can swing it. Between working retail during the holiday rush, being sick, and just plain exhaustion, though, it had been over a month since I’d been able to get out and go bouncing. Far too long…

Good night, though. Right about the perfect sized crowd for me…not dead, but not slammed either. Enough people for a good night without having to fight your way onto the dance floor. Said hi to gracesine before she wandered over to the_mercury to meet up with some other friends; chatted for a while at various times with Shawna, sirriamnis, Brooke, Suzanne, Chris, Mikey, Ron, and other occasional random people; and did the usual bouncing around on the dance floor.

Amusing moment of the evening: now that the club is non-smoking, it made the one guy who forgot about the smoking ban really, really obvious as he sat in the corner having a cigarette. Nobody went up to say anything to him until Evan came on the microphone between songs and said, “Welcome to a smoke-free Saturday night at the Vogue….” Suddenly, the guy got a hilarious “Oh, shit!” look on his face and started frantically stubbing out his cigarette. Quite funny.

And…I finally got to bounce around to a song I’ve wanted to hear in a club for a few years now — Information Society’s “Going, Going, Gone (Razed in Black remix)”. I love the original, but this remix makes it just that much better. It took bugging Evan a couple times before he finally got around to playing it right after last call, but he did, it didn’t empty the floor, he liked it, and ogremarco commented that it was a really sweet remix, too.

Hell, I knew it would go over well. ;)

Eventually, back home to sleep, and now up and getting ready for another day in the trenches at the mall. Whee!

iTunes Signature Maker

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Cool toy if you use iTunes to listen to your music: the iTunes Signature Maker.

People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) to answer in sound a question I cannot answer in words. iTSM analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent it.

iTSM selects a small number of your “favorite” tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature.

Here’s my first one (464 Kb .mp3, 23 seconds).

And with slightly different settings, one more (1.2 Mb .mp3, 64 seconds).

Here’s the analysis that iTSM provides — if you know the songs and listen fast enough, you can hear them all in this order.

(via Kottke)

Read more

That school thing

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Well, it’s official — there will be no financial aid for me in the immediate future. Since aid for the current ’05-’06 year is determined by how much was made in 2004, and as I was applying for winter quarter (late enough in the season that the majority of the school’s aid money has already been passed out), I just don’t qualify. Meh.

On the bright side, as long as I apply first thing in January when the next round opens up, I should have no problems with getting aid for the ’06-’07 school year…starting in September. Until then, though, I’m on my own.

So, Prairie and I are going to see what we can do to scrape together enough funds to get me into one or two classes for the next two quarters (if we can get two 5-credit classes paid for, that’ll cover the 10 credits for a minimum full load) just to get me started and in the system. It’ll likely be a little tight — especially once I drop down to part-time at work come January — but it’ll be a start.

Narnia followup

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A selection of quotes from reviews of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe…

The book’s well-discussed Christian allegorical content, by contrast, is rendered precisely as Lewis wrote it; no more and no less overt than on the page.

— The Seattle Times

Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described the film as “real by the logic of childhood” and noted that the book’s much-discussed Christian themes do not overwhelm the simple tale of four children’s adventures in Narnia.

“As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless,” Chocano wrote in a review on Wednesday.

— Reuters

The Christianity may be too New Age to make good 700 Club fodder. On the other hand, The Lion et al. could serve as a powerful teaching story: the gospel according to Tumnus. Certainly, the Boschian “crucifixion” that Aslan suffers has to be friendlier than Mel Gibson’s Jew-baiting sadomasochist extravaganza. Anyway, for all the Lion‘s blatant allegory, the tale’s engagingly child-centered family dynamics will most likely be understood as a cosmic divorce settlement pitting Aslan’s cuddly dad against the White Witch’s castrating mommy.

— The Village Voice

Some evangelical groups have been promoting the movie as ” ‘The Passion’ for kids,” which makes it sound potentially like a greater source of lifelong trauma than “Bambi.” But the Christian allegory embedded at its chewy center serves less as evangelical cudgel than a primer on morality and the myths we create to explain it. The magical land of Narnia is a place where Western myths and religions (classical, Christian, Celtic, Norse, you name it) are jumbled together so that we may consider their similarities and uses. If it weren’t for Lewis’ stated intention to write a fantastical story to make the dogma go down, it might even come across as a liberal humanist parable about myth and its function in society, especially during times of trouble.

[…] If a scene featuring the torment and grisly execution of Aslan is meant to recall the crucifixion (the lion is eventually resurrected, thanks to the rules of the “deep magic” that governs Narnia), the other stuff cancels it out. That is, unless Christianity has lately been amended to allow for the Christ figure in pitched battle against a witch, a Minotaur and evil dwarfs (the centaur, the faun and flying wildcats are on his side), which, these days, you never know.

[…] No wonder that some might take it as religious instruction: It’s a medieval vision of Christianity for another dark age, with the Christ figure as soldier and war as the way to make the world safe for Santa Claus. As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless.

— Los Angeles Times

If you’re not a fan, perhaps you’re among those who know of the book mainly thanks to the bleating of certain evangelicals who claim that Lewis’ tales–unlike those featuring that satanic Harry Potter–bring viewers to Christ. (“Go spend money on Narnia stuff to show that you love the Lord!”)

It’s true that there are elements of biblical allegory in here; it’s also true that this is a fantasy. And frankly, it’s the story that matters; even if you must categorize Narnia as a Christian movie, it’s many times better than any overtly Christian movie in recent memory. Faith-based films like Left Behind tend to pile on the sentimentality; Narnia does not.

— The Dallas Observer

While pundits and the press witter on about whether C.S. Lewis’ ageless tales of Narnia are too Christian, or not Christian enough, or the wrong kind of Christian, children the world over will yawn politely and read on. I must have devoured The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at least 10 times while growing up in an aggressively Anglican culture, and it never once occurred to me that Aslan the super-lion died the death of Christ and was similarly resurrected. Nor would it have bothered my little Jewish soul had someone set me straight.

…if Narnia according to Adamson is more a democratic war on crypto-fascist totalitarianism than a holy war against the non-Christian barbarian, I for one won’t be filing a complaint.

— LA Weekly

…generations of readers have found The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to be a gripping adventure that reaches well beyond its religious underpinnings, and this robust version respects both aspects and finds the same winning balance of excitement and meaning.

— The Onion AV Club

The lion’s eventual resurrection is crucial to the Christian overlay in Lewis’ work, and while this element may help “Lion” lure Gibson’s passionate audience to untold upward B.O. effect, the film does not stress its religious parallels.

— Variety

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)

Narnia and Christianity — does it matter?

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After reading Terrence’s ‘Saying No to Narnia‘ and Pharyngula’s ‘Narnia as an inoculation‘, both of which pointed to a Guardian UK article titled ‘Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion‘, I was somewhat annoyed. As an open-minded, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-Bush liberal who was brought up in a Christian household and counts Christianity as a major part of who I am and why I’m an open-minded, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-Bush liberal, it occasionally gets under my skin when I’m reminded yet again that ‘Christian’ has become a dirty word synonymous with the worst of the bigoted bible-thumping set, tainting anything that it touches.

It was quite nice to see Arcterex’s take on the same article, then:

I read the Narnia books as a child, and absolutely loved them. They had a similar draw as modern day Harry Potter. The downtrodden who think they aren’t anybody in the world finding out that they are a heros in a magical world.

Of course, then I found out later on in live about the religious overtones in the books…

And couldn’t care less. A good story is a good story, and personally I find this sort of ignorant reporting as bad as the Christian groups who go around saying how Harry Potter is promoting kids to become satanists and how it’s an evil book. It’s a friggin’ book and a good story. Geez.

Damn skippy. Sure, there are Christian overtones to the Narnia stories. There are Christian overtones to the Matrix stories, the Lord of the Rings stories, the Star Wars stories, and countless other stories (both printed and filmed), too. Why all the rancor? Just because the religious right (who all too often seem to embody the antithesis to the Christianity I grew up with) has jumped all over The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is it suddenly impossible to go out and enjoy a fun fantasy movie?

Sure, you can read all sorts of meaning into the stories and why they’re being brought to the screen now — religious indoctrination, right-wing propelled mass media conspiracy theories, whatever. You can also tell your inner Fox Mulder that every so often it doesn’t matter and go watch a movie.

That’s what I’m planning on doing.

LibraryThing Redux

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Well, it took a few hours (spread over the past few days) of free-time puttering, but my entire book collection (that isn’t loaned out, loaned out and not returned, lost, or still sitting somewhere at my folks’ house in Anchorage) is now entered into my LibraryThing catalog.

A paltry 373 books in total. Meh. I thought I’d be doing better than that…but then, I know there’s quite a bit that’s missing for one reason or another (books I remember having that aren’t there, series that are only half-complete, and other similar things). Still, it’s not a bad overview of my reading habits.

I may end up creating another account for Prairie and cataloging her collection also. That particular project is going to wait for a little while at least, though…getting mine done in two days is a good enough accomplishment for now.