Anotherblog

Further stellar observations

Further stellar observations
Anne U. has (politely) commented that there are several well-written answers to the question “Why is the sky dark at night?”, easily obtainable by typing “sky dark at night” into your favorite search engine. Unless your favorite search engine is, say, findanotter.com. Which would be mine, if there was such a search engine, because otters are the coolest animal in the world. I digress. The question even has a name: Otter’s paradox.

Actually, it’s called Olbers’ paradox, but I prefer my version.

Parential units
The folks are back in Brisbane again, and heading back to the UK tomorrow. A very brief visit, but they did end up staying with us last night, and we had a nice dinner with them and Aunt Elizabeth and Cousin Cathy before they left, and certain people had fun pressing Dad’s buttons about medicine vs. alternative therapies. I’m very much like Dad in this respect - often I can tell when my buttons are being pressed, and I know I should just be quiet, but I can’t resist making one last point…

Mage battle
Further work on my mage battle game! I’ve integrated Speed and Size into the game much better, and I think the game is more interesting as a result. It occured to me that some attacks (eg. starvation, poison) would be slower than others, and that I should try and reflect that in the game, and so there is now a mechanism for it, and a nice big game board too, that looks a little like a clock face. Fun!

Esoteric Programming Languages

Why is the sky dark at night?
I managed to get through high school & Uni without having heard this rather interesting question, which David MM explained to me at lunch today. One of the most interesting things about the night sky is that it is mostly dark. This fact allows us to derive the fact that the universe is not infinite in size, and to suggest the existance of the Big Bang.

You are standing in a forest. Why can’t you see the horizon? Well, partly because you have your eyes closed, but if you open them and look hard, you’ll notice that you are completely - gasp! - surrounded by trees. You draw any straight line to the horizon, and it’ll hit a tree first.

So, substituting stars for trees, why isn’t the night sky like that? If the universe was infinitely big and had been around forever, then no matter which direction we pointed, we’d be pointing directly at a star, which would be shining light at us. The sky would be completely white.

Objection: Perhaps stars cluster. Gravity, you know. Then we might see gaps.

Answer: Yes, that’s true. Stars cluster into galaxies, which just moves the problem up one level. Any direction we pointed, we should see a galaxy.

Objection: Stars get old and die.

Answer: Still, in an infinite universe, there’s a whole lot that aren’t old or dead. Actually, I’m not sure of the answer to the related “yes, but dead stars & gas clouds might obscure other stars”. We’ll leave that as homework, and I shall ask David tomorrow.

Objection: Perhaps after a certain distance, there just aren’t any more stars.

Answer: If that was the case, unless we were in the exact centre of the universe, we’d see more stars in one direction than the others. If you think we’re in the exact centre of the universe, fine. Our discussion ends here.

Anyway, it’s pretty cool. You can eliminate a lot of the other answers with observation and mathematics (for example, the expanding-but-infinite universe) and work out pretty much through induction that the best, most logical answer is that yes, after a certain distance there just aren’t any more stars, but that this distance is the edge of the universe, expanding at the speed of light. We aren’t at the centre of the universe *now*, but we were once upon a time, at the big bang.

Esoteric Programming Languages
David MM is well-known for having come up with several esoteric programming languages, and following our mind-expanding cosmology discussion, we came up with a new programming language - or at least, a nifty, incredibly helpful post-processor extension to any existing language. More details as we come up with them…

Parential Units vs. Housemate

Parential Units vs. Housemate
The parential units arrived in town yesterday morning, the day after our housemate Tristan moved out - co-incidentally, as it happened. Still, the folks had already made accomodation plans, so they’re not staying with us. Dad & I & Anna played badminton yesterday, and Dad was surprised at my sudden improvement in the game, as I beat him every game we played. He’s definitely more of a squash player than a badminton player. His fitness vastly exceeds mine, so by the end of the hour, he was catching up. I think he’d have run me into the ground with the next game.

We had takeaway Indian from Masala House in Newtown, and it was good, and I was perilously close to being “over” this morning, which would have meant no sugar today. So, phew. The folks are leaving on Thursday morning, so it’s unlikely we’ll have time for some of the other usual things Dad and I play whenever we get together - squash, golf, billiards. Stonking great barrels of relief, Bruce.

Games
Played a variety of board and card games on Monday, while Mum & Dad were off seeing other relatives. Anna had a snooze and I went over to Iain & Llyn’s place to do another games day, joined by Damian & David C. and an Ian and someone else whose name I surely haven’t forgotten already, but have. We played Apples To Apples (fun, as always, though the reverse game isn’t nearly as much fun as I was expecting), Roborally (terrific, especially with the newly painted miniatures), a very nasty game called “I’m the Boss”, and a weird Chameleon card game, which was actually a strange multi-player varient of Lost Cities mixed with Medici. Kinda. Anyway, all good fun, except “I’m the Boss”, which was a little too evil to be fun for us ultra-competitive types (and yes, I did come last. Why do you ask?)

My game
I spent quite a bit of weekend time working on my mage war card game, and it’s coming along nicely. I finally realised that although the mechanics were fairly solid and the flavour was working well, it wasn’t enough fun to play, and wasn’t looking like it was going to become much fun either. So I put in some solid work streamlining it and trying to make the game choices richer (but not more complicated) and the randomness more exciting and less frustrating. It’s improved already, but there’s a long way to go.

Ways of getting killed in Mage War:

Cut
Crushed
Burned
Frozen
Poisoned
Starved
Maddened

Other work
Worked a bit on “Hulk”, but didn’t get very far on it. Struggled with my cars short film, and abandoned a scene in it that just wasn’t working - a rarity for me (abandoning a scene, not scenes that don’t work). Abandoning scenes always depresses me, and usually means that I put whatever I’m doing aside for a while. But I struggled on.

So, tell us some other details of your boring life, Andrew
And the rest was DVDs. Watched JSA (Joint Security Area), thus finishing off the major films of Chan-wook Park, who did Oldboy and Sympathy For Mr Vengence. JSA was good - an interesting non-cliched take on the military - but not as good as the others. And, of course, it was harrowing and painful to watch.

Parents in town

Parents in town
Mum & Dad are over from England for a few weeks - they’ve been bouncing around Townsville and Brisbane, and on Monday it’ll be our turn. Yay! They are fun peoples, and papa shall ably beat me at squash again, and we’ll also probably play golf.

FF
More work on FF, and it’s beginning to look reasonably professional-ish, now. I posted a Catwoman review the other day, and added a list of the most recent comments to the sidebar, using a nifty plugin and about ten minutes of work. And now people are actually posting comments, too! I posted the Catwoman review to rec.arts.movies.reviews, but it’s moderated, so it hasn’t come up yet. Still, one of these days, some strangers may come to visit. I hope they like it. The plan is to post one FF review per week to rec.arts.movies.reviews, which should generate a mild bit of traffic, and perhaps mention the website on rec.arts.movies.past-films.

Badminton
I played badminton at lunch today against Ian B., my first game in two weeks, and despite the fact that I played barefoot and got a blister, it went pretty well. He won 3-2, which is the closest it has been in quite a while, and for once, I felt like I had answers, and I occasionally won easy points. The secret? The drop shot. Unlike in squash, a drop shot is a relatively safe thing to do: even if the opponent gets to it quickly, they can’t necessarily utterly destroy you. A poorly chosen drop shot in squash, when the opponent easily gets to it, is usually a point to them.

Anyway, thanks to my shoeless state, I wasn’t running around as much, so I tried varying the placement of the shuttle a lot more, ie. concentrated on the game, rather than hitting the shuttle lots. And to my surprise, it worked.

Cat!
Anna’s brothers found a cat, and took him home with them. He was in a shopping mall, wandering around looking lost, without a collar. After making the usual enquiries, they took him home, whereupon Anna’s mom pounced on him and fed him much food.

They’re taking him to the vet today to see if he’s microchipped. If he isn’t, his new name is Tucky, short for Kentucky, which is where they found him (outside a KFC). He’s about six months old, and is affectionate and calm. If he becomes a Bilalis cat, he will become very, very fat.

Snoring
Anna’s snoring was so loud the other night, the characters in my dream complained about it. She’s getting over a bit of a cold, and unfortunately, the vicks that she slathered on at night wasn’t helping much. Time to get earplugs.

Weekend plans
Not really, no. Yourself?

Film Forensics

Film Forensics
Spent most of today working on the old FF… and I think it’s going to pull through. Yup, all looking good. All of the issues I had on my list are now resolved, and the header is looking a wee bit better, and I have run out of excuses, so I’m going to start posting the reviews to rec.arts.movies.reviews tomorrow. Oh, and finish that Catwoman review.

By the way, it’s now at http://www.filmforensics.com/autopsy instead of http://www.filmforensics.com/wordpress, but if you just go to http://www.filmforensics.com/, it’ll find its way there OK.

Princess Blade
I got a couple of films out from the local asian video store, and watched them in order of predicted yummyness. First up: Princess Blade, which was essentially a freebie, and which I wasn’t expecting to be particularly good. And it wasn’t, but it wasn’t unwatchable either. Just a little more low-budget than I was expecting - it was set in a futuristic world full of kingdoms and terrorists and all kinds of wacky stuff. However, they clearly couldn’t afford to film any of that, so it’s a voiceover at the beginning, and a couple of CGI shots and spoken references every so often. The rest of the film is set in a tunnel, a forest, a beach, and a run-down petrol station/house. Still, points for trying, and points for doing lots of semi-convincing sword fighting.

Unfortunately for it, the following film almost completely erased it from my memory…

Kung-Fu Hustle
Rather stronger material than Stephen Chow’s previous “Shaolin Soccer”, but still immensely silly and hilarious. This one has a particularly odd structure - it feels like the film could end at any minute from the half-hour moment onward, because that’s when the fights start. After that, they’re pretty much non-stop topping themselves. Oh, yeah. It’ll be nice to see Hong Kong films move out of the 1950’s in their portrayal of women and gays, though.

It feels oddly like Stephen Chow is on the verge of an entirely new form of film: Kung-Fu Hustle was a kind of visual tall tale supported by enormous quantities of CGI. However, it was clearly not aimed at children.

And tomorrow…
I’ve been saving this one for last: “Sympathy for Mr. Vengence”. It’s by the makers of “Oldboy”, and it’s meant to be just as good. If it is, then I’m in for a real treat, because Oldboy just keeps growing and growing in my estimation the more I think about it.

Still a bit Wug

Still a bit Wug
It’s dragged on all week, and it’s been all I can do to drag myself to work and home again, even though work isn’t too bad. I took yesterday afternoon off and went home and lay in bed drawing designs for the FF homepage. The first design image header is up there now, but there’s a bit more work to go. I usually avoid going red/black/white, ’cause it can sometimes look a bit nazi. I think I’ve avoided it here, though.

Still a lot to do on FF before I start posting to rec.arts.movies.reviews:

- Change the top grapic to use the space a bit better, and be more readable.
- remove the horizontal white line that appears at the top on non-safari browsers.
- change the table format to horizontal instead of vertical (which should hopefully mitigate the problem with the table entrys being offset weirdly).
- Separate categories into three groups: categories, alphabetical, and author.
- Change all reference to “wordpress” to “archive”.
- Fix the presentation of the tables when you click on a category
- Allow permalinks to be more like http://www.filmforensics.com/archive/bubba-hotep, rather than http://www.filmforensics.com/wordpress/?p=27

All good excuses to continue procrastinating.

Anyway, what do you think? Getting there?

Catwoman

Catwoman
Hold everything! We saw Catwoman last night - Anna thought I might enjoy it for FF - and it sucked so much that I started writing a FF on the spot. Never mind Hulk or Constantine, this takes precedence. I’m 500 words in, and going strong. Sometimes there are bad films that are almost impossible to fix. This isn’t one of those.

Continued Wug
Apart from my newfound enthusiasm to trash Catwoman, I am still feeling wug. I would like to take tomorrow off work, but I think I may have left it too late to tell my workmates about it.

But then!
With a sudden burst of ennui, Andrew leaped to his seat, laid his arms on his desk, and fell asleep!

Wug

Wug
What an incredibly useful word.
I too feel wug today. I have had a bludgeoning weekend of procrastination combined with a series of films that can only be described as “draining”.

The House of Flying Daggers
I had been planning to see “Oldboy”, on a recommendation from Anna, but the trains were running late and I arrived about five minutes too late. Fortunately, THOFD was showing a few minutes later, so I shuftied into that screening instead.

Actually, I don’t know whether I was fortunate or not. I would probably have seen THOFD sooner or later, but I think I would have needed precisely the right frame of mind to really enjoy it. As it was, I thought it was very, very silly, and I laughed (quietly, to myself) at all the wrong times. THOFD is from the same tragic epic school of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Hero”, etc. Unfortunately, THOFD is far more melodramatic. It’s a beautiful film, full of beautiful cinematography, beautiful camerawork, beautiful wirework, and beautiful idiots. I almost considered doing a FF on the topic, but the changes I would ring would defeat the entire epic tragic point of the thing, the whole choice between loyalty and love. I understand that there is a big historic Loyalty thing in Chinese history, but really, it is taken to ludicrous lengths here.

Anyway, I came out kinda irritated and disappointed.

Oldboy
The feelings that I had coming out of Oldboy, however, were quite different. Stunned, perhaps. It’s a very, very good film, and saying too much about it would do you a disservice, not because it’s full to the brim with Spoilers - it isn’t - but because I went into it knowing nothing about it, and I think you should too. Having said that, don’t see it if you don’t like seeing nasty things.

The Manson Family
Anna had gotten this out on video, and it is perhaps the definitive underground video nasty exploitation flick. It took 14 years to film, apparently. I felt quite sick after having seen it. Very graphic sex and violence. Nasty and weird and amateurish, but its portrayal of the cult seemed to have a blunt kind of authenticity. It was filmed as though it were a documentary, complete with scratchy film and washed-out video. Also, yuck.

Anyway…
That’s not the title of a film. It is intended as a segue to my continued wugness. Another factor that may contribute to this lassitude is the fact that I played squash or badminton three days in a row, and I now hurt a lot. Thank goodness Anna and I went to see…

An Evening with Peter Jackson
Ah, the “nice” highlight of the weekend (the true highlight was Oldboy, but it wasn’t nice, and it contributed to my current state). It consisted of Peter Jackson and David Stratton sitting in comfy chairs, chatting about whatever came to mind, and occasional bits of the blooper reels from the Lord of the Rings films showing. The chats didn’t reveal anything particularly new, though PJ was a little more blunt than I’d seen/read before. He went into a fifteen minute description of the struggle to get LOTR off the ground, and gave some new tidbits I’d not heard - apparently, the producers had prepared a three-page summary of the two-hour version of LOTR done as one film, and had a new writer and director lined up if PJ said no. He described a little of the summary - Rohan and Gondor squished into one place, Moria done by having Frodo emerge from cave and saying “Well, that was exciting!”.

The best bits, though, were the out-take & gag reels. Hobbits being very, very rude. Gandalf with an amazing flowery Mardis Gras hairdo proclaiming the Time Of The Queen. Legolas repeatedly unable to fire arrows. Theodin and Aragorn speculating on their action dolls. Aragorn firing an Uzi at Sauron. Saruman delivering The Australian Lord’s Prayer, in a rather good Australian accent.

There was, of course, huge applause for PJ, but like the LOTR Symphony, as soon as he left the stage, the applause died down and people started filing out. Now, by my reading, if you want encores but they dont’ have encores to give, they generally turn the house lights on. However, in this case, the applause stopped well before the house lights came on, which (to my mind) says they might have had more to offer. More gag reels. Would have been nice.

Film Forensics
I didn’t do any work on FF or the Cars film on the weekend, which also contributed to my currently Wug state of mind. However, I finally got Winston’s “Battlestar Galactica” review and Marco’s “The Lion King” review up.

Japanese Horror Films

Japanese Horror Films
Went to Dave & Kyla’s place on Sunday and watched two Japanese horror films: “Cure” and “Spiral”. The first was provocative and mysterious to a slightly irritating degree, and Spiral was very, very silly, and looked as though they had run out of money about five minutes before the end. Still, I am beginning to get a better feel for the tropes of the genre now, and they were a lot of fun.

Time = zip!
The days are just flying by. I’ve not been doing much of my own projects lately, partly due to the influx of DVDs we now own, and partly because I’m often rather tired. Must be my age.

Patent!
On the bright side, I came up with a brand new nifty patent idea on Friday, that I’m reasonably sure hasn’t been done before. Unfortunately, it’s a software patent (my other main patent was hardware). I generally dislike the idea of software patents, while recognising that as long as they exist, you have to do them. At least it is a neat idea. I felt smug for quite a bit of the weekend.

The Infants of Paradise
Not only do we own many DVDs, but Anna has been going on a rental binge. We got “Les Enfants Du Paradis” on the weekend, and I watched it over the last few days. It’s a three hour film divided into two parts, and it’s rather remarkable. Hugely opulant, massive cast, epic film that was done during World War 2 in occupied France. A number of the crew were jews or resistance fighters. Quite incredible when you know the back-story, almost as incredible when you don’t, ’cause as epics go, it’s a good one. It’s a very *mature* story, funny and clever and cynical or, possibly, realistic while being at the same time romantic. Anyway. Liked it lots. Never, ever going to try a Film Forensic on it. It’s end up cutting *me* apart.

DVD player

DVD player
We found out why the DVD player was eating the DVDs. We had bought a couple of ex-rental DVDs from Video Ezy, and Anna had efficiently taken the Video Ezy stickers off the DVDs. These stickers were in the middle of the DVDs, and of course, there was a little bit of stickiness remaining. So when the DVD playing mechanism decided to let go of the DVD, it refused to go, and when the platter came out, it wasn’t there. Meanwhile, the DVD gave up and dropped into the mechanism of the player.

So hopefully it will be all fixed now.

Badminton
Played badminton at lunch today… argh. Lost 0-5, though there were a couple of very close games. Sore now. Actually, it was rather silly of me to play, because my neck and back have been very sore over the last couple of days, to the extent that I took Tuesday off and lay on the floor all day with back pain and headaches. But they seemed better this morning, so what the hell. I did many warm-ups and warm-downs, and the games don’t seem to have done any lasting damage.

An evening with Peter Jackson
Hooray! Ev pointed out that there was “An Evening With Peter Jackson” on at the State theatre in two week’s time, so I immediately booked a couple of tickets. Apparently he will be talking about LOTR and showing segments of film and stuff. Peter Jackson, that is, not Ev.

Film Forensics
Posted up a Bubba Ho-Tep review that took an awfully long time to write, and involved watching the film with director’s commentary, reading the short story, and rather more fact-checking than is normal for such a review. Anyway, I’m happy with it. Moreover, I did a bunch of work on the website, changing the theme (to the default Wordpress 1.5 theme, but oh well) and changing the format of the reviews so that the body of the review appears as a hidden area behind a “Read the rest of this entry” message. Which is good: it means that all the formatting of the webpages (including the introduction and motivation pages) are handled by wordpress now. Changing the entire look & feel should be very simple at this point. If I ever get around to it. Meanwhile, I shall work on more content. Next up: probably “Hulk” or “Constantine”, depending on whether I see Constantine tomorrow night.