Grunt grunt mod_perl install grunt grunt hackery. Man, Apache is a pain in the butt. Anyways, works now. I can’t get the supposedly superfast Movable Type as a handler method to work, but it’s running OK as a CGI, and seems to be marginally faster. I’ll take what I can get and look forward to moving onto the G3.
Month: August 2002
The BBC had an article about interesting multi-region DVD players, which perhaps holds clues about the inevitable clash between the people who make content and the people who make devices to display that content. If DVD manufacturers can’t hold the multi-region line, what are the chances that computer makers will care long-term about Hollywood’s digital rights management demands?
Full Frontal probably goes down as a daring failure, but I can’t fault Soderbergh for experimenting. The problem is mostly that the experiment doesn’t have a center. The cinematographic tricks work well, and the acting is solid. But when all’s said and done, the lines between strata of reality have been blurred to no visible end.
“All these facts suggest that there may be, somewhere in United States government (or better yet, the privately-held Federal Reserve system), a department of gnostic artists who perform the priestly function of communicating between man and God.”
Tammy Baldwin appears to be fairly sensible for a politician.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie is called Punch-Drunk Love, and is due to hit theaters in October. As per normal for his films, he’s released little information about it — it’s a romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, and that’s about it.
The site linked above now has three trailers, hiding behind the three words of the title. They are the most non-spoiling trailers I’ve ever seen. Cool stuff. Can’t wait.
Wired does an admirable job of covering the laws regarding air travel and government ID. In short, it appears to be the case that the airlines must request a valid form of ID, but it is not the case that the airlines must turn away a passenger who does not present a valid form of ID. Airlines can, of course, refuse to allow passengers to board for any reason.
Check out this beautiful shot of a Child of Light from the Delta Green CRPG. Wow, that’s batrachian. (Picture changes weekly, so if you look at it and say “Hey, that’s not batrachian at all,” it’s not my fault.)
The kind of person who browses weblogs has already heard about Lawrence Lessig’s brilliant copyright presentation, but sometimes you want to make really sure the meme has spread widely. This is important. It’s an eight gigabyte Flash animation and it will take half an hour of your day but it actually contains information and concepts you want to hear about.
Cure for the common complacency, you know?
Warren Ellis said this in his newsletter:
It’s hard to do melody in comics. I’ve been messing around with it for years, trying to duplicate My Bloody Valentine or Pixies effects in comics, and it’s hard, verging on the impossible. I got close to it sometimes in The Authority: there’s a point in an old Dr Feelgood song where Lee Brilleaux yells “Eight bars on the old joanna” and Wilko Johnson’s guitar clangs like a fucking fire alarm for thirty seconds, and I got close to that in the second story arc — just closed my eyes and ran with it and cannibalised poor Hitch. But rhythm is easier. My basic trick is working three balloons or captions a panel, five panels a page. Bang bang bang. Five panels makes the page just slightly asymmetrical, puts a little flourish in there. Drop back to four/four. Nine-panel grid becomes breakbeats, if you cut the text back. Half the toolbox is in Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. I stole all my pauses from manga. There’s a trick they use, that Scott McCloud explicated best in Understanding Comics — when they pause, they whack at least two of the panel borders out to bleed, so the picture extends off the edges of the page and is no longer contained by gutters or panel flow. It says that, in this panel, time has stopped. Sticks down. Pause. It’s the long second in the back end of my current favourite single, Queen Adreena’s “Pretty Like Drugs,” where the music stops and all you can hear is Kaite Jane Garside saying “Pretty Like Druuuugs” and everything else is frozen around that moment and you stop breathing.