Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2005/01/Sky Captain just came out on DVD today, and it is a friggin' awesome film! The weird-cepia-Turner-just-got-finished-colorizing-it effect was a bit distracting at first, but easily gotten past. Much like the Jules Verne steampunk set in Victorian/Edwardian times, this sort of art deco, retro scifi, serial, film noir is another era and style that absolutely captures me. What really gets me is that, aside from the actors, the entire film was shot in a computer (or, rather, a room full of computers.) The original 6-minute short was done by one of the guys on a DV cam with Mac OS 9 and some off-the-shelf software for 3D modeling and video editing. The final film looks much the same, but was done by a hundred people on more modern equipment. So overall, yes, I thought it was good. Your mileage may vary. I was pleasantly surprised at how tastefully and believably they worked Sir Laurence Olivier in as an important main character.
In the last couple of days, I watched the last episode of Wonderfalls and the first of Angel season 5. (Gosh, based on what you read here, it sounds like I do nothing but watch videos and post to LiveJournal, doesn't it? Really, most of it ends up being background noise while doing other things.) Wonderfalls was ….meh… I got suckered into the happy, sappy ending, but overall it was just so-so. Angel was just… weird. I am having difficulty seeing mister-strong-man-Charles-Gunn as a lawyer. Additionally, the way it sort of un-resolved a few things that got finalized in the last episode of Buffy was a bit troubling. Also: the problem with downloading things is that you are never sure of the quality. Case in point: the Angel episode had the audio and video out of sync by about half a second. This is great with something campy like kung fu, but rather distracting otherwise.
The cats seem to like my tuna jerky more than I. The cat likes getting his ears cleaned much less than I do.
We got to talking about weird old processors at work the other day and the Radio Shack Microcomputer Trainer (catalog number 28-260) came up. Yes, I built one as a kid. Yes, I programmed it through switches. I sort of went from switches to tape drives to single-sided 180K floppy disks and beyond, without touching punch cards or paper tape in between.
