So now I get to listen to traffic go by

alternateorg on October 31, 2001

While at everyone’s favorite interactive agency and after-hours Quake facility tonight, my car got broken into. More to the point, my window got broken and the detachable face of my stereo got stolen. Not the entire thing, but just the face. And also some CD jewel cases that contained zero CDs. They happened to miss the cash on the passenger seat and the entire Case Logic CD caddy positively full of CDs right below that. Smart fuckers, these car stereo theives. It’s happened before, in my high-school era 1985 Corolla, so I’m not that shocked/apalled/stricken with grief as most people are the first time they get violated in such a mildly inconvenient way. This is when having a used-car sales manager for a major Denver-area Toyota dealer for a father-in-law proves to be an advantage. Well, this and the fact that we pay cost for near-new cars. But that’s another story.

Turn on a lightswitch…

alternateorg on October 29, 2001

I saw “Waking Life” the other night. Bear in mind that I fucking hate “Slacker” (though I realize its importance to indie film) and thought that “Dazed and Confused” was one of the more boring films around. That said, I recognize that I am not the desired definitive Gen-X demographic for those films. So he had a lot going against him. But I am a huge fan of animation, and found this whole rotoscoping technique to be very interesting.

But this will probably be the movie this year that I disliked the most.

Two main reasons: 1) Animation rotoscoping. Fantastic idea. Carried out very poorly. The sole reason I can find for having 8+ different objects in any given scene moving completely independently of each other is because it looks cool on drugs. And thats a stupid reason. I don’t get car sick, and I’ve always had a strong motion sickness immunity. But for the past two years, “Star Tours” at Disneyland has been messing with me. And it bugs. So anyways the film lurched my stomach forward instantly, but it stayed at a steadily upset, and never got out of hand. But it honestly seemed that he used this technique SOLELY to get peoples attention so that he could preach to them about reality for an hour and a half.

Which brings us to 2nd reason: the “story.” Did Mr. Linklater get help from Spaulding Gray on this one? What was the concept conversation like? “Hey, we *could* have people talk to each other, try to make it interesting and worthwhile, or we could have these ‘characters’ speak almost directly to the camera. About things that only that angry, bootwearing, hipster goth kid thinks is worthwhile!” I mean, I guess this film bugged because it touched directly on my general problems with most philosophy. While its great to contemplate whether or not life is real or not, whether we’re ants, or really just dead always, or any of that, it seems like most philosophy is a poor excuse for fucked up people to justify their socially irresponsible actions. “Hey, you can’t fuck me and just run out on me!” “But baby, you know that none of this happened, it ain’t real. Hey, lets do some crank!”

Basically, I don’t care whether or not you think you’re going to heaven, hell, be reincarnated, have nothing happen, or wake up from a dream, if you’re an ass *right now* in *this* life, then you should head to the next.

But most people should check out this pic, just to see what they think. While I barely enjoyed it (loved the dream stuff), and more people left the theatre than I have ever seen, I think it is a very ambitious film.

Can’t believe you said you “hate those people” who left the theatre, Kev. Harsh. Anyways, has anyone else seen this film? Flame on!

Poll

alternateorg on October 26, 2001

So the new poll isn’t the most thought-provoking or new idea in the world, but that’s okay. Think of it as a beta-test, which it actually is. If you run into problems let me know, but please don’t vote more than once, even though you currently can in fact do so. You are only to cast multiple votes if you: a. forgot what you voted for the first time, b. want to change your mind or c. really want to.

Black Screen of Death

alternateorg on October 24, 2001

I know how you all like to laugh at Microsoft, so I thought you all might enjoy this.

I played a bit of the XBox today when I went to pick up the suprisingly awesome Grand Theft Auto 3. As before, I wasn’t impressed. That said, some of the launch games are getting some good reviews. Of course, Halo was meant to be on a Mac, so I apologize for opening old wounds. Personally, I’ll just wait a few months and then possibly contemplate getting it. We’ll see. These next coming months will be very interesting for games.

I've Seen It All

alternateorg on October 23, 2001

Saw Bjork last night at LA’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. With an awesome harp player. And the wonderful craziness that is Matmos. And a funky choir of Inuit girls from Greenland. Oh yeah, and a 50+ piece goddamned orchestra. It was…good.

Matmos is a band that makes more interesting sounds than they make good music, in my opinion. Using a balloon as a drum. Plucking and bowing on their old hamster’s cage, as a tribute to said ex-hamster. They have an entire CD of surgical sounds called “A Chance to Cut is A Chance to Cure.” They opened, and were far more enjoyable than I expected.

But I didn’t go to see Matmos.

Bjork is someone that most people either love or hate. I can understand why those that hate her do so, but I feel sorry for those people. It must be sad to not love her work. To not have such warm music to rely on. But anyways this was not an electronica performance. This was essentially “An Evening with Bjork.” There was an intermission. I think that is incredibly stylish. We had wonderful seats, and got to witness something incredibly rare. I’m still beaming.

So if you ever get to see one of your favorite artists with an orchestra, I recommend it. It’s so choice.

Oh yeah, no one will probably care, but on the way to the venue we drove by LA’s Pershing Square. I have never been there, and I only know it from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 previews. Suffice to say, it is very very surreal to drive by a videogame level.

iPod and iTunes 2.0

alternateorg on October 23, 2001

Despite that fact that this whole ‘everything prefixed with a lower-case i’ thing is pretty 1999 (hey, at least the computers don’t come in colors any more), Apple introduced today the iPod and iTunes 2. The iPod is a digital music player with a 5Gb hard drive that weights in at 6.4 ounces and is about the size of a pack of cards. What is quite amazing about it is that it’s got 10 hours of batter life, and can be charged via the FireWire cable that’s used to drag n drop music files to it like a hard drive. An interesting user interface provides the listener with quite a lot of control when away from your digital hub (ie, Macintosh computer), including playlist selection and native language selection. iTunes 2 is simply a newer version of the popular iTunes software, which will be required to connect to the new device. At $399, it ain’t cheap especially for you PC users out there, as you’d have to buy a Mac to use it. Nyah. I also noticed that the new device looks exactly like the MP3 player that was included with Developer Preview releases of MacOS X, prior to the Public Beta which included iTunes instead.