links for 2007-04-17
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While I have no doubt the films in question are offensive to some people, the Office of Film and Literature Classification is more than harsh enough in Australia already!
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Interesting piece suggesting more mobile use decreases PC literacies: “In Japan, the problem is that as the youth become more adept with mobile technology, their ability to use PCs … regressed to the point where it matches their parents’. “
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300/Anchorman mashup – nicely done – not as disturbing as the South Park 300 episode last week, but getting there! “Tonight Ron Burgundy dines in hell.” [Via Chuck]
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300 as a HALO machinima!
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The creators of Lonelygirl15 have a British spin-off, KateModern, a London teenager whose social life is taking a twist! It’ll launch through Bebo, emphasising audience interactivity, and have careful brand and advertising strategies from day 1.
links for 2007-04-16
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Even the ads have behind the scenes featurettes now! 😉 Mind you, wiht that much exploding paint, it’s amazing footage, regardless of what it’s used for!
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Will French politicians beat Obama to become the exemplar of web politics, as JFK was the exemplar of TV politics? [Via Jill]
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Documentary, meets lecture, meets mashup as Slavoj Zizek talks film and desire in this feature directed by Sophie Fiennes. Zizek’s thesis: ‘Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire’
Spider-Man 2.1
Having dedicated the final chapter of my doctoral thesis to examining the first two Spider-Man films as an exemplar of Artificial Culture, I really had to buy and watch the new Spider-Man 2.1 DVD, despite my constant annoyance at how these just-before-the-sequel extended edition DVD releases tend to disappoint. The 2.1 DVD set is advertised as having a new ‘Extended Cut’ of Spider-Man 2 with eight minutes new footage, while the second disc sports a bunch of ‘all-knew’ features. Sadly, the features on the extras DVD really don’t justify the creation of an disc. The ‘sneak peak’ and trailer for Spider-Man 3 don’t show anything not already floating around the legitimate parts of the internet, while the ‘VFX Breakdown’ is quite a laborious walk-through of the meshing of live-action, miniature and digital effects. I guess it’s hard to make these technical mini-docos all that interesting, but the Lord of the Rings DVDs did show it’s possible! I have the feeling VFX piece was shot for the original Spider-Man 2 DVD but cut since they’re just really dull.
Of more interest, the eight minutes of extra footage do change the tone of the film in important places. There’s a lot of extra character development for Harry and Mary-Jane; Harry’s friendship is reinforced in an extended version of Peter’s birthday party, while a new sequence between Mary-Jane and her friend highlights the fact that MJ is settling in her marriage rather than following her true love. Also, probably of more interest to the target audience, there are additional, CGI-heavy, shots added into Spider-Man’s fight sequences with Doctor Octopus. However, apart from some extra punches and scrapes, these don’t add anything notable to the story. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out this extended version isn’t labeled a ‘Director’s Cut’ as I suspect Rami was quite happy with the theatre-released version.
However, just when I thought the DVD was really quite a waste of money, I found myself laughing out loud at one unexpected sequence in which J Jonah Jameson “celebrates” Spider-Man’s retirement and The Bugle’s acquisition of the Spider-suit in an entirely unexpected but unforgettably funny way! Of course, the J Jonah Jameson clip is on YouTube: Be warned, though, this scene is much funnier in the context of the film. Forewarned, then, watching this clip by itself may prove less funny …
Since you’re no doubt just watched the clip anyway, I’d recommend against buying 2.1 – there’s nothing more to see.
Delicious Dilemmas
Sadly, that title means dilemmas in using del.icio.us and WordPress together, not dilemmas in deciding my next dessert! 🙁 For over a month now I’ve been using del.icio.us’ “Blogging: daily blog posting” tool to create daily posts containing my del.icio.us bookmarks in the preceding 24 hours. These posts are timed to occur at 0 GMT (8am my time), but I noticed on Saturday morning, despite a number of bookmarks waiting to appear, none did. Nor did my Sunday post arrive. So, checking del.icio.us, I found this error notice:
results:Running at Sun Apr 15 00:31:03 2007 GMT<br>Fetched 1 items.<br>posting error was: 408 Request Timeout <br>
My first concern was that WordPress had a new issue, but since I was still using 2.1.2 (and had been for more than a week, with successful posts during that time), I looked at GoDaddy (my hosts) which produced a rather intricate and inexplicably complex maze, but in the end no errors could be found in WordPress or my database. So, next I tried to install WordPress 2.1.3 since it has a bug-fix for what they call a “major XML-RPC issue”, which might have stopped del.icio.us talking to my installation of WordPress. No improvements there. Then digging deeper into the WordPress forums I found this thread – WP 2.1.3 slow performance – in which a number of people talk about slowdowns using the 2.1 versions of WordPress but, probably not coincidentally, most are using GoDaddy. So, I phoned GoDaddy support who, after 20 minutes – and putting me on hold for at least 15 of those minutes – I’m told that there’s nothing wrong at their end; their servers are running ‘optimally’, as is my database. Also to my surprise, the support guy had never heard of del.icio.us. (And, I should add, even using Skypeout, calling the US for 20 minutes from Australia isn’t the cheapest thing to do.) Finally, I’ve gone back to del.icio.us and tried to run a slightly different daily blog posting request, but still I get the same error!
So, the short version of this story is: no daily links until I can figure out what’s going on (and, to be frank, I think I’ve exhausted my technical knowledge). If anyone has advice or an alternate way to automate daily del.icio.us summary posts in WordPress, that’d be most welcome. (However, I have tried postalicious and that just times out!). Help!
Update (Monday, 9am): Despite all my failed attempts, my link-posts returned on Monday morning; I have no idea why, but I should know better than to question by now!
links for 2007-04-13
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RIP Kurt Vonnegut
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Justin Kan’s “lifecasting” pauses at the intimate moment! While disappointing to many Justin TV viewers, the life-in-the-comments on Justin TV during this blackout illustrate quite an interesting little community!
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“… for all the undisputed influence of blogs, the figures also show that blogging is still very much a minority sport. … The number of English-language blogs is under 24m, a comparatively small proportion of the population of the US (around 300m)…”
I Jaikued today … I don’t think I shall again.
I tried Jaiku today since it’s been discussed a lot recently as the ‘other’ Twitter (even though Jaiku was around first, I think).
First impressions of Jaiku – a lot more tools, more fleshed out, I like the idea of comment threads on individual messages, it’s less about popularity per se, and more about a small tight-knit group (I think). The recent explosion of interest and use of Twitter seems to have people trying Jaiku as well, but from my few hours of use, the massive influx of users has left Jaiku with more speed problems than Twitter’s recent scaling and capacity issues.
However, the appeal of Twitter for me is its simplicity … it has very few tools and the posts (Twits) are primarily self-contained. The ‘@’ reponding has evolved socially, but I don’t imagine it’ll grow to get all that complicated.
More to the point, for me, Twitter is a sometimes food and I like my procrastination (or ‘continual partial prescence’ if you must) simple and no fuss.
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