Pug’s Place

Similar to Jim Thompson here, CitizenShift of Canada has asked for permission to play my video “What Is Free Culture” at their “Autonomous Media Night” in Montréal on 3 May 2006. Unlike Jim, I don’t mind them playing my short, despite it’s obvious flaws in structure in the last 70 seconds.

(According to the request email, CitizenShift is “a space for independent and emerging media makers offering a unique on-line platform for the discussion of important social issues through video, audio, images and text.”)

Spring Break was fun, but recapping some of the adventures therein belongs in a different post. Of course the old adage that ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ may be applicable, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll mention the bar fight in Margaritaville at 1 am. Hmm.

I’ve spent much too much time doing homework and project-work this week and not nearly enough time playing Sid Meier’s “Pirates!” (which is, by the way, awesome) and coding on Gpremacy. More later.

April and I (with James as a witness) batted around ideas for another Star Wars-inspired Fan Film last weekend, much narrower in scope than Pizza Delivery Jedi. My working title is “William, your neighborhood Sith Lord”. The idea is to make a short about a day (or so) in the life of the guy down the street who happens to be a Dark Lord of the Sith.

I have in my mind his house appearing to be a normal every-day sort of one story house, but when you enter the back yard you find a giant Massassi step-temple being constructed.

I’m imagining short clips where William uses the Power of the Dark Side for personal gain. Like:

• Force Lightning
  • Using Force Lightning to recharge a camera battery
  • Using Force Lightning to power A/C (or a TV, or something) after a hurricane
  • “Rock, Paper, Scissors… FORCE LIGHTNING!”
• Telekinesis
  • Force throw/choke/grip to rescue/remove a cat from a tree
  • Force Pull to acquire a beverage (too obvious, methinks)
  • Modify the roll of dice in D&D
• Other Powers(?)
  • Life drain to LARP Vampire: The Masquerade in very… authentic ways

Consider this my solicitation for further suggestions. If things start looking entertaining enough, hell… who knows, maybe I’ll actually film it. I’m crazy, man, crazy!

According to an interview with Joss Whedon in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, Firefly/Serenity is over. Amusingly, today’s the DVD release of Serenity. Coincidence?

Anyway, it looks like the saga has ended.

…At least they can’t take the sky from me.

Having been to the theater to see Serenity a couple of times in the last couple of days, I noticed an amusing phenomenon: If I were searched at the ticket podium and found to be carrying a loaded gun, I could show my permit and everything would be okay. If I were searched and found to be carrying a can of Jones Soda, I would be thrown out of the theater and banned. Is anyone else amused by this revelation of the peculiarities of theaters?

This is not to say that I didn’t sneak a Strawberry-Lime Jones Soda into the theater yesterday, because I did.

*scratches at ant bite* Anyone want to fulfill a half-scam like those for my iPod last year for my last Play Station Portable referral? This particular FreePSP thing has been waiting at 4/5 referrals since March and starting to get over-ripe. I’ll hand you $15 for your hassle, just let me know you want to do it.

I just watched the first episode of Star Trek: New Voyages titled “Come What May.” If you’ve not heard of New Voyages, it’s a fan-produced continuation of The Original Series, taking place between the end of TOS and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. They’re releasing episodes at a rate of around 1 per year at present, which is rather fast considering the amount of work which must have gone into producing these. Now, about “Come What May”:

The plot was very acceptable, very reminiscent of several TOS episodes. The special effects were, as one would expect, much better than those of The Original Series… the sets were about what I expected, most of them looking like the same room in someone’s house with different spray-painted plastic water containers taped to the walls. That’s not to say they failed to suspend disbelief! No, they worked despite being rather simple. The bridge set, though, looks rather good. Not quite Paramount’s standards, but the important blinky-lights are blinking, the captain’s chair looks uncomfortable and the view-screen has blue matting showing around its edges. Everything working as Trek should.
The acting… well, I’m not so sure on the acting. Some of the characters seemed more occupied with copying their predecessors’ mannerisms than delivering a believable performance. Kirk and Uhura were fairly believable, but I’m less impressed with Spock, Bones and Scotty. Interestingly, the only people I thought were poor were the support folks: the colony leader, the Admiral…

It’s worth watching, if only for the same reason that Pizza Delivery Jedi is worth watching: morbid curiosity. I’ll see if the second episode, “In Harm’s Way,” improves upon the ‘pilot’ and let you know once I get a chance. Considering my present state of health, I will likely have more than sufficient time to vegetate and watch shows. Mmm, Babylon 5….

I watched Top Gun tonight for the first time in four years. While on the phone with my father he asked the inevitable question, “did the ending change this time?” My answer was “yes.”

Top Gun has to be one of my all-time favorite movies, if not #1 then it’s #3 (since there are no points for second place). From May 1989 through June 1990 I watched this movie, on average, four times a week. The VHS tape I have of it, while still workable, now shows a noticeably darker picture during the air combat scenes: those are the scenes I watched over and over. You see, my methodology for watching Top Gun was essentially this:

1. Put on my helmet (one of Jay’s motorcycle helmets which covered the whole head)
2. Get in my cardboard F-5 (which fit me — was made from a refrigerator box, had wings and a tail with cut rudder and ailerons, no joke! Thanks, Dad!)
3. Put my non-working Commodore joystick in front of me
4. Use the VCR remote to fast forward through all of the boring parts (that involved Kelly McGillis, generally)

Thus, as you can imagine, I watched the dogfights a lot more than I did the silly ground stuff. With that kind of dedication you can appreciate why my father asked the question he did. But this time yes, the ending changed for me.

A number of things happened since the last time I watched Maverick have a self confidence problem. First, I now feel no need to fast forward through the Cruise/McGillis relationship scenes. Second, I know Ottis Redding and that song Maverick’s mother loved. Continuing in this fashion, I know about the Gulf of Sidra incidents the first of which helped inspire the finale of the movie, that the computer screens showing telemetry at NAS Miramar in the movie is a simulacrum of the 1980s Display and Debriefing Subsystem (DDS) and that the air combat footage was almost all filmed at the Fallon Range Training Complex, at NAS Fallon (which is now, incidentally, the location of TOPGUN since NAS Miramar was closed as part of a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) in 1993).

That last part is especially interesting. I know this stuff now, I know people at NAS Fallon doing this sort of thing. There’s a lot of attention to detail in Top Gun, about stuff about which I’ve only recently become knowledgeable.

…and there’s ego, F-14s pulling high-G maneuvers, missiles, aircraft carriers, beautiful aerial videography and the strong guitar riffs of Harold Faltermayer. Those are probably the real reasons this movie will number among my favorites for the rest of my life. Well, at least until the Thrawn Trilogy is made into movies.

…Is that Fight Club is an awesome movie. I just finished watching it for the first time and, well, it’s an experience. I was taken aback and fully entertained.

Soap.

What is it about the Dark Knight that makes me want to cast Dominate Person on him and be the Bat? Is it his ninjutsu? The armor? The utility belt? The Batmobile? The Batwing? No, it’s the fact that he has no super powers. He is just a man who has Tom Sensei-like martial art skills and a boatload of money. He’s the sort of man every guy between the ages of 15 and 25 dreams of being. Every guy at some point says to himself, “If only I too could spend seven years of my life training in Aikijujitsu, Ninjutsu, Iaido, Kung Fu and Dim Mak Death Touch, gain several billion dollars and lose my loved ones to violent crime, I too could become Batman.”

So we watch and hope, hope that we might one day wake up and find ourselves capable of becoming the hero, the crusader.

This movie was an excellent piece of story and action. Even my Mom liked it! It’s what you expect out of a summer movie night, engrossing entertainment, things blowing up, swords clashing, evil versus more evil, depression, psychosis, very good acting and Alfred.

I’d write more but I must fall asleep soon. It’s been an entertaining and stimulating evening!

(Oh, and Yay Jen!)

Oh, by the way — it was two years ago today that we finished shooting Pizza Delivery Jedi. Principal videography occured from 13 June until 17 June with voiceovers done on 18 June.

Today I burned the first Pizza Delivery Jedi DVD from Linux, the first working DVD copy which has the rotoscoped lightsabres. Much of the legwork was taken care of by Any2VOB, a shell script which automates the process of taking most video formats directly to a .VOB file which you can put on a DVD. Menus and such I created with DVDStyler which, while not easy to understand, is well documented.

It works, and on the DVD I have:

1. Pizza Delivery Jedi - No Clashes (the version on Archive.Org now)
2. Pizza Delivery Jedi - Clashes (the version on Archive.Org from November until March, the first version with rotoscoping
3. Pizza Delivery Jedi Director’s Cut (no rotoscoping, 11 minutes long)
4. What Is Free Culture? - My video for Florida Free Culture’s first meeting, since it was handy.
5. The jacket art as a picture

The one problem is there is some interlacing weirdness on TVs. It’s only noticeable when there’s fast action going on, but the screen blurs like mad when things move quickly. I’m thinking that the interlacing has gotten backward in the movies through the iterations of editing and it may need to be deinterlaced and reinterlaced before I’m done. But now I’ve proved I can go from .mov files to a DVD which will play in any DVD player!And the menus and stuff are designed, configured and everything so I just have to update the .mov file, transcode it with proper interlacing and re-burn the DVD.
Then I need to go and have some glossy color laser prints of the jacket art done. Hmmmm.

Went shooting with Sean today for a little while. Too little of a while, really. Wasn’t an optimal time but it worked, and we had fun.

Continuing my quest through The Chronicles of Amber. Very entertaining.