Category: Uncategorized

Alright time for a post.

but rather than talking about san francisco or our appartment or the interminable search for work or something interesting I’m going to talk about heros. *shrugs* it’s what I feel like talking about.

Movies. Seen two since we got here: stardust and transofrmers.

Stardust tried but we both thought it fell short. Sometimes way short. A lack of interesting characters and awfull awfull abuse of music. Plus we recently saw Pan’s Labarynth which had the same feel but was fucking awesome.

And why didn’t I see transforners when it came out? I didn’t know until we got here. The IMAX version is playing in town! w00t w00t! Except that the movie sucked. Sucked hard. That was really really bad. Stock characters picked right off the shelf. A rediculous plot. Full of holes. Uninspired fight scenes.

I read the leaked script way before it came out so I knew what I was in for. Although man was the script I read a high-water mark. Just real quick here’s the hole I hated the most:

The movie is laboured with obnoxious hacker people. All the hacker people actually DO is call in the air force to the final battle (with a comodore 64 and a ww2 radio). So the jets show up and they’re going to use marine sighted lasers to drop a bomb on a disepticon. But the disepticon freaks out and the marines fuck up their sighting and a main charater does something rediculous on a motorbike to kill the disepticon instead. Then starscream kills all the jets. That’s it. Jets gone. Net gain: zero. So the hackers are given 30 minutes of cumulitive screen time and all they do is call in some jets that might as well have not been called in! How do those characters survive editing?

So the movie was too suck to be good on its own merits and too different from the cartoon to be nostalgic.

In less suck news: Battlestar Gallactica. Missed almost the whole 3rd season in Thailand so we (Sarah’s started watching it!) got to catch the whole thing up, with directors commentary, in just a week or so. These guys know what they’re doing. Strong plots, great characters, looks amazing. overall great. We aren’t watching the last two eps because it’s going to be an end of season cliff hanger. Forget that, we’ll watch them when the new season starts in jan.

We are finally watching heros. Which everyone and their dog recomends. We’ve got the whole first season and are watching it straight through. Which should be the optimal way to watch a contiguous serial like this. It’s ok but not nearly as good as I thought it was going to be. They expected alot of investment in the characters right away. Here are a two people you know nothing about, their mairrage is in trouble! Frett! Which isn’t really a problem past the first few episodes. Except that alot of them never really get interesting ever. I blame the writing. A few people, like the cop, Hiro, Ando, and to a lesser extent the cheerleader and her dad are interesting. But I think that’s because they have strong actors who save otherwise bland characterisation.

Being able to paint the future only when you’re injecting heroin _should_ be cool. But somehow they just don’t make me care. And alot of the other story lines are the same way. Mabey they just have so many story lines they can’t flesh any out to the point where they’re interesting.

We’re halfway through the season so they’ve abandoned Syler the mystery villain and Evil Government Agency the mystery villain. Which were so 5th season buffy lame. Now that both are proper characters mabey we can get a little nuaunce in there.

We have said goodbye to the indian guy. We gave him 12 episodes to start acting better and for writers to stop making him spout awfull awfull awfull awfull evolutionary psudo-science. But eventually we couldn’t put up with him any more. We fast-foreward through his plot arc. God help us when he gets back with the group. Even now we have to put up with his InsufferablE narration.

Plus I don’t know how you people watched it from week to week. They’re an hour long but nothing happens! It took them half the season to do nothing but save a cheerleader! I get antsy waiting through a whole episode let alone a week.

So yeah, there are some OK plot threads but really not enough to keep us watching. So why are we going to finish the season?

Hiro Protagonist… er.. I mean Hiro Nakamura. Oh man. Diamond in the rough. This rules. From the first line of the first shot of his subplot it was like a different show. Awesomness abounds. I care about the two characters they seem to be going somewhere, there’s humor and pathos. Wicked. Also I guess powers have to get pretty overwhelming to be interesing now. Alot of writers have asked “wow what would it be like if you could FLY!?”. Not as many have asked what would happen if you could pause and rewind time. And I think Hiro is approaching this question in a realistic, intersting, and human way.

When someone re-edits the show to remove all the non-Hiro plots; that will be a good show.

Although… I think at some point I heard someone say he dies? Ah well if it does it better be a fakeout or watch those ratings slide baby.

So I want to see more movies but no tv = no previews = I have no idea whats going on. I need recomendations people!

aha, our couch just arrived. Gotta jet!

Ah. God. Finally.

We have an internet connection. No more living in cafes waiting for my laptop batteries to die.

Now I can live on the bare floor waiting for furniture!

All we have so fars is a matress and a screen. Hold on.. I’ll take a quick couple of pictures. There we go. Some bad pictures of the apt.

Still unemployed. Going to make myself a sandwich. More to come later.

We have a place to live!

map

It’s humble but it’s a great location. It’s a fairly large studio appartment with hardwood floors a view of the inner courtyard.

What really sells it though is it’s location. It’s right on the end of Haight street across the street from golden gate park.

Turns out Haight Ashbury is the place. We really wanted to live downtown within walking distance to Sarah’s work (I’m still looking) but it was hard to find a place we really liked. South beach was the best downtown but it was pretty touristy and not real functional.

Then we ended up checking out haight Ashbury. Aunt Diane said it was cool and it was the centre of the beat movement way back when (actually the beats started in south beach and ran out of room). Then it became the centre of the hippy movement in san francisco. But as soon as we wandered down Height it was pretty clear that this was the place for us. It feels alot like Victoria. All around San Francisco we kept wondering where the clothing places were that _we_ could buy clothes at. Downtown it’s hard to find a place that isn’t gucci or macy’s or in some way owned by the mediocre giants of the fassion industry.

Great coffee places and a ton of restaurants make it remind me of Comercial st. in Van. There are three bike shops within 4 blocks. One of which is next door. It’s just a really nice place to be. So Sarah’s gonna have to do the 1/2 hour bus trip to and from work every day. When I find work I’m going to ride. I’m so keen on getting a nice road bike. The bikes in this city are really really cool.

And yes there is a brew pub on Haight and Mason, easy stumbling distance from home. Called the Magnolia we’ve already been four times. They have some really good beer. Standouts are their very hoppy High Time Harvest which is very beer-fest 2007 and their fruity, floury Red Rose which is very beer-fest 2006. We were chatting to our waitress and she welcomed us to the area and talked about how she wanted to move to Victoria.

Oh wait yeah. I was going to mention, alot of people jokingly said we’d better have a place big enough to put them up when they visit. So by _not_ having a place that big we save easily enough money every month to put you up in a hotel instead :)

Althogh for those of you who really aren’t picky the floor will still be available. Asuming Sarah doesn’t mind.

Union square is an interesting place. There’s almost always something going on in the square. It’s always called something ‘in the square’ too. art In The Square. concert In The Square. movie In The Square. Today it’s bad hotel art In The Square.

Westin hotels has built a rock garden In The Square. I wish I had the camera but my satchel is filled with the laptop today (I’m posting from the square now) and there aren’t any pics on flickr yet.

I’ve become fairly inured to bad hotel art. It’s so omnipresent. Salus had some particularly egregious examples. Tasteless watercolours of golf courses purchased, literally, from wallmart. But even these took me months to notice. You just end up tuning it out.

But for some reason I’m not glossing over this rock garden. I think it has something to do with the uncanny.. ahhh gah! An air raid siren just went off. Ow my ears. “this is a test of the outdoor announcement system” jeez it works.

ow. Anyway I think it has to do with the uncanny valley principle. Most bad rock gardens (I think there are about 10 good ones) are just so rediculous that you don’t register them as rock gardens.

But whoever designed this one was clearly inspired by the real thing. It has a Mount Fuji like the garden in Ginkaku-ji and a rock formation extremely reminiscent of the garden in Ry?an-ji (pics easy to find of both).

Unfotunately the mount fuji is a small unordered pile of gravel and the Ry?an-ji bit wasn’t copied closely enough to maintain any of it’s ‘restfull dynamism’ (you like that? i just made that up). The rakeing is uneven in the extreme where it follows the contours of rocks and Mt Fuji. They ended up with some dirt mixed in with their gravel so in the middle of a very long empty stretch the grey gravel turns all brown. But the absolute nail in the coffin is the moss.

So real rock gardens have been around for a couple of hundred years. Which means that carefull tending has left these lovely formations of moss around the rocks. Here they had an hour in the morning so they couldn’t really grow moss. So instead they dug up clumps of moss from somewhere and planted said clumps in the gravel between some of the rocks. They don’t even make up a coherent moss bed. They left gaps between all the clumps so it looks like ten or twenty green toupes crawled into the garden. Not a great effect.

So yeah. Their slogan is ‘this is how it should feel’. So stay at Westin if you want to feel uncomfortable and out of place.

In the gardeners defense he looks very earnest if completely lost and his boss looks like a douche.

Wow who knew I could write at length about that?

Hey quick off topic post just to get this out of my head.

At the risk of seeming like an actual blog I’m going to post on something almost topical.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the day reading through the MediaDefender emails.

boingboing: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/15/giant-email-leak-fro.html

the actual emails: http://www.mediadefender-defenders.com/threads.html

I’ve read some of the responses to these emails visa vi – MiiVi and can’t help but think people are getting it wrong.

People are mining the emails to support their pre-existing belief: MiiVi is a honey pot built to harvest IPs that can be used to extort money.

And yes there are a few quotes that support this theory in a round about kind of way. Mostly stuff in the EULA saying that they can report you to the cops if you break copywright. I don’t find this convincing. There’s all sorts of shit in EULAs. The wording in this one doesn’t sound any more threatening than the last one I didn’t read.

What I do find compelling is

1) Consistent efforts to find monetary streams outside of their core business model. Like building facebook widgets.

2) A genuine desire to make MiiVi really good.

These guys spent days on tiny interface issues. They sat down users and did actual interface testing. Something that noone does even though it’s the only way to get a decent interface. Most importantly they where brainstorming ways to keep people comming back day after day.

If you’re building a honey pot you don’t spend this kind of money on it. You hack out a front end and go fishing. At the most you make something servicable and then advertise the fuck out of it for a month so you can harvest all those IPs from the initial boom.

You don’t worry about user retention. By the time that becomes an issue you’re first law-suits are hitting the courts with your URL emblazoned all over them.

I think these guys were genuinely trying to make a go of it. They looked at all these sites they where trying to shut down every day, thought about how well they understood the market, how well they understood the technology, and decided they could do better.

Is that really more far fetched than them trying to make a buck off of facebook widgets?

Of course they still had to keep their name off of it. Not to keep it a secret from pirates but to keep it from their day-job clients. Universal had, according to emails sent from Universal employees, around 1000 properties under the watchfull eyes of MediaDefender. Media defender charges 1000$ a month per property to work their mediocre magic. Even if Universal got a deal that’s still a ton of money to lose.

So when you’re little moonlighting endevour gets outed by the pirates do you cop to playing both sides? No. You complain about everything being unfair (because your feelings are genuinely hurt) but don’t provide any explination of what you were actually doing.

So anyway it just looks to me like everyone read this the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong. I hate these guys too. In fact I think they’re even slimier for playing both sides.

Anyway hopefully this was written poorly enough and was lacking enough in cited evidence that it doesn’t come off as a respectable blog post. This is not a blog it’s a Travelogue.

Also, Tabish Hasan, I hope you found work. You’re a good guy even if things didn’t work out at MediaDefender.