Sometimes old posts get stuck in draft form because they need more thought and revision.  I have no idea why capsule movie reviews don’t get published.  These seem to be from December 2011.

-Hugo – Great 3D, and identifiably Scorsese, from the first shot, a long tracking through the station. Weird script though; characters exclaiming stuff in the same room instead of listening or talking to each other. Also, hints of a hated trope: Can’t Spit It Out.  That is, if one character would just speak up when they’re a) in trouble and b) in no danger as a result of just using their words, so much trouble could be avoided, and so easily.

- J. Edgar – A perfectly good telling of the story of J. Edgar Hoover.  If you’ve ever seen or read anything about him before, you’ve probably got the story down already.  Saw it in the theater with a bunch of chatty audience.  But they were a few guys in their 60s, so nobody had anything to say to them.

- The Lie – This seems like something that would be sold as a drama, but actually: pretty funny. Dark, and funny. Jess Weixler is great. Especially her reaction to her husband’s terrible rock song.

- Real Life – Albert Brooks on reality TV.  Really good. I love the nonsense presented as good science and sociology.

And of course:

- The House on Skull Mountain – a mostly black  version of Dark and Stormy Night, or any other meeting for the reading of will in a spooky old house.  Above all else, this was a movie that lives right on up to its title:

This is the very next shot:

Spent the evening trying to make the blog look a little better.  Preparing a theme all on my own isn’t something I wanted to do, so there’s a struggle to find a theme that looks okay and is maybe kind of obscure enough to look original.  A lot of the stuff that popped up early in the googles is just awful.  I don’t want a big billboard for the theme designing company with a little square for my words.

There’s a thing where you play with a mass market tool / toy for a while, like Garageband, and then you’ve heard all the good loops, so you notice them in things other people make.  And now I see where a lot of the site designs for dreadful SEO-gobbling linkbait sites come from.

Anyhow, I found something that looked okay, and ended up digging around in the code for a few hours anyway to make it a negative version of the main site, snip out some broken javascript, and to add some rules to fix the links in the sidebar here. The Tron Legacy soundtrack made this feel like a much more sophisticated project than it was.

The google reader box is gone, since it’s dead.  There’s a new page with accurate information on ordering a copy of The Dialysis, in case anyone’s been in need of an update to the 2004 info page.  It contains the forbidden secrets and unstoppable techniques of our ISBN!

Also, if all goes according to plan, posts found here at http://notArt.org/log will now be duplicated over at http://notArtist.tumblr.com for people who like to tumblr.

If you actually look at the site on the site and have a suggestion, let me know.  I don’t think I’m quite finished, but apparently it was time to change things up.

One of the highlights of the iPad, for me, is reading comic books.  I used to enjoy Comics Reader Mobi, but like Camera+, they got caught doing something sneaky by the app review team, and banned from the app store.  Unlike Camera+, they never got back in.

When their 1-year suspension began to look like a lifetime ban, and since I don’t jailbreak, I’ve moved on to a similar program that is capable of updates, Comic Zeal.  It’s not perfect, but it’s still pretty great.  The two caveats (for me) are all the fiddling around with sorting digital comics (I don’t think this is an area where I desire skeuomorphism… If, indeed, I ever do.) and having to convert everything.

Unlike CRMobi, Comic Zeal converts all of your .cbr and .cbz files into .cbi files, and then into folders of images on your iPad.

An Update:  As I’ve learned from the  developer, this is merely the step of unpacking the zip or rar files to speed loading times.  However, the problem remains:  How to move your already unpacked or converted or just Comic Zeal-friendly bundle of comics?

When I swapped iPads recently, I did make a backup of my old device, but I opted to treat the new one as brand new.  AND, I don’t save .cbi files.  I make them, transfer them, and delete them.  So how to get your comics library from one iPad to the other without rebuilding the world?

1. I copied my entire ‘Imported Comics’ folder to my laptop via iTunes.  If you have a full backup of your ipad, you can either juggle backups (backup new device, restore old backup, get files, restore new backup), or use a backup-unpacking software, like perhaps JuicePhone (which I have not tried).  If your backup is encrypted, then you’re probably looking at yet another intermediate step.  (edit:  All this is assuming your comics are actually included in backups.  I don’t know if this is the case.)
2. I installed and ran Comic Zeal on the new iPad to create the folders and database files it expects, so I could see where they go.
3. I used iExplorer to navigate to iPad -> Apps -> Comic Zeal -> Documents -> Imported Comics
4. I moved all the files from my backup – whole folders + comic_database.sqlite into the Imported Comics folder on the iPad (I don’t know if it used, needed, or threw away the database file.  I didn’t experiment since it worked on the first try.)
   Note: I recommend doing this in small chunks.  I have almost 10GB of comics data, which took a couple hours to transfer, and somehow this action quickly generated 30-40GB of swap files on the laptop.
5. I forced Comic Zeal to quit and relaunched it, and there were my comics.  In delightfully high resolution.

So in my local AMC theater, they’re running a commercial for an app that lets you take a picture of yourself and see how you would look as Ghost Rider.  You know, from Ghost Rider 2, in theaters this somethingth of something?

I couldn’t find any online mention or reference to the app in a 5 minutes’ search just now, but that’s okay.  This app is pretty much the equivalent of one of those big plywood sheets with a scene of mermaids, or the film Aliens, on the front and holes cut out for your family to stick their faces through and get a picture taken.

But there’s one key element the Interactive Online Consultants for this movie tie-in may have missed out on.  You know what Nic Cage looks like as Ghost Rider?

You know what I would look like as Ghost Rider?

You know what my friend from high school Kevin would look like as Ghost Rider?

You know what Kevin’s wife would look like as Ghost Rider?

Being a big fiery skullhead is pretty central to the whole Ghost Riding experience, from what I can tell.

Where’s the app that lets me know what I look like as a bereaved land baron in the hot new The Descendants viral marketing?

I used to write a lot of two-line movie reviews around here.  Then I stopped because I thought I was going to make a podcast called Contra Zoom.  I thought I’d publish all the capsule reviews on the podcast’s website.  Then it seemed like we weren’t going to do that show anymore, but by then I was out of the habit of posting them.

These were written before we recorded the tech demo / episode zero of Contra Zoom.  I had just been to Vegas, guested on the Combinations and Permutations podcast, and gone to MaxFunCon II.

-Deep Water – Similar to Man on Wire, this is the story of someone who attempted something extremely improbable (a solo circumnavigation by sailboat), why they did it, and how it turned out.  I liked it better than Man on Wire, possibly because I hadn’t heard all the details in advance – I just heard the screenwriter of The Informant! mention it somewhere.

-Big Fan – I found the events of this movie surprising, but I shouldn’t have.  This is the apt-est title since Apt Pupil.  I haven’t seen Apt Pupil.

-Loose Change: An American Coup – The popular opinion on these guys is that they’re maniacal revisionist cranks.  I mean, probably, sure, but no less intriguing because of it.  And not really any less believable than any other explanations out there.

-Battlestar Galactica: The Plan – This was better than Razor, since it provides new information at the very least.  Still, felt pretty pointless to watch after the series conclusion.

-Django – This is one murdery western, and probably almost single handedly responsible for the fad of accessorizing with gattling guns that swept 1960s Italy and eventually the world.  You know those photos of your parents when they were just teens or in their early 20s, with their chainguns?  Whether they acknowledge it or not, the whole craze pretty much stems directly from this movie.

-9 – looked fantastic, had some cool action sequences, and has the same appeal that Home Movies or Be Kind Rewind has in seeing objects repurposed.  Also has quite a bit of ‘wait, what?’ and ‘hold on, why did, ah, how does that, er…huh?”

-Dawn of the Red, Zitlover, H.R. Pukenshette, Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy, and Please Kill Mr. Kinski – Shorts distributed by Troma.  The last one is a story told by a director who made the somewhat ill-advised decision to cast Klaus Kinski as the ‘name’ in a project.  It didn’t go well for anyone.

-My Best Fiend – This is Werner Herzog’s remembrance of Klaus Kinski.  I didn’t know very much about him, and I thought this would be an interesting counterpoint to the preceding short.  Here’s the point of view of one of his best friends.   Not as such.  Although one gets the sense that they have fun topping each other in horror stories of working together, supposedly the crew of Herzog’s movies were just as eager to murder the guy, who had to be threatened with guns from time to time, just to keep things civil.

-Red Sonja – Not a good movie, but it was nice to see Ernie Reyes Jr. in something.

-Shutter Island – This I liked a whole bunch.  There was some complaining going around to the effect of the ending not being twisty enough, but I think those people are probably missing the point. In fact, the only way to be more wrong would be to be like what seems to be a majority of reviewers and treat the clues as mistakes and then complain about both.  This movie also had one of my favorite Creative Screenwriting podcasts, with writer Laeta Kalogridis (who is now working on The House With A Clock in its Walls!), because she sounds like a lady who’s totally on the ball, who knows what time it is and where her towel is, and I feel bad for her for the amount of forehead slapping and ‘did you even see the movie?’-asking she probably had to do when people asked her what was up with certain parts.

-Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief – This was apparently a less-successful book adaptation.  Since I didn’t read ‘em, I’m not as outraged as my roommate that did.  To me, it was a kind of fun, kind of dumb thing with some parts that don’t make sense and some other parts with fun references to greek gods.

-Breakout -While this movie does have helicopter pilot Charles Bronson trying to spring framed dope Robert Duvall from jail via helicopter, and a running gag about a bad check, it also has that weird pacing of its era where it seems like nothing is happening, and then everything happened much too quickly, and now nothing’s going on again.

-Splice – This was a test screening, and it may be different by the time you see it.  For instance, there might not be a man with an infrared camera and goggles apparatus staring at you and gauging your reactions.  But it’s by Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube!  And what’s more, I like the recent choices Adrian Brody is making, with this, and Brothers Bloom, and Predators coming up.  It’s like he did his prize-winning work, and his mega money blockbuster work, and now he’s just enjoying fun projects that catch his eye.  (by the by, Bros. Bloom held up well to recent re-watchings, maybe even now a little more enjoyable in terms of how the ending felt to me)

-Hanky Panky – Intended to be another Gene Wilder / Richard Pryor comedy, except with Gilda Radner instead of Pryor.  Mistaken identity a la North by Northwest, silliness ensues.

-The Signal – I just put this on as a movie I could safely ignore in the background while writing things.  You can get through a lot of movies by leaving the TV on like we did back in the day, except I don’t have TV like that now, it’s all movie files and discs and internets.  And this starts off with a bang, dropping you into the middle of another movie by one of the three directors.  Yep, three directors, each writing and directing their own act of the film.  Each worse than the last is one way to look at it, but the first two have some pretty great stuff in them.  It wasn’t at all the movie I thought I was putting on, but it was a nice surprise.

I was going to share this in Google Reader, and then add a comment like

It’s not that good of a line today, but look!  He’s wearing a UCB T-shirt!

And then I remembered that I can’t share or comment on things in Google Reader anymore.  So…  here: “To his friend…“

Other people around the internet have also been discussing some of the points I mentioned last week, in some interesting ways.

On the Mac Pro thing:

• Marco Arment on Scaling down the Mac Pro

• Kevin Fox, former Google Reader designer doesn’t like it.
• Brian Shih, former Google Reader project manager doesn’t like it.
• Reeder for Chrome helps a little.
• The insightful Binary Bonsai doesn’t seem to like it.
• Lifehacker Likes It! - Presumably, like the current google reader team, they probably don’t use google reader.

I did a great show called Pizza Day a couple weeks ago.  Every comedian who was on that show books another show in Los Angeles except for me, and one of them was nice enough to invite me to come on his show, which I did last night.

Here’s me at Magic Bag, run by DC Pierson, who wasn’t there, and Eliza Skinner, whom I’ve never even met..  So if you see them, just tell them it went great!

Long have I sought the solution to making random play or shuffle mode for video a reality in Plex.

Plex is great, for organizing and watching your media, especially if you know what you want to watch, but for some shows, like, let’s say, The Simpsons, or MST3K – shows with a lot of episodes and not much continuity – what I really want is to watch them the way we watched them back in the day – at the whim of the syndication’s semi-random selection.  I don’t care WHAT episode it is, but if you make me pick I will spend more than 22 minutes sifting through the options.

So:  There used to be a trick, you could make a music share, load it with tv, and switch it over to a video share, but the music properties would persist, allowing a ‘random play’ option at the main menu level.  An inelegant tool for a less civilized age.

Today: for OSX users of the laika build of Plex, navigate to ~/library/application support/plex/userdata/guisettings.xml
(for pre-laika, guisettings.xml is a level higher.  For other OSes, look around for yourself; I haven’t investigated.)

Open this file in textedit.  Find <settings><myvideos><playlist> and change <shuffle>false</shuffle> to <shuffle>true</shuffle>

Now, when you hit play, or open up the context menu and select play: random episode selection!  This works everywhere.  If you make a collection of sitcoms, or choose a whole show, or choose a season of a show, or choose ‘all unwatched’ you’re going to get a random selection.  Technically, when you choose a single episode of a show you’re probably also getting a random selection of 1 item.

The only situation where this would not be the preferred behavior, I imagine, would be if you’re used to hitting play on a show and marathoning episodes in sequence, which I’ve never tried to do before.  Laika’s got new features to make sequential viewing convenient anyway.

Posted for your convenience, since I’ve found very little information on this topic through my own googlin’.

Parts of my digital neighborhood are being bulldozed to make room for informational highway bypasses lately.

Google Reader has, once again, found a litany of things that weren’t broken to fix.  The last time the site was redesigned, I was unhappy, and the while the visual changes seem unnecessary and unhelpful so far, I can cope with those.  The serious issue is that in a move to try to cheer up the unloved-feeling Google+, sharing features have been removed.  Anecdotally, the sharing features seem to be the most popular and useful portion of the service for most or all of the users that I know.

Now, I had been hoping that there’d be a way to pipe my Reader shared items into G+.  I like sharing things in Reader and I’d like to be able to let more people see them, for one.  For another, directing services into other sites gives me some kind of existence in that world where there might otherwise be none, like when I can route tweets into facebook posts.  I’m glad that seemingly simple and basic functionality between Google services has been added.

As detailed elsewhere, the only plausible reason for stripping features out of Reader is to drive users into spending more time clicking things in G+.  But I think the practical result is going to be that either a) I’ll discover a new service that will finally take over as my RSS reader of choice, or b) I’ll simply stop reading shared items from other people.

I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot of extra browsing in G+ because the reason I use an RSS (or really, web) aggregator is so that I don’t need to keep 200 bookmarks sorted into sites that I visit daily, weekly, and monthly.  I visit one site.  It’s my lens to the internet.  I use it so that I don’t have to visit a million websites to find something to look at.

(Even if I DID want to go to G+ just to see what’s going on, it mysteriously lists my own posts first all the time anyway)

Plex updated this week.  I wish they’d added a random play option for television, but at least they didn’t remove the features that make it more interesting and useful than VLC.

(edit: I notice that this means my ‘Reader Shares’ sidebar on the blog is now broken.  So that will be going away soon.)

I don’t know if this is the same thing, but it’s been kind of interesting to watch Apple apparently moving away from some of the creative professional market that’s been a mainstay of their business for so long.

I’ve wanted to like and use Final Cut X, and while some of the new features are nice, it’s not convenient or powerful enough to replace the editing tools I already use.  Today it’s rumored that it may be curtains for the Mac Pro.  Neither one of these is kicking creative folks out of the mac world, but I bet it does make things a little less welcoming.

On the hardware side, less so.  Today, if I were to rent out a machine for an editing job, it would undoubtedly be the Mac Pro, an 8-core model which has served me well and paid for itself, but the main reason it would be the machine rented is because it’s the fanciest-looking box.  The modern laptops (and, I’d assume, iMacs) can give it a pretty good run for its money in a lot of areas.  It still wins out in having the most expandable storage and PCI slot upgrades, but Thunderbolt is going to be able to mitigate one or both of those very soon. And really, I’ve cut entire feature-length projects on macs less capable than the current Macbook Air, so it’s not so much a question of whatever they release next being able to handle the work.

Losing FCP (because again, the developer has decided to kill features that previously made it an attractive option) is the more upsetting turn of events.  I’m a big proponent of continuing to use FCP7, which is just about as fully functional and useful as it ever was, for as long as I can, but the fact is that it’s no longer being developed and will be unable to keep up one day.  Will FCPX be featureful enough to take over by then?  Avid already is (more or less). Maybe editing will take me full circle back to cutting in Premiere on a Windows machine, where I was 10 years ago.

At the time, the notion of editing on my own computer, in my room, was phenomenal.  No more tape to tape or Draco Casablancas, just get to work.  Whether or not the firewire cards would be able to interface correctly and it would be possible to export the finished video was another matter, but still.

Today, I expect to be able to slice up a project at a whim, anywhere I go.  I can, and have, finished and returned assignments emailed to me before getting out of bed in the morning.

It feels like tools are being taken away, and not in the service of the users.  So of course everyone’s mad.