Month:
July
2009

I found this little tool somewhere online the other day, and thought it was worth looking into. AddThis is a little button/gizmo that allows a browser of the the site to instantly push content they want to share to any one of some 50-odd social networking sites. Now, if you know me, you know that I really do not care for the ol’ social networking thing. Something about it still strikes me as… oh I don’t even know.

I don’t like it and, largely, I don’t us it.
But other people do! If you are one such person, and you feel so inclined, we now have a “Share this Observation” feature located after the meta info for each entry. Mouse-over for the main options, click it for the whole song and dance. [the notion that I've opened the doors to people aggregating my site to bebo is sickening... to say the least.]

That aside, I have a small gripe. Apparently, it is beyond the powers of the great and magnificent AddThis monolith to enable a relatively simple request. If you decide to install the AddThis feature using the WordPress Plugin from AddThis, you can’t pick where you put the damn thing. They let you customize a whole manner of things, colors, features, images, but not WHERE. This struck me as kindof silly. All the AddThis code appears to be is a link to a small javascript hosted at their server; the object itself is about handful of lines of code:

<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=xa-4a6396e4416cf507"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')"
onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()">
<img src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif" width="125" height="16" alt="Bookmark and Share" style="border:0"/></a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js?pub=xa-4a6396e4416cf507"></script>

I’d just installed the plugin, and was rather irritated to see it sitting, smugly, to the left, at the end of the entry. As you can see (at the time of writing) all the meta data is clearly on the right-hand side of the page. Such a displeasing destruction of symmetry is inexcusable, even here at the blog-hack-capital of the internet, Schrödinger’s Blog. The above is the code they provide for you to just install it on any ol’ website. I looked at that, and thought, “it really can’t be that hard to get that thing working the way I’d like.”

Turns out, a manual install of AddThis to a WordPress blog is easier than I thought. I don’t know a ton about how this hunk-a-junk works, but I knew that AddThis essentially just calls for a URL and a title for it to pass on to all those other services. I know from programming the template for this site that two such tags exist:

<?php the_permalink() ?> - For the link to the entry
<?php the_title(); ?> - For the entry's name

So… you grab those, stick them in where AddThis supplies [URL] and [TITLE], and game over. It functions just the way it would if you installed the plugin, but now you’re free to stick that little chunk of code wherever you’d like in your template! I slung mine over to the right, and used one of the AddThis images available for download, just to slim down the entire affair. My final code appeared as follows:

<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20"
onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '<?php the_permalink() ?>', '<?php the_title(); ?>')"
onmouseout="addthis_close();"
onclick="return addthis_sendto();">Share the Observation <img src="http://schrodingersblog.com/images/plus.gif" alt="Share This" style="border:0"/></a>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js"></script>

So. That was a fun little project. It was something I’d been meaning to play with. I get irritated when projects like that pop up, but it’s a good opportunity for a little spot of problem solving and I always feel pretty badass when I can code my way out of an annoying problem. [Also: Big thanks to Damnit Jim! for the WP_CodeShield plugin]

Finally: My quest continues for a good plugin for “buy” or “purchase” links. I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking I’m trying to mine money off of this godforsaken little blog. I’m just trying to gear it up as a music-blog that I might one day submit to Hype Machine or elbo.ws, and they’re pretty particular about making sure you give readers the opportunity to purchase the artist’s music. I really like what billy’s done over at TWF, but either he did that by hand, or the plugin has a name I can’t think of.

As you might glean from my last post, I saw Harry Potter recently. My thoughts on that aside, I’ve got to say that one of the things that stayed with me after I left the theater had nothing to do with brooms, horcruxes, or even Ginny Weasley!

One of the previews we saw right before the film was for Where the Wild Things Are:

Come to find after viewing the trailer a few more times and reading about the film some that Spike Jonze is directing the movie. I knew I knew that name, but couldn’t remember from where. More clicking; Ah! He directed Adaptation! One of my favorite movies of all time, which (due to its emotional content) got me through a handful of rough points in my life! How weird, that the same guy is back again, messing with my head this time with only a trailer…

A Theatrical Poster

Enough about my baggage though: The Film! It looks awesome. The fantastic people from Jim Henson’s Workshop are doing the suits for the Wild Things, and the faces are done with computers. For one, I’m just plain stoked about this. After the disappointment endured suffering through countless Hollywood films that put all their eggs in the CG basket, I’m really excited that someone’s hybridizing it for the forces of good [I always bitch that the new Star Wars films look fake while the old ones look real, mainly because the new ones DO look fake, and the old ones DO look real, on account of the new being mostly CG, and the old all making use of models!]. But the result of using both in this movie looks fantastic.

Past that, the music will also be a hybridized effort between Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Arcade Fire! Ahhh. Excitement abounds; I might even pay for the soundtrack if it’s good. I read somewhere that the camera work was done by hand, for the majority of the scenes involving the Wild Things, to give it an other-worldly sense, which seems to work well for such a film.

What I’m most excited about is to see how they fill this. In the trailer, I see shit blowing up everywhere Where the Wild Things live, and none of that is in the book. I actually found the book sitting out at a store I was at down in Harvard Square, and I paged through it real quick. Most of it is actually about Max being a punk, and getting sent to his room without dinner for being a pain to his mom. Then he dreams/imagines a world where crazy Wild Things live. They make him king, because Max seems wilder than they do!

Then proceeds about 6-7 text-less pages of them just like, parading around Wild Thing-land. Then Max gets lonely for his mom, and goes home. Nothing explodes in the book. What gives, Spike Jonze? I don’t mean to be like “you changed it! boo!” at all. I understand that adapting a pretty-short-mostly-illustration-children’s-book into a 2 hour film isn’t easy. You gotta add stuff, in this case: conflict? I feel like the parts of the book with words comprise maybe… 40 minutes of film, if you stretch it, embellish it a little. That comes up at least an hour short, meaning that a lot of stuff, the body of the work, I’d expect, must happen Where the Wild Things Are. I’m pretty geared up to see how that pans out. The explosions, the maritime scenes, and the varying landscapes all look really interesting EXCITING, and I’ve got a good feeling that they’ll stay true to the original message and tone of the work.

Let’s just say I’m going to be seeing this the first day it’s out.
I just hope I’m not the only person older than 12 that came not on account of a child.
After all…

There’s one in all us.

I’m almost falling asleep, so the full thing will come later.

1) Very funny. I felt as if I laughed a good deal.
2) Kinda short? It didn’t seem like a great deal happened.
3) I am maybe getting it confused with parts of the final book, I do admit.
4) In any case, the ratio of time spent in the theater to time spent getting to see Ginny Weasley was not what I was looking forward to. There was a kiss, which was good, but I was kinda geared up for makeout (it was so masterfully done in the book, but I guess that’s the way it goes…)

As I said, more to follow.

POST SCRIPT [Includes Spoilers]:

Yeah, upon further mulling, I’m having trouble coming up with a full-blown critique of this film. I really enjoyed every minute of it. Thankfully, this film has a fantastically small amount of the “Harry Potter Forms Conspiracy Theory Against Draco Malfoy” attributes that mar previous films. I don’t know if that’s because of the book, or the editing of the film, I just know those parts always used to make me wince, and make me hate the character.

Not much of that to be found here. Really, the film was pretty character-oriented, and I typically don’t care for that. I’m a dude that’s big on plot, and not a whole lot happened. Certainly we learn about horcruxes, and Dumbledore meets his end at Snape’s hands, but aside from that, what?

I’m left wanting a little bit, for a few reasons:
1) The title of the film is the “half-blood prince”. That entire attribute of the film is handled in the most cursory manor possible, and I expect they would have cut it, if not for the title! The book reads more like a suspense thriller, and Harry’s obsession with the Prince was not conveyed very strongly. He parted with the book far too easily, but then again, HE WAS MAKING OUT WITH GINNY WEASLEY, which probably made it easier.

2) On that, I thought the kiss between Harry and Ginny was good, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped. The book did a great job building that tension, until it all cut loose in a makeout session after a massive quiddich triumph, which was AWESOME. I missed that, but I can see how it would’ve been a little difficult; also: everyone is sick of watching quiddich.

3) It suffers from what I guess we have to call “Dead-Man’s-Chest-Syndrome,” wherein the penultimate of a series only serves to do a lot of book-keeping and housework to ready the stage and the viewer for the grand, epic finale. To an extent, I understand the film’s functionality in such a capacity, but the book stood on its own far better than this film did. Particularly the omission of Dumbledore’s funeral was the biggest example (and in my opinion, mistake!) of this.

Three good reasons to go see it?
1) It’s a fantastic character piece. Slughorn is a hilarious addition, and I enjoyed the film version much more than the obese, awkward, intrusive man that I conjured from the text. The Ron-Hermione ordeal was well done, and makes you kind giggle to yourself at times, while at others you legitimately felt for the poor kids. I guess I just mean to say it decently captures the turmoil of such enterprises… Plus the paired-down Harry-Ginny subplot, while only a fragment of what it was in the novel, is comparably cute.

Additionally, the protagonists have matured to a point that we spend a lot less time listening to them whine and make stupid mistakes, which is a lot more pleasant for the mature viewer.

2) Ginny Weasley
Damn

3) It does do a great job setting up what’s to come. I’m pretty close to busting out my Potter books from the box in my basement and giving the whole thing another go, so re-invigorated in my Harry Potter fandom by seeing the film adaptation of my favorite book!

Go see it, it’s a well-crafted adaptation that does its source justice (within inherent limitations) and reminds you why Harry Potter is pretty much always bankable for a good movie.

I made the mistake of mentioning at one point to Conor (in the REU program) how badly I miss playing Halo. He said he and his friends were actually going to play that evening, and I was welcome to join them! Terribly excited was I, for it has been a sad, lonely month since Master Chief, the Arbiter, and myself laid down some hurt on a whole manner of evil.

What I didn’t realize is there is a delicate balance between being good at the campaign mode (Ethan and I are currently somewhere in the Legendary campaign) and online play. In even the worst campaign battles, through clever use of teamwork, you can beat the system, and your enemies. I was thinking online play would be kinda fun; I remember when Hank had the old XBox Live, for the old XBox and the old Halo, and how we’d get on and I’d work the controls, just running around like a lunatic, and Hank would talk smack to evoke entertaining responses from all the 14-year-olds that inhabited the online-Halo-scape.

It’s a whole different ballgame now, folks.
These people are crazy.

Now, I know I accuse insanity in a lot of different subsets of human culture… and I suppose this really isn’t any different… I was just amazed/appalled how intense online Halo is. Maybe I feel like I need to make excuses (EG: these guys are too intense and have no life!) to compensate for my own gross shortcomings in online Halo play (EG: getting routinely wiped across the floor by people with ‘leet’ screen names). In fact, I know that’s what it is. Nonetheless, the intensity of those players surprised me. I think I might have to drop some coinage on a few months of Xbox Live just to hone my skills; I don’t like sucking that bad. A man would like to be able to hold his head up high when he gallivants around a digital landscape, assuming the guise of a fictitious super-soldier.

I’m bemoaning my lack of XBox during the summer months in which I have large amounts of unassigned time, but the XBox would certainly spell doom for my reading list, so in the end it’s probably a good thing.

Sadly, this review isn’t nearly as much fun as my Gundam Wing review… Gundam X is a much better program, and so it’s harder to mock. In the chronology of the Gundam Universe, this series aired directly following Wing, and somehow despite a noticable improvement in quality, suffered poor ratings, ultimately clocking in ten episodes short of the intended 49, totaling 39. Thus, I began my ‘halfway’ review at around episode 20.

(NOTE: I do intend to do a wrap-up review of Wing, but I still need to find the time to watch Endless Waltz on YouTube, which is a bit of a pain in the neck… But I haven’t forgotten!)

Backstory
The story of After War: Gundam X is not terribly complex, but it’s solid. It is an “alternate universe” in the more typical definition of the word; that is, you can actually trace the point at which the AW timeline of X diverges from that of the UC. In this world, the rebelling space-fairing forces actually managed to stage a world-wide colony drop, ravaging the face of the planet, and reducing the planet’s population to something like less than a percent, if I remember correctly. That event occurred 15 years prior to the opening of the series.

In this strange new world, by and large devoid of humans, the survivors cling to the surface, struggling to rebuild their world. Confusion reigns, and people are more or less self-sufficient, with no sense of any collective, global conscience, for the moment at least. The main characters are a class of adventurers called “Vultures.” I’m not sure if that word has such a negative connotation in the Japanese language as it does in English, but nonetheless, the protagonists all seem to be happy with the label. They scour the Earth, looking for left over and abandoned equipment from the war, selling it off for money to maintain repairs on their ship and to their weapons, as well as to feed their crews.

Jamil is captain of the Frieden (Germ: Joy), a Vulture craft. The first story arc focuses on how the headstrong young mobile suit pilot Garrod, and the Newtype Tiffa, come to join his crew. With them comes the GX-9900 Gundam, the ultimate weapon of the old federation which unleashed the attack that in turn triggered the colony drop. Jamil, guilt-ridden for his contribution to the war 15 years ago, now makes his living as a Vulture, all the while seeking out Newtypes in order to protect them.

Garrod Ran

Characters Garrod is the main focus of the series, but given that he eventually joins the crew of the Frieden, that becomes much less apparent later on, when the entire crew gets roughly equal screentime. Garrod is a 15 year old punk, hasty and too bold at times, but also quite resourceful. One of my favorite things about Garrod is he’s a pretty believable character. We know little about his past (or it escapes me/has not been revealed), but it’s easy enough to understand him: he’s a hot-shot out to prove that just because he’s a kid doesn’t mean he can be ignored.

Constantly rushing in without looking at what’s ahead, Garrod finds himself in countless tight spots. More often than not, Roybea and Witz, the “hired guns” on Jamil’s ship, arrive in their respective Gundams to back him up. These two guys are pretty interesting characters, because while it would be easy to write them as either “faux-twins” (basically the same person with different animations) or polar opposites, neither is actually the case. One entire episode is devoted to telling their respective backstories, and you slowly come to see the reasons why each fights. Most of the time, they get along like old buddies, kidding around, watching out for each other, and so on. However, the current arc I’m midway through actually sees them at odds with one another, which has been fun to watch. One of the most impressive points about X so far is that they’ve received development at all.

That supporting characters get this treatment is fantastic, and the principles are no exception. Both Tiffa and Garrod are noticeably changed by the events that transpire on board their ship. They both begin to understand what it means living with the rest of the crew, and it comes to define their interactions with the rest of their shipmates. Contrast this with the static and mysterious Capt. Jamil, the former Federation Soldier, and his first mate, Sarah. They don’t seem to change much, but they’re already, for the most part, responsible, empathetic characters that lend most of the support the rest of the crew needs from time to time. Even more minor characters, such as Kid, the ‘boy wonder’ chief mechanic, and the Doctor that takes care of the crew, step up to the plate and prove interesting and complex, in spite of their limited screentime.

Tiffa, most of all, I like. Her character, the strange shy girl with tremendous power (characteristic of a Newtype), is so easy to screw up from a writing standpoint. In order to maintain the “mystery” aspect, they usually would just mute this character (I’ve seen it done… Neon Genesis Evangelion, that was directed at you, in spite of our love affair). That way, if she never says anything, you never know what she’s thinking. I was very worried that Tiffa would be like this, and she was, a bit at first. But then she starts speaking, because the crew starts listening. Her feelings about many things (like helping Jamil, caring for the Frieden, etc.) are easily enough discerned from her actions. However, she’s still reserved (never is seen joking around or playing with her shipmates), and much to his chagrin, seems ambivalent to Garrod’s shy and timid romantic advances.

Once more, I can’t emphasize enough that the real joy of watching Gundam X has been seeing how these characters progress and develop. All of this only from the first half of the series! Contrast this with Wing, in which what pass for ‘characters’ in that program are more or less scripted archetype-automatons that respond the same way in the first episode as they do in the last (Quatre and Trowa being the exceptions, perhaps, and Duo getting points for not being half as irritating as the remaining cast). Remember Heero’s “I Fight Because There Is Fighting!” speech? None of that trash here; not even close.

Mecha Not to continue contrasting this to Wing, but I feel like I can do that because they were aired back-to-back, and I watched them in the corresponding order. Here is one spot where Gundam Wing proves the better. Gundam X is a really well-written show, but there are really only one or two interesting suits. Whatever model of the GX Garrod pilots is fantastic to watch. Witz’s Airmaster is cool too, transforming many times in a single battle from humanoid form to an airplane mode. Roybea’s Leopard is essentially an artillery platform, spending most of the battles shooting endless supplies of missiles into the fray. But that’s it. The enemy suits encountered are very generic, (even the OZ mobile dolls had a bit of character to them, or at the very least you knew their model types!) and given that their average screenlife is about 2 seconds, and then they explode, it’s hard to really give a damn about them. The two antagonists that recur have confusing and odd suits, cited by the crew as “Freaky Gundams” in the translation I’m watching. That about sums it up. They’re goofy looking, and have extendo-arms, and show up long enough to make a mess of things, and then they run away. So complex is their makeup though that it’s almost impossible to identify one from the other, and even then, understanding what you’re looking at is a bit of a chore with those guys. So yeah, only the two or maybe three really cool suits, but that’s OK. They’re cycled and upgraded often enough that you never really get bored of watching them get the crap beat from them every other episode. Plus the satellite cannon is a pretty sweet (and actually technologically feasible!) weapon.

The GX-9900-DV, Piloted by Garrod

Overall/General Comments
The best thing I can say about X is that it’s a well crafted story. It’s composed of about 8-9 arcs, each lasting about a handful of episodes, with it’s own set of new characters that join the regulars for that arc. The structure is almost reminiscent of a serial or comic book, as within the arc every episode ends on an air of tension. Unlike Wing, with the mega-generic recap that occurs at the start of each episode that contains ZERO useful information in it the 2nd-15th time seeing it, X updates you on exactly how the last episode ended.

The best part here is that this recap normally goes about 20-30 seconds PAST what you’ve already seen. You can’t ignore it, because there is a tiny scrap of new material, even in the recap, which is, in 4-out-of-5 instances, masterfully timed to recapture the suspense you felt at the conclusion of the previous episode, and then they throw you into the intro sequence! Once or twice this was done so well I even got goosebumps! Then, at the close of an arc, they lay off. That leg is over, and they’re not going to drag you along to the next one if you don’t fancy it. Thus, with nothing suspenseful to recap, the following arc-opening episode usually begins with a small prologue, giving you helpful information to understand what is about to unfold.

I don’t know how else to put it: it’s respectful, intelligent, professional story telling. The episodes seemed to be crafted with a purpose in mind, as opposed to a 30-episode story stretched to its limits to fill 50 episodes, and then haphazardly diced up indiscriminately where it was convenient (YES, GUNDAM WING, I AM GLARING AT YOU). It’s masterful, and I’ve enjoyed it greatly.

Not available in America, I’m getting pretty close to buying a crap-copy of this program, so enamored am I with it thus far! I’ll let you know how it winds down, but let’s just say I’ve got high hopes.

ADDENDUM: Sorry, I just thought of this; the episode titles! They’re always quotes from the show, which I thought was neat. At the very least, it’s a step up from Wing:

…so maybe that wasn’t quite as scathing of a commentary as I meant to level, but Wing’s titles are just plain terrible. Seriously, can you guess what happens in episode 18: Tallgeese Destroyed? THE TALLGEESE GETS DESTROYED. Come on. Maybe X’s sound a little fluffy, but at least they’re not spoilers. Actually done now.

[LIES! Final comment, is to take a look at this fantastic review of Gundam X. I was looking around for some images to stick in the post, and I came across this review. He says what I say far more concisely, I do admit, but it's more or less the exact sentiment I was getting at with my survey of the show! ]