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Jun
30
I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned it on this blog, but I hate going to the movies. I’ve nearly given it up. The only exceptions are Pixar movies and the very few movies that I can’t wait until they come out on DVD to watch. So today I went to see WALL*E with my wife and slightly younger brother. It is, literally, the BEST Pixar movie ever created. The only reason I’m okay with the fact that they waited this long to come out with the movie is because it allowed them to get so awesome at creating movies that it looks beautiful!!!
First of all, like most Pixar movies, there’s a short film at the beginning. Right from the intro screens, you’re clued in on the fact that this is done in the slapstick, physical comedy style of the 1940s Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Let’s just say that my brother and I were laughing so loud and cracking up so bad, I’ll have to watch it at least another two times to catch everything I missed from my eyes watering up. It’s that funny - if you’re a fan of physical comedy. And, of course, Pixar has character emotional expression down to an art form.
Then the feature film came on and it was great. In a way, WALL*E is “An Inconvenient Truth” for kids. But to say that is to do a HUGE disservice to the guys at Pixar. Really, the whole point about how rampant consumerism caused the Earth the be so polluted that we had to leave is so that we could have this extremely cute robot cleaning up the Earth. So, it’s no spoiler that he’s the only robot left cleaning. Everyone was talking about this: from Pixar to some of the trailers for the movie. Basically, we caused such a mess that all human life is sent away and we leave an army of WALL*E robots to clean up the Earth. Eventually, the task is SO daunting that we’re left with our one WALL*E. He’s diligently cleaning up when the humans send a probe to see how the cleaning is coming along. This causes his love interest to enter the picture. Again, no spoilers yet. Now, when she first appears on the scene, oh man, it was exactly the type of humor that my brother and I love. We were shattering that theatre with our laughter.
I loved so much about the movie, the story, the visuals, the characters. But what really blew me away was how two robots who can only convey emotions by moving their eyes, heads, and hands (the robots can’t talk except for a very small amount of words, but I don’t want to ruin it!). My wife really got sad about something that happens to one of the robots - and it’s just a robot! And the way the “female” robot acted towards WALL*E’s advances, conveyed pure feminine energy. It was just great to watch. Now for a few spoilers.
<spoiler!!!>
Things I loved in the movie:
- the iPod and the role it plays with the movie
- the references to Space Odyssey 2001 such as the Auto Pilot looking like HAL 9000, the music when the captain first wakes up is the same as the music when the pen is floating in 2001 and the use of Thus Sprak Zerathustra
- My brother caught that WALL*E’s powered up sound is the sound of turning on a MAC
- the giant WALL*As at the space ship were great
- I loved the little OCD cleaner robot. He was, without a doubt, my favorite secondary character in the movie
- The robot sanitarium was a hilarious scene
- The part where the silhouette of EVA made WALL*E panic was pure animation history - I’ve seen that in so many of the old cartoons from the 1940s
- The part about how the corporation wanted to keep people fat and lazy so they were easy to control was a great social commentary - in fact the whole thing was great - it was much more sci-fi than I thought it was going to be
- Also, I loved how the story was revealed bit-by-bit like when he rolled by the area where the space ship took off and the videos went off. It had a very tragic feel to it because the videos seem to feel like the humans will be back really soon
- With the video only for the Auto Pilot to see where it says that the work was too much and the world became too toxic, I was left wondering:
- did the CEO and his workers die on Earth? IOW, did they remain on Earth to supervise the cleanup and were so sure of their machines that they didn’t take a ship to leave?
- did they see all the WALL*Es breakdown? Or did that happen after the humans were dead. I mean, WALL*E was around for 700 years!
- I loved the cameo by the actor who played the CEO of BnL.
</spoiler!!!>
Ok, I think I saw a Pizza Planet truck, but I blinked. Can anyone confirm that? Also, I kept my eyes open, but didn’t see any Pixar toys amongst the trash. On the one hand that could have been a conscious decision on their part to say that their toys would never end up in the trash. But I was really hoping for a cameo! If anyone spotted a cameo, let me know.
Go see it right now. I don’t know if it’s going to have an awesome opening weekend, but go see it if you enjoy animation at all you MUST go see it!
—–
Or you may know it as WALLE or WALL-E, but the commercials and wikipedia have it looking more like WALL*E.
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Jun
29
Happy Birthday!
Category: General | 
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You know who you are. I just didn’t want to give identity theives more info.
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Jun
29
On LinuxToday a few days ago
Category: Geek Love, Internet, Linux | Leave a Comment
Once again I was pretty excited to find that I had been aggregated onto LinuxToday for this blog post. The funny thing is that I almost didn’t make that blog post as I was contemplating it for over a week and usually if I wait that long, the blog post doesn’t get written.
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Jun
29
I was dugg!
Category: Internet | Leave a Comment
For what I think is the first time, I was dugg for my Xfce article!
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Jun
28
A few days ago I finished The Fellowship of the Rings. Things picked up in the second half of the book and they accelerated in the last quarter. I’m enjoying The Lord of the Rings a lot more now that Tolkien has gotten Tom Bombadil out of his system. In the Wikipedia article, even Tolkien seems to understand how much Tom annoys the crap out of people.
“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”
“And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).
Tolkien did go on to analyse the character’s role further:
“I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…
“It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war… the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”[3]
Tolkien even seems to justify Tom Bombadil’s presence:
At any rate, what I like about the book over the movies in the last half to fourth of the book is that a few of the plot elements get explained a little more clearly. Sauron’s origins are explained a lot more clearly. Gandalf and others talk about how he came to power and why he’s just an “eye” now. Gollum is a lot more treacherous in the books. The characters know who he is and he menaces them a few times. I think this elevates his dangerous aura and prepares the reader for the fact that Smeagol has been following our protagonists. Finally, the elven queen Galadrial is given a much more cohesive treatment in the book. In the movie, from what I can remember, she just talks to Frodo in a dream. In the book, all of the characters leave the forest changed in some way because of her. Also, she gives everyone a special gift.
So, perhaps LoTR can be enjoyable….if you can get past Tom Bombadil…
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Jun
27
Making Babies
Category: xkcd | Leave a Comment
3/4ths of this XKCD strip explain exactly how I feel about having kids.
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Jun
26
I am just sharing this because it’s about my alma mater, it’s a little funny in a geeky way, and I like Mark’s blog.
Check out this story about CIT and Cornell labs.
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Jun
25
My Newfound Love for Xfce!
Category: Linux | 12 Comments
For the past week to two weeks I’ve done something I had’t done in years - I switched my default desktop environment in my GDM login screen. I’ve been logging into Xfce instead of my usual Gnome. There are basically three reasons why I’m loving Xfce over Gnome.
First of all, I love the theme. I know it’s just Bluecurve, Redhat’s theme, for the Window manager, but I just love how it looks compared to Gnome. I can’t really explain it, but there’s something about the share of blue they’ve chosen and the way it blends with the White of the letters and min, max, close buttons that’s very, very pleasing to my eye. It’s definitely one of those subjective things and I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me, but I think it’s beautiful. There’s something about the shades of blue they use that I just love. (For the curious, the theme of the desktop environment is Clearlooks, their newest theme, but that’s not available as a theme for the Window Manager)
The second thing I love about it, is the right-click background menu. This is something I’ve always loved since I first encountered it on WindowMaker and then on Fluxbox. No matter where I am on the desktop, I don’t need to go to some corner to find a “program” or “start” menu. I can just right-click anywhere. Sometimes, as in the screenshot below, it’s pretty close to the “program” menu anyway. But if the desktop can be seen, it can be a lot faster.
Finally, there’s one thing I love that can’t really be shown in a screenshot - changing desktops using the mouse scroll wheel. Just like being able to deploy the menu anywhere on the desktop, it’s often very fast to juse scroll the mouse wheel on an exposed piece of desktop and swtich from on to another. If you have all your desktops clear it’s very convenient. And usually I just put my mouse somewhere on the bottom of the left screen and except for the narrow little bar with the menu and logout buttons, I’m sure to be on desktop and I can scroll from desktop to desktop. And it’s a lot faster to scroll from 1 to 4 than to go to spot number four in the desktop switcher and click.
Of course, there are a few little things missing. For example, as far as I know, there isn’t a beagle search bar for Xfce. Perhaps there’s a tracker applet, but I don’t use tracker. I think I’m sticking with Xfce until KDE 4.1 comes out and I check it out.
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Jun
24
Twitter-like Post: Da Hui
Category: Music | Leave a Comment
Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”. I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded really funny. Well, I finally found out that the song was about a real-life gang of surfers called Da Hui. They get a brief mention in the Local Surfers section of the Surfing article in Wikipedia. Interestingly, The Offspring also wrote a song about “da hui”. Well, I’ll certainly think of that song differently next time I hear it!
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Jun
23
Top 20 Pictures on Flickr
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
The top ten are mostly the same photos they’ve been for a while now, but the bottom ten have changed a bit. It’s very, very intersting (to me, at least) that every digital camera I’ve ever used is represented in the Top 20.
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15
#16
#17
#18
#19
#20
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