It Takes More Than Glasses To Take You To Another Dimension

Really, how hard is it to try and see a film in two dimensions these days?

I don’t have a problem with 3D, in fact I quite like it for the two minutes were it actually feels like it’s making a difference in the cinema before it feels like just another movie you didn’t pay five pounds extra for. However, cinemas understand student budgets, that’s why they have student tickets (however overpriced they are as well), so they must understand the benefits of not turning every screen into some kind of cinematic beer google….s… on the wallet, and really, things aren’t that much better in 3D unless you’re trying to hunt something. Stereoscopic vision was not made for having enjoyable experiences, not that that’s any sort of excuse not to use 3D technology in movies, I just want to keep blathering on until there are more showings of movies I want to see in the two dimensions I don’t need funky funky glasses to observe.

You go to the cinema to see a movie, and I don’t see how you’re going to capture any less of the story line if there isn’t shit flying in your face all the time. In fact, I would go as far to say that you’re probably going to catch more of the story if there isn’t shit flying in your face, unless the film itself is called something like Faeces Flinger 3D or something equally absurd.

What Qualifies?

If there was a news media meltdown every time someone became pregnant, we’d never hear about anything else. I don’t mean to deny the role that what remains of the British monarchy plays in the wealth of this nation, nor that there are people who truly do care what celebrities are getting up to, but what I don’t quite get is how this is front page news, next to people getting slaughtered overseas and new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. I suppose that when news isn’t personally tailored to the watcher the things that some may not consider important overrule some things of great importance to some, much to the latter’s chagrin. I suppose there are people who wait with baited breath for the sports section of the news, whereas I usually switch off, but that’s a matter of personal taste, as, I suppose, is whether or not a pregnant princess is important enough to qualify as news.

As Youtube and other services like it become more popular, perhaps news will become more tailored towards the individual rather than as the nation as a whole, perhaps that’s where we’re heading, into a world where we can hear what we like and pretend that celebrity culture doesn’t exist to sustain whatever faith in humanity has managed to cling onto the remains of our brains at that point.

As much as I care about the latest discoveries, I’m sure that there are people who couldn’t give less of a shit about how technology is being used to save peoples lives and the planet, and there are probably equally as many people for whom the prospect of finding life on mars is but a huge ‘meh’. To those people, I raise a solitary eyebrow, but I understand that not everyone is going to agree on everything, and that’s largely a good thing.

Fish Faces

I wonder if there could ever be another intelligent life form with a similar head to ours.

You see it in the movies all the time, in fact it’s rare that in a film or representation of any sort of alien creature that the alien does not have a face like our, or at least a head like ours, and when you think about it, this is really odd, because not all animals have faces like ours, or even faces at all.

Think of mollusks, like octopuses and snails, they don’t have faces. They have eyes, but on the former they are at either side of their mantle, and in the latter they stick out above their front end. The mouths for these creatures aren’t visible from the way we usually perceive them and you would probably have quite a bit of a job on your hands arguing that they have a face.

What we, and all tetrapods have (animals with four legs and their descendants) are essentially modified fish faces, and if you haven’t evolved from something like a fish, I’d love to see what sort of ancestry brought you one’s face.

I assume, I suppose, that not every inhabited planet has something like a fish, and I would probably be onto a winner there so I’m going to stick to my guns and say that in all likelihood, this is the case.

Don’t Talk Down To Them?

Hey guys, it’s Saturday, and you know what that means?

It actually means nothing in particular but I thought I’d start this off like a cheesy children’s television presenter. How did I do? I give myself an eight out of ten for being patronizing and a zero for fart jokes, because in my world there would be a few less of them. Let’s give the kids something other than their excretions to lack about, shall we?

In my opinion we should be giving kids a better variety of shows but I’ve always cringed at the amount of condescension that happens in children’s television. Nobody should be talked down to, even if they are eight years old and don’t understand as much of the world as some of us.

One of the reasons I think Doctor Who is so popular, for example, is because it relates to all ages, and wouldn’t it be nice if there was more stuff like that on kid’s TV, instead of taking out the interesting bits of family television and labeling it ‘for kids’?

And then when they grow up they can appreciate Rome and Game of Thrones and the other stuff that they probably shouldn’t be watching, but I also think that there’s no harm in telling kids what sex is and that the world can be a violent place… I suppose if I was a father I might think differently, but I’m not… excuse my naivety while I try and put myself in someone else’s shoes.

I watched Rome when I was relatively young and I came out just fine…

Right?

Super!

Give me a few hours to recover, we met some very nice people last night and may have stayed out longer than we should have, the trade off being that a lovely engaged man let me wear his Captain America mask, and although the star spangled hero is probably my least favorite avenger and I’m far from a super soldier, I think I pulled it off pretty nicely.

I’m only assuming that facebook doesn’t have some kind of photo cock-blocker here so I apologize if all you get out of this blog is a broken jpeg.

I did adore the avengers movie but the more I think about scenarios where the bad guys all droop into lifelessness at the same time the more I think that it’s implausible, especially as the chitauri are shape shifting aliens and not robots acting from some sort of wormhole-threaded remote control. In the latter scenario they could effectively all lose communication and cease to fight, but surely that won’t work with aliens?

Perhaps I lack some understanding of their alien biology, perhaps their brains are all connected to a giant being that embodies their collective consciousness, kind of like the giant plastic blob that controlled the Autons in the first episode of the Doctor Who reboot.

Seeing as in the marvel universe telepathy is a thing I suppose this isn’t completely implausible, but I’m pretty sure the chitauri are a race of individuals, not a thousand shades of the same creature. Perhaps I need to read up on the marvel universe some more. If I could afford to buy comics these days that would help immensely.

Perhaps I should start a kickstarter account for that.

With just four pounds a month, Eddy can buy Deadpool. Give him forty and he can actually begin to understand what’s going on in the marvel universe at the moment. Give him a thousand and he can buy all of avengers vs x-men.

Doctor Cubed

Welcome back, internet.

Just a quick warning to those of you who haven’t seen the most recent episode of Doctor Who, this could be considered spoilery, because it is. I’m going to be talking about something that could probably ruin the plot for you if you plan to watch it after reading this. Take that as you will, but let me remind you that actively looking for LOST spoilers ruined a certain twist at the end of season three for me.

After watching last night’s Doctor Who episode: ‘The Power Of Three’ I had to pause for thought. Not because Doctor Who is usually the most scientifically accurate program in the world, but I was a little taken aback by the mass defibrillation scene, because I was trying to get a sense of how much time had passed since the cubes started the whole mass heart attack thing.

I got the impression from the show that there was a significant amount of time between the cubes’ attack and the Doctor’s solution, perhaps I got the wrong impression, but if their heart attacks had actually stopped their hearts the defibrillators would be pretty much useless. If I remember correctly, you can use them to return the heart to a steady rhythm, but not start it back up again, because at that point you’re pretty much screwed.

If this happened quickly then it’s plausible, if not a little optimistic, but Doctor Who’s all about the optimism, hence why the dark backstory to the ‘dinosaurs in space’ episode was filtered down by ridiculously whimsical dialogue and Russel T Davies levels of cheese.

And as one of the few people who doesn’t seem to hate Amy and Rory, I’m going to be sad to see them go. that is, unless the new companion is in fact the dalek she played in episode one of this series.

Then I’d be impressed.

Get on it Moffat.

To Walk The Plank

When will the media realise that people are going to get their hands on products regardless of who they target? When you shut down one website, another opens. If you take down people for allowing file sharing, I’ll bet that another ten will replace each one in a hydra-esque spawning, probably hiding behind pseudonyms and other such measures, but still active. If you make your products hard to get a hold of especially, people are going to find a way to get their hands on it if they enjoy the product. Is that not a good thing? Are the people that are so desperate to see something that they can’t wait until the DVD comes out or until they can afford the DVD the more long-term fans of whatever your selling? Aren’t they the people that will later buy the merchandise, tell all their friends about it (and subsequentlly convert a few into buying what you’re selling) and in the long run be the best investments under your radar? I suppose I’d be able to answer that question if I’d have taken a business course instead of a Biology one, but it does really interest me, because that seems like a logical train of events to me, and something that I don’t think I thought would spew from my fingers onto my keyboard when I thought I’d say that I think the arrest of the founder of the pirate bay was a dick move.

Also, you probably knew that I would have something essentially akin to that to say about the incident. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you by being unpredictable, especially when I feel strangely passionate about the freedom of people to fileshare.

Perhaps I would sympathise if I was in business. Perhaps I’d look at what’s changing in the way we consume media and think that it’s a big problem that needs to be solved. Instead however, I’m looking at the way it’s changing and the media’s extreme reaction to it, and thinking to myself that this could probably be resolved a lot more quietly by finding a way in which both new and old methods of distribution can marry without either side damaging the other as much as it appears they are trying to.

Perhaps I’m too ignorant of this topic to understand it properly, but it seems to me as if the first instinct of the larger corporations to what the internet has allowed us to do is to declare war on something that they don’t quite understand.

Being Brave

Sorry this post is going up so late but I’ve been far too busy entertaining myself in various venues to remember that I still had one more duty left to carry out today. Forgive me and let me talk about Brave, the new Pixar movie that’s no longer new in the USA but has only just come out in the UK making it new for me. Do you understand? The movie’s positively new! New, shiny and allowing myself to issue a proud spoiler warning just in case I divulge into the details a little too much.

So yeah, possible spoilers ahead people.

If you hadn’t guessed yet, I saw Brave today.

Oh really Eddy?

Yes really Eddy you condescending son of a gun. And although it didn’t quite reach up to the bar set by Up and Toy Story 3, I enjoyed it. I thought it was well written, the animation was gorgeous and the messages were awesome.

I was a little freaked out when the main plot initially kicked in, probably because this movie did what I’d love all films to do and didn’t actually give away the plot in the trailer. I had no idea what was going to happen until I was in the cinema, and that was pretty refreshing even if it involved a transformation that really made me feel sad for the character in question. My empathy however, might have been helped by the fact that I watched Age Of Steel a couple of hours before.

The origin of the curse the movie revolves around was one of my favourite parts of the film; I loved how they tied everything together nicely without being too in your face about it.

Here’s your mission now filmmakers; make the promotional material for your work exciting enough for me to want to watch it but vague enough that I’m genuinely surprised by the film. Cheers.

Rise!

Since the Internet on my computer is down you may have to forgive me for a few errors in this post. I may love my new phone but I fear it was not designed with blogging in mind. Nevertheless, I shall rear it towards that purpose in the best ways I can think of, and, if technology shall serve me well, I will soldier on.

Now, I know by now you are probably sick of me not talking about the kind of things that I actually have the knowledge to make reasonable commentary on, but considering that I left the door open with yesterday’s post about me being somewhat hesitant about what I thought going into it, I want to say a few words about the dark knight rises.

I think I’ve forgiven Christopher Nolan for inception.

You may think that is a bold statement if you have yet to see the new batman flick or if you have been one of those people unfortunate enough to get the awesome experience out of it that I did. I would go on however, to deny that, it was a really bloody good movie, at least after the first twenty minutes to an hour had passed. Without giving too much away, wow, just when you think it’s a typical superhero movie everything hits warp speed and the film turns into the tangle wood of awesomeness that may have even beaten the avengers and the amazing spider-man for me; although in truth I cannot pick a favourite, and would furthermore insist that, despite falling within the same movie genre, those films are all too different beasts from each other to be compared.

Nolan’s Last Chance

Welcome back to the fold gentlemen and gentlewomen (who implies that females can’t be gentle as well, that’s crazy), and into the lair of idiocy and raised eyebrows that is this blog, which today is brought to you by the letter S and the number 4; not for any logical reason but because I just got an iPhone and it’s stuck in my head, sorry about that.

I’m going to go see the Dark Knight Rises today (hopefully) so no spoilers, but I’ve got that nice balance going where half of the people I’ve talked to about it have said it was amazing and half of them have said it was terrible. I usually get quite into those kind of movies though, I loved Wolverine Origins… but then again, I regret every minute I wasted watching Inception, that shit storm of a movie should be erased from time and Christopher Nolan should have to use any money he makes from the Dark Knight Rises as compensation for all of those people who had to watch that crap and are still reeling from the turd that they had to watch for three hours.

But then again, if this movie is as good as some say I might just have to forgive him. This is your final warning Christopher Nolan, I loved The Dark Knight, and I thought Batman Begins was pretty awesome too, so if you can make a perfect trilogy… perhaps… just perhaps I can forgive you.

Perhaps.