Filter madness
What happens if you take a normal picture and then apply every Photoshop filter to it, one after another?
The Stranger
We were able to get one of Orson Welles lesser known movies for Hulu. But it's still Welles. I'm looking forward to checking it out.
Palin on the Bush Doctrine
Well, I'm mostly preaching to the converted here, but the thought that Palin could be one McCain health issue away from being our President is terrifying.
In a perverse way, I wish it had been Chris Matthews instead of Charles Gibson in the interviewer chair. It's probably better that it wasn't, though, as Matthews would have eviscerated her on her ignorance of the Bush Doctrine, and that might have come off looking mean-spirited and prompted accusations of sexism from the McCain camp.
There's a reason they've been sheltering her from the press. Drill, media, drill.
I can't help but think that Hillary Clinton could cement her status as a Democratic hero if she'd step out of the alley and face down Palin. Clinton would run circles around Palin. Like Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday stepping out of the shade to take out Johnny Ringo, Hillary would go down in history as a feminist hero by taking down the woman who's inherited the title of most divisive woman in politics.
UPDATE: Rebecca Traister writes in Salon of the same desire for Hillary to rescue feminism. Traister concludes the article:
Which leads us to my greatest nightmare: that because my own party has not cared enough, or was too scared, to lay its rightful claim to the language of women's rights, that Sarah Palin will reach historic heights of power, under the most egregious of auspices, by plying feminine wiles, and conforming to every outdated notion of what it means to be a woman. That she will hit her marks by clambering over the backs, the bodies, the rights of the women on whose behalf she claims to be working, and that she will do it all under the banner of feminism. How can anybody sleep?
The Amazon users' verdict on Spore: DRM bad
The restrictive DRM of Spore is one of the primary reasons it currently receives an average rating of 1 star at Amazon. That's across 2,123 reviews at last count, spurred on in part by the organizing power of the web, where DRM is a dirtier word than most four-letter words.
What is Spore's DRM? From what I've read, you have to connect to the web to activate the game the first time you install it, and you can only install the game on three computers before you have to call EA for permission to install it again. I have an old copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter that I bought years ago that had a similar DRM model, and I have to concede it's been a real hassle over the years. You have to be very careful to retire a computer from your installation count when you get a new computer or install a new operating system or have a hard drive fail on you, and you're stuck keeping that box of software around forever.
I hate DRM, it never thwarts the people it's focused on. Take iTunes. I buy a song on iTunes on one computer, and getting it to another computer is a hassle. If I copy the song to my iPod or iPhone, I can't pull it back down to my other laptop, even if both are computers I register among the 5 that I authorize to play those songs. I can never remember which computer my iPhone is synced to, but keeping my music in sync between all my Macs is way too difficult. This is probably due in great part to pressure from the music labels, but regardless of whose fault it is, the honest consumer suffers.
On gaming platforms, DRM is a tough pill to swallow when the competition from consoles is so stiff.
Meanwhile, Metacritic gives Spore an average review of 86 out of 100. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle as the web tends to attract polarized opinions. I haven't played Spore, but I doubt it's a 1-star game if you consider just gameplay. But as a form of mass protest, this is an effective one. If you're Electronic Arts, you sure as hell better listen and respond. Brands are meaning, and those meanings are written by more than just Will Wright and the employees at EA. And if you're on the fence about buying this game, you're going to hesitate when you see the following user review distribution.
Maybe the Democrats need to spread rumors that McCain and Palin come with DRM.
Most anticipated fall/winter movie
The movie I'm most looking forward to seeing the rest of this year? The new James Bond film. It introduces Mathieu Amalric, he of the fascinating French face, as the villain.
The latest trailer is out, and it's hot. Is it any coincidence that the return of Bond to a heavy-hitting movie icon coincided with his return to the Aston Martin as his car of choice? It heralded the return of a more severe Bond, of extreme and discerning taste, and it served as a bridge to the Bond of old, breaking ties with the intermediate BMW Bond years (let's just sweep those under the rug).
The theme song, "Another Way to Die," will be a duet between Jack White and Alicia Keys.
Red working on a DSLR competitor
After taking on the motion picture camera industry, Red is now coming after Nikon and Canon with a DSLR replacement targeted for late 2009. They're calling it a DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera), which brings to mind the recently announced Nikon D90.
What is the Red DSMC? No one knows yet. Jim Jannard says its the product in their pipeline that he's most excited about.
Intriguing.
Title sequence of Thank You For Smoking
From Art of the Title, a Quicktime movie of the gorgeous typography of the title sequence of Thank You For Smoking.
New iPod Nano
If the new iPod Nano, supposedly to be unveiled on Sep 9, doesn't look like the pictures on this web page, this 3rd party iPod case manufacturer is going to have a lot of wasted inventory (another leaked photo via Engadget seems to echo the previous photos).
I use my iPod all the time, but it's harder to get excited for every next iPod release. The differences from one iPod Nano to the next aren't that significant anymore; they tend to center on greater storage for the same price. The major form factor benefits have been realized.
Not that there's still not huge revenues and value to be extracted from the iPod line. Google's search ranking algorithms haven't noticeably improved (to my eye) for many years, but they continue to rake in cash because no competitors have been able to leapfrog them.
Palin
Back from the Dylan concert, I watched two of the Republican National Convention speeches on tape delay on MSNBC. First was Rudy Giuliani's speech. Rudy has gone off the deep end, and after that speech, any lingering crumbs of goodwill from his 9/11 performance have been cleared away.
But the speech everyone is talking about is Palin's. As a vessel for rallying the conservative base, she was perfect. She was remarkably self-assured, and if disregard for irony is courage, then she was fearless in her assault on Obama. If the VP's job is to attack the opposing presidential candidate, Palin seems as eager and willing to take on Obama as Amy Winehouse was to beat up her husband. That crowd was fired up, and the Republican party seemed to get its mojo back.
Of all the politicians who've spoken at the conventions, her life story was best at conveying that she's just like one of us (whether it's true or not). George W. Bush seems like one of us because he comes off sounding like an underachieving frat president. Palin seems like the tough hockey mom she says she is. Democrats saw Dubya win the last election in part on his folksy charm, and Palin has an element of that. Her life story allows the Republicans to put some weight behind their elitist attacks against Obama because she serves as a foil to his best-selling book-writing, Harvard Law Review President past.
But the Republican party always gets behind its candidate, so the Democrats had to expect it, even if the candidate is McCain. How did her speech play to independents, and Hillary supporters, and Democrats in general?
I think it will rally Democrats just as much as it rallies the Republicans. The few Democratic friends I've spoken to are livid over her speech and its largely facile attacks, and two of them jumped online immediately to make big donations to the Obama campaign. I caught myself with fuming from time to time at what seemed to be a certain smugness on her part. Who does she think she is? If you look to Palin's speech as a roadmap for how the Republicans are going to approach the next two months, we should expect a clear return to the type of divisive attacks that Obama has wanted to avoid. Palin fired up her party, but she also lit a fire under the opposing team.
I was struck, in the Democratic Convention, by how many times speakers stopped to praise McCain. I heard no such concessions from Giuliani or Palin. They had no qualms about resorting to a sarcasm which left them looking particularly vicious and petty. In my mind, this helps the Democrats because it opens the door to attacking Palin more aggressively. If she is as tough and antagonistic as she seemed in this speech, the Democrats should be able to take off the kid gloves. Charges of sexism won't stick. Hell, she made Biden look like the one who should wear a cup to the first VP debate. This is an important opening that the Democrats need to seize. The Democrats need to go after Palin's vulnerable spots, and there are many, so that she can't remain this abstract, attractive attack dog.
Palin's attacks also crossed a line. They tried to paint Obama as a egotist who cares little for America. Whether you're for him or against him, I doubt many independents will buy that he's a preening narcissist. The bluntness and exaggerated nature of her attacks made her seem tough but simple-minded.
Criticizing Obama for being elitist while belittling his work as a community organizer is the type of obliviousness to irony that Republicans are very good at (honestly; their focus on message is just good politics). It plays great when preaching to the choir. But does Palin have the weight to make the charges stick?
I don't think she does. I kept thinking throughout her speech that I was impressed by her command of the crowd and terrified at the possibility that she might become our President. Her speech was so light on actual policy talk that I couldn't help but feel that she was a movie character, from the story of any average person thrust into the White House unexpectedly who impresses everyone with their folk wisdom. If there's a war breaking out between two foreign countries, she's not the one I want answering the 3am phone call. Maybe if there's a rabid moose on the loose, but not if she needs to jump in and mediate between, say, Georgia and Russia.
Did her speech play well to Hillary's sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits? I'll be curious to see the polls. I suspect just as many professional women are appalled by Palin as thrilled. Finally, despite her youth, in attacking Obama with arguments that seem so partisan, she only offers more of what has turned so many young people off of politics.
I could be entirely wrong. I'm no political expert. But I can't help but be drawn in. This Presidential election is the best new drama on TV. Can it win an Emmy?
Pot, Kettle, Black
Experience? Leave the family alone? Sexism? Whose playbook is that?
Bob Dylan
I saw Bob Dylan at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium tonight. I've never heard Dylan live before. He's more mythical to me than real, seen mostly in black and white photos, documentaries, and movies, played by a variety of actors.
I'm a lifelong developing Dylan fan. My first real exposure to Dylan came in high school as one of my friends was a huge Dylan fan and would play Dylan in the tape deck of his car all the time. Recently I found a good deal on Amazon for a used copy of the Bob Dylan SACD box set, and I've been working my way through it, one disc at a time. His sound transports me back in time and across America like a musical road trip in a convertible with its top down, with the wind tousling my hair.
I will remember tonight, but not for the venue. The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium is fugly, and the acoustics of the cement-floored space are awful and muddy. The speakers were balanced to lean to the left, and it sounded like Dylan was singing from a space floating about 20 feet over the left third of the stage when he was in fact standing about two thirds of the way to the right of the stage most of the evening.
It's a credit to Dylan's songwriting that despite the terrible acoustics (which made his already incomprehensible lyrics sound like the language used in Apocalypto), my toes were tapping the whole time. Given the state of my Achilles, that's no small feat. I nearly fell over from exhaustion a few times--for some reason, tearing your Achilles reduces your endurance for standing--but managed to stay upright to the bitter end, through the second song of his encore.
As a fan of speech, I admire Dylan for his sui generis command of the rhythms of English language. He really is the poet laureate of American music.
NOTE: You can download "Dreamin' of You", a previously unreleased track from Tell Tale Signs, from BobDylan.com.
If You See Something
Bernie Hou, who used to do the online comic strip Alien Loves Predator, now has devoted himself full time to the online comic strip If You See Something.
The latest entry is a beaut. It's titled Google Releases New Chrome Browser.
It's that mother of three in Detroit
One political speech tactic I've heard a lot recently which doesn't work for me is the reference to some person the politician met on the campaign trail. Here's an example from Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic Convention:
I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism. She didn’t have any health insurance, and she discovered she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head, painted with my name on it, and asked me to fight for health care for her and her children.
I will always remember the young man in a Marine Corps T-shirt who waited months for medical care. And he said to me, “Take care of my buddies. A lot of them are still over there. And then will you please take care of me?
Convention vs. Convention
If we're to judge the quality of the two conventions by the quality of their streaming video, then hands down it's a victory for the Democrats. The Democratic Convention site had, and still has, high-def video using Move and Silverlight. The Republican Convention site has fuzzy YouTube videos.
Maybe the poor video resolution will be flattering to McCain's complexion. There is some element of this disparity in online experience that is consistent with the Luddite image of the Republican Party, especially McCain, relative to the Democratic Party.
W, the movie...er, film
I made the mistake of visiting the site for WTheMovie.com, which is a surreal satire on the presidency of George W. Bush, instead of WTheFilm.com, official site of the upcoming Oliver Stone satire about the presidency of George W. Bush.
You may mistake the movies for each other via the URL's, but once you've watched the trailers you're not likely to confuse the two.
FiveThirtyEight on Palin
Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, liveblogging from the Republican VP announcement,
Great visual: Palin walking out with her daughter. Not-so-great visual: Palin embracing McCain and looking like his daughter.
I had the same reaction to their age differential, and for all the reasons she might be a good VP choice--how she comes off to people in public appearances may matter more than what the pundits write about her--this is potentially a problem.
More from Silver:
Because it isn't really an argument about experience per se. It's an argument about whether she meets the basic threshold test of voters feeling comfortable with having her as President. Experience is a part of that, but so are essentially the aesthetics of it: picturing a young, attractive, kooky, female governor from Alaska who has an accent straight out of Fargo in the White House is going to be a much bigger leap for many voters than picturing Barack Obama there.
At a minimum, I'm looking forward to seeing how Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, and Jay Leno work Palin into their routines.
Based on early polls, it's starting to seem like Palin's selection won't make a difference to any of the entrenched Democratic or Republican voters. But this is before she's made her speech at the RNC. That's going to pull some serious ratings.
If the Republican VP search committee thought through their choice, and I'm sure they did, Palin seems like a choice designed to draw Obama supporters into outrage and ridicule, and so far it's worked (yours truly guilty as anyone).
But the Obama and Clinton reaction to her selection seems the better approach. Don't attack her on experience, or run the equivalent of McCain's "Celebrity" ads, attack her on issues. Leave the ridicule to the late night talk show hosts and comedians, and take the high ground. McCain is the candidate, and he provides enough target area for the Democratic Party to set up an entire firing range, from his houses to his weak grasp of economics to his policy shifts in the last eight years. If Palin is a liability, voters will be able to connect the dots themselves.
It's hard not to stave off a nagging fatalism on many things in life this year. The Cubs are playing well, but that only means we Cubs fans have to lash ourselves a few extra times, like Paul Bettany in The Da Vinci Code. The Cubs rotation might get shut down by Webb, Haren, and the Big Unit. Harden, Zambrano, Wood, and Marmol's arms might fall off. The Cubs might make the World Series and lose to the White Sox. And so on. Obama might lose because the Republicans mobilize their base better. Palin will steal enough independent women voters and evangelicals to push McCain into the lead. Biden didn't sway enough independents to Obama's side. And on and on.
But taken as pure drama, it's all golden. Forget W, I want to see the Paul Thomas Andersen movie about this election season. Who would play Hillary, Bill, Obama, and McCain? Tina Fey may look like Palin, but can she play her? Will Biden or McCain slip up and refer to Palin as a "gorgeous broad" in a Mad Men-esque moment? What if McCain wins and croaks and Palin becomes President? It could be a Hollywood movie come to life, like Dave crossed with Legally Blonde.
In the time of year when nothing good is hitting movie theaters, I'll be cozying up with a bucket of popcorn and watching the Cubs in the playoffs and Obama/McCain in the main event.