A Scanner Darkly

It’s not often I get excited about films in advance, but A Scanner Darkly, due for release December 31st, 2005, is nothing if not intriguing.

Written by Philip K. Dick (Bladerunner, Minority Report, the film stars Keanu Reeves as a cop planning a sting operation on a drug dealer. Unfortunately, Keanu is hooked on Substance D, a drug which splits the mind; and the other half of his mind is the dealer he is trying to snare.

Also starring Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr, A Scanner Darkly has been filmed using a technique called Rotoscopy. The process involves taking each frame of film and tracing over the detail, giving a ‘live animation’ effect to the final result. The technique was used to create the lightsabers in the original three Star Wars as well as the animated singer effect in the A-Ha video for the 1986 song Take On Me.

There is currently no official site for the film, but there is a trailer as well as, of course, an IMDB page, OsakaSteve has another picture on his flickr blog, and keanuette has published Empire magazines’ May 2005 article, along with another excellent picture.

McDonalds bribes rappers for endorsements

McDonalds has offered to pay chart rappers to include the trademark ‘Big Mac’ in songs. The burger chain, recently criticised for blatantly targetting youth in its’ advertising campaigns, is to pay rappers $5 / �2.80 each time their song is played on the radio. Maven Strategies, McDonalds marketing company, will have the final say on the lyrics of such songs before release.

A McDonald’s spokesman said: “This partnership reflects our appreciation and respect for the most dominant youth culture in the world.”

Whiskey-drinking mouse-catching cat dies

The BBC has announced the death of Towser, the record-breaking resident of the Grouse Glenturret distillery.

A replacement is being sought for the cat, who holds the world record for catching 30,000 mice over his lifetime. Distillery bosses have consulted feline charities as well as a cat pyschologist, as they know Towser will be tough to replace.

In other news, Manchester Met University are holding a conference to discuss the socio-cultural impact of The Smiths. The bands’ 1986 song I Know It’s Over was once voted the best song to listen to when feeling depressed.

• Binge drinking and driving while drunk is dangerous. No shit.
• Musty smelling, flightless parrot gets laid. Polly wants a cracker!

Henry Earl, drinking legend

Henry Earl is fast becoming a legend. He has his own fan site, his own page on wikipedia and has even appeared in the Sunday Mail.

He’s been arrested over 900 times, each time spending an average 3.7 days in jail, and each charge the same: alcohol intoxication.

Now i’m not condoning having too much to drink, but i like someone who can aim for a target and have the dedication to keep on going, so todays’ respect goes to Henry Earl.

Netgear media router

Set up one of these in our office today. The user installs a netgear media server on a machine, then the mp101 can wirelessly hook into the music on that machine and stream it over the network to your stereo. There is a remote, which is used for skipping songs, and the unit itsself has an iPod style music browser on the screen, so you can browse by artist, genre, album etc. It can also play through playlists, created in the server software. However, i couldn’t see that it could be told which track to play from the server software – rather you have to browse to that track on the actual router, which seemed like a huge shortfall.

Planning on using it daily at work, i guess time will tell what i think of it.

Things to make and do

Percussion players in flash. Catchy, i wonder who thinks of these things? Also loving the tickle game over at crapville.com, which is very simple but strangely hot.

Shuffle It!

It’s got to be said, i love my iPod shuffle! I’ve had it two months now, and although i’m using it less now that i’ve got my car stereo back, it’s still great for weekends, holidays, gym (ahem)…

At first, i was dubious about the lack of screen, but having used it extensively, this is absolutely no disadvantage. Thing is, if you have a 40Gb iPod, and you put 5,000 songs on it, you’re not just putting the best songs of each album on; you’re putting every song of the album on, warts and all. When you load up U2’s “The Joshua Tree”, you’re not just putting on “With Or Without You”, you’re also putting on “Running To Stand Still” and “One Tree Hill”.

With a shuffle, this doesn’t happen. A capacity of ~230 songs ensures that the songs you choose to fill your shuffle are the best of the best – there is no need for a screen, as there is no call for skipping through the ‘not so great’ songs. This also maintains a battery life of 12 hours (as stated by Apple), although mine seems to last more like 24 hours from each charge.

And really, who needs 5,000 songs? I’ll laugh I will, when your hard-disk based iPod suffers a disk failure mid-treadmill! I’ll be there, with my ever faithful flash memory and 230 of the best jogging music!

Beginning…

I’ve started using Wordpress as my new blog, as writing my own blog backend was proving too much – i’m learning so much that by the time I finish the core of one version, the things I can do in my head are two versions in the future. WP has all the functionality I need. I’m looking to edit the themes a bit more, make it more individual, possibly base it around K2, the next version of Kubrick

Also i’m looking at how easy it is to use the Flickr API to host my photos, while maintaining galleries on the site.

It should also be fairly easy for me to adapt WP into some other stuff I have in mind, while using the core templating/login architecture. Hopefully, starting with something i’m confident of will kick me into spending some time on this…

Famous last words?