WALL-E

I saw WALL-E yesterday. I don't usually go in for Pixar films, mainly out of loyalty to traditional animation, but I've got to say WALL-E is a really good movie. Pixar has always made fairly decent stuff, although all the ones I've seen before (of which the most recent was Finding Nemo) I've always viewed as primarily kids' movies. Sure, adults taking their kids can enjoy them, but I doubt many adults would buy them on DVD for themselves. When was the last time you felt the urge to go rent Toy Story? WALL-E is different - it really is a movie anyone can enjoy, perhaps adults even more than kids. (The kids sitting next to me, during one of the film's climactic scenes, were too busy fart-assing around with lollies to pay any attention.)

The first thing that stuck me was the bang-up job they did depicting an Earth that has totally had its shit ruined. The hilariously large piles of garbage and nasty green smog look really cool, and the way everything looks all rusty and banged up is really impressively detailed. I'm big into robots so I thought WALL-E himself was pretty cool, I like how his body serves as a trash compactor/storage compartment as well as being able to hold his head and wheels when he retracts into a cube. EVE is nicely designed, contrasting WALL-E's traditional mechanic design with a cool sleek look, presumably made from some kind of smart polymer. The robot "voices" are really good, which is to be expected considering they were created by Ben Burtt, the guy behind R2-D2's expressive beeps. EVE's electronic but feminine voice reminds me a little of GLaDOS from Portal, perhaps not the best association character-wise, but anything that reminds me of my favourite physics-based first-person puzzle-comedy game is OK by me.

Another cool thing is how they tried to mimic the look of actual cameras. Apparently they wrote software to mimic the cameras used in sci-fi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There are a few other cool 2001 references too.) The shots during the part where WALL-E hitches a ride on the spaceship that picks up EVE were especially cool. Once they get into space the film shifts gears a bit, and there's plenty of cool shiny tech and robots, and an all-too-believable glimpse at the future of humanity.

So Pixar has seemingly matured, and replaced their usual torrent of pop-culture references with some fairly obvious but effective messages about the dangers of corporate monopoly, environmental neglect and human complacency. Even if you don't feel like being preached to, there's enough laughs, plot and cool robots to satisfy anyone. I give it 9 out of 10 discarded hubcaps.

Mid-semester break

Not a moment too soon, I've got a week off from uni. There's plenty of stuff to catch up on but before getting onto that boring stuff I decided to head down to Kiama for a couple of days. Pretty much the usual, but a few things are worth blogging.

I went to the blowhole on Sunday for nothing much else to do. It wasn't doing much despite the wind. As I was coming back to my car there were a couple of seagulls flying near my car, but because the wind was blowing so hard they were stationary in the air, which was pretty funny. I remember once in primary school I was hanging out with a friend of mine at lunch or whatever and we saw a pigeon flying sideways because of the wind and we pissed ourselves laughing. While one of these seagulls was hovering above the car next to mine I snapped a few photos.

I wandered into the bookshop a bit later and checked out what was around. With exams looming darkly on the horizon I don't have much time for reading, but I bought a copy of Ender's Game anyway. I've heard good things about it and I've not been reading much recently (well not in dead tree format anyway - I've been reading a few good books by email). Hopefully I'll finally be able to appreciate this xkcd strip, continuing in my tradition of learning enough to understand xkcd strips long after I first read them.

I saw WALL-E too, but I'll put that in a separate post.

Drawage

there's a couple of new items on my sketch blog Mod Rocker. One is a comic, the other is just scary. This weekend I was gripped for no apparent reason by an urge to draw. I drew some other things which are in various stages of completion, including a comic I'm not sure I should post because it is just gross. I'm slowly starting to realise that if I stop trying so damn hard to get every line just perfect, things still end up looking pretty decent (or even better than they would otherwise) and I can draw like ten times faster, resulting in things that actually get finished instead of abandoned a quarter of the way through.

Evil robot game alert!

I came across a game the other day called...

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS

Aside from that being a pretty cool name for a game, it's really fun too. It seems pretty standard at first, but then you die and it suddenly becomes awesome. You will see what I mean.

Tip: two dudes shooting at the same thing can create explosions.

Google Street View = awesome

Google Street View has just been unveiled in Australia. It's pretty awesome. What impresses me is the scope of it - there's a map here which shows just how much of the country you can see. Of course the first thing I did was check out my house. I don't know what people expect to see when they do this - it looked the same as in real life. It was still cool to see my house though, with my car parked outside and everything.

What intrigues me most about Street View though, isn't spatial, but temporal. Since each panorama is taken at a different time as the Google cars drive down the street, you can see what other cars and people were doing for a minute or so. This adds a whole new dimension to Google Maps - literally*. Coming down the main street of my suburb I can see people wandering about or doing whatever, captured in a series of frames as the car went past. A man walks along reading a piece of paper. A van goes past in the opposite direction. An old fat bloke stands with his bag of shopping on the ground. A 4-wheel drive comes out of a side street and turns right, following the Google car down the block. A guy in a high visibility shirt unload stuff from a van. A Forester comes around the corner and parks in front of the pizza place.

Then, tragedy strikes! The next image in the set for some reason shows all different people and cars and weather conditions. The Google folks obviously came down the main drag twice, so they could also go down the avenue that goes by the supermarket, and for some reason as you come down the road in Street View, one of the panoramas (out of maybe 10 or 15) is from this other, second set of photos. Nevertheless you can continue on and see most of the first set. This may be a mundane scene, but the cool thing is that it's been preserved forever in four dimensions.

I recently finished reading a book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame. I highly recommend it. The novel (which Doctorow relesed for free online) describes a future where people can back up their memories, the way people back up their hard drives today, and if people are killed they can be restored from backup by having their memories and personality implanted into a force-grown clone. When this happens to the main character, Julius, included with his restored memories is a computer generated fly-through of the scene of his murder. That's what I was reminded of when I started reconstructing the Google car's trip around the suburb. A fly-through of a scene from more than half a year ago.

It's hard to care about privacy concerns when you have such an amazing toy to play with.

*I'm trying not to misuse the word "literally" here. I hate it when people do that. Time is a dimension, after all...

Full license

I got my full driver's license yesterday. It felt pretty good taking the P-plates off my car and throwing them in the bin. Just in time, too, because I'm going up to Armidale on Tuesday and now I can legally keep up with everyone else on the freeway.

After I got home from the RTA, I was minding my own business working on some papercraft when a telemarketer rudely decided to call. It was for some charity, but I refuse to support any company or charity that uses telemarketing so I decided to have a bit of fun. I pretended I was looking for my dad, then asked the telemarketer if I could put her on hold. I placed the phone down in front of my computer speakers and put on a Midnight Juggernauts song. While that was playing I cued up a couple more songs: "Code Blue" by TSOL, and "Ass 'n' Titties" by DJ Assault. By the time Ass 'n' Titties finished she had hung up. I'm not sure when she hung up, but it was probably somewhere between hearing "I wanna fuck, I wanna fuck the dead" and "Stankin'-ass bitches that need to wash up, don't get mad when I don't wanna fuck".

I hate telemarketers.

The RTA are a bunch of useless tossers

I've finally almost finished the RTA's stupid gauntlet of plates and tests, and I'm going for my full driver's licence. The test for that is a combination of an unrealistic hazard perception test and a quiz about utterly useless statistics. Some of the statistics are more than useless - they don't even make sense. Take this example, copied and pasted directly from the Driver Qualification Handbook, page 49:

• At least 14 per cent of all crashes involve the driver being distracted by something.
• Distractions that happen outside the vehicle account for about 30 per cent of crash-related distractions.
• Distractions that happen inside the vehicle add up to about 36 per cent of crash-related distractions.

Is there some third possibility here that I'm not aware of? Where the hell is the other 34 per cent, in some no-man's land between the inside and the outside of the car?

There's some other dodgy stuff in there. Have a look at this graph about crash types, from page 10:



Nice graph, eh? Got the little pictures on there and everything. But compare this graph with one I made using the same data on a graph-making website:



Specifically, look at the large blue part. 25 per cent should obviously be one quarter of the chart. On the RTA's bullshit graph it looks more like 36 per cent. The three on the left-hand side of the graph are wrong too, leaving only two sections that are more or less right. Lots of people, including me, absorb information more easily in visual form, and are going to look at the graph rather than the numbers, and will get a false impression.

Nice work, RTA. Give us bullshit information and then test us on it. That'll make us better drivers.