Scattered Points

Paraphrase of the Day:  “Traditional farming methods use 10 times less water, 10 times less energy and produce 5 times as much biomass per acre as does modern mechanized farming.”  — Vandana Shiva

Back at kung fu practice today, after a week and a half off due to a bout of sickness.  In the beautiful world of crazy coincidences (and also in the world of there are no accidents) one of our Shi-Bo just so happens to be visiting the Bay Area and just so happened to be out walking at night last Tuesday and just so happened to cross the road in front of the kwoon and just so happened to see the class practicing Sun Style Tai Chi and chose to come in and watch.  And, since she is our Shi-bo, she trained with Sifu and our Shi-Gong Sun Jian Yun a decade ago.  Really awesome, she’s staying here for a couple of months and will be joining us for classes and already she has been an outpouring to couple with Sifu and provide observations and illumination.  She only speaks Mandarin, which makes for some fun listening, observing, and waiting for one of my classmates who speak Mandarin to translate for me…

I bought the soundtrack to Wall-E (DRM-free digital music, woo!).  Very interesting soundtrack, very different from most other soundtracks.  There are some 38 tracks on the album, and each cue is very short, most only about a minute or three.  Which, in thinking about it, makes perfect sense, given the mostly dialogue-less nature of the film — the music is what does some of the speaking.  Each cue truly does relate to a scene or chapter in the film.  Very nifty, and cool for the great musical range of the many cues, including a couple (EVE, and the sort-of reprise in Define Dancing) that are truly very beautiful and instant shiver-material.

Railway tracks have a particular smell to them, it turns out.  Maybe it’s the (probably nasty) oils they put into the ties to weatherproof them.  Discovered this today while walking home, and interestingly I found it a pleasant smell, likely as it brought back many pleasant memories from my youth.

A couple of weeks ago I bought six copies of The Art of Possibility, and gave a copy to each principal and each associate in the office.  The office manager saw me do this, and we had a small conversation and I’m now scheduled to introduce it to the office as a whole tomorrow at the staff meeting.  Ordinarily I think I would hide out and not tell anyone about this, so that if it doesn’t turn out no one would know.  But here I lay it out, I’m brining what’s in this book to the office, and taking on altering the disempowering conversations that are inadvertedly created on a daily basis.  And out of seeing those conversations return our work and our environment (and most importantly our experience) into the realm of creativity, inspiration and excitement.

current possibility:  living life full out

Power Armour FTW!

Midway through the film, I thought to myself “Self, you’ve nearly forgotten that you love power armour! Rock on!”  (’course some readers of this blog may remember one Champions character named Cyclone… built, um, insanely as he was…)

[The mini review: good fun dialogue, good wry humour, some interesting character dev, very nice f/x, would've really sung with a much stronger cast of villains and a strong villainous plot to give more impetus]

Pandas, Robots and Animation, oh my!

Two weekends, two animated features seen. Last weekend I went to see Kung Fu Panda, and last night was the opening night for Pixar’s WALL-E. Two very, VERY different films.

Perhaps spoilers.

What I Love: Vol 4

I love a good story.

I love being lost in a good story.

I love being provoked by a good story.

I love being made pensive by a good story.

I love being moved by a good story.

I love being excited by and cheering for a good story.

I love being transported by a good story.

Meandering

This is the type of research that one professor I’m designing lab space for at Stanford is currently working on:  Spontaneous Generation of Chirped Time-Energy Entangled Photons.  He works with lasers.  I get to work with lasers by proxy!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I passed my eighth Architectural Registration Exam — one left to go!

This is a nifty design for a helicopter, and amusing, as it basically is a similar idea to what Airwolf was to do…

This is a great site, it is amassing funds and making recordings of classical music (which is in the public domain) and then releasing the recordings into the public domain (as most recordings of said music are NOT in the public domain).  Ditto with the sheet music for a lot of these pieces.

In my post about Prince Caspian I spoke thusly:  “not so fine as an epic fantasy tale.”  In thinking about it later, I realized I misspoke.  One of the things about Narnia is that it is not really ‘epic.’  That’s key really, it’s a much more intimate scale, more of a yarn or a tale than an epic.  And perhaps that’s where the film took a wrong turn, in going for the epic LotR-type treatment rather than a more modest tone.  That might have guided them towards filling in those gaps and capturing the missing feel.

Aurora 2.3 is out!  And let the two week countdown begin.

QotD:  “What is that resistance?  You resist it when you think about it.  You resist when you prepare for it.  You resist as you go to it.  You resist as you start it.  Then you do it, and you’re always glad you did it.  What is that resistance?”  — Unknown

Princes and Kings

A few months back I read Prince Caspian to get ready for the upcoming release of the film. And found myself surprised. The book/story, as a whole, just… fell flat for me. There was a fine story kernel there for sure, but the telling of that story was lacking. It was straightforward, almost droning in narrative, with much exposition and little discovery or wonder. I was left somewhat indifferent to it; it was alright, but nothing really special, and without the first instalment as a backdrop I’m not sure it would’ve been even that.

Fast forward to Friday. It’s no secret of my great adorement of the first Chronicles of Narnia film (in fact, I popped it in Thursday night just to watch a little bit and ended up watching vast chunks of it). The job done was superb both as a film and as a great adaptation of the book. When I heard that the producers were going to _add_ things to Prince Caspian in order to add some additional aspects to the storyline, I was actually pleased (I usually have reservations of changes being made to novels when filmed).

Does Prince Caspian succeed as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe did?

What I Love: Vol 3

I love music.

I love that I love so many different genres of music.

I love being moved by music.

I love when I get chills up and down my spine from a piece of music.

I love the human voice used as an instrument.

I love a choir.

I love soundtrack scores.

I love music with complex layering.

I love instrumental pieces, vocal pieces, and much in between.

I love being surprised by music.

I love having all my music on one server for the ultimate 8 month long plus never-repeat shuffle mix

Another omnibus post

Wicked days.

Which one to root for?

Jackie Chan. Jet Li. Together, in one film. Could I possibly not go on opening night? I choose not! So thusly, I did, heading out with a bunch of friends to see The Forbidden Kingdom last night.

Story wise, it wasn’t really a success. It is at its core a simple story, which is all well and good, but the telling of the story (or the execution of the story) is where the film lacked. Heavy handed in some places, holywood cliché’ed in others, and oddly expositional in yet others. A beautifully woven yarn this was not.

As a kung fu piece, here the film was much more successful. Yuen Woo-Ping was the fight choreographer, so, hey, you know the fight quality is going to be there. Of course the highlight of the film was the Jackie vs Jet duel, a prolonged, classic, scenery-damaging contest of great length and great technique. Mmmmm. (Interestingly, it wasn’t very later-style Jackie-ish, ie, not prop- and stunt-driven — I think that was the intent in hiring Woo-Ping, but it still surprised me that there was almost none)

Really, this film was one great long Kung Fu geek-out for me. Mostly internally geeking out, I only had one outburst (wherein I exclaimed “Hey, I know that set!” — the protagonist was doing, I’m pretty sure, Tong Bi Quan). Guan Daos, Ma Bu, great staff action… and the opening/title sequence was brilliantly done, a very nifty effect and idea. It’s a film that isn’t taking itself seriously, which really worked for it.  The sense of camraderie for the two J’s was evident;  I think they had a great time making this film.

Overall it really was a very fun film for me. Fortunately, I had already practiced earlier in the day and did not feel entranced to go work out for a few hours afterwards…

Tasty topic

Yes, it is about food…. hooray!

Friday I discovered (all hail google) a nearby restaurant that served nothing but brown rice sushi. I wanted to head over to a camera store nearby so Rev and I tried it for lunch. Small hole-in-the-wall place that totally lived up to the reputation of hole-in-the-wall places. All the vegetarian rolls I ordered were excellent: the asparagus, the amazingawesome umi, and something I have no idea what it was I ordered but it was star shaped. Very tasty and different and definitively seemed on the traditional side of sushi cuisine… I’ll be going back there.

Today I fired up my slow cooker for the first time and made myself a tasty split pea soup for coming lunches. I don’t think I had a grasp on how much this would make — I now have eight portions in my fridge/freezer, which is four weeks worth, woo! To quote Darth Vader: “All to easy.”

Oh heck, here’s a Darth Vader gratuitous but interesting link: Manga vs Comic adaptations of Star Wars.