{"id":3439,"date":"2009-05-12T18:30:02","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T22:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2009-05-12T15:08:14","modified_gmt":"2009-05-12T19:08:14","slug":"tuesday-various-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3439","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday various"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\"><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do you think John Ridley&#8217;s caveman ancestors went around saying things like, &#8220;Everybody&#8217;s always cave-painting nowadays! I don&#8217;t want to know about the mammoth you killed last night! You annoying kids and your <i>fire<\/i> and your <i>wheel<\/i>!&#8221; His <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/visibleman\/2009\/05\/keep_your_tweets_to_yourself.html\">anti-Twitter screed<\/a> on NPR &#8212; which he&#8217;ll probably hate to hear I heard about first <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/kphipps3000\/status\/1772658505\">on Twitter<\/a> &#8212; gives <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/04\/22\/opinion\/22dowd.html?_r=1&#038;ref=opinion\">Maureen Dowd&#8217;s recent piece<\/a> on Twitter a run for its money on Just Not Getting It. Twitter isn&#8217;t anything more sinister or complicated than a microblogging platform with a built-in open chat feature. It&#8217;s not an insidious invasion of privacy, and it&#8217;s not an unavoidable annoyance. If you don&#8217;t care what people are posting to it, then don&#8217;t read those posts.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s another one I found via Twitter &#8212; this time via <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/rainnwilson\">Rainn Wilson<\/a> &#8212; apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lfexaminer.com\/20081016.htm\">IMAX isn&#8217;t always IMAX<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">Let me make one thing clear: I am not opposed to digital projection in principle, or to the IMAX digital system in particular. I think the change to digital projection in the giant-screen world is inevitable. And I fully admit that the IMAX digital system is superior, in certain respects, to some other digital systems. <\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">But I object when anyone claims that two patently different things are the same. Where I come from that&#8217;s known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lying.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And call me na\u00c3\u00afve, but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe that any company whose business plan is based on deceiving its customers can succeed with that strategy for very long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cradleofaviation.org\/IMAX\/imaxf.html\">My local IMAX theater<\/a> is one of the genuinely big-screen theaters, and I think the truly immersive experience you get with that is worth the extra money. Personally, the experience isn&#8217;t exactly my <i>favorite<\/i>, which is the main reason I haven&#8217;t been back since I saw <i>Beowulf<\/i> two years ago. Still, if that&#8217;s the experience you&#8217;re after &#8212; and if that&#8217;s what is being marketed &#8212; you have a right to be upset when you&#8217;re charged the same price for the small-screen IMAX.<\/li>\n<li>And <i>another<\/i> story I first heard about on Twitter &#8212; it&#8217;s been that kind of day &#8212; this time via <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/JSCarroll\">Jonathan Carroll<\/a> &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/Irish-student-hoaxes-worlds-apf-15201451.html?.v=1\">Irish student hoaxes world&#8217;s media with fake quote<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">DUBLIN (AP) &#8212; When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.<\/p>\n<p>His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">Don&#8217;t these journalists read <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/285\/\">xkcd<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li>I kind of actively disliked the <i>Charlie&#8217;s Angels<\/i> movies, but maybe it&#8217;s a little unfair for me to keep judging their director, McG, on their excessive and annoying gloss alone. Certainly, he&#8217;s no worse a choice to follow in James Cameron&#8217;s footsteps than <i>Terminator 3<\/i>&#8216;s director Jonathan &#8220;Who?&#8221; Mostow. And I can kind of respect McG&#8217;s recent defense <a href=\"http:\/\/scifiwire.com\/2009\/05\/why-mcg-now-defends-termi.php\">of giving <i>Terminator Salvation<\/i> a PG-13 rating<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">&#8220;It just became clear that the things that would take it to an R or an NC-17 would be: There goes the arm, and now the blood is squirting on my face,&#8221; McG said in a group interview last Friday in Beverly Hills, Calif. &#8220;That wasn&#8217;t in service of the character or the story. The elements that would have taken it to R just ended up feeling gratuitous in the editing room. There&#8217;s a topless scene with Moon Bloodgood. I was trying to echo that scene in Witness where Kelly McGillis turns and says, &#8216;I&#8217;m not ashamed&#8217; to Harrison Ford. But it just felt like, &#8216;Oh, there&#8217;s the genre stunt of the good-looking girl taking her top off.&#8217; And it felt counterproductive in the spirit of what we were looking to achieve on a storytelling level, so way to go.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">Assuming it&#8217;s not just BS, of course.<\/p>\n<p>The PG-13 rating is sometimes lambasted for being an easy cop-out for directors and studios, afraid of losing the lucrative teen audience with a more mature R rating. But McG is not wrong: forcing a movie to be an R just to appease fans isn&#8217;t the way to go. It would compromise the film just as much as making cuts to appease the ratings board. I&#8217;m willing to accept that this is exactly the film McG set out to make.<\/p>\n<p>Whether that film will be any <i>good<\/i>&#8230; That, I don&#8217;t know.<\/li>\n<li>And finally, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telescopictext.com\/\">Telescopic Text<\/a>. I also really liked Joe Davis&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thesearetheboringbits.com\/\">These Are the Boring Bits<\/a>. [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.waxy.org\/links\/\" title=\"Waxy.org Links\">via<\/a>]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do you think John Ridley&#8217;s caveman ancestors went around saying things like, &#8220;Everybody&#8217;s always cave-painting nowadays! I don&#8217;t want to know about the mammoth you killed last night! You annoying kids and your fire and your wheel!&#8221; His anti-Twitter screed on NPR &#8212; which he&#8217;ll probably hate to hear I heard about first on Twitter &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3439\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-3439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-various"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}