External hard drive

I'm thinkin' about buying an 500 GB external hard drive... probably no time soon, but maybe in a few months... or half a year... or a year. I'm still low on funds since the money I do make get sucked up by George Mason University. Anyway, I only have 10 GB left on my 120 GB hard drive, and every month it seems I have to do house cleaning to keep it around there. All my MP3 music only takes up about 13 GB, so that's certainly not where the majority of my storage is being taken up. I've also got some quite large music software programs though, sample libraries, and computer games that I need to play more of. Then I have years worth of collected stuff in my "My Documents" that I just don't want to get rid of just in case. I'd love to shove all those "I-might-need-one-day" files onto a big old 500 GB hard drive so I don't have to worry so much about space for a while. Wouldn't that be nice? What's that? You don't care? You think that I think everyone is stupid?! Wha?! Well, I'm sorry, I had to blog about something... I keep missing days to fill the Internet with more clutter.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

I got my August edition of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the other day. I haven't read anything in it yet, but I really liked the cover art. I Googled the artist's name and didn't come up with much, but I did find this. Huh, there's a similarity I would not have noticed!

New CDs...

I got my hands on some new CDs a few days, including the Shrek the Third soundtrack (not the collection-of-pop-songs-soundtrack, but the musical score) composed by good old Harry Gregson-Williams and recorded and orchestrated with the help of a bunch of non-famous people. Many great variations on the Shrek themes here, especially the first track which gives the Shrek theme a delightful Baroque twist.

I also bought one of those movie theme compilation box-sets... a Varese Sarabande 25th Anniversary Celebration collection. $15 for four CDs is quite a good deal in my opinion, and the CDs are filled with unforgettable music like... well, I can't remember right now, but you get the point. No, seriously, it's got some great tracks like "The Man from Snowy River", "Iron Will", "City Slickers", "The Mists of Avalon", "Ice Age", "The Iron Giant", "Air Force One", and many more.

Good stuff.

Blu-ray

I went to Best Buy a few days ago (didn't buy anything) and I finally saw an example of what Blu-ray looks like... looks good! Really good. Of course, my family won't have an HDTV any time soon, but perhaps by the time I move out in 2 or 3 or 5 or 9 I'll get to see one in the house. There's still a bit of a battle between the Blu-ray format and the HD-DVD format, but my guess is that Blu-ray will win because it sounds cooler and the blue cases look cooler. Even the movies themselves though are way too expensive, so I reckon it'll be some years, perhaps even a decade, before some HD movie quality discs make it to the mainstream market. I'm not sure how many people even have HDTVs that can play these things. So, until a format wins and the prices drop by 50%, probably best to stick with DVDs (unless you are rich).

Musicals...

I was surprised to learn not too long ago that Mel Brooks has turned Young Frankenstein into a musical, and it will be coming to Broadway sometime this year. Although I'll probably miss it's Broadway production because I'm too poor and far away from New York for such things, I'll be sure to get my hands on the music somehow. I wonder how they're going to get the stage show to be in black and white... maybe the audiences will have to wear special glasses?

If you love musicals but are afraid of monsters that Put on the Ritz (will that be in the musical?), you should enjoy The Count of Montecristo: A Musical. Although it's all in Italian for now, I can't get enough of this music. Every melody is catchy and powerful and goosebump-giving. I sincerely hope this musical can also make it to Broadway, I would think it could gain many fans here in the USA.

As for my own musical... I haven't even started yet.

No such thing as random

I watched two movies tonight... The Fountain, which looked interesting but turned out to be pretty dumb, and one of Darren Aronofsky's earlier films, Pi, which was also pretty dumb. I'd give them both 5 out of 10 stars, which I guess isn't too bad. What the films lack in good storytelling they at least make up for in thought provoking-ness.

Like listeners of a meaningless symphony, any human who watches these films could come up with his or her own meanings (and say whatever you'd like about the director's intent, although be careful not to be too arrogant and presume to know something you don't).

The Fountain had a definite theme of life and death, and creation through death (or life through death). Through parallel and interlinked stories, the main character battles death, both through the loss of a loved and through the confrontation of his own mortality. Meanwhile, a "tree of life" always seems to hold a promise of everlasting life, an unreachable goal that he thinks would solve all his problems. But the real solutions to his problems lie within himself. Boy, does that sound corny.

Pi seemed to have a lot more mathematical crap thrown into it for little reason. On the one hand, it might teach some audiences something new. Personally, unless you have something new to say about Fibonacci sequence, I no longer find branches and bunnies and golden ratio art all that interesting. If it doesn't emerge naturally, forcing it isn't going to accomplish anything. You can keep trying all you want, but you gain nothing. And, actually, that seems to be one of the themes of the film... (even if I just made it up)

Let me put it another way before I seem as ambiguous and meaningless as the films. A number, by itself, is meaningless. A sequence of numbers is meaningless. It is our conciousness that must create meanings for these numbers; that's why we use them. They don't just exist, they're only representational tools. There's an old philosophical question that asks: "If man did not exist to think of numbers, would they exist?" If you're trying to answer that question, though you might have fun with it, you've gone too far; no answer is really practical, whether you say 'yes' or 'no' isn't going to change anything. (You might as well ask "can anything exist without someone to perceive it?") The real problem lies in what people decide to do with numbers.

In Pi, all these dumb people want to use a certain number to control the stock market or reach religious enlightenment. They're using numbers backwards. Yes, everything in the world can be explained with numbers and through mathematical calculations. But everything can also be explained with soda cans and toothpicks, with letters and spaces. What gives numbers their meaning is us, what we see in them, what we put into them. A number itself is meaningless. A word itself is meaningless. (A child could ask "why do things fall?" and an adult could say "because of gravity" ... the child has learned nothing but a new word while the adult didn't understand that he didn't really know the answer. Unfortunately, the child often accepts just the word. He might even be a college student.) This isn't to say numbers aren't useful or that there's no "truth" behind their pure concepts, it means it is we who actually define them, not nature. We can apply them to nature, but they are emergent properties of our own minds, not physical things. Tree branches and conch shells may seem to know about the Fibonacci sequence, but their structures are only emergent properties from the laws of atomic physics. That we can find patterns in them and apply our numbers to them may be fascinating (it certainly is to me), but it doesn't imply anything about the Fibonacci sequence itself. So, when artists try to force math into their work, it doesn't necessarily mean anything. Focus more on your own artistic desires than on what math you think governs the world.

In Pi, the main character also tries to find a pattern in the stock market. While there is indeed no such thing as true randomness, you can't find a pattern in the stock market with the outcomes alone. This isn't just because the system that dictates the stock market prices is too chaotic for anyone to understand (though it is), it's because you can't find a pattern for something simply by viewing data. Well, alright, many times you can find a practical example (day comes after night), but flipping a coin a million times will not help you determine what it will land on next, even if you can compute some weird pattern.

All this blather reminds me a bit of the book I just read, The Black Swan. According to IMDB.com, Darren Aronofsky's next film will be called Black Swan. Hmmmm....

I know what you Google

I think most people who read anything from this blog come through Google or some other search engine. When that happens, I can see through my "Awstats" statistics program what people searched for to get here. Here are some of the searches people have done that led them to this website (with my evil commentary):

"jazz suite no. 2- waltz 2.mp3" Not here
"video i m in debt up to my eyeballs" Sorry, no video here
"sibelius 5" Use Overture 4
"stuff for facebook" Try looking on facebook
"black swan taleb free download" Pirate, go buy the book
"black swan free download taleb" Ooh, nice job changing the wording
"peter van der merwe" Book author
"what word is used for beheading chickens" What?!
"meaning of comb in my dreams" Means you're stupid?

A lot of people search for themselves or their companies or something that has to do with them in blogs, so careful what you say in a blog that anybody can read. On an episode of TWiT, they even warned that some employers may look through blogs when deciding whether or not to hire someone. Wouldn't that stink?

Computer science decline?

I was listening to TWiT #100 today and they mentioned an article by Ryan Paul about declining interest in Computer Science at universities.

In the article, Paul says:

I have less than fond memories of my own experiences with computer science education. I was frustrated with the emphasis on niche commercial development tools that I had never used before and have rarely used since. I also got frustrated with the emphasis on technical minutiae that aren't particularly relevant to general application development. Assembly programming and compiler design skills acquired in college aren't going to be very useful for software developers who enter the workforce and get paid to write web applications with ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails. That particular problem could largely be resolved by the emergence of new academic programs that differentiate between computer science and web application development. Few schools do this, however.

YES. Exactly! Being a Computer Science major at George Mason University, I can attest to this. (And I still have two semesters to go that I'm not really looking forward to.) Anyway, I'm always somewhat delighted to find someone out there who I don't know who seems to agree with me on something. I have far less than fond memories of especially the past two semesters, in which 90% of what I learned is just crap I'm not going use. It'll definitely be useful for some people, but I think my time could be much better spent. It's very frustrating to be interested in emergent properties, game programming, and artificial intelligence when professors waste your time with math problems and assembly programming assignments. (But if you tell the professors this, they will say that you need a change in attitude if you want to be successful, the same kind of advice spouted off by vacuum cleaner sales men, as if such a position is really high on the what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up list. Attitude is much more likely to be influenced by success than vice-versa, so give me a break. And then there are the adults who think there's no such thing as a lousy professor and advise young people to learn every piece of pointless knowledge they can and always be happy because they wish they could go back to college. And then they say learning is a life long process. Ok, then, why do I need college to learn if I'd be learning anyway? And I would think I'd learn a lot more with an actual job doing something useful than doing math problems out of text books and programming binary trees in LISP.)

Ah, fun rant...

Further, Paul says:

Improvements to computer science education are being touted as a way to prevent the United States from continuing to lose relevance in the technology industry, a problem that is also becoming pervasive across the board in other fields relating to math and science. Although increasing the number of computer science students could make the United States more competitive in the tech industry, there are other factors that should be included as well. Encouraging students to become technology entrepreneurs isn't going to do much good if abusive patent litigation, for instance, prevents them from innovating and developing products.

More good points! I just read The Black Swan, and I think I remember the author saying something like "the reason capatalism works so well is that it allows for Black Swans." (Not an exact quote, check the book for the actual words.) I think this could easily be applied to the field of computer science as well. Let the Indians do the tech support, there's not going to be a Black Swan out of there. Let China manufacture the plastic toys, no Black Swan out of that either. Let the Japanese be good at their math problems and piano playing, no Black Swans there. Oh, you can make a fine living out of any of the above, but the best thing I think American universities can do is encourage students to be creative and "become technology entrepreneurs", because that is where the Black Swans lie waiting somewhere in the dark. (And for all you bad professors out there, that means give your students less math homework! And please do not think saying "I challenge you to be creative and think out of the box!" is truly any kind of encouragement. You have to encourage it through your actions and your teaching style. I had one professor who always said "I'm trying to teach you to think out of the box!" and then gave us dippy math problems while spouting off anti-Microsoft rants because they're successful and he had to become of professor.)

Ok, I'm done for now. And don't think I'm going to change my opinions when I'm 40. I'll hopefully just be less annoyed by all the time I was forced by the education system to waste because I'll have more interesting things to think about...

Music time...

I wrote Trio for Harp, Flute, and Oboe No 2, Op 39 last night. Woohoo!

I also made "The Banquet" piece into a video...



Not much else to say today. My sleeping schedule is unfortunately sort of in reverse right now. :(

Oh, I had a weird dream not long ago in which I somehow ran into my 10 year old self. I tried asking him what was on his mind, what kinds of stuff was he thinking about. He said something about a poem or lyrics or something and then I woke up. Certainly wins the prize of one of the strangest dreams I've ever had. Sometimes in dreams you see yourself in 3rd person, but I've never dreamt of two of me talking to myself. Very weird, yet pretty cool.

Tortured prodigies

I'm on page 90 of The Name of the Wind, and while it seems pretty well written, there's something about the characters I don't like. Unfortunately I just can't pinpoint it... it's like a cognitive dissonance in my mind that I can't sort out... very annoying.

One thing that bothers me is the characterization of the main character. He's narrating his childhood, and it turns out he's an amazing 11-year old prodigy who can learn things unrealistically quick. I find that I don't really care about him. I think perhaps the problem is that he's just too independent, or perhaps he's not tortured enough. (Granted, I'm only on page 90. Maybe something tragic will happen. Seems like it should. Still, he seems rather arrogant, not someone I'd want to have lunch with, and most main characters should strive for that desire.)

Prodigies need to be tortured, don't they? I think one of the most prominent examples of the tortured prodigy the poor brilliant little Ender Wiggin (perhaps paralleled by Bean), who not only has to save humankind, but struggles with the need to be loved. (It can sound a bit corny in a blog, eh?) There's also the chess kid, Josh something, from the film Searching for Bobby Fischer (who's in Iceland), who must also bear the burden of amazing intelligence. There's also that Little Man Tate, poor thing, and I just saw a preview for some foreign film called Vitus (I think), about some prodigy piano player who just "wants to be normal", whatever that means. Boo-hoo.

But it's not really prodigies that need to be tortured, that's the burden of being the main character. Main characters need to be tortured somehow. Not necessarily physically (though that's a possibility), but the main character's torture is the entire point of any story, isn't it? What the main character goes through. It's common literary advice to make the main character suffer as much as possible. Who doesn't relate to suffering? (Autistics?)

So if the need to be tortured comes from the burden of being a story's main character, what makes a prodigy so popular among young main characters? How often are genius adults main characters? Old smart people are just jerks. (That's a joke, by the way.) They may work perfectly well as supporting characters, but if the main character is recognized as a brilliant genius, then he's probably 14 years old or younger (and also probably male, as male is the dominant sex in our society, whether you like it or not). And, come to think of it, main characters are probably not over 50 anyway. There are exceptions, but I can't think of many main characters who are in their 70s. If you're going to live through a story in someone else's shoes, you probably prefer it to be someone young and good lookin' (like me).

Oh, and another thing. I hate seeing main characters on book covers. I suppose it works fine for children's books, but on adult book covers they try too hard to make people look attractive. Perhaps it helps sell books (though I'd want hard evidence of that if any publisher claims it, as I doubt there is any), but it annoys me endlessly.

Happy Father's Day!

And now for today's post...

Hope everyone had a happy Father's Day! We went out to eat at a place called Logan's, where they stuff you with peanuts, bread, and soda and then give you chicken you don't have any room for. At least I know what I'm having for lunch tomorrow.

Not much else going on besides my summer work... I guess I should upload another YouTube video sometime. Perhaps I'll turn "The Banquet" into an animated video next. And then perhaps "Twilight Fantasia".

Ok, bye.

Missed a day

Ah, I missed a day. Well, this counts for yesterday, so there.

We continued having a garage sale today. My parents made hundreds of dollars.

Geez, I have run out of stuff to blog about... :(

Oh, I saw the remake of Charlotte's Web the other day at a free film festival with a sibling. It had great animation and great music. I was surprised to see that Danny Elfman did the music... it doesn't really sound like his style. But it sure was good. Maybe I'll have to buy the soundtrack. Is the Shrek 3 score out yet? I'm too tired to go look. I'm going to get a drink and go to bed. I'm tired. Bye.

Selling the garage

Woke up [way too] early today to set up a garage sale. It is quite fulfilling to see people walk away with your junk after giving you money. Actually, the only fulfilling part is the money. I just love money.

I started reading another fiction book called The Name of the Wind. I had heard good things about it somewhere, so I got it from the library. It's got a good prologue, which is all I've read so far.

Summer days are passing far too quickly...

The Black Swan's End

I finished Taleb's The Black Swan yesterday. Certainly one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a long time, I highly recommend it to everyone (though I can think of some people who would probably want to burn it). I must admit I became a bit lost in some of the more technical parts, but this is one of those rare books which I'd love to read again sometime. (The only book I've actually ever reread is Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction. I've been meaning to reread Godel, Escher, Bach again for some time, but never made myself find time for it.)

I was introduced to Taleb's work through Michael Allen's blog. He wrote a book (which is available as a free PDF download) called On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, which I also highly recommend (at least for writers). I was quite happy to see Allen's book referenced in The Black Swan. (I also recommend Allen's The Truth About Writing, also available as a free PDF download.)

Many thanks to Taleb (and Allen) for the great books!

And, of course, I do have some quotes from The Black Swan that I'd like to add to the book quotes blog eventually. (I'm really lazy about all my other blogs.)

Experience schmexperience!

Here's something I wrote on a forum today not long after an ad hominem attack based on my "experience":

Experience probably fools a lot of people. It won't give anyone that much more insight as to "how and why" certain artists become successful. (Often successful artists don't believe this and write books on how they do what they do so well. (Though I'm of course not arguing that experience means nothing when it comes to actual craft, just when it comes to trying to spout off reasons for something's success or failure when such things are more dependent on the decisions of others. Such artists will often actually be just as clueless as everyone else. (Does that make sense? Actually I am just writing this sentence so I can have another set of parentheses. (And here's some more.)))) Age doesn't automatically increase knowledge; it more often fools people into thinking they know more than they do. "How and why things are in the state that they are in" is not such a simple subject that can just be learned with experience. There are too many emergent properties, too many "black swans", too many unknown variables.

Do you agree?

And, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in The Black Swan on pages 279-280:

An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

Hmmm... is that itself an ad hominem attack?

Print on demand

Wouldn't it be awesome if bookstores in the not so distant future had POD technology right in the back room? Then when you're looking for some obscure title, or just some title the bookstore doesn't have in stock, they can simply print one off for you in just a few hours or so. Heck, they could even customize it by putting "Property of Sean the Best" on the cover or something. Wouldn't that just be great?

Although... wouldn't be awesome if bookstores had Amazon.com prices?

Also, if you are a publisher and are looking for someone to read through the slush pile (for a good salary), I'd be happy to do it. I know about Black Swans.

You know, you only have to change one letter in 'swan' to get 'Sean'. Meaningful?

No time for games

Yesterday I started playing Shadow of the Colossus again... I haven't played it in over a year. Unfortunately I couldn't find my saved game, in which I had defeated 10 or 11 of the giants, and so now I'm back down to 6. Fortunately the game does at least of some replay value. Even when trying to defeat giants I had already defeated, the music and the visuals make redoing such things remain fun. Visually, it is probably the best console game of all time. Its controls and interface are also minimal and intuitive, and the orchestral soundtrack is brilliant... it's too bad video game albums don't seem to have a market here in the USA like they seem to in Japan. I'm sure there'd be a market for them if Americans weren't forced to buy expensive imports. Not having a decently priced album available for such music just encourages piracy. Oh well, maybe that will change when and if American orchestras shift their target audience away from old people.

Pan's Labyrinth

I'd give Pan's Labyrinth 7 out of 10 stars, the same as Children of Men. The film had some awesome special effects; visually it was wonderful, especially with its use of colors and just the atmosphere of the different locations. Even the bathroom was very stylistic and fantastical. The movie is by no means an epic, but I still thought the story needed something a bit more... and I wasn't too happy with the ending. There were a lot of parallels between the real world and the fantasy world in Pan's Labyrinth, but I felt there should have been more parallels that actually have to do with characters and their motivations. In fact, the director didn't seem too worried at all about character motivations, and if I don't understand why a character wants to do what he or she is doing, then why would I care about their decisions? Instead, much of the drive behind the story comes from the fear of the bad guys and the need to get away from them. The gruesome violence that makes the film rated R shows you just how horrible the bad guys are, but that almost seems like the most important thing in the film, which it shouldn't be. But, oh well, the director and I probably have artistic differences story-wise, and he's the director, not me. Overall, good film, check it out. If I was a director, I'd definitely want those visual effects artists working for me, and I wouldn't mind the director's eye when it comes to the visual experience of the film.

Things go slowly

I'm on page 126 of The Black Swan. Ah, great book, wonderfully thought provoking. I highly recommend it to everyone.

I worked on The Game of Gynwig just a bit more, and I think in just a few days I can post up another chapter on the Gynwig part of this website. I'm working on Chapter 12, and my guess is that there will be at least 30 chapters in all, perhaps more. There is so much more of the story to go; after 100 pages of writing, I'm still near the beginning! Argh! I hate writing, I just love the idea of it.

Sibelius 5

I don't have much else to blog about so...

Sibelius 5 was announced not too long ago. (If you care, check it out here.) It looks like it has many new great features, its biggest being that it is a full VST host, like Overture 4, which I've been using for the past two years. Feature-wise, it looks like Sibelius 5 should be more impressive than Overture 4, but I'm so used to using Overture that I doubt Sibelius 5 will be on my shelf any time soon, even with its great looking features. This is all entirely due to usability. While I'd love to have the new features, I know Overture 4 too well. I downloaded the demo for Sibelius 5 and I'm having trouble figuring out how to do some basic things. Granted, if I bought and fooled around with it for months, I could work much quicker, but are the new features worth it? I don't think so, not yet. And the demo doesn't seem to allow me to test its VST capabilities (unless I'm missing something) which is a bummer.

Another big reason I probably won't buy Sibelius 5 is cost. At over $300, a college student such as myself just has bigger priorities, like vacation expenses. (That's a joke, by the way, about the vacation expenses.)

A link to this blog

I was going through my website's stats (my site isn't that popular so there aren't many to go through), and I found a couple links coming to my site from this site... if you can find why, I thought it was pretty funny (and quite nice to know that someone out there linked to this site): http://www.squidoo.com/strange-loop.

A Blogger who finds the book boring...it takes all types.

Gee, thanks!

The station of international space

I saw the International Space Station tonight... (it was in the weather report). At least, I thought I did. I had never seen anything like it before. It looked like a star, small and bright, but moved faster than a plane, though not quite as fast as a shooting star. Unlike a plane, it did not seem to move in a straight line, it sort of curved across the sky, which looked very srange because my mind kept seeing it as off path. It was a pretty cool site, but nothing to blog about... oops!

In other news, wow... did you notice the new features in embedded YouTube videos? (If not, check one out from this blog here.) Pretty cool stuff!

ClickCaster free again!

I got an email the other day from ClickCaster:

Due to user outcry, we will continue to offer FREE accounts on ClickCaster!

Starting June 30th (and June 15th for new signups), sign in and get 125MB of Storage and 10GB of transfer a month with some features limited.

Woohoo! Many thanks ClickCaster! :)

I'll have to see if the new limitations are reasonable or not. For my purposes, I'm guessing they will be, but if my podcast ever becomes too popular for some unknown reason, I can just host them on this website.

The Black Swan in music

It's good to finally be reading a good book... The Black Swan, that is. Go buy it.

I was thinking you could easily apply (and I already have, somewhat, after reading Fooled by Randomness) the Black Swan idea to the "modern music" discussion I blogged about weeks ago. Some music scholars, theorists, and historians probably like to think that they can be certain of why certain composers and certain pieces became and/or remain popular. They then predict what music will be like in the future, and try to compose such music, while most of them will probably remain utterly obscure, while the real composers who stay famous from our time will be film composers and pop artists, who those scholars loathe for their simplicity and success.

What really makes a composer or a piece of music remembered for a long time? Like what makes a bestselling novel, the ingredients are not definite and easy to reproduce. They're Black Swans. They emerge from a system far too complex for anyone to understand or predict. What makes something matter in a single human brain is far too complex to predict accurately; what makes people think they can know what makes fame emerge from the interaction of all these human minds? Yet that doesn't stop people from buying a book on how to write a bestseller, or studying with a snobby music historian hoping to collect secrets on how to become the next Beethoven by being "innovative", as if that was the prime ingredient.

What can I be certain of? That (insert a Black Swan here) will change music forever.

Pirate music

I was listening to the Pirates 3 soundtrack today, and the first track, "Hoist the Colours", is corny. They could've at least gotten a lad who could sing. The track "The Breaking of the Fellowship" on the The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack is just beautiful, aided by the fact that the choir and soloist could actually sing.

That said, I'd say this is easily the best Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack of them all. (Strange that the soundtracks should get better and better while the movies get worse!) Many thanks to Hans Zimmer and all those others who work with him but aren't famous! The orchestrations are wonderful, they define "cinematic drums" don't they?

Also, part of one of the themes reminds me of the Titanic love theme... the theme that the track "I See Dead People in Boats" begins with... hmmm, dead people in boats music reminding me of Titanic, what a coincidence!

Also, the soundtrack's use of accordion reminds of Monkey Island. Oh, Monkey Island! How I long to return to your piratey world! Please, LucasArts, give Ron Gilbert all the rights to Monkey Island so he can properly make a 3rd game! (By the way, Ron Gilbert blogs here. Check it out.) Actually, they should remake the first two games as well... keep the storyline, but make the puzzles and the interaction different (with no silly 3D circular inventories). There's so much new technology now, they could really make a best seller out of remake. They do it with movies, I haven't seen it a lot in games.

I Am A Boring Loop

I'm on page 78 of I Am A Strange Loop and it's a boring book. Hofstadter's fascination with loopyness gets him nowhere fast. The ideas themselves are rather fascinating, but I've heard it all before (so far). And Hofstadter's become another person since GEB... his style of writing is just much more stale, I don't get the same sense of passion and interest I got with GEB, I get the sense of quite an intelligent professor who's forced to give a lecture he doesn't really want to give but gives anyway. And he seems much more defensive. I've got a few quotes from the book I want to add to the quotes blog eventually, but I'm really gonna have to take a break from this book and move on to The Black Swan. Surely I can devour Nassim Nicholas Taleb's sharp, witty, and thought-provoking writing as I did with Fooled By Randomness, right? I guess we'll see. Goodbye, I Am A Strange Loop; I shall come back for you someday to finish you, but for now I want to start seeing other books.

Lady in the Water review

Well, Lady in the Water wasn't completely stupid... I'd give it a 5 out of 10 stars. I think the reason a lot of people don't like it is that it's not like the director's other films, such as Signs or The Sixth Sense, in which there is some twisted ending. I guess you could still say there are "twists" in Lady in the Water, but it's certainly not the same as his prior films. I think the story itself had a good message, but the film has some problems...

First of all, film critics might see the film as a reflection of their own arrogance, which I don't think they like. One of the characters in the movie just happens to be an arrogant film critic, and real film critics probably aren't fond of the way he is portrayed. Meanwhile, the director's character (he plays in his own movie) is a struggling writer who is told that his book will end up changing the world after he dies. Uh... corny. Film critics probably have a tough time buying that, especially when they see their own arrogance being portrayed. In other words, they probably get the feeling that the movie is against them.

The audience might get that feeling too from the opening, when a narrator tells us something like "perhaps man has forgotten how to listen." What? You can't seemingly insult the audience about how wrong mankind is nowadays and then think they'll still follow you. Mankind in and of itself is perfect. It is a character's decisions and desires that can be flawed.

Finally, the film was just corny. It's too hard to suspend disbelief when you have a bunch of adults from our world doing all these fantastical childish things. But who's fault is this, that it becomes too hard to suspend disbelief? Film critics might blame the director, while the director might blame the audience. Well, technically it's both our faults, ours as the audience and the director's, but the need to even blame an entity is silly, because we don't have to presume that not being able to suspend disbelief is somehow wrong. It just didn't work, and no one should try to make an audience afraid to admit that. Do you get what I'm saying or am I being too wordy? It's an issue that comes up time and time again in art, and my point is that a person should not be afraid to dislike something for fear he might be seen as stupid. And trying to blame someone for a difference in artistic taste can seem like a justification for something that is neither right or wrong anyway. Does that make any sense?

I think the story's message would have been much better portrayed in a film targeted towards and starring children in some sort of fantasy world. It would then be much easier to suspend disbelief and much harder for film critics and/or audiences in general to get the sense that the film is against them.