Greetings, Na’vi!

By now, most of you have probably already seen James Cameron’s latest epic Avatar.  Krellion gave you his thoughts on the film this past December, but you may have noticed that I was noticeably quiet on the subject.

That was because until this past weekend, I had no interest in seeing the film.  Don’t get me wrong, I bore no ill will against the movie at all.  It looked amazing in the trailers and it appeared to be another megahit for the director of Aliens and Titanic.  I’m certainly an avid enthusiast of all the movies Cameron has put out so far.  But for some reason, this particular film didn’t grab me, slap me around, call me a tramp, and make we want to see it.  It just didn’t interest me.

Well, leave it to Krellion to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. (Hey!  I’m The Don.  That’s supposed to be my job.)  After twisting my arm (by offering to pay for my ticket), we went to one of the evening 3-D showings last Saturday.

I have to admit, I was quite impressed.  But then again, I knew I would be.  That was never a point of contention for me as far as the film was concerned.  The movie was just as head-splittingly stunning visually as I had expected.  What I didn’t expect was that the lackluster, formulaic story would actually pull me in and keep me entranced for two-and-a-half hours.

A lot of that has to do with how it’s presented.  I think Cameron knew that the storyline was one we’d seen a million times before (comparisons to Dances with Wolves and Fern Gully are accurate).  So, in order to compensate, Cameron completely draws you into the story, the world, and the characters.  You almost become a living, breathing part of the narrative.  This is definitely one of those cases where the 3-D effects aren’t used simply as a gimmick; they serve to help fully immerse you into this expansive world.

Of course, you can’t mention Avatar without mentioning the visuals.  I won’t say much on them, as this is the aspect that everyone from Ohio to the Mutara Nebula is already aware of – the sights on display are nothing short of spectacular.  Cameron definitely raised the bar as far as CG effects go, as well as how creative a special effects company can get with exotic, otherworldly locales.

But, while the eye candy is indeed impressive, it’s in the visual effects where my biggest problem with the film lies.

One of the main issues I had with the movie was that despite the brief interaction at the beginning of the film and big battle at the end, the Na’vi do not interact with the humans for most of the running time of the film.  And since I knew going into it that the Na’vi side of the story was almost entirely CG, my mind kept telling me that I was pretty much just watching a CG animated flick.  Without seeing live actors against the CG characters, it made it hard for me to see just how impressive and photorealistic the Na’vi really were.  Don’t get me wrong, all of the Na’vi stuff looked incredible, but without the contrast I couldn’t resolve in my mind that fact that I was just watching a CG movie.

What this created for me was a situation where it almost felt like I was watching two different movies – the CGI animated feature about the Na’vi, and the live action film about marines and scientists trying to exploit a planet’s resources.  It got to the point that every time the story would transition from one to the other I was briefly pulled out of the film, like having cold water splashed on me.  Granted, I was able to quickly get back into the story, but that jarring sensation continued to plague me until we got to the final battle and we finally got to see the “livers” take on the “animatees”.

But man… when the marines finally engaged the Na’vi armies head-on (apply directly to the forehead!), my mind was blown.  Ask Krellion – as soon as one of the Na’vi started to engage the humans in hand-to-hand combat, I actually whispered “Finally!”  This is what I had been waiting to see ever since Cameron first started bragging about how photo real the Na’vi were.  And it was glorious.  Just a shame I had to wait until the last act to really see it in action.

Despite my (minor) issue with the movie, I really did enjoy Avatar.  In fact, despite the formulaic plot, I still find myself thinking back to these characters as their story still seems to resonate with me.  I will definitely be picking it up when it comes out on Blu later this year.  In fact, I may be compelled to go see it in the theater again before it finishes its run.

I’ll even buy my own ticket this time.

The Don sees you.

Welcome to this week’s post!

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First up, a couple movies I caught earlier this afternoon:

First was The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s latest animated feature. This film went back to Disney’s roots, using a traditional hand-drawn animation style and incorporating multiple character-sung songs. It also introduces Disney’s first African-American princess, Tiana. Overall, I think the movie was great; it was definitely following in the footsteps of their previous animated musicals, like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. I’m even thinking about picking up the soundtrack.

After Princess was the just-released Avatar. Being James Cameron’s first non-documentary film in twelve years (since 1997’s Titanic), there has been a major amount of hype generated which I believe it lives up to. I enjoyed it greatly. There were no parts that appeared to drag on to me. The CG was probably some of the best I’ve ever seen. The Na’vi looked so realistic that at times I was thinking that they had painted the actors blue and digitally manipulated their performances instead of them being full-CG creations. This film takes what was done for Davy Jones and his crew in Pirates of the Caribbean and raised it to a whole new level. Now since these were only humanoid alien characters, the movie easily managed to keep out of the uncanny valley, so I’m really curious about what the technology will be able to do when it comes to rendering regular human characters.

I will definitely be picking up both of these when they’re released on Blu-ray.

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I finally got around to ordering a copy of the full version of Windows 7 Professional. I hope to get it installed sometime after the holidays. Meanwhile, the RC is still going strong on both of my systems.

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We’re full-on into the holidays, and Christmas is only a week away. I’m sure some people will be doing the long-distance traveling thing to see family, and I just want to tell you to be sure to travel safely. Make sure your vehicle is good to go, especially if you’re traveling to locations where you might experience winter weather. Tires (proper pressure, good tread), make sure your windshield washer fluid is topped off, don’t let your fuel get to too low of a level, etc. Be aware of road conditions, watch out for other drivers that think they need to be wherever they’re going faster than you; there has also been reports of newer LED traffic signals getting covered up due to them not generating as much heat. Get there and come back safely.

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That’s it for this week’s post. Enjoy whatever your holiday of choice is!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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Sorry for the last of a post last week, I was following the standard holiday herd mentality and visiting family for Thanksgiving. I hope everyone reading this had a good Thanksgiving as well.

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While I was visiting said family, I was able to go see Mannheim Steamroller in concert again thanks to them having a show in Detroit on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I had managed to see them in my local area last year, but they chose not to come back this year (my bet it was the area’s traffic that did this). I had my mom join me for the concert and she enjoyed it as well.

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Gotten from an IRC chat that I spend time in, I give to you 25 Hilarious WiFi Network Names. Note that this may not be safe for work. It gave me the idea to set up an access point with the name “The Black Hole” and have it constantly dump all traffic sent to it.

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That’s all for this week’s post!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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Keeping it short this week with a review of Disney’s latest version of A Christmas Carol. I managed to see the IMAX 3D version and was quite impressed. The CG was done in a photo-realistic way, similar to The Polar Express, but it managed to keep the characters looking just cartoony enough to avoid what is known as the “uncanny valley” most of the time. It also managed to avoid the “dead eye” issue that Express had and it looked like the animators paid quite a bit of attention to making sure the eyes were animated correctly. The film did the usual “hey, we’re 3D” thing by having objects coming out of the screen at the audience (it wasn’t too overdone and the falling snow was a nice effect) and had a flying sequence for each ghost’s visit to play to the IMAX audiences.

The only real issue I had with the film was the IMAX 3D presentation itself. With non-IMAX films that are released in 3D, Disney (and most others) use RealD, which uses circular-polarized glasses (left eye is counter-clockwise, right is clockwise), while IMAX 3D uses standard polarized glasses where the lenses’ polarization are set 90 degrees from each other. The circular method is much better than the standard because it’s not affected by the viewer’s head being tilted left or right, which will cause the other eye’s image to start bleeding over in the standard method. So the whole time watching the film, I had to make sure to keep my head in the proper position. I may avoid IMAX 3D presentations in the future due to this.

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That’s it for this week’s post!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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Sorry about the lack of a post last week, I was quite busy helping the Tech Crew of Nekocon’s Main Events room. It was very tiring, but I’m happy to say that most things went off without a hitch.

I almost missed making this post as well; between almost getting swept away by the nor’easter that came out of the remnants of Ida (ok, not really, but I did see quite a bit of flooding), and keeping myself busy with some coding I had been meaning to do (when my power wasn’t out due to the former), I’ve been busy these past few days.

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Still running the release candidate of Windows 7; I’m hoping to be able to hold off changing over the release version until I get my new system built sometime early next year. Speaking of my new system, I decided that I’m going to try to go for one of the new six-core i7 processors instead of the current quad-core versions. Yeah, I currently don’t know what I’d do with all of them (with HyperThreading, it makes a total of 12 virtual cores), but I’m sure I’ll find something.

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I’m a fan of the TV series Numb3rs, and while the producers try to do their research, they don’t always get things right. Take, for instance, last week’s episode: The FBI is trying to find a couple of hackers and one of the characters suggests that they keep an eye out on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for them. Now IRC is real, but some of the things mentioned about it in the episode aren’t completely true. The episode makes it seem like there’s only one IRC server on the internet (there are hundreds of different IRC networks, if not thousands), that it’s totally anonymous (not true on most networks), nothing is tracked (again, not true, some channels on IRC have bot programs whose purpose is to track stats of the channel), and that all users speak leet (yet again, not true; a lot of users just chat normally in their language of choice). Just remember that this is a TV show and sometimes (or most of the time) the facts are stretched to keep things interesting. Not to say that there aren’t IRC networks out there where this stuff isn’t true, but it is usually not the norm.

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That’s it for this week’s post!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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Ah, Hallowe’en Eve, otherwise known as Devil’s Night in the metro Detroit area where I grew up. Not that I did anything bad, but I did always look forward to the local cable company’s attempt to limit the chaos by making all of the pay-TV channels (HBO, Cinemax, etc.) free to view for that one evening. I wonder if they still do that…

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted about components I’d like to upgrade my computer to when the time comes, one of which was the monitor. I forgot to mention a couple of additional aspects I’d like to see in the next monitor I get: LED backlit (like I mentioned for the next TV I’d like) and multi-touch support (got to make the most of Windows 7 whenever I get it ^^). You hear that Dell? Make me proud!

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It appears that the wave that Nintendo has been riding since the release of the Wii may have finally crashed upon the shore: It was recently posted that their profits weren’t as high as expected. A local news anchor commented that it may be due to the Wii’s popularity: Everyone already has one.

Nintendo also announced the DSi XL, which is exactly what its name implies: It’s an enlarged version of the DSi. Besides having larger screens (still having the same resolution as the DS and DSi, meaning the pixels will be VERY BIG), it comes with a larger stylus. This may be mainly to make it more accessible to older people who have a hard time seeing the smaller screens and holding the standard (and quite thin) stylus.

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There are indications that Sony is at work on the PSP 4000, which will continue to support UMDs. I guess many people didn’t like the PSPgo’s lack of it. Sony may make the 4000 more go-like, to include built-in storage.

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Netflix also announced the near-future availability of their Watch Instantly service on the PS3. At the start, a special Blu-ray disc will be used to access it (free via the link), but it appears that Sony will add built-in support in a future (sometime in 2010) firmware update. I (and others) wonder if this will force Microsoft to remove the X-box Live Gold requirement on the 360’s version. There are also indications that the service may become available on the Wii as well.

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The next Final Fantasy XI update is close, with a release date of Monday, November 9th. This is also when the third mini-expansion, “A Shantotto Ascension”, goes live (it became available for pre-order earlier this week). SquareEnix did a pre-update update yesterday, downloading around 1700 files totaling 30MB in size.

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That’s it for this week!

Welcome to this week’s posting of my Geek Journal!

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Apologies that this is being put up so late; I just got back from Busch Gardens.

Howl-O-Scream was good, though Don and I found that the Scare Zones were kind of lacking compared to what we remember from previous years. We did manage to make it through all of the Mazes, but had to pass on the Shows (I may try to make it back this or next weekend to catch them on my own). We’re still disappointed that BG has continued to not do the haunted train ride.

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Windows 7 has finally been released. I haven’t yet gotten around to ordering a release copy for myself, as the RC is doing quite well for me and I want to wait a little while before doing the actual switch. I’m also hoping that I might be able to find a copy of the full version (not upgrade) for less that was the current retail price is (I want to get Pro, which is currently $300).

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That’s it for now, as I’m really worn out from BG. ^^

Another Friday is upon us, so that means it’s time for another post to my Geek Journal!

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First, I would like to give congratulations to Richard and Katy for their marriage to one another this past Saturday. I’m glad I was able to be a part of the craziness that ensued that night.

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It appears that Sony has decided to let the US have access to the 250GB PS3 Slim… I may have to jump at that since I’ve been having so many issues with my 60GB model. Too bad that means I’ll have to give up PS2 support.

There are rumors starting to surface concerning the possibility of Nintendo releasing an HD version of the Wii sometime in the future. They may finally started feeling pressure from their HD-supporting rivals. Of course, who knows (besides Nintendo) if this is true or not?

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Being a computer geek (among other geeky things), I’m always on the lookout for newer things I can use to upgrade my system and then forcing myself to not buy them (so hard to resist at times!). I usually try to do a major system upgrade every three years or so, and this coming May happens to the three year anniversary of when I upgraded my system last. Current plans:

CPU – An Intel Core i7 processor, most likely the 920, as that appears to give the best bang for the buck: It runs at 2.66GHz, but there have been reports of it being overclocked quite high without the need of expensive cooling.

Motherboard – This is still up in the air right now, but I’m hoping to be able to hold out for one that has native support for USB 3.0 and third-gen SATA (eight ports at least).

Memory – Right now, 4GB has been doing quite well for me, but for my next system, I’m planning on pushing that to either 6GB or 12GB.

GPU – I already upgraded my video card from an ATI 1950 to an ATI 4870 1GB, so I’ll probably not worry about changing this anytime soon.

Storage – I’m already good on HDD storage (4.75 TB and counting; someone has to make backups of the Internet ^^), but I’m thinking that I may finally look into getting a Blu-ray drive. Still not sure if I’ll get one that can burn them.

Monitor – Ah, Dell 2405FPW, you have served me well these 4.5 years I have had you, and you currently show no signs of giving up on me. I have thought about getting one of your younger siblings (the 2408), but for now I think I’ll stick with you. Now that I think of it, getting the newer one would be nice, allowing a side-by-side setup… *drool*… Must… resist!

TV – Ok, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Why would he include a TV in a computer upgrade?” Well, right now I’m using my TV as a second monitor (great for multimedia stuff). I did just upgrade it earlier this year, but I figure that it wouldn’t hurt to include what it’d take for me to consider getting a newer one: 3D support (hopefully one standard will prevail out of the multiple that have been mentioned lately by Sony, Panasonic, etc.), and the display itself using OLEDs (awesome contrast ratios, but right now still too small, way too expensive, and the life is not yet good enough) or an LCD back-lit with LEDs (better contrast than cold-cathode lit LCDs due to the ability to locally dim single or groups of LEDs).

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That’s it for this week’s post!

Welcome to this week’s post to my Geek Journal!

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This post is going be quite short due to me being busy with plans for this weekend. ^^;;

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This morning at 7:31 am EDT (11:31 UTC), you might have heard a loud noise come from the vicinity of the moon. Ok, maybe not, but anyone with a decent telescope (and proper viewing condition) or access to NASA’s TV channel got to see the LCROSS impact near the southern pole of the Moon. At least it wasn’t something really massive that impacted.

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Before I go, check out this “talking” piano.

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That’s it for this week!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ve probably seen that the GM’s sale of Saturn to the Penske Auto Group has fallen through. I’m saddened by this, as I have been driving Saturns for over a decade. My first new car was a 1999 SL2 and was first one of that model year sold at the dealer I went to (they had just gotten them in the day I went). After getting into an accident a few years later and having it declared totaled, I changed to a 2002 L200. Now, nearly eight years and almost 150k miles later, it runs quite well (still getting 32MPG highway!) and has only needed a few minor repairs. It has survived nine trips to Michigan (all but one being during the winter), dozens to the Washington, DC area (still can get there and back on one tank and have plenty of fuel left over), and three years of one-hour each way commutes. It also helped me move five times over the years. I hope to keep it for at least another couple of years, but I’ll miss being able to take it to the dealer for its regular maintenance. It’ll be a sad day whenever I have to give it up.

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Here’s a question for you: How can a person be alive, but not have a pulse? When she has an artificial heart that works as a continuous pump. Nature isn’t able to make a pump that can do the same (at least for amount of blood a heart has to be able to move all the time), so it has to stick with a sack of muscle that alternates between contracting and relaxing (hence working in pulses) to do the job. This article from three years ago details how a continuous flow artificial heart works. This technology will continue to improve, allowing people who are suffering from heart failure and other issues to survive longer until they’re able to get a donated heart, or even go without a biological heart. I wonder if this is the type of heart Picard has.

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That’s it for this week’s post!