A few hours ago a friend sent me mail about Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials. One of the novels in this series was recently made into a movie called The Golden Compass. Apparently there is some controversy over this series, which I have not read and only heard about recently, that the books [...]
The B-Movie Comic was recommended to me by the folks of the In Sect. B-Movie is pretty funny! Imagine archeologists, the British Raj, dodering professors, plucky Chinese orphans, goths, a doomed family of Egyptians, jocks and ancient priestly mummies wearing t-shirts all suffering at the hands of bad continuity and low budgets in a cheap [...]
A few months ago I rented Primer on DVD. Primer is deeply elusive movie about time travel. More exactly, it’s a story about what would happen if someone really invented a time travel device. I suppose some people may find it little frustrating but, I liked it. The acting is understated and restrained and that [...]
Computers in the movies are much more noisy and visually exciting than in real life. The truth is that computer crime is visually very boring to watch. The criminal just sits there switching between prompts and editors typing in cryptic commands and getting getting very terse output as feedback. All that’s heard is the tick [...]
Well, I’m not surprised. The movie, I, Robot, apparently lacks depth. It’s impossible for any project that large, involving that much money, to have any depth. But it’s still disappointing. Here we are on the edge of an explosion in artificial intelligence and the issues aren’t really being explored.
So let’s assume it’s the End Times, the Wrath of Gods has decended upon us heavily in the form of flesh-eating ghouls rampaging in the streets. The question is asked, “If zombies attack, how long before the power grid fails?” Of course the question is rather silly, perahaps only for escapist horror movies, but it [...]
Watch TRON instead.
Okay. I just got wind that they are going to make a movie about a murder mystery in a future of ubiquitous robots. They’ve got the audacity to call it I, Robot. Now, I think it’s really cool that they’ve got Will Smith to play one of the lead characters in the movie. Hollywood’s portrayal [...]
Apparently the bad guys use Microsoft–boring, stogy, patronizing–and the good guys use Apple–cool, stylish, friendly (Although I’d argue just as patronizing, at least before the release of OSX.). Out in the real world of course, we all know this really isn’t true. Most of the real work of evil government officials and corporate drones gets [...]
Most of you out there probably saw this coming for a long time but, it is now getting almost impossible to tell computer generated images of humans apart from real humans. For example, Final Fantasy’s Dr. Sid is not real, he’s just a bunch of binary numbers on a disk. Of course his voice still [...]