Today I was mostly clearing up after two busy days of organizing a varieté show and a combat juggling tournament. And I had to pack for a a ten day work trip and get ready for a long night of traveling that included an 11 hour flight and two other flights.
I watched Mad Max Fury Road again, as I seem to do on every long flight that I've taken where it's been available to watch since it came out. I think it's my fourth time watching it on a plane, but I'd have to look that up. Anyway, I've seen it enough times now that I think I know a bit how Derek and Victor might feel when watching Terminator for the sixth time. Most movies wouldn't hold up to so many repeat viewings, as there isn't the depth of thought behind the movie making. But George Miller spent years working out the tiny details of Fury Road, and James Cameron put in similar work into Terminator.
So all I can review is Victor's observation of the wave form of the movie becoming like a graph of the energy levels. I think this works for action movies, but maybe less so for other genres. In a horror movie, a lot of the energy or tension comes from tense moments. They are often quite quiet. Or so I remember them. But maybe I'm wrong. There could be a lot of sound and music behind the building of tension, but in well made movies that stays in the background.
For the next week or so I'll be in Brazil, a few hours behind my normal time zone, but a few hours closer to Derek and Victor. Who knows, maybe I'll get a bit more into synch with them.
Victor posted a list of notes, and Derek posted a long blog post on just a few themes. What is happening to the world?
As Derek said, if you've been following along, his blog post works without included examples. And I think if I watched the movie today, this would be the blog post that would be stuck in my mind as it played out.
Meanwhile, I like that Victor is doing the rough notes thing. His chosen topic is the humanity of the T1000. He includes the comment:
"Yeah, I know this is just Arnie being human, but we’re looking at the work, not reality."
I think this is why T2 works so well. The tiny touches of humanness can't help but break through. Arnie isn't the best actor, but he has charisma by the bucketload, and he just can't hold that in! If he could hold it in, and be the total machine-like void of personality, the movie would suffer. And nobody would have any desire to watch T2. Or any other Arnie movie. But he's a megastar for a reason, and Terminator movies without him aren't even listed with those with him.
Also today I discovered Derek has a VHS copy to watch... and then it was broken, so he ordered another.
And Derek posted a song. It wasn't a good song. I turned it off half way through. If you're going to do a song about Terminator, it has to be at least as good as song from the club noire scene.
Victor made a post about Terminator Vision, and how it’s a bit silly. He also said it isn’t seen until he cuts out his eye. I’m not an expert, and Victor has seen it more recently than I have, but I’m sure there is Terminator Vision in the Tech Noir scene.
Derek is experiencing problems getting through the movie due to having guests. I talked to someone about this project today and they asked “do these guys have girlfriends?”
In 2002 I made a new years resolution not to sleep in a bed for the whole year. I did it. Except I had to update the rule to say “not sleep in a bed alone for the whole year” because the first time I ended up in bed with a lady for sexy fun times, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her just to keep up a stupid challenge to myself. So, I’m cool with Derek bending the rules for the sake of sociability.
In the US, the FCC requires that any phone that can connect to the phone network (even cell phones without SIM cards) be able to call emergency services for free. Even encrypted smartphones can make emergency calls without having to decrypt their hard drives. I assume it's the same in most other countries.
I think Derek's explanation for Terminator vision as leftover debug mode/developer mode output makes more sense than any other possible in-universe explanation.
Regarding the Terminator missing shots: shooting a mortar shell out of the air is much easier for a computer than shooting an irregularly-moving target while you're also in motion.
Yesterday I watched The Terminator DVD on a DVD player with a broken remote control. All I could do was put the disc in and hit play, and then watch it from the start. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except I pressed pause part way through to take a piss. When I came back, the DVD player had frozen or something, so I pressed stop and then resume but it flaked out.
I wanted to watch the rest of the movie, but I had no way to skip the chapters forward. Suddenly the thought struck me:
“Maybe I could just watch it again from the start!”
But that would be crazy. Who would ever watch the same movie from the start so soon? Nobody. Because nobody is crazy enough to watch the Terminator more than once in say, one week.
So I pressed play, set my watch timer at 45 minutes, and went to have a juggling training session. I’d just guessed at the time, but generally action movies take take a break in the story at about 45 minutes, to let the viewer relax a bit. Keeping the tension going for so long is unsustainable. James Cameron is a master at this kind of formulaic movie making, so I guessed 45 minutes would work for Terminator too.
And it did! I’d taken a piss break at the first scene in the police station, after that first car chase, and when Reese is locked up for being crazy. When I came back to press pause again, after 45 minutes, I was at the very same scene. I went to finish my juggling session, came back, had a shower, and watched through to the end of the movie.
Victor posted a graph of the movie based on the sound track. There should be marked on the graph “pause for a piss here” and a bit later “get a drink here, because if you leave it any later, you won’t finish the drink before the end of the movie”.
Back on the internet! I checked the Tumblr. I’m a bit disappointed that there isn’t much there after the five or six days I’ve been away.
Victor wrote a post about everyone in the movie doing the least stupid thing possible. I agree. I looooove movies where I don’t feel like the plot is being progressed by the stupidity of the main characters. When reviewing novels, I often talk about something that can be phrased “it’s not a battle of good vs evil, but evil vs stupidity.” As in, the only way the bad guys can succeed even slightly is due to the incompetence of the good guys.
For example, Jurassic World. If even two people in the theme park had even the bare minimum level of competence or intelligence, the movie wouldn’t have happened at all. At least in the original Jurassic Park movie, things went to shit because Nedry made a system with holes he could creep through, and stuff went wronger after he set the wrongness in progress, based on chaos theory style ideas. Wrongness had to built into the system for character-based and plot-realistic reasons. Wrongness can’t just exist.
In Jurassic World, wrongness was built into the system due to… what? No idea. The whole things is obviously set up to fail, in a way that the original Park wasn’t. Everyone watching the Jurassic World movie could point out dozens of ways it could go wrong. In Jurassic Park, we are told even the experts don’t know what could go wrong, but that “life will find a way”.
In this fashion, Jurassic World is much more like the original novel version of Jurassic Park than the movie Jurassic Park was like the novel Jurassic Park. The novel version of the park was obviously flawed, and run by idiots. The movie did a better job in making the tech crew and Muldoon and the gang into competent people who find them self in a bad situation, rather than incompetent people who somehow manage to find work in a death trap.
Enough about Jurassic Park!
That said, if I was going to watch a movie every day for 31 days, Jurassic Park would be one of a very few movies that I could see myself watching.
“Watching” the movie only via the soundtrack? I wonder if there is a version for blind people. With a narration over the action. If that doesn’t exist, Victor and Derek should record one. Victor has a good voice for that kind of thing.
And yes, Skynet seems like a pretty flawed system in the first movie. Humans had won! The time travel thing was clearly a last chance crazy plan. But if that was the case, I’m not sure why John Conner blew up the time travel lab after he sent back Reese. Maybe it’s because he knew nobody else came back from the future? And he knew nobody could come after Reese? That’s the only reason I can work out, otherwise a time travel lab seems like a handy tool to have for rebuilding future civilization.
I left the browser tab of the Tumblr site open since yesterday, and I just noticed that on the “Skynet: from Computer to God” post, there is a “Keep Reading” link at the bottom. I didn’t notice that yesterday. Maybe there is a lot more to read, so I shouldn’t have been disappointed by the lack of major updates.
I watched the Shaun the Sheep movie on my latest transatlantic flight. The animal catcher has terminator vision. Red and black picture with white information overlay.
It’s surprising how many Terminator and Terminator 2 references there are in a movie obviously aimed at very young children. As well as the Terminator Vision, there are things like the caravan escaping with a claw still attached, like the car in T2 escaping with a bit of the T1000 attached.
Some other things may or may not be references. How much is convergent movie making? As in, did they just happen to find the same solution to a similar problem in the story or production, or did they use a specific solution to a problem because it could also work as a Terminator reference, rather than a non-referencing solution?
I would be super down with that as some kind of Greatest Movie Ever style thing, but like, adversarial. You make me watch whatever saccharine crap you can dredge up, and I make you watch the absolute bottom of the action film barrel.
You better get ready for some fucking Glitter Force if that's the route you wanna go. Nah, I was thinking just a normal sort of thing, not adversarial. See, I've wanted to do something like that for a while, but I think I need someone to do it with me to keep me accountable. I mean, shit, I wouldn't have watched 29 days of Terminator if I didn't know (or at least believe) that you were out there watching it too.
The first movie would be "Expelled from Paradise". The main character's name is Officer Angela Balzac. Balzac. It stars Wendee Lee, Johnny Yong Bosch, and Steven Blum.
In 2012 I wrote a musical based on Groundhog Day. In 2013 I uploaded a demo version. In 2014 I performed it for the first and only time, and made a slideshow to go along with it. Now I finally got round to matching up the slideshow with the demo recording, and adding all the lyrics to the video too.
So here it is, just in time to get completely ignored when the official musical premieres later this year:
I wrote rules to a really board game. It's bad, but has potential to be good. For a few days in a row, including today, I slightly improved it every day.
I wrote rules to a really board game. It's bad, but has potential to be good. For a few days in a row, including today, I slightly improved it every day.
The board game I am making i snow maybe 15% done? I think we can actually play a really un-fun game of it now.
Dumb question would you be interested in going to take the game to an UnPub? I have connections to the main one in April in Baltimore and would be prime to get your game in front of plenty of play testers.
The board game I am making i snow maybe 15% done? I think we can actually play a really un-fun game of it now.
Dumb question would you be interested in going to take the game to an UnPub? I have connections to the main one in April in Baltimore and would be prime to get your game in front of plenty of play testers.
Any chance you know the people are San Diego UnPub? I've been wanting to go but the slots have all been filled instantly on day 1. The most irritating part of that is about half the slots are "unknown designer" and the game is "TBD".
Comments
Today I was mostly clearing up after two busy days of organizing a varieté show and a combat juggling tournament. And I had to pack for a a ten day work trip and get ready for a long night of traveling that included an 11 hour flight and two other flights.
I watched Mad Max Fury Road again, as I seem to do on every long flight that I've taken where it's been available to watch since it came out. I think it's my fourth time watching it on a plane, but I'd have to look that up. Anyway, I've seen it enough times now that I think I know a bit how Derek and Victor might feel when watching Terminator for the sixth time. Most movies wouldn't hold up to so many repeat viewings, as there isn't the depth of thought behind the movie making. But George Miller spent years working out the tiny details of Fury Road, and James Cameron put in similar work into Terminator.
So all I can review is Victor's observation of the wave form of the movie becoming like a graph of the energy levels. I think this works for action movies, but maybe less so for other genres. In a horror movie, a lot of the energy or tension comes from tense moments. They are often quite quiet. Or so I remember them. But maybe I'm wrong. There could be a lot of sound and music behind the building of tension, but in well made movies that stays in the background.
For the next week or so I'll be in Brazil, a few hours behind my normal time zone, but a few hours closer to Derek and Victor. Who knows, maybe I'll get a bit more into synch with them.
Victor posted a list of notes, and Derek posted a long blog post on just a few themes. What is happening to the world?
As Derek said, if you've been following along, his blog post works without included examples. And I think if I watched the movie today, this would be the blog post that would be stuck in my mind as it played out.
Meanwhile, I like that Victor is doing the rough notes thing. His chosen topic is the humanity of the T1000. He includes the comment:
"Yeah, I know this is just Arnie being human, but we’re looking at the work, not reality."
I think this is why T2 works so well. The tiny touches of humanness can't help but break through. Arnie isn't the best actor, but he has charisma by the bucketload, and he just can't hold that in! If he could hold it in, and be the total machine-like void of personality, the movie would suffer. And nobody would have any desire to watch T2. Or any other Arnie movie. But he's a megastar for a reason, and Terminator movies without him aren't even listed with those with him.
Also today I discovered Derek has a VHS copy to watch... and then it was broken, so he ordered another.
And Derek posted a song. It wasn't a good song. I turned it off half way through. If you're going to do a song about Terminator, it has to be at least as good as song from the club noire scene.
Victor made a post about Terminator Vision, and how it’s a bit silly. He also said it isn’t seen until he cuts out his eye. I’m not an expert, and Victor has seen it more recently than I have, but I’m sure there is Terminator Vision in the Tech Noir scene.
Derek is experiencing problems getting through the movie due to having guests. I talked to someone about this project today and they asked “do these guys have girlfriends?”
In 2002 I made a new years resolution not to sleep in a bed for the whole year. I did it. Except I had to update the rule to say “not sleep in a bed alone for the whole year” because the first time I ended up in bed with a lady for sexy fun times, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her just to keep up a stupid challenge to myself. So, I’m cool with Derek bending the rules for the sake of sociability.
No internet on a ship sailing down the Amazon. I miss the updates.
I have a DVD copy of The Terminator from the ship’s library. I will watch it tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
My own notes:
Square cursor is off on two of the main titles.
It won't matter in 100 years.
15 day wait on the handguns, but the rifles you can take right now. Holy shit.
Better than mortal man deserves.
Fooled you. You're talking to a machine. Yes. And you are talking to the machine.
Phone book. This is crazy.
Do you need to pay to call 911?
Matt is a real hero! Lasts longer against the Terminator than most.
Where the Terminator stands on the headphones wouldn't break them enough to stop the music.
Yeah. Terminator Vision as they leave Tech Noir, way before he cuts his eye out.
Can they trace the weapon that killed the other Sarahs to the weapon shop? And then find security footage of the T-101?
Where was Sarah's hand going when she touched the blood?
Fire in the TV set
I need that piano music for the next time I have sex.
Actually, I need that synch music for the next time I have sex.
I think Arnie loses his eyebrows in the fire so they didn't have to make a fake Arnie head with convincing eyebrows.
"Let's get out of here!" So quick to do a hit and run?
I think Derek's explanation for Terminator vision as leftover debug mode/developer mode output makes more sense than any other possible in-universe explanation.
Regarding the Terminator missing shots: shooting a mortar shell out of the air is much easier for a computer than shooting an irregularly-moving target while you're also in motion.
Yesterday I watched The Terminator DVD on a DVD player with a broken remote control. All I could do was put the disc in and hit play, and then watch it from the start. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except I pressed pause part way through to take a piss. When I came back, the DVD player had frozen or something, so I pressed stop and then resume but it flaked out.
I wanted to watch the rest of the movie, but I had no way to skip the chapters forward. Suddenly the thought struck me:
“Maybe I could just watch it again from the start!”
But that would be crazy. Who would ever watch the same movie from the start so soon? Nobody. Because nobody is crazy enough to watch the Terminator more than once in say, one week.
So I pressed play, set my watch timer at 45 minutes, and went to have a juggling training session. I’d just guessed at the time, but generally action movies take take a break in the story at about 45 minutes, to let the viewer relax a bit. Keeping the tension going for so long is unsustainable. James Cameron is a master at this kind of formulaic movie making, so I guessed 45 minutes would work for Terminator too.
And it did! I’d taken a piss break at the first scene in the police station, after that first car chase, and when Reese is locked up for being crazy. When I came back to press pause again, after 45 minutes, I was at the very same scene. I went to finish my juggling session, came back, had a shower, and watched through to the end of the movie.
Victor posted a graph of the movie based on the sound track. There should be marked on the graph “pause for a piss here” and a bit later “get a drink here, because if you leave it any later, you won’t finish the drink before the end of the movie”.
Back on the internet! I checked the Tumblr. I’m a bit disappointed that there isn’t much there after the five or six days I’ve been away.
Victor wrote a post about everyone in the movie doing the least stupid thing possible. I agree. I looooove movies where I don’t feel like the plot is being progressed by the stupidity of the main characters. When reviewing novels, I often talk about something that can be phrased “it’s not a battle of good vs evil, but evil vs stupidity.” As in, the only way the bad guys can succeed even slightly is due to the incompetence of the good guys.
For example, Jurassic World. If even two people in the theme park had even the bare minimum level of competence or intelligence, the movie wouldn’t have happened at all. At least in the original Jurassic Park movie, things went to shit because Nedry made a system with holes he could creep through, and stuff went wronger after he set the wrongness in progress, based on chaos theory style ideas. Wrongness had to built into the system for character-based and plot-realistic reasons. Wrongness can’t just exist.
In Jurassic World, wrongness was built into the system due to… what? No idea. The whole things is obviously set up to fail, in a way that the original Park wasn’t. Everyone watching the Jurassic World movie could point out dozens of ways it could go wrong. In Jurassic Park, we are told even the experts don’t know what could go wrong, but that “life will find a way”.
In this fashion, Jurassic World is much more like the original novel version of Jurassic Park than the movie Jurassic Park was like the novel Jurassic Park. The novel version of the park was obviously flawed, and run by idiots. The movie did a better job in making the tech crew and Muldoon and the gang into competent people who find them self in a bad situation, rather than incompetent people who somehow manage to find work in a death trap.
Enough about Jurassic Park!
That said, if I was going to watch a movie every day for 31 days, Jurassic Park would be one of a very few movies that I could see myself watching.
“Watching” the movie only via the soundtrack? I wonder if there is a version for blind people. With a narration over the action. If that doesn’t exist, Victor and Derek should record one. Victor has a good voice for that kind of thing.
And yes, Skynet seems like a pretty flawed system in the first movie. Humans had won! The time travel thing was clearly a last chance crazy plan. But if that was the case, I’m not sure why John Conner blew up the time travel lab after he sent back Reese. Maybe it’s because he knew nobody else came back from the future? And he knew nobody could come after Reese? That’s the only reason I can work out, otherwise a time travel lab seems like a handy tool to have for rebuilding future civilization.
I left the browser tab of the Tumblr site open since yesterday, and I just noticed that on the “Skynet: from Computer to God” post, there is a “Keep Reading” link at the bottom. I didn’t notice that yesterday. Maybe there is a lot more to read, so I shouldn’t have been disappointed by the lack of major updates.
I watched the Shaun the Sheep movie on my latest transatlantic flight. The animal catcher has terminator vision. Red and black picture with white information overlay.
It’s surprising how many Terminator and Terminator 2 references there are in a movie obviously aimed at very young children. As well as the Terminator Vision, there are things like the caravan escaping with a claw still attached, like the car in T2 escaping with a bit of the T1000 attached.
Some other things may or may not be references. How much is convergent movie making? As in, did they just happen to find the same solution to a similar problem in the story or production, or did they use a specific solution to a problem because it could also work as a Terminator reference, rather than a non-referencing solution?
So here it is, just in time to get completely ignored when the official musical premieres later this year: