This is great! 🙂
Making The Lego Movie
Is it bad that I still haven’t actually seen this thing?!
Regardless, I did watch this 4:11 behind the scenes movie showing how they rendered the whole thing and it was pretty awesome! What I’ve seen of the movie looks fantastic visually and judging from the number of sets that they’ve released (several of which I do have), it seems like it was an obvious win for Lego to bridge film and merchandise.
I think it’s actually even on HBO or something now, so I suppose I really should just find an evening to get caught up with the rest of the world before the next one is already at our doorstep… 😛
movie thoughts … The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1
I guess you could say that I had conflicts with this movie…
In some ways it was exciting.
In some ways it was kind of scary.
And in some ways it was honestly just kind of boring.
I don’t know – I guess it was just a hard sell for me to understand why Katniss’s biggest contribution during this movie was essentially PR work when there’s an uprising happening around her, but even more so, it just seemed apathetic that this girl was still so torn between her boys with so many things bigger than that taking place!
Literally, at one point I almost shouted at the screen – “People are getting bombed – no one gives a shit about how your boyfriend is doing!!!”
The whole District 13 Bombing scene didn’t entirely make sense, either, despite scaring the crap out me and inspiring nightmares of claustrophobia for weeks. How big is District 13, anyways? Why don’t they just keep bombing until there’s nothing left, or use a radar to monitor the planes that jet Katniss to all of her TV commercial sites???
Something just doesn’t add up for me in this world where cameras are everywhere, yet at times the civilization on both sides are kind of technologically illiterate. Of course, I think that’s a thread that if you pick at it too much, the entire Hunger Games concept starts to unravel because as I’ve said in the past, the capital can conjure up virtual bears out of thin air in the arena but you can’t feed and clothe people out in the slums?!
Then again, maybe it’s one of those can vs. want to debates because I suppose we had holograms of musical guests featured in the last couple of years on awards shows but we can’t seem to nip our poverty problem in the bud, either!
And as for the whole Peeta Comes Back … and Then Goes Crazy scene at the end – I thought that was just plain stupid because out of all the hassle they went through to save that guy, not one person thought to hold Katniss back because maybe he’s not quite what he seems???
Thankfully this isn’t a real big franchise to me anyways so I’m not too invested in it to begin with – same as my last review, I enjoyed the first movie standalone for what it’s worth. As for the finale this fall, I guess we’ll see. 😕
Also, can we please stop with the multi-part movies for a while after this one is finally behind us?!?!?!
movie thoughts … The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
So … at least we shouldn’t have to worry about The Simarillion getting made into a movie too, right?
Anyways, as for this final chapter in the unnecessarily long hobbit trilogy, I guess I look at it like this – from the perspective of one last adventure with these rich characters and simply seeing how it all unfolds on screen, I enjoyed the movie for the most part. The same ones that I’d grown fond of in the previous episodes – Bilbo (obviously), Thorin, Balin, and I’d even built more of a liking for Kili and Young Legolas in this finale … it was fun to see those characters up on the screen one last time.
That said, I think that by far the biggest detractor for me with this movie, as well as frankly the trilogy as a whole, as just how much off base from the books the entire series featured. I mean, I didn’t even have to go back and re-read the book to know that Sauron was barely mentioned in The Hobbit, yet Peter Jackson seemed to go to great lengths to tie this series back to the original Lord of the Rings, which honestly kind of hurt it a bit in my book because it seemed like maybe otherwise he thought that the story couldn’t hold its own without.
Which of course is just silly, but I suppose when millions of dollars and franchising and merchandise are to be considered, maybe the story isn’t always at the top of everyone’s list … which is sad.
As cool as it was to see Elrond brandish a sword, I didn’t think the battle of the White Council vs. the Nazgul fit with this movie any more than darkness brewing fit in either of the other chapters.
There were a lot of little things – Bard having his son help him slay Smaug, Azog coming up through the ice, the whole romance between Tauriel and Kili … here I wasn’t super crazy about stretching a 300-page book into a movie trilogy, but it makes you wonder if The Hobbit could’ve been a really great one or even two-part story had all of this new material to bridge the two series not been crammed into the story in the first place.
Ultimately, my big question when I walked into An Unexpected Journey two years ago was whether at the end of it all The Hobbit would stand in the same epic sense that the Lord of the Rings does as a truly amazing series of movies that is kind of iconic of its time.
And sadly, I don’t think it does.
Maybe it’s the same problem that the Star Wars prequels ran into when your predecessors are so great that there’s simply nowhere to go but down at that point – I don’t know.
At the end of the day, I can still see myself watching these three movies again from time to time when they come on TV, but whether I’ll anxiously look forward to a movie marathon of the trilogy each and every Thanksgiving for years to come?! Not likely. 🙁
good dreams and bad dreams
It’s my understanding that dreams are essentially made of various random memory fragments that your brain pieces together during REM while it’s focusing on repairing the rest of your body.
And it’s for that reason that sometimes I wonder if being a writer and a storyteller has the potential to work against me because although sometimes I have these really random, highly creative dreams like the ones that I like to share here on my blog, occasionally I also have much worse ones that aren’t anything like a story that I’d actually be interested in writing in any capacity in real life…
Those kinds of dreams often include a lot of fighting – typically with people who I’m not in real life, along with nasty disputes with my wife, and in one I even watched myself try to commit suicide. Last night’s bad dream was this complex drama about how my wife had to go to jail for a while and when she came back we had this big falling out because I felt like I had been abandoned and she didn’t want to talk about it.
It’s kind of like dreaming a Tim Burton movie – everything starts off clear, but a little odd, and then things start getting more and more bizarre … but not bizarre in a good way – just weird … and eventually you find yourself at a point where you desperately just want the whole thing to be over, yet you’re far too invested to simply get up and walk away without knowing how the whole thing ends.
The thing is, most of the bad dreams that I end up having myself don’t end and thus I’ll spend the first part of my day in sort of a funky mood trying to remind myself that it was all just a dream and that my wife didn’t try to leave me and that I’m not fighting with so-and-so after all.
It’s a really weird sensation, but I wonder if it’s just one of those things where you have to take the good with the bad otherwise all of my dreams would just be boring and unoriginal across the board. 😕
Movie Marathon Day!
Sara and I used to go to the movies all the time, but since we’ve had the baby I think we’ve gone exactly twice.
The first was Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which we actually saw the last night he was in the NICU before we were able to bring him home.
The second was Sex Tape, which was a pretty disappointing movie and I think the first time we went out and left him with a sitter (well, his aunt, anyways).
So this weekend we found ourselves with an unexpected offer once again for said aunt to kidnap Christopher overnight and we’ve decided to use this time to catch up on not one, but two movies that we’d each wanted to see in the last couple of months but just had no way to facilitate.
- My Pick: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
- Her Pick: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1
Movie reviews to come shortly!!! 😀
Living in the Future, 2015 Edition
I’m a nostalgic guy, and especially when it comes to tech, sometimes I honestly just find myself in awe when I stop and think of how far things have come just here in my own modest lifetime.
Case in point – above is a screenshot of This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte’s sequel to TechTV after it merged with Comcast’s gaming channel and subsequently went belly up about a decade-ish ago? The show started as a simple podcast in a bar with some friends and has since grown into an entire network of technology-based programming, arguably better than TechTV was at its best (and probably more profitable!).
But that’s not the amazing part, believe it or not … well, it’s one of them! What really amazes me though is simply that what you’re looking at there is streaming HD video that I’m pulling through Plex onto my new 4k TV, and it looks beautiful.
This is a big deal to me because I first started watching Leo & his friends on TechTV when digital cable first rolled out to my neighborhood up in Northern Michigan, and at the time we were excited to get a whopping 1 Mbps down and I’m sure some fraction of that up! The package was about $100 for digital cable and broadband – I remember because I paid for it out of my own money when I still lived in my Mom’s basement.
Timeframe was probably around 2000-2001.
So now here we are 15 years later, and in comparison to how things were at the time we really are living in the future!
- In 2001, we had just shrugged off the chains of dial-up in favor of high-speed broadband Internet.
- In 2015, I have a 75 Mbps fiber line connected to my home that facilitates HD streaming and can download the equivalent of one optical CD-ROM from 2001 in less than a minute and a half!
- In 2001, cell phones were just starting to become a thing – I think my voice-only Nokia candy bar phone had 100-minutes a month of air time.
- In 2015, nobody uses their cell phones for calling anymore, but 4G speeds connect to that same Internet to give me access almost anywhere at speeds rivaling my home connection!
- In 2001, HD was the new, new thing and for the first couple of years, Discovery HD Theater was how many of us justified buying our brand new, gigantic HD TVs.
- In 2015, I just upgraded to a new 4k TV that has four times the resolution of HD, and even though there’s only one movie available for it in true 4k today, even just watching the trailer makes me drool for a copy of the full-res film to really see what this thing is capable of!
Technology has always been an exciting part of my life and today I find myself surrounded by more gadgets than ever, from advanced video game systems to tablets and smart phones to a new streaming media server right here in my own home. In a way, it’s just kind of crazy to be able to pull up TWiT on this ginormous 4k screen in my living room because 15 years ago I used to watch the same guy teaching me about tech stuff on an old TV setup next to my computer while I was building the very first version of Just Laugh.
…and ethernet cables spanned the floor because I hadn’t quite gotten wifi figured out on my laptop just yet!
It makes me wonder what the whole landscape is going to be like when Christopher gets to be in his teens, but then again, just like how *I* grew up on 8-bit consoles and an Apple II clone, my son is going to grow up in a world where you’re never really not connected to all of those people and all of that information.
In fact, by the time he’s old enough to notice that kind of stuff…
- 75 Mbps Internet is going to feel slow to him.
- The Nintendo Wii will be considered a retro video game console.
- And it’s really going to drive him nuts that the cable company still doesn’t take those stupid lower resolution channels out of their line-up when better options are available!
As a wise man once said, it’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, and I for one am kind of curious to see where the next 15-20 years actually takes us! 😉
Playing with Plex
Since I left off on the subject back around Thanksgiving, I’ve actually made a lot of progress in my little Plex project…
I still have my little test server running on an old laptop that’s hardwired to the network.
The server is running CentOS, Plex … and that’s about it. Eventually it’ll also have a CrashPlan install on it, but that tested out fine – no sense in running it now until I’ve got more disk space available for it.
Media-wise I have about 1 TB worth of shows and movies ripped from DVDs and whatnot, split between the laptop’s hard drive and a bigger drive in my old desktop PC that I was able to share out and mount to Linux that Plex seems to read just great.
Total count is about 130 movies and a couple dozen TV shows that I’ve collected to various regards. Considering the two 4 TB drives that I have sitting waiting to be used, I’m expecting to just about fill up 4 TB (with the other for backup) by the time I’m done ripping our entire DVD and Blu-Ray collections.
Thankfully, disks are cheap and I think it’ll take a lot longer to fill the next 4 TB! 😉
The Positives:
- So far, Plex has been pretty awesome. I absolutely love the interface and how it pulls pretty metadata for everything that it can identify, and at first I thought that naming stuff so that it could ID it would be a pain in the ass, but it really isn’t. The organization with poster and background art is wonderful!
- Once my brother-in-law was able to help me sort out firewall permissions on the server, we got it streaming to any device on the local network in the house and I’ve been able to watch all sorts of stuff using the Samsung app on my new TV with no additional setup hardware needed.
- Picture quality looks as good as the original DVDs did, which makes me think I made the right choice by just doing straight MKV dumps rather than re-encoding everything, despite the much larger file sizes.
- I’m very surprised that both the laptop and the wifi have been able to handle full-size streaming pretty well. I’ve only had one or two hiccups where the video stopped or the audio temporarily cut out, although it’s hard to tell whether Plex is even to blame because I think at least once the remote for the TV had fallen into the couch and itself is very sensitive!
- Did a very limited test of streaming to multiple devices when we were sorting out the firewall issue and that seemed to be ok, too, so I have little doubt that it’ll run just fine when I move it over to my old quad-core desktop hardware when I’m finally ready to do so…
The Challenges:
- Finding time!!! Both to move the hardware over as well as just to finish ripping another 200-ish DVDs – right now everything hinges on first moving my old files over to my new laptop, which I’ve been doing slowly, but I’m also hesitant to completely pull the plug until I’m 110% sure that I don’t need anything anymore on Windows.
- It’s not a big deal, but I still need to sort out port forwarding in my router so that Plex is available outside of my home network. It doesn’t really matter now, but I can see it being a neat bonus when we travel or go on vacation to be able to access all of our movies remotely. Plus I think I’m going to load all of my music as well, which admittedly would get used more remotely than the movies and TV.
- Speaking of music, that’s going to be a pain in the ass simply because a huge number of my MP3s aren’t tagged properly and I don’t really know how to tackle the issue yet. iTunes hates it, too, and there have been all sorts that I’ve only ever been able to play on my desktop because if they’re not tagged right, iTunes doesn’t load them right and you can’t move them to a mobile device. It’ll be another huge project, so maybe when I’m nearing the end of DVD ripping…
- One other random thing I’m noticing is that aspect ratio can be a pain for older movies and TV shows, which let’s be honest, a bunch of my collection consists of! Plex seems to preserve 4:3 if that’s what the original video is, although I did find just last night how to make the TV stretch it to 16:9 … I’d just like it to be automatic rather than having to make the tweak each time because so many older TV shows especially weren’t encoded in widescreen.
If anything, I still think that my biggest complain/concern is that I don’t know how I’m going to handle adding new content to the server, meaning that as far as I can tell there’s no good way that I can just buy a movie or TV show from iTunes or Amazon and automatically import that into my Plex library. I’ve already tried doing it manually with iTunes, but the movie has DRM on it … not sure if Amazon is any better.
I have a bad feeling that my best option may still be to buy the physical discs and rip them, which just seems stupid when ultimately what I want is a digital file … plus I don’t know what I’ll even do with the discs afterwards when I’m thinking that just like my old CD collection, my DVDs are going to end up in a tote out in the garage once I’ve ripped and don’t have a need for them anymore. 🙁
Good progress, though! Looking forward to sharing some final numbers once everything is done and cleaned up … I’ve wanted to do this for a long time and the apps just didn’t exist to do what I wanted yet, so progress is good. 
A Public Personal Life Is Still Private…
So the question at hand is pretty simple – whose business is it what you chose to do in your personal time???
It came about via a random posting on Facebook in the form of a warning to kids about what they post online, specifically with concerns about jeopardizing any potential scholarships as they’re preparing to go off to college. In one scathing example, a child being scouted for college sports was cited as being no longer considered after the recruiter came across this person’s social media accounts and didn’t like what they found…
And that’s really troubling for me, as I expressed in a few comments but wanted to elaborate more on here because for me the scenario sounded awfully similar to an overreaching employer trying to dictate what his employees are allowed to do online, which frankly I think is kind of horse shit.
I’m going to write about it here from the perspective of the employer/employee simply because I think it relates to more people, in addition to the student level seeming a little power-play-y between the adults admitting students and the students desperate to get into a good college.
Of course, then again I’ve certainly worked for full blown employers who try to do that same sort of crap with their employees, so maybe the simple power aspect of it has more weight than I assumed… 🙁
…but anyways…
The way I see it, when you work at a job your employer gets you for X hours a week, and in exchange for the money they pay you they get to establish some rules:
- They can say when you’re to report to work.
- They can say what you’re allowed to wear.
- They can say how you’re supposed to answer the phone.
- They can even limit the amount of personal things you do during company time – up to zero should they so desire.
But the thing is, with the exception of specified positions in the company, your job has to have a defined beginning and end to it where your working day ends and your personal life resumes because otherwise you should be getting paid for much more than 8 hours of work each day!
And it’s for this reason that your boss doesn’t get to decide:
- What you’re going to have for dinner that night.
- What you’re going to watch on TV.
- Whether you’re going to have intercourse with your spouse.
- and so forth!
They’re not paying for that time, so they have no right to dictate how you’re going to spend it, and just like how yesterday it was none of your boss’s business whether you had a couple of beers while watching the game over the weekend, it also shouldn’t be any of his business what you choose to post online when you’re not on the clock, either.
Now of course the big caveat is simple – it’s probably not wise to trash talk your boss online, and specifically to do it by name, but aside from that I have a real problem with this whole concept of using things posted online as a judgement of a person’s character when the non-digital equivalents are still very much considered off-limits. An employee would never worry about getting reprimanded at work on Monday for saying the word, “Fuck!” in his backyard over the weekend, so why should it suddenly be a ding against his character if he posts something similar to his Twitter or Facebook account???
Sure, maybe he posts some things that are controversial or downright nasty, but still, just because it’s posted online shouldn’t make it an indicator of how well you’ll perform at your job or in your classes at school … not to mention the little subjective issue of what may be offensive to you isn’t necessarily offensive to the next person down the line.
Just as it’s none of your employer’s business if you get drunk on the weekends, or go to church, or date members of the opposite sex, or walk around the house in your underwear, they’re not paying you for the things that you post on your Twitter account outside the hours of 8a – 5p, and honestly I think enough of these kinds of cases are going to turn into lawsuits that eventually we’re going to have a bigger discussion on just how “official” the boundaries between personal and professional lives really are.
There’s a reason why we don’t police free speech, and even though I know I’ve also said myself that freedom of speech doesn’t necessarily mean freedom from consequences, it’s one thing to have someone pass judgement in a personal setting but it’s an entirely different monster when it happens at work or school where the thing said has no relevance in the first place. Besides, today someone decides that saying swear words on Twitter is a poor show of character, but what happens next week when it’s saying liberal things or saying anti-Christian things?
I guess I kind of look at it the same way that I would IP rights – if you want to pay me $1,000, I’ll write something for you to run exclusively on your site; $250 gets you non-exclusive rights to reprint something I’ve already written, but you can’t demand the lower rate and exclusivity because that’s not what you’re paying for at that rate.
As an employer, you pay someone to work for you for 40 hours per week. If you want to maintain a code of conduct outside of those hours, put up or shut up unless I’m specifically going out of my way to slander or share trade secrets about your own company.
Going back to the original story, sure it makes for a bad headline when it says UNIVERSITY OF BADGERVILLE FOOTBALL STAR TWEETS ABOUT UNICORNS ONLINE, but are you paying for his tweets or are you paying him to play football???
I think if schools and employers are going to demand a say in our social media presence after hours, it should cost them.
Dream Journal : The Great Chase
I was at work and things were weird.
First they were shuffling desks around, which made me really upset because I was back by my old group in an open floor plan setting and it felt like I was getting a demotion. Then they fixed it and said that I was really supposed to be somewhere completely different, so that was fine.
Then I was supposed to be looking into an issue for a specific customer where we didn’t work a ticket on-time, and the customer was allegedly pretty upset but a lot of folks were just trying to sweep it under the rug. I refused to let it go, so I kept digging and was pissing a few people off here and there until I finally got to the root of it and could verify that we definitely hadn’t worked their ticket completely – somebody had written the code for the customer, but it hadn’t been tested yet so they didn’t technically have it, although the manager in charge was trying to be shady and said that it really wasn’t that big of a deal…
So we got in a big verbal fight that escalated to us yelling at each other on the floor and at one point he threatened to beat me up. His wife also happened to work there, who I got along with a bit better, but she got into it, too, until I finally walked away and still refused to let it go. When she came over to my desk and wanted to confront me on it, I finally straight up told her that the problem had always just been that her husband was a gigantic asshole … which she didn’t want to hear at first, but then something else happened.
Apparently it all clicked and she knew that I was right, and then she went back and told him that she was going to divorce him for it!
He was pretty mad at me about that…
And so began the great chase – I first ducked into a stairwell when I saw him sprinting towards my desk and shouting, and we played hide and seek around the stairs and the hallways for a bit until I finally ended up outside and decided to just make a run for it. I took off sprinting – apparently home – down this mostly dirt road, assuming that my assailant was still in hot pursuit.
At one point a group of runners approached from behind and easily caught up with me because I’d been running for a while at that point. I was afraid that he was part of the group, but they said that he wasn’t, but also that he wasn’t far behind them, which forced me to go cross-country and take off into the woods in an attempt to duck him.
After running through the woods for a long while, I came to this almost Alice in Wonderland-y-like scene where a river ran through the forest and these giant, colorful flowers sort of provided a canopy of cover over the entire thing. From the flowers hung these vines that I could swing on, and I found that I could cover a lot more ground by swinging close to the water, although I also worried that somehow maybe my assailant could see how the flowers were being pulled down as I swung and would still be able to track me that way…
But he didn’t, and several miles away at that point I came to the end of the patch of giant flowers and found an old campground with a shower area where I could rest for a while. I had been running for several hours and had covered a lot of ground, but now I knew that I also had a long way to go to get back to civilization, or so I thought. I crashed inside of the building and was awoken when people started coming and going as they do and I realized that the campground wasn’t actually abandoned after all.
Mingling around for a while after I cleaned myself up, I made a couple of friends and we wandered into this general store in the campground that contained all sorts of random junk that one tends to find at your average camp store. One thing that the store also contained that you don’t tend to find, however, was Kevin Smith – the director – who was apparently just hanging out and quickly made friends with us as well. We chatted for a while and he said that we should come hang out with him back at his place, and we browsed the store together and he pointed out a few great deals.
The store had a surprising amount of pop culture and comic book-type stuff, so I guess that’s where his expertise came in. We found a grey, plastic ray gun from an old cartoon series that was marked down from $1 to a mere $0.75 and we both agreed that one couldn’t not buy something like that at such discount prices! The guy also had some Magic: The Gathering and Marvel cards tucked away in a box, but I worried that maybe he actually knew what they were worth so I didn’t even ask about those…
Eventually we decided that we needed to get back and said goodbye, and kept walking until we reached what was like a mobile computer center for work that had workstations and whatnot. And so one of the guys suggested that we check on the ticket to see if maybe it had gotten taken care of while I was away. We approached one of the computers, half expecting the guy to jump out at us or have smashed it in advance or something, but nothing happened and we were able to pull the thing up and review the ticket log without incident.
The stupid ticket still hadn’t been completed.