at long last, I took in Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within tonight. a few thoughts:

1) wow.
2) even retina-shattering visuals can be harmed by bad writing (I thought everyone would take a hint after Episode I, but…).
3) wow.
4) the influence from the games is obvious: the character named sid, the similarity to FFVII in overall idea, the same visual effect schemes are even used from some of the cooler console visuals.

but the most interesting thing is the japanese sentiments that are portrayed throughout the movie – the buddhist and shinto beliefs concerning “angry ghosts” and the notion of all objects carrying a life force… really amusing. that these notions would make their way into the games, which would then survive intact and even be developed further in the silver screen production.

but seriously, if you’d like a crash course in the fundamental attitutes regarding sprits, life, and death a la japanese-style all wrapped in some phenomenal graphical achievement, it might be worth your seven american dollars.

I feel textually migrant, lining up at the immigration station to get validated: beautiful promise, fallen on hard times: tempi duri per I vampiri. Thanks anders, for community access. Sasm

sarah has joined us. hopefully she will offset the abundance of testosterone that thraxil is currently soaking in.

random magic of the street of new york! just one click away: http://www.streetstudio.com/
Oh, I like NewYork! I have to go there someday!!!
It is summer, and I have to learn for exams! That’s unfair!

Just bought this the day before yesterday. Good deal.

If you didn’t think Disney was lame before, check this out.

http://www.oldcrows.net/Atlantis/

i went out to a party in Astoria (that’s in Queens for the non-new yorkers) where the street names are designed to cause confusion (all within a quarter mile of each other are 24th ave, 24th st, 24th rd, and 24th Drv. and the streets go from 21st to 18th in a single block. made trying to find the corner of 19th st and 24th ave fun.)

on the way home, i got to ride on one of the brand new subway cars. i was very impressed. the MTA has finally started to catch up with the rest of the world. aside from being a little cleaner (give it a few weeks and that will change), it looks pretty much like the older cars. but they’ve made a few usability enhancements that were long overdue. on the front of the train, the line number was big and neon so you can see it clearly from farther down the tunnel. inside, there were several LED displays by the ceiling that showed the current and next stop. mostly though, i was impressed with the big display on the wall showing the entire line as a series of labelled lights that would turn off when the train had passed that stop. it allows you to tell at a glance where you are and how many stops you have till you arrive at your destination. the text was large and easy to read from pretty much anywhere in the train (no more stooping and squinting to find yourself on the wall maps that other trains have) and showed what transfers were available at each stop. i’d seen this system before on the subways in Hong Kong and i remember being impressed at how easily i had been able to navigate them my first time. for people who live in new york and know the lines, these are probably pretty minor improvements but they should definately help out people new to the city or who have just never been on a particular line before (i’ve lived in nyc for two years now and there are still plenty of places i haven’t been).

i also noticed that the intercom messages at each stop (you know, “this is the bronx bound number 2 express train. next stop 72nd street. please stand clear of the closing doors.”) had been pre-recorded. it always amazed me that some poor schmucks had the job of mumbling out the same damn thing at every stop for 40 hours a week (usually so quickly and muffled that you couldn’t understand what they were saying anyway) and i’d never heard of them going insane and commiting mass-murder after a week on the job.

this article about diets, calories, and food volume and weight caught my attention not because i particularly care about dietary issues (i’m substantially underweight), but because of something i once read in Nikola Tesla’s autobiography.

the article mentions that the volume and weight of food that people eat in a given day stays much more constant than other factors such as the amount of calories, and so the way to reduce your calorie intake without being hungry is to not reduce the amount of food you eat, just to reduce the calorie/volume ratio of the food (by eating things like fruits and vegetables that are primarily water).

i found this interesting because one of Tesla’s little idiosyncracies (the man was seriously obsessive-compulsive) was that he absolutely refused to eat anything without first calculating it’s volume in cubic centimeters to several significant digits. perhaps he was just way ahead of the curve on this volumetrics thing. wouldn’t be the first time.

I enjoyed this movie immensely. spelling? I felt they treated the subject matter seriously, and presented decently complicated topics in a manner that keeps ordinary audiences interested, and those who know a bit more of the technical side of things relieved that they don’t engage in a hideous amount of technobabble. Its more of AI philosophy anyway. I’d recommend it as a good way to spend 2.5 hours.

so our alma matter finally updated the “award winning Bates College website”, or as anders once called it, the “six-year old award winning website”.

pathetic.

you know, given the amount of money they spent tearing up the entire quad and staple gunning down fresh grass every spring instead of not using so much fscking sand every winter, and the millions they spend on a football program which excells in date rape and seems to abohr winning a single game or two, you’d think Bates would have some coin to plink down on a new site. moreover, you’d think, given the tight aesthetic criterea all campus buildings have been maintained and/or built within, they’d have some sense of taste.

nope.

picture/graphic heavy, using outdated pix which are of the exact size and quality which makes them absolutely torrid to look at even at a full 16 million colors; poor visibility for most links; a rather bland template/layout; a nearly impossible to negotiate organization/hierarchy of pages and great difficulty navigating to content which was formerly accessible; no secure connection for the alumni section; using some sort of coding scheme which constantly reformats the page depending on what link your mouse is poised over, making clicking more like a game of wackamole than surfing….

….but most of all, it’s boring. and they didn’t mention me niether.

boo hiss.