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... can we build it?
Jul. 15th, 2003 03:19 pmThere've been a number of things bouncing 'round in my head recently, and it's probably about time to drone on about them...
Sunday night, I went with Brett (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zip4096) and Richard to go see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was actually quite well done... or at least entertaining. It was a film that required a fairly healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief, and it wasn't even particularly self-consistent, but it was certainly entertaining. Some choice lines that don't give away anything at all:
"What's that sound?" -- somebody or another
"That's the sound of treachery!" -- Captain Nemo
"Scientists!" -- Tom Sawyer, looking over a ledge and seeing a bunch of guys in white lab coats, ostensibly working with test tubes
Hilarious :) Yah, so at times the dialogue was not the most clever, and there were some pretty gaping holes in the plot, and the idea of driving a massive battleship/submarine/thing through the canals of Venice (or apparently up the Seine -- they never deal with how the League gets to Paris, aside from mentioning that the Nautilus is used) is rather silly, and the whole premise takes pretty big licenses with the underlying literature... but on the whole, it was certainly entertaining. The opening scene is brilliant -- next time I'm involved with a bank robbery, I'm going to have to drive a tank through the front door. The fight scenes in general are quite well done, but there's always a degree of disconnectedness -- the CG scenes are very clearly CG, and the bits set in the Frozen Wastes of Mongolia somehow manage to be done all in white snow without looking cold at all.
It's mostly interesting because of the characters -- all of the members of the League are both visually appealing and have enough story behind them for you to latch on. Particularly endearing is Rodney Skinner (the Invisible Man), which is interesting because he's mostly just a visual effect and a light Cockney accent. Kudos to Tony Curran for that. And aside from how she pretty explicitly loses her humanity and gets whacked in Dracula, the Mina Harker character is super-creepy -- "... and do I distract you, Mr. Quartermain?" That, and her visual effects are darn skippy -- she's like a thunderstorm. and I think everybody likes Sean Connery. "Then the game is on!"
On the whole, I'd say it's worth seeing, if you're in the mood for a film.
Today, I've been working on fixing up John Reeves Hall's Penguin Warrior game, which he put together for his Most Excellent Book -- the only issue is that it doesn't compile with newer versions of the libraries he uses. So I'm getting a pretty good education on libsndfile, which is primarily where the incompatabilities have been. I just wanted to play Penguin Warrior, so I could take it apart and learn more about SDL, because I've got the vague goal of writing a Street Fighter-ish fighting game (very preliminary work has been started)... I think that should be relatively simple to make a relatively simple one... although making a good one would take about forever, I'm sure... This is mostly just to keep the creative hacker juices flowing :)
When I get Penguin Warrior working (it's almost there) on my system, I'll post a tarball, and then maybe you too can enjoy the fruits of Reeves' labour.
Yesterday, I forget exactly how, I ran accross![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
pro_ana. I find this really disturbing... not in the sense that I think that people shouldn't talk about eating disorders on the web -- what I find disturbing is that there's this much of a need to talk about them. There are, apparently, a number of communities similar to this, and they look pretty active. There's a set of online shorthand in common usage for talking about this sort of thing. This one in particular seems... self-consciously (well, imagine that! anorexic girls being self-conscious!) ... really aware of what's going on, almost like a support group, encouraging each other in the whole Not Eating habit. Somebody was saying something about "apparently, when the body goes into starvation mood, your skin stops dropping dead skin cells..." ... which has the built-in assumption that everybody there has driven their bodies into starvation mode, and that they're aware of it. Another post was like "here's a big list of things you can do so you don't get distracted and accidentally eat something".
*blinks*
I really don't know. We're pretty b0rked, as a culture -- most of us are pretty well overweight, and young girls willfully starve themselves. I need to get into the Fitness Guru business to get people to actually eat something (other than twinkies and Big 'n' Tasties). "Athletic" looks far healthier than "about to keel over from not having eaten for a year". That's really not even super-important -- cute girls come in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- on different people, for example, muscles, soft edges, tall, and short are all lovely.
I was trying to understand this phenomenon, and it seemed really foreign to me, to get caught up that much in one's own body image. I hadn't always been super-pleased with how I looked, but just as of this summer, I've actually been feeling much better about it -- lotta running and lifting will do that, I suppose :) It's now much more natural for me to go out running with no shirt, and I've been thinking more along the lines of "form fitting" when picking out clothes, whereas my choices in the past had run to baggy. I think I stand taller, too. That, and I think to myself "I should eat more" and consciously look for stuff with more protein in it (I had two pretty big tofu dishes yesterday :) )... I'm liking what my body is doing, and I'm trying to grow.
It hit me today, though, how to begin to relate with this -- when I'm depressed, I think that I'm stupid, whatever evidence I might have to the contrary -- which is, in fact a stupid thing to think :) Last semester, for example... which is interesting, because things that aren't quite as central to my being (say like my appearance, or my health) don't get targeted by my depression, when I'm depressed (which I'm not, now). But I think of myself as, first and foremost, a Smart Guy And A Programmer, so blows to my self-image come from failure to perform like that... not making something computer-related work really slots me off, and if it gets to the point where I get depressed, I come to the conclusion that I'm an utter moron, despite whatever other accomplishments I might've put together before and how (humility kicking in...) much more clever I am than other people in the world. On the other end of things, I'm clearly not the fastest, or the healthiest, or the most attractive, or the best at water-skiing... but little improvements in my running or shape or water-skiing accomplishments make me feel pretty good about myself, and it doesn't matter so much if I have a bad run or if I can't lift a billion pounds at the gym; those are only tangentially important to my self-worth.
I think this is ... a very much milder ... form of what happens with anorexics... a busted self-image (tied very strongly into looking good as a girl) leads the sufferer to assume she's the Worst Thing Possible, which is Fat... or an idiot, for me -- which is interesting, because I don't personally hate stupid people, as long as they're other people... some people just aren't as clever as others, and there's not a lot an individual can do about that. But if it's /me/ being stupid, then that's horrible horrible. Do anorexics as a whole hate bigger girls? I don't think so ... although hate/envy directed at a thinner girl seems pretty likely.
Erm... and I think on that note, I'm going to walk the dogs a bit, then go take a constitutional of my own.
What's that sound? ... that's the sound of a trail out in the forest with nobody running on it!!! Gotta rectify that situation...
Sunday night, I went with Brett (
zip4096) and Richard to go see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was actually quite well done... or at least entertaining. It was a film that required a fairly healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief, and it wasn't even particularly self-consistent, but it was certainly entertaining. Some choice lines that don't give away anything at all:"What's that sound?" -- somebody or another
"That's the sound of treachery!" -- Captain Nemo
"Scientists!" -- Tom Sawyer, looking over a ledge and seeing a bunch of guys in white lab coats, ostensibly working with test tubes
Hilarious :) Yah, so at times the dialogue was not the most clever, and there were some pretty gaping holes in the plot, and the idea of driving a massive battleship/submarine/thing through the canals of Venice (or apparently up the Seine -- they never deal with how the League gets to Paris, aside from mentioning that the Nautilus is used) is rather silly, and the whole premise takes pretty big licenses with the underlying literature... but on the whole, it was certainly entertaining. The opening scene is brilliant -- next time I'm involved with a bank robbery, I'm going to have to drive a tank through the front door. The fight scenes in general are quite well done, but there's always a degree of disconnectedness -- the CG scenes are very clearly CG, and the bits set in the Frozen Wastes of Mongolia somehow manage to be done all in white snow without looking cold at all.
It's mostly interesting because of the characters -- all of the members of the League are both visually appealing and have enough story behind them for you to latch on. Particularly endearing is Rodney Skinner (the Invisible Man), which is interesting because he's mostly just a visual effect and a light Cockney accent. Kudos to Tony Curran for that. And aside from how she pretty explicitly loses her humanity and gets whacked in Dracula, the Mina Harker character is super-creepy -- "... and do I distract you, Mr. Quartermain?" That, and her visual effects are darn skippy -- she's like a thunderstorm. and I think everybody likes Sean Connery. "Then the game is on!"
On the whole, I'd say it's worth seeing, if you're in the mood for a film.
Today, I've been working on fixing up John Reeves Hall's Penguin Warrior game, which he put together for his Most Excellent Book -- the only issue is that it doesn't compile with newer versions of the libraries he uses. So I'm getting a pretty good education on libsndfile, which is primarily where the incompatabilities have been. I just wanted to play Penguin Warrior, so I could take it apart and learn more about SDL, because I've got the vague goal of writing a Street Fighter-ish fighting game (very preliminary work has been started)... I think that should be relatively simple to make a relatively simple one... although making a good one would take about forever, I'm sure... This is mostly just to keep the creative hacker juices flowing :)
When I get Penguin Warrior working (it's almost there) on my system, I'll post a tarball, and then maybe you too can enjoy the fruits of Reeves' labour.
Yesterday, I forget exactly how, I ran accross
pro_ana. I find this really disturbing... not in the sense that I think that people shouldn't talk about eating disorders on the web -- what I find disturbing is that there's this much of a need to talk about them. There are, apparently, a number of communities similar to this, and they look pretty active. There's a set of online shorthand in common usage for talking about this sort of thing. This one in particular seems... self-consciously (well, imagine that! anorexic girls being self-conscious!) ... really aware of what's going on, almost like a support group, encouraging each other in the whole Not Eating habit. Somebody was saying something about "apparently, when the body goes into starvation mood, your skin stops dropping dead skin cells..." ... which has the built-in assumption that everybody there has driven their bodies into starvation mode, and that they're aware of it. Another post was like "here's a big list of things you can do so you don't get distracted and accidentally eat something".*blinks*
I really don't know. We're pretty b0rked, as a culture -- most of us are pretty well overweight, and young girls willfully starve themselves. I need to get into the Fitness Guru business to get people to actually eat something (other than twinkies and Big 'n' Tasties). "Athletic" looks far healthier than "about to keel over from not having eaten for a year". That's really not even super-important -- cute girls come in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- on different people, for example, muscles, soft edges, tall, and short are all lovely.
I was trying to understand this phenomenon, and it seemed really foreign to me, to get caught up that much in one's own body image. I hadn't always been super-pleased with how I looked, but just as of this summer, I've actually been feeling much better about it -- lotta running and lifting will do that, I suppose :) It's now much more natural for me to go out running with no shirt, and I've been thinking more along the lines of "form fitting" when picking out clothes, whereas my choices in the past had run to baggy. I think I stand taller, too. That, and I think to myself "I should eat more" and consciously look for stuff with more protein in it (I had two pretty big tofu dishes yesterday :) )... I'm liking what my body is doing, and I'm trying to grow.
It hit me today, though, how to begin to relate with this -- when I'm depressed, I think that I'm stupid, whatever evidence I might have to the contrary -- which is, in fact a stupid thing to think :) Last semester, for example... which is interesting, because things that aren't quite as central to my being (say like my appearance, or my health) don't get targeted by my depression, when I'm depressed (which I'm not, now). But I think of myself as, first and foremost, a Smart Guy And A Programmer, so blows to my self-image come from failure to perform like that... not making something computer-related work really slots me off, and if it gets to the point where I get depressed, I come to the conclusion that I'm an utter moron, despite whatever other accomplishments I might've put together before and how (humility kicking in...) much more clever I am than other people in the world. On the other end of things, I'm clearly not the fastest, or the healthiest, or the most attractive, or the best at water-skiing... but little improvements in my running or shape or water-skiing accomplishments make me feel pretty good about myself, and it doesn't matter so much if I have a bad run or if I can't lift a billion pounds at the gym; those are only tangentially important to my self-worth.
I think this is ... a very much milder ... form of what happens with anorexics... a busted self-image (tied very strongly into looking good as a girl) leads the sufferer to assume she's the Worst Thing Possible, which is Fat... or an idiot, for me -- which is interesting, because I don't personally hate stupid people, as long as they're other people... some people just aren't as clever as others, and there's not a lot an individual can do about that. But if it's /me/ being stupid, then that's horrible horrible. Do anorexics as a whole hate bigger girls? I don't think so ... although hate/envy directed at a thinner girl seems pretty likely.
Erm... and I think on that note, I'm going to walk the dogs a bit, then go take a constitutional of my own.
What's that sound? ... that's the sound of a trail out in the forest with nobody running on it!!! Gotta rectify that situation...
