On Web Culture

Auckland International Film Festival
Who made this website? And why does it suck? This happens every year and I don’t understand why. This is not good design, it frustrates my attempts to click on different links and open them in new tabs. Why is only the text and not the whole block clickable? After I opened 15 new tabs of films I was interested in seeing, Firefox 2.0 crashed and then caused my computer to hemorrhage trying to restore the previous session. Website crashes Firefox? Tick!

If you’re going to some festival films drop me a line with what ones you’re seeing.

We are meant to be here
Such a notion often requires an absence of pride. We as a people are not good at doing this. I am human, I know it all.

The Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars
You might have passed over the Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars the first time. I encourage you to give it another go. Watch as we strive for excellence. Watch as the validty of Spyro The Dragon’s inclusion in the Crash Bandicoot article is debated in detail:

* Calm down, kid. As I’ve explained numerous times, those situations are not the same. And if they were, I’d argue for them to be changed too. As for the Pirahna Plants, why do they link to a Mario page? Because they’re Mario in origin. Just like Spyro is, well, Spyro in origin. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be noted on the template. He features in a number of Crash games, therefore he’s part of the Crash “universe”, therefore he should be in the template. It’s that simple.

* And, as WE’VE (all three of us) have explained to you (or tried to), the situations ARE the same, you’re just insisting that they aren’t the same so your opinion can, once again, be portrayed as fact. And the plants in Crash are NOT Mario in origin, they’re a totally different plant. Spyro IS Spyro in original, so he is NOT a Crash character. Yes, we KNOW he’s been IN several Crash games, but that does NOT make him a Crash character. He is STILL a Spyro character. Will you give it up already?

* All three of you? The only person to comment here (other then you, myself and Klaus Kratchet) agreed with me. As I’ve said, those situations are not the same, with the possible exception of Nights and Sonic, and if that’s the case, I think that should be changed too. What’s your point?If the Pirahana Plants are not taken from Mario, why does the link go to a Mario page? Obviously they’re considered to be a ‘cameo” or a reference to Mario, or whatever. The point is, they appear in several games, like Spyro, they’re recognised as coming from another series, like Spyro, and they should be in the template, like Spyro.

* Further proof that you ae incapable of reading. We’ve repeated this information numerous times…they are NOT the same flipping plant! Sheesh! You’re a rock, you know that? It’s impossile to get blood out of you. (more)

Source: Time

What The World Eats feels like one of those ‘click-or-miss’ links that you quickly read, go “…huh” and move on. But it takes a little while to get through the photos and then you find yourself looking at the people wondering who they are, what they do. What the world eats is amazing.

Source: Baraskit

The random collections.

I got Photosynth to go at work but at home it refuses to work on Firefox 2.0 (.xpi) or Internet Explorer 6 (ActiveX). I don’t know why, I don’t completely blame them because Flash doesn’t work on my Firefox either so there might be ghosts in the machine. Check it out though, it may work for you. When I was playing with it at work I was thinking “Yeah, but it is as useful as Street Maps?”

I’m also using a couple new plug-ins that I picked up over at technosailor. If you’re a WordPress user the Subscribe To Comments and Popularity Contest plugins seem robust.

climb on the back and we’ll go for a ride in the sky.

Lawrence Lessig on The Differences Between Culture And Code [video.google.com] at German conference 23C3. I think this footage runs well over 100MB when it has fully downloaded so you may want to start it loading and come back to it. It is well worth the wait especially for the exchange between Lessig and John Perry Barlow at the very end.

Via BoingBoing.

I’m a sucker for these things. And go Slate’s crazy new Javascript nav menu, not sure what to make of it.

The Movie I’ve Seen the Most?

Firstly I think it is fair to discount kids movies your family owned that got thrashed in the VCR player, i.e. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or that movie about some dinosaurs that don’t die. I know I saw Return of the Jedi far too many times.

Then there were a number of films I watched many, many times as part of my film studies paper’s at university which would have been difficult not to watch and try to write essays about.

I’ll get the ironic one out of the way, I have seen Most – The Bridge about 5 or 6 times. The last time I was privileged to play it to an audience of about 40 people. And that was like watching it all over again, observing the way others responded. Most is a fantastic film.

I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption again about 5 or 6 times. These were more spread out though because I think the first time I saw this was in the middle of high school. Those English classes were awesome, I’d get lost in 50 minutes chunks of the movie before the period ended. “Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free”

I’ve seen Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times each. I thought Eternal Sunshine was a terrific film before I read an alternate draft of the script and went “Whoah, they could have gone to these places in the movie as well?” and well impressed, I had to watch it again.

As far as movies go, I’m happy to watch a good movie again but I can’t match 30 or 40 times for movie I’ve seen the most. For the most part I think of good movies like good books, it’s nice for some time to pass between viewings so you forget the details a little bit and the movie has some magic next time you see it.

Aha! is an exclamation for finding a link I wanted to blog that I thought I had lost.

The lost-but-found link in question is to B List’s Let’s talk about frameworks which adds ‘big belly’ to your web vocabulary. It brings up Ruby on Rails which Penny-Arcade is based on. I heard a little about Ruby on Rails at Webstock 2006 from Michael Koziarski. My impression was it seemed accessible kind of in the same way PHP is. I don’t know massive amounts about PHP but it always seemed something that I could learn if I needed to.

2Advanced’s “Attractor” website is a pretty spectacular effort for a completely Flash-based website. I think it has a pretty big download so dial-up users may want to open this one in a separate tab and come back to it. I’m particularly interested in the effort to have ‘pages’ in a Flash site so you can bookmark pages and use your back and forward browser buttons. It doesn’t happen all the time, for example when you click to download the wallpaper that opens in a Flash window, but it’s still impressive nonetheless.