Tragedy hit last night for many students when The Shack burned down. Famed among students for cheesey pop, the lack of access will mean having to go to, shock horror, The Garage.
Stuwee, unofficial spokesman for The Shack, was said to be “totally gutted”. Expect him to set up a support group soon.
Mad, stupid, silly, daft, bizarre, off-colour, odd. All terms that describe Shaolin Soccer well.
At it’s core, Shaolin Soccer is about an idea rather than a story. Someone thought it would be a good idea to mix bullet-time special effects, CG effects and wire-fu with the most basic of comic stories to create a surreal football film. The results are stupid but amusing scenes of balls smashing through players like bowling balls.
Although apparently cut for Western release, the film is still entertaining enough to watch.
Up until fairly recently, I didn’t use an RSS aggregator. Using my own bandwidth to check so many sites was just hammering my connection, and starting and stopping the application when I needed to reserve the bandwidth was just a pain.
Enter Bloglines. Yes, I’m late to the party. People have been praising it for months now but I only very recently saw the light. It is an excellent tool: allowing me to check sites quickly when I want to (and not using up much of my bandwidth), keeping unread items up to date no matter which computer I’m using, and making me far more productive.
Before Bloglines, I was struggling to keep up with about 50 sites regularly. I now easily keep up with around 120. Thoroughly recommended.
Now, I checked my server logs for the first time in months tonight and noticed that a single host had hit my site 2000 times this week. That’s a hit every 5 minutes from one entity. Investigating a little further made it clear that the one entity was an aggregator: the bloglines aggregator.
Now, Solitude is not a high-throughput site. I attempted to update once a day, but it’s usually more like once every two days. In the last week, there have been 3 updates (this being the 4th).
Think about that: 3 updates, 2000 checks. 3. 2000 checks. Notice the ever so slight disparity?
Those Bloglines guys make a very usable interface to a damn fine service, but they really need to work on the crawler updating logic. It’s not that hard to extrapolate predictable update patterns. If a site is updating every 15 minutes, check it every 15 minutes. If it slows down and stays at once every day, 15 minutes is probably very inappropriate. Once an hour would be better. You don’t less any real sense of freshness and you don’t over do server hits.
Common sense and the polite thing to do.
Let’s get this out of the way: I’m a total arsehole when it comes to music. Like most people, I have very strong musical opinions. I also have enough restraint to know that most people who read this site probably don’t give a shit about my taste in music and hence it rarely, if ever, gets a mention.
I was tempted recently to rip into Dizzee Rascal’s new single, “Dream”, which amounts to the original record with off-key and half-finished singing. I thought better of it, thinking it would be best to let it speak for itself.
Today, however, I say something being advertised that I couldn’t remain silent about. The Junior Eurovison Song Contest. I am at a total loss as to who thought this was a good idea. The Eurovision song contest is a painful joke, a cruelly perpetrated one at the expense of the Irish who think it’s a good thing to win, but I digress. What sick fuck decided to bring children into it? The humanity, oh, the humanity. I can already imagine the entrants from the backwaters of Europe in their red sequined shirts crying into their milk as they get nil points. Normally, that would amuse me somewhat but, given the setting, it’s just embarassing.
The last thing music needs.
I’ve been trying to think of a good term for a particular kind of music for a while now but nothing immediately springs to mind.
I’m thinking of albums that are technically solid, enjoyable to listen to, but entirely forgettable. The sort that you can’t say anything bad about but probably don’t listen to as much as you should; probably because there’s no particular reason to break it out. Maybe if you see the band live it spurs you to listen to them again, but the notion fades.
The particular album that spurred this doesn’t matter too much I just want a concise way of describing such an album.
Suggestions?
Those fine young engineers over at Microsoft are trying to edge their way into the search engine space with MSN Search. In attempting to take Google’s dominance, they need to not only at least match the quality of results, they have to make people want to leave Google. It’s not sufficient to simply have good links. Google is the search engine. To make people leave it, they have to have some tangible improvement to the user experience.
Their answer? The search builder.
This is a terrible move that will not win them the search war. The problem is that people don’t want to build up searches, they couldn’t care less about most of the options presented to them (assuming they took the time to understand them in the first place), they want to “type their 1.3 words into the search window and let the search tech do its stuff”. They won’t do any more than that.
Google understood that. The UI is as simple as it can be: a textbox and a button. No ambiguity, no ignorable complexity, just the functionality.
An unusual proposition: take a fairly successful Japanese horror film, the original crew and director (who also wrote it), an American star, and remake the thing in English.
That is precisely what The Grudge does.
It makes for interesting viewing: we have an American actress (Sarah Michelle Gellar) speaking English in what is otherwise a very Asian film. Everything from the minimal dialogue, to the quirky characters, to the unsignposted time transitions make this seem Japanese; which is both impressive and somewhat jarring at the same time. Although it’s good to see a remake for the Western market that doesn’t molest the source material like Steve Irwin in a crocodile pit (The Assassin AKA Point Of No Return, I’m looking at you here), a question hangs in the air: why bother?
I’m sure Gellar doesn’t need the money, the original film could easily be viewed with subtitles (it did get a UK release after al), and the director was probably fairly happy with his original vision. The only answer that makes sense is that the potato farmers in Utah didn’t want to read while viewing a film. Mass-market appeal means something to the money men.
Not to say that The Grudge is bad. It is not great though. Fairly middle of the road horror, if we are being honest.
Via Jack Mottram comes news of the The Publisher. Leveraging the offer made by Archive.org to host any CC-licensed audio or video files, the Publisher is a tool to upload such files and provides a link to give people to download.
This has all the signs of a good thing:
I’ve been getting more and more impressed by Archive.org’s contribution to the net. The free movie archive is good, then the legal bootleg archive (which I recently noticed features shows by Texan alt rockers And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead… reason in itself to visit) and now this. Good stuff.
The rest of the links from yesterday’s batch. It seems that all the flash games and fun stuff ended up in the other lot:
Hopefully that’s the last of the links for a good while.
Via Simon Willison comes a link to a religious tract called “Squatters”.
Wow.
I’m totally awed by this strip (in the sense that it is mind-numbingly shocking). It’s like catching your boss fuck a carrot on your lunch break. Words can’t describe it. Featuring Vatican conspiraces, evil arabs, World War 3 and other insanity. Nuts.