June 2010
19 posts
The Smart Set: The Term Paper Artist - October 10,... →
Term paper writing was never good money, but it was certainly fast money. For a freelancer, where any moment of slack time is unpaid time, term papers are just too tempting. Need $100 by Friday to keep the lights on? No sweat. Plenty of kids need 10 pages on Hamlet by Thursday. Finals week is a gold mine. More than once the phone rang at midnight and the broker had an assignment. Six pages by 6...
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Effects Corner: Getting the most out of your VFX... →
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Watch] Waking Up Itchy: RITUAL
W.
T.
F?
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“Does anyone else, when you get a script, and you know it’s not funny, does...”
– ] Ted Danson, in a Roundtable on Comedy [link via Xander Bennet]
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“The whole art of movies and in plays is in the control of the flow of...”
– ] Tom Stoppard, Backstory 5 (via [shame] David Bordwell]
Why Christopher Hitchens Doesn’t Matter →
A romp into the Hitchens oeuvre reveals not a major creative talent, but a scrappy linguistic boxer, primarily interested in the vainglory of winning arguments and debates. He does not give and give. Though he has persisted in a self-conscious attempt to cultivate a kind of rakish Orwell-ness about himself, he has failed to produce a lasting sociopolitical novel, or any novel at all. It’s as if...
DreamTime | Overcoming Bias →
Yes modern stories and art are more enticing than were those of our distant forager ancestors. But their stories and art also occupied much of their time, especially when food was plentiful. It seems rather implausible that this was only because “imagination … hijack[s] mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure.” Surely our foragers would have evolved a resistance to such...
Watch] Lite White 24 hour Milk
This is the version with out preferred music.
This spot was done entirely with stills, in a studio, with no greenscreen.
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is...”
– ] Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 21
A Wakeup to the “Awe(some/ful) Future” of Indy... →
If anybody feels in harm’s way with the changing landscape, there are plenty of other lines of work. But if I may say so–without being too bold–I can pretty much guarantee that those other industries are not immune. They are being forced to innovate, stay fresh and stay nimble to differentiate their product from the next guy’s product. If you somehow think those other industries might sit around...
Is this the final curtain for classical records? →
The classical market share has now sunk from nearly 11 per cent in 1990 to 3.2%. According to figures drawn from the major retailers, the sector has seen sales in the last twelve-month period drop by a staggering 17.6 per cent, with full- and mid-price ranges showing the steepest decline (825,000 fewer units sold).
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Near-Far Summary →
Short version: there is a cognitive correlation between the way we think about spatial distances and the way we think of temporal distances.
Never put the quality of your life in the hands of... →
“It’s up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don’t design your life somebody else will design it for you and you may just not like their idea of balance. It’s particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. Commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much...
“Zodiac literalizes the pulls in Fincher’s own corpus between method and...”
– ] Nick Davis on Zodiac
One of the more thoughtful essays I’ve read on Fincher’s Zodiac. I am going to rewatch the film soon, but at the time it struck me as a rather surprisingly personal film by Fincher - a film about obsession by an obsessive.
