I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed, but I do have a list of things I find interesting but don’t write about. It’s on the sidebar on the right, under ‘Recent Linkage.’ Yes, that list is dynamically generated and yes, it is updated whenever I find something to link to. It’s a lot easier for me, as well.
So it’s been all over the Internets that Star Wars Episode III has been leaked. I must say though that it’s of excellent quality and anyone who’s not disturbed by the ticking text thing at the top would enjoy.
Let’s be realistic now. Everyone knew that this was going to happen. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that it didn’t happen a few days earlier. I’m beginning to think that the MPAA and RIAA doesn’t care about money anymore. I think it’s trying to take over the world. Think about it. Not only are they flushing their toilets full of $20 bills (in American currency, no less) regardless of whether we buy Britney Spears’ latest CD or go see Star Wars 12 instead of the 15 times we were planning to, there’s no bloody way any corporation would willingly antagonize its customers if it were merely attempting to make a profit. No, they’re extending their powers into the US government and funding the lawmakers and giving themselves more power over ‘intellectual property.’ Today it’ll be music. Tomorrow, it’ll be your mind.
In all seriousness though, let’s take a look at what the MPAA’s President and CEO, Dan Glickman says:
‘There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.’
So now after admitting that BT has great legal uses, they’re blaming it for distributing Star Wars. I’m sure he’s hoping that the courts don’t use his logic, because it can trace it right back to him for allowing Lucas to make the movie in order to get it distributed using BT.
The only thing dimming the magic of Star Wars is Lucas’ craptacular writing.
Today was quite a nice day. Originally, the plan was for me to go on a trip downtown and conveniently miss the Wonderland trip. Unfortunately, the trip got cancelled last minute, but I still had prior circumstances that got in the way. More specifically, the Hillsongs concert clashed with Wonderland, and I hated Wonderland, so off I ducked out.
Since all of my classes would be barren wastelands without the other physics students and with everyone skipping, I decided to skip too and stay home. I spent a productive morning watching Naruto 136, burning the rest of FMA, and the second season of Red vs. Blue. I also managed to download a torrent of Star Wars Episode III that was a workprint and not a cam, so it was of quite good quality except for the time thing at the top.
I spent the afternoon watching it. Spoilers abound.
The space battle was not quite what I imagined it to be. It was comedy. R2 was awesome, the droids were kind of funny, Obi-Wan and Anakin were throwing each other one liners, but it felt wrong. It didn’t feel like it was a war. I mean, there were explosions and stuff flying around, but it was too focussed on the two Jedi and so we weren’t able to see more gigantic space battle unfortunately. Why is R2 so awesome?
The battle with Count Dooku was quite good. Fancy schmancy saber work, but the end was a bit strange. You just have Palpatine say KILL HIM and Anakin goes “I dunno, but alright” and decapitates the Count. What?
I was totally expecting Grievous to be awesome. All I get is a coughing robot who runs away the entire movie and gets shot to death by a single Jedi. Didn’t he take on like five Jedi and kill them all during the Clone Wars series? The voice was strange and there was way too much coughing. It’s like he has SARS or something.
Palpatine is awesome in this movie. He’s the villain behind everything and anyone who wasn’t mentally retarded would have known that from the very beginning. I mean, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to notice that Ian McDiarmid played both Sidious and Palpatine in Episode I. Still, all of his scheming is quite enjoyable in Episode III. The one problem is right after he kills Mace Windu. His voice becomes a really comical version of the Emperor voice from Episode VI, to the point that the scene makes you crack up whenever Palpatine speaks.
The Mace vs Palpatine fight was excellent. It gave us a peek at a Sith Master’s combat skills. It also shows us how amazingly brilliant and evil Palpatine is. And it shows us how Palpatine became that old, wrinkly man from RotJ.
Order 66, the order to wipe out the Jedi was probably my favourite part of the movie, and not because I think that the Jedi were arrogant chumps that got owned good. You get shots of a few Jedi in different situation caught completely off guard and the look just as they realize what’s going on is fantastic.
Yoda is also awesome. When the clones that get the order to take out Yoda, they walk towards him, weapons pointed at him. He calmly waits for them to approach and chops off their heads when they’re right behind him. Later on, when he goes to Jedi Temple with Obi-Wan to check out what happened. Right before they enter, the both of them are taking on bunches of clones and Yoda is just slashing, pushing stuff, and throwing his saber into a guy, jumping, taking his saber out, and slashing another guy. It’s like something right out of Jedi Outcast. The one thing I didn’t like was how he just kind of gave up after fighting Palpatine.
Speaking of which, both of the HUGE fights were excellent. Much action, very intense. The dialogue in both fights were also very good. This is the Jedi at their peak.
And now for the stuff that sucked. Any time Anakin and Padme were on the screen together, the scene was automatically sucky. It’s like magic. The other thing was Vader’s NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! It wasn’t quite right.
Anyway, after that, we went off to the Hillsongs concert. I’m not sure if we told anybody else, but I knew that it wasn’t just Hillsong. There was also Something Like Silas, which was alright, but the A/V dudes were probably fumbling around with the slides with lyrics on them. Then there was Vicky Beeching who sounds familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Finally, there was Hillsong. By this time I was quite uncomfortable from all the people pushing into each other and having no space to move even my fingers. It was quite alright though, and by the time they got to One Way, I was focussed on worshipping anyway. I left there with Passion ’05: How Great Is Our God for $17.99 ($20.69 with tax).
No one has asked yet (probably because they’ve figured out it’s pointless since people usually look at me strange and back away slowly when I answer stuff like this), but I can sense the question burning in all of your little cerebrums.
“What does the name of your blog less blkmage | grep life mean?”
Well, it’s a good thing you asked because I felt like explaining it.
I’m sure all of you are aware that I’m a Linux user. And as a Linux user I can do all sorts of magical stuff by typing things into my computer and it’s like automagic! Well, this is kind of one of those things that you type in. Let’s break it down first. Here, we have a command prompt:
$
It’s a pretty lonely prompt. It’s just longing for someone to give it a purpose and a chance to show its automagic abilities. If we were to type in the command:
$ less blkmage | grep lifeit would look like that.
What exactly does that mean?
less is the opposite of more. Believe it or not, those are actual names of programs in UNIX. All they do is read files and allow people that don’t have supereyes to read large files one screen/page at a time. In UNIX (and most other command lines), the file that we want to read is put right after the command like so:
$ less blkmage
Everything in UNIX is considered a file. A text file is a file. A mouse is a file. A directory is a file. Any device plugged into your computer is a file. Any piece of data is a file. In this situation, I (blkmage) am the file. I am being read by less.
This thing: | is a pipe. What this does is it redirects the output of the program to another program. For example, if I wanted to look at the system processes, I would use the command ps. However, the output is usually way too big for one screen to handle. What I would do then is use the command:
$ ps aux | lessto pipe the output of ps (with the options a, u, and x) to less so that I can read it using less.
Finally, we have grep. grep is a program that searches a file for a string. Essentially, what we have in:
$ less blkmage | grep lifeis: read the file blkmage and pipe the contents through grep to find life.
As with most things, there is more than one meaning to the name. It’s not just a cool little play on UNIX commands.
He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less. John 3:30 (NLT)
Less of me, more of Him, Him being Christ.
And finally, since I’m so entranced by computers and science fiction stuff and am driven to learn more and more about interesting things, I’ve been told that I need to get a life and get out more. Hah.
This is the reason I’m not thrilled about Java. It has one of the ugliest user interfaces I’ve ever seen. Java’s UI is about as attractive as the Windows 3.1 look with less colour. I do admit that Java can look nice, looking at Azureus and LimeWire, but they’re not using Java’s native Look and Feel thingamajinger. The fonts are bloody nasty too. There are console apps that are prettier than Java.