Everybody loves Transformers. But a Mr. Nakamura over at Himeji Soft Works in Japan actually built one that's going to take part in the International Robot-One Competition in Korea next month. I think it's going to be very popular there! Watch the video- I'm sure you'll agree.
(via Robot-Dreams.com)
Comics writer extraordinaire Warren Ellis is running a new column called Ministry for Comicon.com Pulse. In his second Ministry column, he compares the webcomics scene of today to the small press comics scene in Britain in the 60s and 70s. He says most of the minicomics out of that scene were crap, but some of the best future writers and artists in the comics industry started there. So now, he says, the future of the comics industry is unfolding right here on the Web. Yeah, I can see that. I've been reading webcomics for a long time. I've seen a lot of crap but I've seen some really great stuff too. Here's some of the good stuff I've been reading recently:
Little Dee- A really sweet comic about a little girl who gets lost in the woods and is adopted by a rather odd family consisting of a bear, a dog and a very cynical vulture.
Dinosaur Comics- This one's pretty impressive. Every comic strip has exactly the same visuals, only the dialogue changes. Ryan North, the creator of the comic, shows remarkable creativity in keeping the comic fresh week after week simply by dint of superior writing that manages to be both funny and intellectual at the same time!
Alien Loves Predator- much better than Alien Versus Predator, this comic is all about New York, pretty much the only city in the world in which guys who look like this would fit in. It's kind of like Friends, except with a smaller cast. And funnier.
a softer world- this weekly photocomic combines gorgeous photos with gorgeous words. Coolness. 
Copper- I give my highest recommendation to this comic by Kazu Kibuishi, editor of the excellent graphic novel anthology series Flight . I won't put it up here because each comic is huge at 900 by 900 pixels, but it's well worth your while to click on the above link and check it out. Kazu's artwork is unique and beautiful and each self-contained Copper comic tells a story that's simple but sublime. The kind of thing that puts a smile on my face every time I read it.
Found this rather interesting post about cheating in NUS via Tomorrow.sg. The blogger quite rightly points out that many NUS students have a very blase attitude towards cheating, regarding it as just another way to get the highest possible grade on their assignments/tests/etc. He raises a very good question- what does it mean to get such high grades when you've compromised your integrity to do so? I'm in the School of Computing and I've seen more than a few examples of this myself. Personally, I think it's just sad that the rat-race mentality, shared by too-many people in this country, leads to this kind of behaviour.
A pioneering space tourism company called Space Adventures (the same guys who organised Dennis Tito's- the first space tourist who paid his way to space- trip to the International Space Station) is collaborating with Singapore to build a Spaceport right here in Singapore! According to the official site, the spaceport will offer suborbital space flights, zero-G flights, simulated space walks, space camps and astronaut-for-a-day programmes. The suborbital flights are the main attraction, though Channel Newsasia reports a ticket on one of those will set a traveller back a cool hundred thousand US dollars. Ouch. Clearly, space travel is still going to be for the super-rich for a while (the rest of us can just go on simulated space walks, I suppose *sighs*) but I'm still really enthused about this development! Private initiatives like this spaceport will eventually drive down the cost of space travel- I'm confident that within 20 years, space travel will hit prices that are more-or-less affordable for the common (upper-middle class) man. Or woman, for that matter. And space travel isn't just a vanity thing for rich folk, either! Besides giving people the opportunity to witness the beauty of our planet from space, commercial space flight will eventually let us make suborbital flights around the globe (you can travel anywhere on the globe in just 45 minutes that way!) and even travel to the moon- again! If you've got even one adventurous bone in your body, then that's just bloody exciting.
I just realised that non-comics people would probably have a question mark hovering above their heads, Metal Gear Solid-style, after reading my last post. So who is Grant Morrison? Why, simply one of the greatest writers in the comic book medium, that's who! His magnum opus, in my opinion, is the amazing, mind-bending Vertigo (DC's line of mature comics launched in the wake of Swamp Thing, Hellblazer and Sandman) series The Invisibles. It's about psychic secret agents who are waging an unseen war against those who would rule the world. It's about sex, drugs, violence and magic. It's about Buddha and the end of the world. It's about everything, really. It's also the reason I still read comics today- I got my hands on a copy of the first trade paperback. At a time when I thought comics were all about overly-muscular men beating 10 kinds of $*#! out of each other while angsting about their dead wives/girlfriends/children/pets (this was the early-90s!), The Invisibles restored my faith in the medium.
Grant Morrison's specialty is subverting the superhero genre and transmogrifying it into a way to express supremely imaginative concepts and ideas. One of his most famous mainstream works, Arkham Asylum (illustrated by famed Sandman cover artist and director of the recent fantasy film Mirrormask, Dave McKean), is a metaphorical story based on the theories of Carl Jung. Batman is cast in the role of the conscious part of the human mind, fighting to keep the unconscious part (represented, of course, by the inmates of Arkham Asylum) in check. One of the most original takes on the Batman mythos in recent years, Arkham Asylum has been a best-seller since it's release.
He's not incapable of doing mainstream work either! His mid-90s Justice League of America revamp was hugely popular and helped create the genre of "wide-screen" superhero action that Warren Ellis would use to great effect in his later title The Authority (the same book GM is going to be revamping later this year!). He similarly revamped the X-Men in his book New X-Men, which was by far and away the most exciting, SEXY X-Men book to come out for a long, long time. Last but not least, his new All-Star Superman series (with the supremely-talented artist Frank Quitely) makes that tired old hero cool again.
So that's who Grant Morrison is- the coolest English-language comic book writer ever (not the best because that's Alan Moore. Neil Gaiman's the gothest). That's why I'm so, so, so excited about his new (old?) books coming out later this year.
My main man GM is already writing the superlative All-Star Superman. This year, he's also going to be writing two books for DC's Wildstorm line of comics: WildC.A.T.s and The Authority. The former will be drawn by star artist and cheesecake specialist Jim Lee, while the latter will be drawn by Gene Ha (most famous for his work on Alan Moore's Top 10). If that wasn't cool enough, it's been announced at a DC Wondercon panel that he'll be writing both Batman and Detective Comics after the current writers' runs end.
COOLNESS OVERLOAD. I'm going to have to go lie down now.
Oh the self-reflexivity of it all! Oh and by the way: this is my fourth post today! How unusually productive of me. Anyway, the February issue of New York Magazine's got a cool article called Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom, written by Clive Thompson- who runs the excellent science and technology blog collision detection. The article tries to answer the question of why some blogs become really popular and others languish in obscurity, despite the quality of their content.
Well it seems that Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University who specializes in network theory- which the article describes as "a mathematical model of how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such as users of the Web"- studied this phenomenon by analysing 433 blogs and found that a very small number of blogs received hundreds of inbound links (links being the equivalent of popularity votes for blogs) whereas the vast majority of the rest barely had any at all. So we have a very small A-list who get loads of links, a slightly larger B-list (less links than the A-list, but still substantial) and a huge C-list (all us folk who hardly get any links at all *sniff sniff*).
OK so I guess this isn't news to a lot of bloggers out there. What is interesting, though, is that the curve that Shirky obtained by sorting the 433 blogs in order of most linked to least is a power-law distribution- a distribution that is common to many social systems. Shirky thinks that this result can be explained by a simple quirk of human nature- that when we try to choose amongst many given choices (in the case of blogs, a dizzying number of choices), we'll gravitate towards the most popular ones. Which, of course, means that popular things just become more and more popular, and vice versa.
That certainly does seem to describe the "blogosphere," at least to an extent. It also explains why small blogs often try to catch the attention of larger A-list blogs to try and get linked on their front page, which guarantees a surge of attention. There's lots more interesting stuff in the article, but I'm going to cut this post short and send a link to BoingBoing. :P
EDIT: Oh yeah, Clay Shirky's got his own website where you can go if you wanna read more about his research into power laws and blogs.
Vikings. Rock & Roll. Giant Robots. Need I say more?
Well, the song is War Photographer by Jason Forrest (go buy his album Shamelessly Exciting- it's great!) and the animation is by Joel Trussell, who is clearly some kind of animation demi-god.
Ghibliworld.com has posted a high-resolution trailer of Studio Ghibli's (who brought us such masterpieces as My Neighbour Totoro, Porco Rosso, Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke) newest film Gedo Senki, or Tales from Earthsea. Oh yes, it's a Ursula K. Le Guin adaptation! I love her Earthsea books- they're the very pinnacle of all-ages fantasy writing- so I'm very excited about this adaptation. At the very least, it should be better than the despicable recent Hallmark adaptation of the books.
Anyway, Gedo Senki is directed by a Miyazaki, but not the Miyazaki we're used to! This film is the directorial debut of Goro Miyazaki, son of the famed animator Hayao Miyazaki. Judging by the trailer, I think he may well have his father's talents. The animation is up the high standards that we expect from a Ghibli production, but what really stands out in the trailer is the theme song- which was written by Goro Miyazaki himself and is absolutely beautiful. I haven't been able to get my hands on a translation of the lyrics but I'll put em up as soon as I do.
In an interesting side-note, Goro Miyazaki's been posting a daily blog about the production of the film- a translation of which has been put up by the good folks at Nausicaa.net. Sadly, the blog reveals that that Hayao Miyazaki was against his son directing the film and subsequent entries show that a rift between the two men that seems to go back quite far. In his February 22nd and 23rd entries, partially translated by Ghibliworld.com, Goro Miyazaki wrote that the reason why it took him so long to enter the world of animation was because of objections from his mother. Apparently, his mother used to be an animator but the pressures of child-rearing forced her to resign- while his father worked so hard that his family hardly saw him at all.
Is this, then, the price of genius? Hayao Miyazaki is undoubtedly a genius in the medium of animation, and it is ironic that many of his films are about childhood. In fact, as many have noted, the depictions of children in his films are more nuanced and realistic than many other animations, or live-action films for that matter. Its ironic that his own son would feel this way about him now. Is it truely impossible to balance the burden of a singular creative vision and the responsibility of being a parent? Or is this more of a generational gap issue? Impossible for me to say. I only hope that the release of this film (which, if all goes well, will be Ghibli's latest masterpiece) will go some way towards healing the rift between the two Miyazakis. Perhaps Ghibli's next film can be a collaboration between them!
Gedo Senki is set to come out in July in Japan, so hopefully it'll reach Singapore before the end of this year!
There you have it folks, it's official. Spider-Man's wearing a black suit in Spider-Man 3. Now, the fanbois are going crazy speculating over what this means. Yeah, basically everyone's thinking SYMBIOTE! I suppose it's reasonable enough to think that astronaut John Jameson (son of Peter Parker's cranky boss J. Jonah Jameson) is gonna come back from space with some black goo in tow, which'll somehow make it's way to Petey and bond with him.
But somehow I doubt it. Let's corral the facts. Topher Grace is in the movie, but we don't know who he's playing (though good money's on him playing Eddie Brock- who will eventually become the villain Venom). Thomas Haden Church is playing Flint Marko- AKA The Sandman. Bryce Dallas Howard (director Ron Howard's daughter) plays the gorgeous Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man's first, doomed love in the comics) and James Cromwell plays Captain Stacy, her (also doomed) dad.
Ok here's what I think. Firstly, it's pretty much a given that Harry Osborn will take up the mantle of Green Goblin in this film- he already hates Spider-Man with a vengeance and he found his dad's secret Green Goblin lab at the end of the second film. Add to that the fact that Mary Jane's already played out a very Gwen Stacy-esque bridge scene (except for the fact that she survived, of course!) in the first film and I think it's entirely possible we'll see bridge scene redux in Spidey 3. Well, maybe not an identical scene, but hey, Kirsten Dunst's kept hinting that the third Spider-Man movie will be the last one for her, so why not reverse Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy's roles and have MJ kick the bucket in this one? End one love story in tragedy while sowing the seeds of a new one. Makes sense to me.
I suspect Harry might end up killing Mary Jane in a rage (or accidentally while holding her hostage) and then feels so bad about it afterward that he gives himself up to Peter, who would then have to decide between taking revenge or forgiving his girlfriend's (wife's?) killer! Dramatic, no? Going on with my speculation, I think the black suit isn't a symbiote, but one that he wears in mourning. Doesn't he look gloomy in that picture? Whatever actually happens, I think it's safe to say the tone of the movie's gonna be significantly darker than the first two. Gah... 2007's such a long way away.
I really haven't posted about my movie viewings in a while! Well, I've seen quite a few over the past month or so. Namely: Fearless, Andrei Rublev, Paheli, Match Point, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Dreamer. Some of them were good, some not so good.
Let's start with The Good:
Fearless- Jet Li's latest and perhaps last martial arts movie is really, really good. It's quite earnest, very upfront and unsubtle in delivering it's anti-violence and patriotic messages but it's immensely likeable and has some of the best fight scenes in Jet Li's career. Even better, the man actually delivers a kick-ass performance, in and out of his fight scenes. The movie is a very fictionalized version of Huo Yuan Jia, a legendary though very real martial arts master who founded the Jing Wu Athletic Federation and is perhaps most famous for defeating foreign challengers in a time where the Western world was trying to stereotype the Chinese people as the "sick men of Asia." The movie strays pretty far from the man's real life story, but that very deviation allows it to create a gripping, dramatically effective story. In seeking to expound it's theme of wushu as a means of self-realisation, the movie moves through 3 acts.
In the first, Huo Yuan Jia is an arrogant, hard-drinking young man who fights for pleasure and glory and thinks nothing of breaking the bones of an opponent. There's a fight scene in this section which by itself is worth the price of admission- an amazingly brutal, violent battle between a drunken Huo and a Master Qin, who he has just insulted. The fight starts off at the top floor of a beautiful tea house set and makes it's way down to the basement of this building, leaving nothing but destruction in it's wake. Jet Li and his opponent succeed in creating a sense of raw power and fury that's so palpable, it's frightening. It's one of the best-choreographed fights in the movie and at a certain point, it felt like I was watching a battle between angry gods. It was just that intense. At the same time, I felt bad watching the fight because it was obvious nothing good could, or would come out of it.
True enough, BAD THINGS HAPPEN following this fight, and Huo spends the next few years of his life in exile, getting back to nature and rediscovering his soul. This part of the movie has a pseudo-love story that doesn't quite go anywhere and some silly moments involving farmers who all do a Titanic "King Of The World" impression (without actually yelling out the words) whenever wind blows. But it still works to establish the change in Huo's character and leads up to the final act of the movie- where Huo kicks all kinds of foreign ass and becomes the hero of the Chinese people. The fight scenes here do a really good job in depicting how much Huo's character has changed- the bone-cracking violence of the first half of the film is replaced by graceful, almost balletic moves and a primarily defensive style that turns opponents attacks back on them. The first fight scene in this act, against a British boxer named Hercules O'Brien, was particularly cool. It's no secret that Huo died soon after founding his martial arts federation, but the movie buts a very dramatic spin on the events of his death. Even though I knew he was gonna kick the bucket, I still felt really sad when it happened.
So there you have it, a Jet Li movie with the requisite amount of ass-kickery and an emotional storyline to boot! Solid stuff. Though I'd like to see the extended cut of the movie (which apparently had Michelle Yeoh as a character). What's with Hong Kong movies getting cut to bits these days? Granted, this movie was coherent even with the cuts, unlike Seven Swords, but still! Trust the audiences a bit lah!
Andrei Rublev- The Singapore Film Society screened this movie by famed Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky last month and me and my friend Jacky were there to see it! It's a hard movie to watch as it leaves a lot up to the viewers and doesn't bother to explain itself, but it's a bonafide masterpiece of cinema and perhaps one of the few movies I can call a genuine work of art. It's ostensibly a biography of the medieval Russian Icon painter Andrei Rublev, but it doesn't follow a conventional story structure or anything that simple. What it does, and does beautifully, is question the role of art in a world where virtue, beauty and love seem all but forgotten and war and suffering seem to be omnipresent. I challenge any lover of cinema to watch the final sequence in the movie and not be inspired and deeply moved.
UPDATE: Paheli- I totally forgot about this one! Mostly because I saw it on TV and not in a cinema- it was showing on Central a few weeks ago. Me and my mom caught it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The story, a sort of supernatural village fable, is different from the usual Hindi movie fare and quite delightful. Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee have great chemistry and predictably enough, turn in great performances. Nice appearance by Amitabh and the twist ending is rather cute.
The Not So Good:
Match Point- Woody Allen's latest work seems to be, on the surface, quite different from his previous offerings. It's no comedy, for one thing (though it has a few comedic moments). But in the way it looks at the tangled web of human relationships, and the way love and lust can alternately invigorate and destroy lives, it treads very similar territory to previous Woody Allen movies- particularly Crimes and Misdemeanors. The plotting is smart and the visuals very pretty (if rather cliched- the movie is set in a tourist's London, complete with a scene set to the backdrop of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace) and the operatic soundtrack gorgeous. The best part of the movie is Scarlett Johansen, who's grown more beautiful with every movie she's acted in and is just ravisingly gorgeous in this one.
With all that goodness, why didn't I enjoy the movie more? Well, the movie is bloody misogynistic, that's why! The three main female characters in this movie are a) a bitchy mother, b) an over-bearing, nagging wife and c) a femme-fatale who turns into a clingy, shrieking harpy. Granted, the main character is not exactly likeable himself (in fact, not many of the characters are), but Woody Allen continues to demonstrate a failure to depict women in a realistic or nuanced way at all. I'm still looking forward to his next film, though, if only because it'll star Scarlett again. Yep, I'll watch anything with her in it.
Memoirs of a Geisha- Shakespeare's phrase, "full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing," just about sums it up. Even rather heartfelt performances by leads Zhang Zhiyi, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li couldn't save this movie. It's beautiful but ultimately soulless. A far cry from Chicago, this.
The Bad:
The Dreamer- A friend of mine convinced me to watch this movie, claiming it would be good. Well, it was quite possibly the most boring movie I've seen in the past 2 years. It's about a little girl, played by Dakota Fanning and her dad, played by Kurt Russell (what happened to you man? You used to be THE MAN!), who live on a horse ranch with no horses and decide to buy a horse with a broken leg, nurse it back to health and try to win a big race with it. It's based on a true story. The horse wins, of course. That's it. The movie is so mediocre there's just nothing to say. If you want to see a good movie about a horse, go see Seabiscuit.
Edited: 30 October 2006 (added list of movie titles to the first paragraph).
Right-o. So it seems that a company called d3o lab's making futuristic material, called d3o (doh!), that's lightweight, bendable and stiffens on impact, effectively turning into a form of body armour. A clothing company called Spyder's making ski suits made of this material- and apparently the US and Canadian ski teams are loving it. Awesome stuff. I'm willing to bet the designs of Spyder's d3o suits were inspired by Spider-Man's suit. They look pretty cool, don't they? Now if only they would make some for hot weather. ;-)
I was just looking through a few sites I'd bookmarked recently in order to put up links to them here when I realised all of them had a unifying thread. They were all about the way Internet and surveillance technologies (current and near-future) are eroding away our privacy and freedoms. It's good to see artists (writers, comic artists and animators in this case) tackling these issues that really don't get as much attention in the press as they should. Anyway, here goes.
Online science-fiction magazine Futurismic has a great story up by Mark Ward. It's called Cycle Thieves and it's a deft blend of noir-mystery style cyberpunk and Internet-generation concerns about pervasive social technologies. Very nice and it's apparently his 2nd story, which makes him a ery promising writer indeed.
Wired Magazine's February issue has a nice write-up about the uber-cool artist Paul Pope's upcoming Batman story- Batman: Year 100. I love the man's work- his graphich novel 100%, a character centred science-fiction story filled with beautiful dialogue and even more beautiful art, was just brilliant. So I'm rather looking forward to his take on the Batman myth- set in 2039, Batman: Year 100 posits the character as the last bastion of freedom in a dystopian police state. Which is a bit similar to Frank Miller's take on the character in The Dark Knight Strikes Back, his sequel to the seminal Dark Knight Returns, but I think that given the state of America today (cough*Patriot Act*cough) it's a scenario well worth revisiting. Paul Pope's stated in interviews that he wants depict Batman as a sort of escape artist, fighting the powers that be with dangerous, acrobatic acts of civil disobedience. Whoa, apparently the comic came out last week. Time for me to hit the comics shop.
Animation blog Cartoon Brew linked to a very nice British short animated film titled Welcome To Glaringly. The quality of the linked Quicktime video isn't the best, but the animation itself is gorgeous- utilizing a blocky, pixel-artish look to great effect. This wryly funny short film posits a scenario where video footage from a public surveillance camera is wildly out-of-context, to hilarious (for the audience, anyway) results. The underlying message here, I suppose, is that due to the very nature of public surveillance, it's hard to put any context to such footage and it's necessary to take whatever those cameras see with a grain of salt.
The year was 2004. Still jetlagged from a return trip (was it from India? Or the Maldives? Fickle memory can't decide), I entered my room eagerly anticipating the prospect of a nice warm shower. Oh but a surprise awaited me! My sister had bought a few new CDs, most by artistes we already listened to (like Badly Drawn Boy's Have You Fed The Fish- an OK but not overly exciting album) but one stood out. A black CD jacket with the words Franz Ferdinand on it. According to my sister, they were the hot new stuff. Oh boy. Were they ever! Franz Ferdinand were very much a part of the new wave of bands led by The Strokes (of whom I am a minor fan), but they had an infectious, dancecy vibe which was just brilliant. It really was a very fun album to listen to, the only downside being that a lot of the songs tended to sound a little similar.
Cut to 2005- the boys in stripes release a new album- You Could Have It So Much Better. True to it's title, it really was a marked improvement over their debut. It rocked harder, they played around with new sounds (particularly on the excellent Beatles-esque song Eleanor Put Your Boots On) and the first single, Do You Want To, was pure glee. Yep, Franz's sophomore album was a grade-A effort which earned regular rotation on my iPod.
So when they announced they'd be playing in Singapore this year, it didn't take me a nanosecond to decide to go. Well, the deciding factor was the price actually- $50 tickets was too good to be true! Though on hindsight, the $88 free-standing tickets were the way to go. The seats I got for me and my friends were up in the balcony- pretty far away from the band. But no matter. This was the first concert I'd ever paid to go see and it was so worth it!
I know understand the term ELECTRIFYING as applied to a band. These boys were the very definition of electrifying. Up on that stage, they weren't mere mortals like the rest of us in the audience. They were gods. Gods of Rock and Roll. Alex Kapranos, the lead singer, was a whirling dervish on stage, prancing, strutting and leaping about like he was jacked up on a barrel of Red Bull. The rest of the band was equally awesome. It seemed like each member of the band played at least 2 instruments each- for one song (I forget which) drummer Paul Thompson actually switched places with guitarist Nick McCarthy. And near the end of the 2-hour set (in which they only took 1 break, amazingly!), they did this thing where another dude- I think it was their concert drummer- started drumming along with Paul, creating a crazy-cool ruckus of percussive zing! As if that wasn't enough, a 3rd person (no IDEA who he was!!!) leapt onto the drums (not literally) to create a 3-way drum attack of epic proportions. It looked and sounded brilliant.
Perhaps the coolest part of the concert was seeing how sincere and likeable the band really was. They talked about how much they loved the food here and they actually invited EVERYONE to go down to their hotel with food so they could have a "food party" after the show! How cool is that??? Me and my friends didn't go cause we were kinda tired and I had an assignment to hand in the next day, but reports indicate that they were really friendly and chatted with all the fans who turned up for quite a while. Darn it I missed the chance to meet em! But I'm definitely catching them when they next come down, so maybe I'll get another chance then.
I didn't take pictures that night but lots of other bloggers did. Let's see, one guy got loads of photos and the setlist up on his blog. Someone else's blog has a very professional photoset of the concert. And some more on Flickr. Finally, a blog named Cirkusflea's put up a few VIDEO CLIPS of the event. Sweeeeeet.
Epitonic.com, despite not having been updated in a long, long, long time, remains one of the best sites on the Internet to find quality music by lesser-known artistes. What makes the site particularly cool is that it provides at least one MP3 from most of the artistes featured on the site. After all, there's no better way to learn about a band than actually listening to their music. There I discovered great bands like Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Rocket From the Crypt, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sleater-Kinney and 50 Foot Wave, the subject of this post!
What made me sit up and pay attention to 50 Foot Wave were their singles "Long Painting" and "Clara Bow", available on Epitonic.com. The songs were loud, aggressive, punk rock, full of vim and vigour. Just my kinda thing. So I got their 2005 album "Golden Ocean", expecting it to be full of rockin' goodness. It did not disappoint.
Now, as if to prove their complete and utter rockingness, 50 Foot Wave have released a new EP (actually it was released in December and I didn't know about it til now :P) entitled "Free Music." Which is available, for free, on their website. Too cool. And if you like the music, just click on the little donation box on the top of the page. I know I will. Bands who are brave enough to give away their music on the web deserve to be supported. Well, not if they suck. But these guys are the very opposite of suck. They rock. And therefore, deserve to be supported so they can keep on rockin'.
No really. It's called Flushed Away. It's about an upper-class rat who get's involved in some brouhaha with the, ahem, underworld. What's interesting about this film (I mean, besides the fact that it's by AARDMAN!) is that it's a CGI movie, not a claymation, which marks a first for the studio. I'm a bit tremulous because the film's a co-production between Aardman and Dreamworks, whose animations I don't quite fancy (I liked Shrek, didn't love it though, didn't care for the sequel much and just HATED Shark Tale). But this new trailer for Flushed Away looks promising. The film seems like it'll retain Aardman's trademark visual style, character design and wry, British sense of humour so that's all right by me. Aardman's made some of my very favourite animations so I'm looking forward to this greatly, if a bit nervously.
Bought a Netgear WGR614v5 Wireless router the week before last to replace a Linksys router that was giving me a fair bit of grief- for goodness sake, I had to restart it every 3 days cos my connection kept dropping out on me. The Netgear one doesn't do that- well it better not!- but it does this really weird thing where I get "Server not found" errors on a lot of pages when I first start a browsing session. Browsing feels a little slow in general. This bothered me so much that I actually contacting Netgear's tech support- sadly they don't have a Singapore tech support line so I got through to a call-center in India. A friendly Indian dude ran me through a whole set of trouble-shooting questions and after about half an hour told me to update my routers firmware to the latest version. Which I did. But it doesn't seem to have alleviated the problem. This is severely uncool. I'm gonna call em back but somehow I doubt the service guys'll be of much more help- I suspect I'm going to have to turn this thing in and get a replacement. But I'd really appreciate any help/advice that kind netizens out there could offer.
Oddly enough, I've never used a wireless router that DIDN'T give me all kinds of problems. And I've been using Linksys- supposedly the best brand in routers- routers up til now.
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