So while I was stumbling around the internet(using StumbleUpon, the greatest procrastination tool of all time, if you use Firefox get the extension StumbleUpon), when i stumbled upon some sort of blog that had the top 10 sexiest videos. There were a bunch of techno songs with the predictable Satisfaction and Call on Me and some other techno videos...one involving skydiving babies whose target was a mountain size, lingerie-wearing supermodel. So one of the videos was this song My My My by Armand Van Helden. It is a techno/dance song and the girls are pretty attractive but its also the bit of humor he uses that really sells the video for me. The song is also addicting with a pretty awesome beat.
So I youtubed Armand Van Helden and he has a couple other videos i really liked.
This one is called Into Your Eyes...this video also has a subtle humor to it and more sexy girls. Plus the guys haircut is ridiculous. The song is again pretty awesome.
The last one is called Hear My Name...and i gotta say its probably the strangest of the three. Im not going to spoil what goes on. The song is also probably the weakest of the three but its still not bad.
My new goal in life, that I intend to see through to its completion, is to get into the NBA so I may participate in a totally random, and therefore awesome, danceoff. Such a danceoff can be seen below. The dance moves aren't incredible, but thats beside the point, its the fact there was a danceoff at all is what makes it so incredibly awesome. And because Shaq and Dwight Howard are huge.
On a side note, the all star shootout back on saturday night was awesome, I personally thought michael jordan and Dr. J were inconsistent with their ratings for the slam dunk contest.
So last night me and a friend decided to do some midnight sledding...on our backs or in plastic bins. Conventional sleds were used as well, and were the most thrilling, as they'd launch those brave enough to use 'em across the street at the bottom of my hill(seriously wouldn't hit the street at all) and into the next yard, into a stupid pole thats randomly in the middle of the yard...or an even stupider golfball-shaped mailbox.
We'd race sometimes, and like all races I've been in, I won 'em.
So Sunday is again upon us and I should be doing homework right now....but instead I'm going to post. Last night I was playing with these magnets my girlfriend has and I found out my magnetic powers are on the same scale as Magneto's. Look below and be amazed:
Now I know what you are asking yourself, "Is that all your powers can do?" And of course the answer is no. Behold greatness:
These scenes are probably boring when they're isolated from the movie they're from, but I think they're extremely effective in immersing the audience when apart of the movie as a whole.
One of the all time greatest single take scenes ever in cinematic history, so inspiring to me.
"Accept me as I am. Only then can we discover each other."
Another great old foreign movie, this one is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made, and I agree. After watching this, the similarities between this and Adaptation are insane. 8 1/2 was basically an autobiography of Federico Fellini, the director, and Adaptation was basically an autobiography of Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter. Each movie mixed together the past, present, and fantasy seamlessly and dealt with their shortcomings as human beings and their regrets, of course both ending with a revelatory message as how to come to terms with themselves and live a fulfilling life.
This is one of the few movies that stands the test of time, I think it will forever be applicable to whoever watches it. But, it is a poetic movie, and as Tarkovsky said, "the film for the large audience cannot be poetical", so only if your artsy fartsy in the least bit should you try watching this movie(or Solaris).
In closing, heres a creepy clip of a midget laughing maniacally for 3 minutes, and a great scene from the movie "Oldboy" demonstrating the sculpting in time theory.
"We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!"
A while ago I made a list of my top ten sci-fi movies, one of them was the american version of Solaris. I said I never watched the original version because it looked like a boring 60s experimental movie. But then I learned of Andrei Tarkovsky's genius, and decided to see what his movies are like. This movie is a near masterpiece, and among the greatest movies made, making the american remake look superfluous and shallow.
What this movie does so well and so poetically, is present such themes as the inadequacies of human kind to comprehend the universe or the heart...human fraility, through its fundamental weaknesses of sentimentality and guilt...dependency. The alien in this movie is a planet comprised entirely of water, with which the humans try to communicate with. The planet, which is basically a perfect entity, tries to communicate with the humans by materializing people or things from the humans' memories or fantasies, in an attempt to understand them better. For the main character, it was his deceased wife. There is so much that could be said about this movie, perhaps another time I will exercise my philosophical thoughts in another post, but not this one, maybe never...as its better to destroy whats unnecessary than to create it, does it really matter what any of us has to say? Man generally writes to affirm his existence, to feel of some worth.
I would like to point out a cinematic theory that I love, that Tarkovsky created. He created the theory known as "sculpting in time", using long takes and few cuts to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. I think, a movie like Children of Men is probably a good contemporary example of this idea(from my understanding of it), where there were several great long sequences with minimal or no cuts - the first car chase where Julianne Moore gets shot, Clive Owen escaping the safe house with the pregnant girl, just about the entire final 20 minutes in the refugee city. A long uncut sequence in a movie is more memorable than any other technique, in my opinion...leaves a more lasting impression as it is transcribes time in real time. It is this unique trait of the cinematic medium that should be better utilized. "The speedy jump-cutting style that is prevalent in music videos and many Hollywood movies, by contrast, overrides any sense of time by imposing the editor's viewpoint." Some music videos that I love that follow this theory are below, 2 for radiohead songs, the other for the old 90s band Wax, directed by the great spike jonez(Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine on the spotless mind).
So I had to make this a separate post because I have a nice little series of screen shots that will depict, in a different way, the destructiveness of the weapons.
So this is the map at the start, still with 10 players, again thats me in the white circle:
This next one shows all the missiles, in flight. It's hard to see, but I just launched the most destructive nuclear warhead in the game at that little city:
This is the resulting mushroom cloud from said nuclear device:
This is the final aftermath of everything, only the huge, water-filled crater is the result of my nuke, the other smaller crater was caused by the United Kingdom:
So I've been playing a lot of this simple little game called Scorched3D. It's free for any OS and has some pretty incredible graphics made entirely out of OpenGL. So I took some screen shots of the game in action.
Here is a snapshot of the land as it started...before I used the most devastating weapon in the game. Thats me in the middle with the big, white circle around me.
Here is the same piece of land after I used the weapon called Dr. Strangelove. If you look carefully you can see the tiny strip of land that was left in left corner area. There were originally 10 players, 9 bots plus me, afterwards there were only two.
This blog is just a collection of stuff we like, so we can find them easily at any time later on. This blog is also to serve as a "creative" writing outlet for us...any posts with the label "potdana project" means one of us gave the other a topic to write about, and the style in which they must adhere too. So, thats why theres random stories and lyrics and poems and whatever.
