Bees Love Truth

The PBS show 'History Detectives' is not uninteresting, although it's for some reason never actually gripping enough that I seek it out (I suspect the fictionalisation of a hunt for information, glossing over long hours in this or that library, the expert advice that feels flat and weirdly too-well-suited (no long rambling conversation in which important information emerges)).
Anyhow, I was flipping channels a little while ago and ran across an ad for it, which I stayed and paid attention to long enough to figure out what the advertised show was, and why they were using the opening (and titular line) of 'Watching the Detectives' as a soundtrack.
I am somewhat amused to imagine Elvis Costello amiably agreeing that it was fine for PBS to use the song (I know they can't have the budget to pay much for it), but I am also amused by the metadescriptive aspect of this song, delineating not the content of the show but the relation the viewer has with it. Yes, I guess I am watching the detectives. Thank you for making that so clear.

Aww, cute, Rip Slyme (the band with the afterfx puppets and hand creatures) has done a takeoff on some Meiji chocolate packaging for their album cover.

In situations like this, I always want to post on the forum in question and be like [Gary-spilled-his-ear-medicine voice] This is actually a style-parody of a very common brand of chocolate! Now you know! [/G-s-h-e-m v] But then I realise that this would be pointless and no one would care.

The other day I was coming home from work, and WERS was having its acapella segment. It was not that exciting (except that I now know what 'Jolene' is about), but there was a version of 'Such Great Heights,' done by a couple of equivalently wispy-voiced girls. I'd never heard all the lyrics before, whether from unwillingness to sit through the whole song or from difficulty in understanding whatsisname; but now I have, and now I know that there's a hole in the lyrics large enough to drive an mean-spirited video interpretation through. (You may not want to read this if you're one of those people who both likes this song and can have associations ruin things for them.)

Okay, so at the beginning, the protagonist is being self-consciously sappy about his (presumably) girlfriend, who's away on some trip. He's saying things about how he misses her and he wants her to come home. In fact the whole song is only about missing someone, not about how actually being with them is (and this is fuel for the popularity fire in certain circles. It's easy to idealize someone who's not actually present; all the iconic love-stuff can be projected onto them in their absence). This is important because once the chorus arrives, the point of view is shifted ('They will see us waving [...etc]'). Imagining a video for this song, it's not unreasonable to picture at this point a low angle shot of some people in grey suits and ties shading their eyes against the bright sky and motioning the inexplicably flying emo avatars to return to earth.
(Having this shot from the perspective of the singer doesn't work all that well, because the 'come down' gesture would be hard to read and the consternation of the 'they' would be invisible. Also I'd argue that thinking of the singer and his chick as unattainably far away, if only emotionally, is exactly what the songwriter wanted. They'll never understand us! Man!)

So, okay, in some small way, our perspective is placed with the earthbound normal people, the ones not in love or whatever. By wanting to place his awareness both with the observers and the observed, Mr. songwriter has made it fair game to apply 'everything looks perfect from far away' from both viewpoints. It's supposed to be applied from the viewpoint of the fliers, who are above the troubled world and don't have to care about it because they are reenacting a scene from Superman. However, the people on the ground can also think this about the fliers. How good is their relationship? I, the listener, don't actually know, all I hear is someone pining away for someone who is absent. There is no information on whether when they're together they're actually happy, or whether their relationship only looks perfect from far away.

And this is how I'd play it. I'd do a nice straightforward live-action video with cutely halfassed effects (to indicate the low production values necessary for those in love (ha, no, seriously to red-herring away from the actual intent of the video to subvert the ostensible message)), but whenever there was a shot of the couple flying around hand in hand, I'd make sure they were at arm's length and never quite looked at each other. Ooh, better yet, only looked at each other at arm's length. Maybe a couple of unexplained tear-stained faces. Just a couple of other little telltales that indicated that they weren't really actually comfortable around one another, that the relationship that they thought they had when they were apart wasn't anything like the one that seemed to be there when they got together. I'm sure it could get pretty sinister, but I think playing it subtle would be the way to go.

Not to get too Enid Coleslaw on you, but oh good god I CANNOT find a simple black/white, blue/cream, or black/grey longsleeve striped reasonably closefitting shirt. This is about as close as I can come, but it is large and mannish, and the stripes are frankly too big. Also, o gross, urban outfitters. Ebay has failed me. I hate stuff.

This animation school was lunk yesterday by mefi, and although I'd seen all the 2d stuff already, I thought to myself, Self, lettuce see how their 3d stuff looks, because kids doing their thesis are probably going to be inspirationally good at such an obviously good school. And thus I looked. And in close juxtaposition, the 3d stuff looked... dead. Something was wrong. And I think I have finally worked out what it is, and it's not even complicated. Minimal deformation (in the 2d sense of outline & mass distribution change) and squash/stretch. 3d models never deform nearly as much as their 2d counterparts. And yet, they're animated similarly otherwise, and sometimes the gestures are cranked way up to compensate for lack of form change. This looks in the end like a half-finished process, where stuff sure does move fancy (and OFTEN, GOD, every damn word has to have a hand-flail), but there's no overextension of limbs to wind up an extravagant gesture, there's no head squish in wacky takes. Damn it! And ALL THIS TIME, I thought I just sucked at 3d, because I couldn't make anything look good (in my favored style). I thought that Dreamworks was hiring the wrong people, or... I don't know. But it's all in the rig. In short, you can make it move the way you want, but you can't make it change shape the way you want. Unless you have a superfancy setup.

I believe Pixar has brought in some deformation to their characters, and CERTAINLY they have in Cars. This is probably why they made it, as proof of concept for mobile form-changin' characters. So that's why everything with a budget less than Pixar Feature Film still looks like Jimmy Neutron.

Now, of course, 'hyper-realistic' game anims shouldn't probably be able to do any of this, except... maybe a little.



* Title from the dinosaur mailing list I follow.

If I had the legs for it, this would totally be my costume this Halloween.

Nick will now show up and make an observation about dressing up as multiple people.

You know what would be expedient? If LJ interests and LJ tags could somehow be crossed, so that tag-interests could somehow grow organically out of what tags you use and how often. That way it's meaningful all by itself, as opposed to constructed to hopefully be meaningful. (I was just going back and tagging entries, and happened upon my big whiny post about LJ interests.)
However, the way you'd use tags would have to be a little different (categories could be less broad and such), but whatever. It's easier to put names to concrete things you are currently talking about than to divide your whole consciousness into named piles.

Also I would really like a way to mass-tag things on LJ, as lastfm does it, f'rinstance. Going back and tagging entries one by one is so much for chumps that it's all over you screen.

You know, in a way, what with all these new avatar-icon slots available, livejournal is starting to behave like the Conversatron (or TMOL). The same characters generally written by the same people, but variety is there, and avatar-as-deliverer-of-comment (selection of avatar for appropriateness of representation of the post) happens all the time. HMM!

Has anyone ever noticed that the manure truck that stops Biff's car in Back to the Future is labeled 'D Jones manure (hauling?)' I mean, I know PEOPLE have, because I have google, but, see, what I think this means is that Robocop and Back to the Future take place in the same universe. Conceivably, the Robocop timeline happens along the alternate evil 1985's, and is destroyed by Marty. Although, it's also possible that since it's obvious that BTTF is set in a California-like place and Robocop in a Detroit-like place, that even the good BTTF timeline could coexist with Robocop.
So, maybe Dick Jones's dad is also named Dick Jones (or Don, or Douglas, since Dick is short for Richard), and it's really his family's manure company, and by 1985 Dick Jones Jr. is seeking his fortune out in the rust belt, finally out from under dad's unambitious thumb.

(Credit to Kelli for finding the Harry Potter image I so sorely needed.)