Tuesday, October 17, 2006
This and That
I've been painfully busy of late, mostly with RL stuff, and have been neglecting this blog, along with my review writing and other things. That's probably not going to change very soon, but here's a grab bag of various cool stuff I've seen during my recent surfing.
You Tube Tools. A site put together a list of a bunch of cool freeware programs to enhance your You Tubing experience. Save videos with one click, convert them to mp3s, easy simultaneous searching of You Tube, Google Video and AOL Video, and more. I've not tried them out, so caveat emptor, but the list looks pretty handy. (I've got to get a new computer; my old 60g HD has been 90% full for like a year, and it's holding me back from stealing content at the speed I deserve.) I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but if you like Anime, YouTube is your one stop shop. I recently finished watching all 51 episodes of Full Metal Alchemist, and pretty much the full run of every anime series you can think of is available on YouTube, albeit at far lower quality than DVD/file sharing networks. You have to hunt a bit, usually, since these videos are clearly copyright violations and get taken down, but there's always another person ready to upload them.
Here's one Lanth sent me; it's a NYT article about a new digitizing technology that's leaps and bounds beyond the current motion capture stuff. Watch the video if nothing else; it's visually impressive. Their technology isn't quite as good as fully animating a figure, as WETA did with Gollum in LotR, but it's getting better and it doesn't require a dozen video animators to go frame by frame for six months of post production. Plus, as Lanth said, it beats the rubbery, uncanny valley-proving, "soul-destroying motion capture techniques that they used for Polar Express."
Among the recent most popular photos on Yahoo News are a few beefcake shots of US military personnel.
This undated photo released by Freedom Is Not Free shows former Marine Corps Sgt. Rudy Reyes, of Kansas City, Mo. The photo appears on the cover of the 2007 calendar 'Americas's Heroes: Reconnaissance Marines,' with proceeds to benefit veterans. (AP Photo/Freedom Is Not Free, Tim Mantoani)
No, freedom isn't free. I wasn't aware that it cost so much time in the gym, though.
The first trailer for Grindhouse, Quentin Tarentino's and Robert Rodriguez's homage to the low budget gore 'n tits slasher pics of the 70s, is now online and it's unbelievably cheesy, and a hell of a lot of fun. Word is that each director is making an hour long film, and they'll be shown as a sort of double feature, with (newly created) trailers for other such films as filler between the two halves. I don't know if two hours of this stuff will be watchable, but two minutes of it chopped into a trailer certainly whet my whistle.
Starvation is a great diet aid. I've weighed around 170 for several months. In theory this is a good thing, since I get to the gym 4 or 5 times a week and lift weights pretty regularly, so I must have been losing fat while gaining muscle. It was just odd that I kept so consistently between 168-172. That changed a couple of weeks ago, when Malaya brought home some sort of food poisoning from work, passed it to me, and caused me not to eat for about a day and a half. I felt crappy for about three days, getting mostly over it the Friday that I visited Flagship with Lanth. The benefit? I lost about five pounds, and as they say in the diet pill commercials, "I've kept it off!" So for the past two weeks I've weighed 165, and since my extra weight concentrates almost entirely on my would-be pot belly, the difference is visible when I'm shirtless. Lucky Malaya!
This is what's tough about dieting for most people. Those of us who make an effort and exercise and eat to moderation can maintain our weight. It's just damn hard to drop those 10 pounds you want to. You can gain them easily; any weekend spent pigging out on pizza or quesadillas will do the trick, but doing the opposite requires starvation, illness, or a radical diet. Losing a pound a week is possible with long term moderation, but what fun is that?
On the other hand, most people seem to lament their yo yo dieting, as they binge and purge and go up and down, so maybe my theories about maintaining only apply to Malaya and myself.
I don't think I've ever linked to him before, mostly since I've not been blogging about politics that much off late, but I wanted to point to at least one Glenn Greenwald post while I was thinking about it. Pretty much everything he posts is worth reading (if you can spare the time; he's got worse logorrhea than I used to) and finding a recent post worth highlighting is like throwing darts at his archives. I'll go with this one, not because it's about any real burning issue, but simply for how well it demonstrates his skill set. Greenwald specializes in taking a hot argument (usually from the right wing), airing it, then utterly demolishing it with countless counter examples and dozens of links. It's almost scholarly, the way he does it, and the fact that he's worked as a litigator is evident when you see how thoroughly he pwns idiocy with calm, reasoned, unassailable argument.
Another good example is this post, about a Thomas Sowell, a right wing journalist who writes that we shouldn't pay attention to the various ongoing Republican pedophilia and bribery scandals, since they're just distractions from more serious North Korea and terrorism news. As Greenwald exhaustively documents, Sowell spent most of the Clinton Administration obsessing over all things Lewinsky, even going so far as to dismiss Clinton's military strikes against Osama bin Laden as political ploys to distract the media from the more serious issue of whether or not the president got a blow job from a horny, plump, big-haired intern.
Or take this one, about a right wing blogger who is obsessed over high Muslim birthrates, and how large families are a bad thing, and how this means the terrorists are outbreeding us. As Greenwald points out, high birthrates are tightly correlated to most religions. Devout Catholics in the third world are rather notorious for the habit (Irish twins, anyone?), and as Greenwald points out, Orthodox Jews in Israel actually have a substantially higher birthrate than the various Arabs in the area.
Anyway, you get the point. I like his blog and his writing, though I often wish he could make his arguments about 25% shorter. Then again, I wish the same thing about me, so it's not a real serious criticism.Labels: dieting, glenn greenwald, military, uncanny valley, you tube
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