MikeBrum.com

I saw The Watchmen today.

I am a big fan of the comics and expected a lot. Naturally, my expectations weren’t 100% met – but when do these sorts of adaptions truly deliver 100%? Little things aside, I was thoroughly pleased.

First, the most unexpected aspect that I was happy with was the soundtrack. It seemed to me that extra special care was given to the music selection for particular scenes. The sorts of music played throughout most of the movie wouldn’t make it into my usual rotation, but they were contextually spot-on. For example, has anyone ever played 99 Luftballoons at a more appropriate time? I think not.

Now, it’s true that a lot was left out of the movie. I don’t think the majority of it is critical to the plot. The Black Freighter is being addressed in an “animated comic” DVD that’ll be released on March 24th. I really don’t think they could have properly interlaced it with the current movie in the genre in which it was shot without it feeling painfully disjointed. It’s a great sub-story that perfectly reflects the dialogue that it sits over, but it wouldn’t have easily worked within the structure of a motion picture in my opinion.

Similar to the reason to exclude the Black Freighter sub-plot, the “mars time scene” in which Jon revisits aspects of his past (where the readers are keyed into the nature of how he perceives and exists throughout time) didn’t really work for me in the theater. I think they salvaged a decent creation story for Dr. Manhattan, but the punch and impact of those panels in the comic are unfortunately lost. These pages are definitely my favorite in the series, so I was paying particularly close attention to these scenes.

At the heart of the story, the viewers are asked classic questions about the nature of Good and Evil -

• Is anyone wholly good or evil?
• Is there good and evil in all of us?
• Is it OK for a good person to do something evil if it begets a good outcome?
• Can someone neither good nor evil be capable of either?

The moral ambiguity and conflict are transmitted as clearly on the big screen as it is turning pages of the comic. I’m glad they didn’t sacrifice this for more action or crazy special effects. The movie is just as juicy if you’re receptive to it. It’s also very raw and graphic at times. While many movies use these cheap tricks as a vehicle to keep the viewer interested while there’s no other content to deliver, we see most of the gore and excess used to drive those moral questions and paint the world in the dark tones that are needed to fully explore the characters that we’re watching and properly understand their personal challenges and struggles.

As for the change in the ending, I think it was somewhat “necessary” in terms of selling it to the general public. We’ve seen it happen in many comic adaptations to film and that’s totally fine if it serves a purpose.

This is definitely a movie that I plan on getting on DVD and will likely watch it countless times – enjoying both the breathtaking visuals that modern cinema can produce and meaty content that was written up so expertly in the mid 80’s.

I wanted to share some of the first “real” shots with my MP-E 65 that I took today. With the world starting to wake up around us, we’re getting some little critters to shoot… finally.

This little house spider was hanging out on a door jamb and being rather patient with me while I snapped away. He started out in a really bad spot, so when he got restless, I transplanted him to another door jamb.

The shots are at 3x and 5x, respectively. I’m using the MT-24 EX for light. Like all of my macro shots I post, I didn’t do any cropping and only the most basic RAW-to-JPEG conversion.

Definitely not the easiest thing that I’ve done, and definitely not the best shots either. I can see that the MP-E is going to be a huge learning curve – especially when I’m shooting moving critters mere millimeters from the front of my lens.

… but it’s just the type of technical challenge that I enjoy.

I’ve decided that I want to learn a “speed solving” algorithm for the Rubik’s Cube.

I already know a pretty easy-to-memorize algorithm that takes about a minute to two minutes to solve pending how much work needs to be done at each “step”. For whatever reason, I enjoy solving it – even if it’s very predictable and it’s only a minute’s worth of work. It’s not uncommon for me to randomize and resolve a cube as soon as it’s solved from the previous pass.

Clearly a heavy dose of Geek + OCD going on here.

Since I haven’t been challenged at solving a cube in a while, I want to learn something that’ll make me have to think for a change. I don’t really have the desire to be one of those crazy people that can solve a cube in 10 seconds flat (the current world record is actually less than 10 seconds – which just blows my mind!), I just want to have to think about what I’m doing moreso than I have to now. Plus it’d be pretty neat to be able to solve a cube around 30 seconds – which would be a 50-75% reduction in time given where I’m at now.

And yes – this is what I’ve done with my Saturday evening. I’m that cool.

I think I’m going to finally see Watchmen tomorrow – which I’m rather excited about. Put it off for too long!

With the weather finally becoming bearable, I’m getting motivated to get outside and start taking photos again. Time to stretch and shake off the winter hibernation I’ve been in. Can’t let the slump linger – spring is just a week away!

On my way to work on Wednesday I saw a low-speed car accident. I’ll set it up for you.

The accident happened at a stop light. Both cars were side-by-side at the red. The truck was probably the equivalent of a 24′ Uhaul (but wasn’t a Uhaul – it was another local delivery truck that was transporting dairy or something like that). The truck was in the left lane and the car was in the right lane. The truck had its blinker on to turn right.

When the light turned green, the truck started going right – as one would assume given its turn signal. The car lurched forward, honked its horn and screeched to a halt. The truck kept on turning and the rear wheel well tagged the front-right corner of the bumper – mostly pulling it off. The truck “hopped” a little and there was a rather loud bang. It was great.

The important note about this setup is that the right “lane” that the car was in isn’t a lane. Up to the corner that the car was at its a bus stop. And further back it’s parking spaces. It’s not a travel lane. At all. So in all of this, the truck was the only one that was obeying the traffic laws and in the right. The car was just being a jerkoff.

So the truck pulls over after making the corner and the car follows. As is the case with situations (and people) like this, the dude in the car gets out and is super pissed and starts yelling at the truck driver. The truck driver calmly explains all the reasons why the dude in the car is a shithead and is 100% at fault for what happened (blinker, not a travel lane, etc.). The car driver wasn’t so verbal after the schooling, but was still clearly pissed. Plus his car was already a piece of crap, so you knew it was going to get a duct tape special when he got home.

All-in-all, a good time for the spectator.

See kids, it pays to learn the rules of the road and pay attention to what you’re doing… even at a red light.

When not working, I’ve been spending a lot of time building lego sets and tooling around with a tank concept.

The inspiration comes from this awesome tank bot created by Brian Davis:

I’ve been able to build the basic shooting mechanism and have prototyped a track as well. I need some additional parts before I can build a part and start building a frame to haul around the shooter, motors, ammo hopper and the NXT brick (the computer that runs everything). Once I get that built out, I’ll start to actually write code for it to add some automation.

I don’t want it to be a pure ripoff, but I’m really impressed with the efficiency in the design and I figure it’s worth emulating.

As I start making some progress and actually have something to show off, I’ll be taking some pictures and hopefully video – because people can only read so much text before getting bored out of their minds.

I built the Lego 8294 Excavator set and took a series of photos to make a time lapse.

While the video isn’t the greatest thing ever (I haven’t really done this before today!), I wanted to share it. I figure this is the only way I’ll learn.

Enjoy!

Nothing major to report. Just lots of little things.

Today’s Wednesday, so I picked up some comics on the way home. It was a good day for some titles that I’m a fan of – Deadpool, Farscape, Hellboy and Army of Darkness. I’m going to need to get a new box to hold comics and another set of dividers soon. Space is getting tight and things are starting to get disorganized – which irks me to no end. Some aspects of my life can be blissfully disorganized, while I get super ADD if others are not. I don’t claim to understand it, I just deal with it.

The past week or so has been Lego-centric. I’ve made a few small purchases for specific pieces that I need for a project that I’m visualizing. I think I’m going to be building a set tomorrow or Friday night (that’s exactly how cool I am) and then start putting specing out what I need for the other work in progress. I think I need a second container for parts. My current one is almost at capacity and I have more things that need to be sorted. Meh.

I ordered some candy through Amazon and I’m waiting on its arrival. It was supposed to show up on Tuesday but didn’t due to the snow we got. Then it was supposed to show up today but apparently requires a signature- even though another package was delivered without one. Luckily I can work from home tomorrow morning and wait for it to show up. It’s just a pain in the ass. At least I’ll have a bunch of candy!

The only other bit of news is that I’ve signed up for a course at NESOP. It’s a creative lighting course, which I’m excited about. Most of the things that I enjoy shooting require external lighting to do well – so anything that helps me in that area is beneficial! There’s also an “advanced” lighting course (meant to be taken after the one I signed up for) which is definitely an option pending how this one goes and what the specific course material will be. Bridges to cross though.

Since I’m working tomorrow evening, I’m forcing myself to stay up a bit later tonight so I can get up a bit later and thus be prepared for the later end time tomorrow. My sleep schedule has been pretty messed up since vacation and I can’t afford to be a zombie while working on production systems in the evenings. Gotta get my sleep scheduled shifted back to where it should be. Hopefully something can get sorted out in the next week or two. This is getting old real fast.

That’s more or less it. Like I said, nothing big. Staying busy, but still not doing a whole lot. Strange how that works out.

Here’s some topside shots from our Bahamas trip.

The thumbnails don’t reflect the actual composition of the images, so click through if you’re interested!

If you look up, you’ll see a new link: Photo Galleries.

I wrote some code to leverage the existing gallery engine that I’m using and display a nice listing of the galleries that I have to show. I’m running the exec-php plugin to allow me to actually embed code in my posts and pages, which increases WordPress’s versatility exponentially in my opinion. I used it a while back while running my old D&D Blog, but haven’t really had need to dabble with it for quite some time. I wanted to find a “simple solution” for a gallery display and I think this is it.

I had to make a minor code change to a NextGEN Gallery module in the end, but it was amazingly trivial. While I’ve been working on this for about 4 hours, it was also while chatting, browsing and watching The Big Lebowski – so I definitely didn’t have my head buried in code the whole time. The biggest issue was tracking down the NextGEN Gallery issue, which turned out to be the addition of just two lines of code. I still want to add some error handling/sanity test code to the gallery wrapper, but it’s ready to go as-is.

Definitely feeling good about finally having a nice gallery browser. I’m sure I’ll extend it over time.

In 2008 we went to Grand Cayman for about a week and a half to do some diving.

Due to some technical issues, the underwater shots really didn’t turn out, but I got a handful of good topside shots that I’ve posted.

They’ve been added to the regular galleries and you can check out the site here: