Published: February 15, 2007 – 4:55 pm
Last edited: February 15, 2007 - 4:55 pm
Published: February 12, 2007 – 10:14 pm
Last edited: February 24, 2007 - 9:14 am
Not as different from the movie as I thought.
Some simple differences, and a few of the characters are quite different physically from the actos who played them in the movie (Humperdink, Westley) and the narration part of the story is different, with the narrator of the story being the author talking about being told the story as a child by his father, and having interludes about the publishing of the story, and the “original” version of the story but overall the same story, with most of the lines in the movie being word for word from the book.
Better than the movie in that there is a lot more content, especially on some of the supporting characters (Fezzik and Inigo).
If you liked the movie, read the book. If you’ve never seen the movie or read the book, watch the movie and then read the book, both excellent.
Published: February 2, 2007 – 8:27 am
Last edited: February 22, 2007 - 1:57 pm
Popping, a R&B/hip hop based dance style from the 70’s has become popular of late in Japan, and whereas I’m not generally a huge R&B or dance fan some of this stuff is neat to watch.
One of the biggest things in the media over here was an 11 year old girl, whose father is a dancer known as “Strong Machine”, hence the girl’s name of “Strong Machine #2”. She was used for a video (below) from the Japanese newave/synthpop group the Polysics and one a major dance competition in the U.S. and was then promptly featured on every Japanese tv show ever, or that’s what it seemed like anyway.
I’ll post a couple of the videos and I am not even gonna bother with YouTube because they’ll just get pulled anyway considering they are a “promotion” video (which apparently isn’t allowed to be used to actually promote the music…) and some (gasp) clips from (the ever forbidden) Japanese tv.
Here’s some videos:
The Polysics video featuring Strong Machine #2
Strong Machine #2’s contest-winning performance on a Japanese tv show
A neat video of the popping group Umin. Watch the video to the end to see the sped-up/slowmotion stuff they do (with their bodies that is, not camera tricks)
Just ignore this link for now, leaving up the conflicting player for now for testing purposes, videos are below using a separate plugin.
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Published: January 27, 2007 – 7:56 am
Last edited: February 27, 2007 - 4:56 pm
I decided to save the most “specialized” of the webcomics I read for the last of the webcomics posts I will do for a bit.
Order of the Stick (OotS) is a webcomic which parodies role-playing games (the dice kind, not the final fantasy kind… mostly) and the internet “stick figure everything” fad all in one.
I don’t think anyone who has never played RPGs will get much out of it, but if you played them when you were a kid (like me) or still play them, you’ll probably find this strip hilarious.
Here’s the site:
http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/GiantITP/ootscript
Published: January 26, 2007 – 4:59 pm
Last edited: January 26, 2007 - 4:59 pm
This is a book by Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies as well as Brisco County Jr. and the Hercules and Xena tv shows.
I really liked the evil dead movies, Brisco County Jr. and (somewhat embarrassingly) the Hercules TV show.
Campbell is a great actor, who really shines playing kind of “hammy” roles, and he’s a really funny guy to boot.
I ended up picking up the book when I was back home for a month last year, because I’m starting to run out of things to read and the selection of English books available in the general Japanese bookstore isn’t all that great (99% of my book shopping here ends up being through Amazon.com, but it’s not as easy to “stumble on” something new that might be interesting), so when I go home I end up picking up anything that seems like it might be even remotely interesting.
So I bought this book. Turns out it is mostly about making movies and TV shows, and being an actor (not surprising for an actor’s autobiography I suppose), and I am not at all interested in making movies or being an actor, but this was a really well written and entertaining book. Campbell is a really funny guy, and he managed to make aspects of the movie business that I normally couldn’t care less about seem interesting.
One of the very rare books that has actually managed to get me to laugh out loud.
