|
|
|
January 30, 2004
I've spent the last few days digging out on the East Coast, where it is 15 degrees right now. From the Trek world comes this gossip item, which, if true, could signal a much different future. My personal belief is that Enterprise is going to get canned, either this season or next, and nothing is going to replace it. Maybe doing two Trek specials a year would solve some of the big problems the franchise has had since the mid-nineties.
January 27, 2004
An exciting night in the NBA last night, where no less than three games were decided by two points or less, and two different buzzer shots that went in--that would have tied the game or changed the game's winner--were ruled too late. I was frankly happy to see the Spurs lose again because they're clearly overrated this year and, in my opinion, got lucky last year.
Becoming an NBA junkie has had some ill effects on my free time, but NBA league pass has been a pretty good value. But the point of this post is that Comcast cable, which serves the Bay Area and is now the country's largest cable company, hasn't gotten on the ball and added the NBA TV channel. So even though they're happily hawking the NBA league pass through iNDemand PPV for $199, you're missing four big games a week that are only on NBA TV. My suggestion is to get satellite TV if you can. January 26, 2004
For those of you interested in my band, Ganymede, I've been mixing our last album, Space and Time, into 5.1 surround sound. I got a "ProActive 5.1" monitoring system as a demo from Alesis, which is good because these speakers have a few problems and I wouldn't have wanted to pay for them.
In any event, it has been a lot of fun to take the files and make a nice surround experience out of them. I'm particularly happy with the 5.1 mixes of "Hong Kong" and "Missing" that I did, and I hope to encode them in 5.1 Windows Media files and post them here for anyone who's interested. January 24, 2004
Not to degenerate into Star Trek posts, but I have to warn everyone about Shattered Universe, the new Trek game for the XBox and PS2. What a load of shit this thing is! This review calls it out for being lame, but only hints at exactly how awful it is. The controls are impossible to manage, the action is slow and clunky, you spend most of your time flying in wrong directions through space, the video interludes are painful, the music is terrible and the 3D is unconvincing ... the list about the game could go on and on.
But it's even more of a disaster creatively, supposedly taking place in the "Lost Era" between the original movies and The Next Generation. There are a few technical things that are completely wrong, and if you're interested email me and we can discuss. I simply can't believe the sordid cast of losers who have taken over the Star Trek franchise, from the fools producing Enterprise and Nemesis, to the idiots screwing around with The Motion Picture for the "Director's Edition" down to the morons responsible for Shattered Universe. No one can get it right. January 23, 2004
I was initially dismayed at the Kerry win in Iowa, but then I remembered back to about a year ago when I thought Kerry was probably an OK candidate. We all thought Dean could be swept up on a wave of liberal populism, but that's probably wishful thinking. It's back to heavy lifting for the Democrats, and Dean probably can't do that heavy lifting, so he may as well leave it to Kerry or Edwards.
I got some interesting responses to my SACD post yesterday ... I think the general idea is that most people don't want to re-buy their favorite albums yet again. For most people, surround sound isn't enough of an enticement because they don't have audiophile systems or ears. January 22, 2004
It's pretty funny that the music industry, mired in sales and stupidity doldrums for most of recent history, is shocked--shocked!--that people aren't lining up for the new SACD and DVD-Audio formats. I happen to be a big SACD/DVD-Audio fan, and I wrote a 5,000-word article for the recently deceased ArtistPro magazine on this very topic, reprinted here in its uncut glory as a PDF. However, I believe now that the industry is so screwed that no amount of technical wizardry is going to pull them out this time.
Interestingly, since I wrote the article, development of the "super DVD," based on blu-ray techonology, has been getting much closer to reality. This means that the movie industry is about to discover what the music industry has already found out with SACD and DVD-Audio: People won't re-buy stuff again once they have it on a pristine digital format. For most people, the compact disc is a perfectly great medium, an unbreakable replacement for obviously imperfect vinyl and cassette. For even more people, the DVD is the "ultimate format," the perfect replacement for shitty VHS. It seems unlikely that there will be much need for blu-ray discs in the marketplace because DVD has been portrayed as the last movie format anyone will need. January 21, 2004
A pretty amazing find from Cinephile, the best video store in Los Angeles:
 It's a Canadian true-crime show called The Scales of Justice from 1990, something a bit like Unsolved Mysteries. Two episodes were directed by none other than David Cronenberg, and the whole team was involved: Howard Shore, Ronald Sanders, Denise Cronenberg, etc. The first and best episode deals with a convenience store ("milk store" in Canadian) robbery by some Jamaican thugs that leaves a woman paralyzed. In creepy Cronenberg fashion, the paralyzed woman plays herself in the dramatizations, which is something rarely attempted in American true-crime shows. There's also a running narration by a lawyer guy who appears on camera in creepy, not-quite-right setups. In short, it's an amazing thing, shot on video, inexplicably made between Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. Further proof that Cronenberg is the best. January 20, 2004
Hello everyone, and welcome to patrickrunkle.com. As usual, lots of things going on around here. I just got my beautiful Crumar Spirit back from the shop in southern California, and I'm really excited about making some space music with this thing. I've always wanted to tackle a more instrumental synth project, and I think the time is now. I'm also working on a track for Synthetik FM's upcoming album. And last but not least, we're hoping to start filming the video for Ganymede's "Hong Kong" shortly.
|