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Monthly Archives: August 2006

Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children was just released on DVD. Now I was a huge fan of the first Final Fantasy movie - The Spirits Within, and even a fan of a all but the most recent Final Fantasy games, but somehow Advent Children manages to disappoint me.

I just got the DVD in the mail and popped it in to watch it. The story seems too built on top of Final Fantasy VII (the video game) and without having played it I found the movie difficult to get into. There are some cute cliches, and a lot of throwbacks to the game as a series, but Advent Children lacks the intelligent story and true artistry that the The Spirits Within was so rich with.

To top it off the DVD is a very poorly encoded. For such a cutting edge computer generated movie I would have expected much higher video quality. Other CG content (The Incredibles for instance) looks so fantastic, and given that the production company does not even need to worry about a film transfer so it’s really a shame.

I’m suddenly inspired to go get another copy of Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within for my collection. It’s a much better movie, and from what I remember is an order of magnitude better of a transfer.

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Continued domesticity - now with more frosting

Sunday, August 13, 2006

In the continued theme of home improvements I got all domestic today and decided to frost the glass in my sliding deck door. It will make it easier to cool my condo off, make for a much more private living room, and finally make for a truly naked cinema experience to be possible (without all those pesky tickets for breaking decency laws).

Check out the before and after shots.

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YAY - adult livingroom

Sunday, August 13, 2006

So I’ve finally accomplished my goal and replaced pretty much all of the furniture in my living room with something more appropriate of my age. The couch and love seat arrived yesterday in all their leathery goodness and have graced my life with their welcoming embrace.

Now that they are up here in my condo I’m pretty happy, but getting them here was another story entirely. When I ordered them I carefully measured to make sure they would fit in my living room, but completely spaced on measuring any of the halls, corners, elevators, doors, or stairs to get into my living room.

Upon Wee showing up with the couches shortly after noon we excitedly hauled them through the garage and into the elevator. Sticky bit was that only about 90% of it fit into the elevator, so unless I fancied an impromptu sectional the stairs looked like the only option for getting the 3,323,467 pound couch up and into my third floor condo.

Three hours of heavy lifting later Brien, Wee, and myself managed to haul it up three flights of stairs, around 11 corners, through my door (after removing the door from it’s hinges, and one of the moulding panels surrounding my door) and into the now fully adult living room.

Thankfully after the whole couch saga the love seat fit into the elevator, and slid right into the condo (particularly with the door removed) and now sits in it’s final comfortable resting place.

Skype is a little less enthusiastic about the couches than I am. Last night he all but wouldn’t get on them, and today is still a little wary of the big, new, leather monsters inhabiting the corners of my living room. I’m sure he will get used to them (I sure am) in time, and come to love them as much as *his* old futon.

P.S. speaking of the old futon - I got rid of it on Craig’s List, and damn if the hottest guy ever didn’t come to get them. Pity he mentioned his girlfriend otherwise I so would have done naughty molesting things to him while he was checking out the couch.

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Damn I watch a lot of movies

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Damn - I decided to give up my OCD alphabetizing of my DVD’s about three weeks ago and just started sorting them by date last watched. Every time I watch a movie I put it at the beginning of the collection. I was just looking at my collection and realized that I watch a lot of movies! In the past 19 days I have watched 32 movies. That works out to about 1.7 movies a day.

It’s actually a bit more than that because I have watched a few of the HD-DVD’s more than once, and have watched V for Vendetta four times. Once you throw that into the calculation it actually works out to about two movies a day.

To continue this trend I’m watching a movie right now - The Dark Crystal in all it’s Jim Henson goodness! To see a full a full list of the movies I have watched in the last three weeks (in chronological order no less) click through to the full post.

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(Continued)

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Two movies, one good one

Monday, August 7, 2006

Yesterday involved two new movies being crammed into my skull. The sad thing is that the two movies averaged out to a rather mediocre experience. For my first cinematic experience I drove over to Bellevue to join Scott, Erin, and Mark for A Scanner Darkly, which was simply fantastic. A Scanner Darkly is yet another movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel brought to life with a masterful touch. The animation (or rotoscoping if you want to get technical about it) was well done, the dialog left questions dangling in my brain, and the move as a whole meshed nicely.

Sadly the second movie I saw was nowhere near as good. Before A Scanner Darkly I dropped by the mall to pick up some new HD-DVD’s to add to the collection. I saw Doom had come out as an HD-DVD, and figured “Hey - it’s going to be a bad movie, but comon - it’s got chainsaws in space! It can’t be that bad”.

Boy was I wrong. Doom is quite possibly one of the worst movies ever made. The dialog is transparent and annoying, the action is mediocre, and the #@$@ chainsaws in space bit was a mere 20 seconds rather than the redeeming whole movie experience it should have been. To top it all off the cheese FPS view that was so hyped in the trailers was poorly done, and only managed to take up a mere 30 seconds near the end of the movie.

Hey - I guess I should be looking on the bright side of things. Even though I had to endure a nearly space-chainsaw free Doom experience I still had a great day, got out of the house, and saw some good friends.

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God bless

Sunday, August 6, 2006

Or so I was just told by a random stranger outside while walking Skype. It’s been a fantastic week. I’m settling into my 25th year of life with style, and have been spending a lot of time at home working on a few new projects as well as enjoying my new home entertainment setup.

Of note regarding the home theater I was able to add a HD-DVD player to my personal digital entertainment ecosystem. Thanks to the many great friends to each pitched in a bit for my birthday the amazon gift certificates added up to let me get the Toshiba HD-A1 player, and a few discs. I’m very impressed with the quality of the picture (MPEG-4 makes such a difference over MPEG-2 for HD compression) but agree with most other reviewers that the HD-A1 has some usability and performance quirks that will hopefully be ironed out once HD-DVD players are no longer gen-0 products.

Of note in the new project space I’m working with some cool new people in the blogosphere and aiming to start a few new concepts in personal and business blogging. More on that later - I promise, but I have a couple of weeks of work to do on the project before it’s ready to share with the world at large.

Outside of those projects my professional work life is going well. This week I got invited to interview for a full time Program Manager position at Microsoft, and will be following up on that next week. If all goes well I should be a “real employee” rather soon rather than being the dash trash I currently am.

Now I’m enjoying the bliss of blogging, watching The Return of the King in all it’s upscaled goodness, and waiting for some friends to show up for an afternoon matinee of A Scanner Darkly - sounds fun huh?

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