wonkablog

There’s something that’s been baffling me recently that I just really can’t understand.  I’m not even sure if I can explain it.  The basic thought, though, is this: I’m finding it really interesting how commercial playback of multimedia formats is moving in two directions at once — closed and open.

Everything is getting more closed in the sense of stuff like HDCP and vendor lock-in.  I’ve been reading the stories recently about how Apple is stupidly enabling HDCP (another fancy name for DRM) on their laptops, and I think to myself, what an incredible mistake.

First of all, it’s not going to do anything to stop piracy.  All it’s going to do is annoy customers who actually legally pay for the content.  That’s actually a principle I had a hard time wrapping around my head (mostly because I never have to deal with annoying DRM), but it’s really starting to sink in.  If I pay $15 or whatever to get a DRM-wrapped movie that will either only playback for the next 24 hours, will only let me watch it on my computer, and won’t let me back it up, then what has more options — the pirated version or the legal one?

I’m not advocating piracy in the least.  I think file-sharing, legal or not, is still morally wrong.  Everything I have a digital copy of in my home is from stuff that I’ve bought and paid for with my own hard-earned money.  And I don’t share stuff.  But at the same time I can honestly sympathize with people who get suckered and then locked into solutions.  It’s turning the world into a scenario where corporations are our benevolent dictators, deeming how, when and where we can watch the content they are so gracious to bestow upon us.  You’d honestly never believe that money was even changing hands.  I could understand all the restrictions if it were *free* or incredibly cheap.

Speaking of pricing, that’s one thing I really don’t understand either.  Things like online movie stores are growing, and that’s a great thing, but I still think the pricing schemes are completely whacked — both for rentals and purchases.

Right now, I, personally, only have access to two online video stores: TiVo and PlayStation Network, so I could only compare those two.  I don’t have any hard numbers on me, but I know that “buying” a movie usually costs between $10 and $15.  It’ll come in the form of a digital download that you save on your system’s hard drive, and then can only play it back from that device.

Now, this is what totally baffles me.  For generally the same price, and honestly, at a max price point of $5 more ($20 total) you could get the actual disc itself, which is going to include all the special features, not to mention alternate language tracks if you need that sort of thing.  The pricing ratio just doesn’t match up when it comes to features.  And, obviously, with a DVD you can play it anywhere — ironically, the PS3 even comes with a DVD player (Blu-Ray as well) so you could just play it back on there.

Then don’t also forget that your hard drive space is limited.  The Series 2 TiVos are usually about 80 gigabytes in size, and the PS3 is now selling with about 60 or 80 gigs.  My PS3 only has 40 gigs, and half of that is already used up by game updates and saved games, so I have very little space to start with.  When you’re so limited in size, why in the world would people build a digital library on that device?  You’re only restricting even more functionality, since you have less breathing room to record TV or save games or whatever else.  And since you can’t move the media anywhere else, you’re pretty much screwed.

The vendor lock-in is even worse.  Apple is by far the worst, in my opinion.  Their store content will only play on their devices.  Nobody gets upset about it because everyone is an Apple apologist, simply because their hardware is cool.  So apparently it’s easy to get taken for a ride if the car is a shiny Cadillac.  Unfortunately, the only real lesson that’s going to work in cases like this is time.  Years down the road when their playback devices are obsolete, they’ll have to repurchase their content again either in an open format or a relicensed DRM wrapper, and it’s then they’ll realize what they bought into was just a ticking time bomb.

I don’t want to pick just on Apple, though, Microsoft is just as bad, if not worse, since they have a history of taking open standards and tweaking them so that some content will only work if it using their modified formats.

Now, ironically, on the flip side, things are also starting to get more open.  At least, on the software side.

My PSP’s firmware has been updated and it makes a nice video player now.  It’s incredibly simple to encode a video using open codecs and formats (MPEG4, AAC, MP4) and watch it on there.  I just put my PSP into USB mode, and copy them over and I’m done.  My TiVo lets me copy digital files.  My PS3 lets me stream videos and music over the network using UPnP.

Those are some small examples of things actually moving forward, but I think it’s great that companies are realizing that their hardware should act more as a media playback center than a vendor-supported-format provider.  That’s a good thing.

And despite all the issues there are now, I’m actually really optimistic about the whole thing, and I think the market will work itself out.  In fact, I think in five years or so we’ll look back and just shake our heads about how silly it was.  Even now things are changing, with music labels finally ditching DRM on music, due to the futility of lock-in an enforcement.  Things will just find a way.

If nothing else, there’s this morbid but obvious observation — the dinosaurs will die out.  The executives and business men who are dedicated to holding onto the status quo will be gone in a couple of years.  And the next generation will be the ones who grew up with portable media players, cell phones and digital distribution all their lives, and they’ll want to take things to the next level.  It really can’t help but get much better.

I saw Quantum of Solace last night, the new Bond movie.  The best way I can describe the experience is that I was lost the entire time.  I had no idea what was going on almost the whole time.  The movie moves really quickly, pausing only a few times to give some details.  The fight scenes also moved so fast that almost the entire time I couldn’t figure out who was what person.  That was pretty annoying, actually.  The camera work just constantly clipped shots way too short so you couldn’t see what was actually happening.  Oh, there goes a car, whose car was that, too late, here’s another one going off a cliff, was that Bond?  Pretty confusing.

Plus, Bond in this movie (spoiler alert!) is pretty much gone rogue during the whole thing, and who he attacks and takes out is pretty much irrelevant.  As the movie hints at a few times, the lines between heroes and villains is blurred, and that was pretty true here.  He’s chasing a dictator, then a Bolivian secret agent, then a corporate psycho, then the guy who killed his wife, then he throws a CIA agent off the roof.  Huh?  The whole thing was just all over the place.

There weren’t any Bond gadgets in this one, either, which kind of stunk.  I didn’t realize that til the film was over.  I guess it did make sense since he was pretty much on his own.  I did really like the great nod to Goldfinger, though.

One thing I read on Wikipedia was that this film takes place one hour after the events of Casino Royale.  I had no idea.  That certainly explains why Bond is so ticked about his wife being dead, still.  I never picked up on the continuity part — I thought the first one was good, but not really memorable.

Overall, an interesting film.  I wouldn’t say don’t go see it, but don’t expect a typical Bond-style film.  It’s more a generic action film than anything else.

One other positive note was that I saw my first trailer for Star Trek.  It looks pretty cool.  I’ve been avoiding all trailers / promotional materials / whatever about the new movie because I’ve consistently found it’s a much better experience walking into any movie having zero expectations.  I must say, though, that I was sure that this movie was going to totally suck, but now I’m sold on checking it out.  My early verdict would be that it looks like it’s going to be a good action movie, but not really a Star Trek movie in the traditional sense (seems to be a common theme).

Ah, well, the real problem is that there doesn’t seem to be much recently to go watch anyway.  Maybe next year.

Warning!  Spoiler alerts!  Oh noes!  Teh Internets!  Runs!

Mondays are always hard for me.  Mostly because I spend the entire weekend doing, you know, fun stuff the whole time, coming back to work and starting a new week is hard.  My attitude is always, “wait … what?” for almost the entire day.  It’s a bit jarring.

Today is no different, because I spent most of yesterday, shamefully, playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on my PS3.  My gosh, what an incredibly fun game.  I’m actually surprised to hear me say that after what my initial thoughts were of it for a while. (more…)

I got this awesome poster on ebay this week, it’s an original mint condition poster of the movie Shipwrecked. I’d never even seen this alternate design before, but when I happened to notice it, the colors just blew me away and I couldn’t resist getting it. It’s really gorgeous.

I took it to get framed, and just got it back tonight. Here’s what it looks like:

It looked nice before, but with a proper frame it really just stands out. I tell you what.

If you haven’t heard of the movie, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not even out on DVD in the US. I had to buy it from Australia (in widescreen, woots!) and rip it on my region-free DVD drive to watch it. Totally worth, it though.

One thing I think about every now and then is how I’m going to raise my kids (when I eventually get some) about watching TV and entertainment and things. In my opinion, what’s on television these days is completely worthless, save the interesting documentary now and then.

Ironic as it sounds, I actually grew up never watching “live” television, in the sense of original programming for the day. Even at a really young age, I could recognize it was total crap and I just ignored it all. I did watch a lot of movies — seriously, I’ve probably seen a thousand by the age of twelve — and Saturday morning cartoons, but that was about it. Everything else was reruns of older shows or just movies that we had taped.

I remember we got the Disney Channel when it first came out. I was about eight years old, and we got a VCR shortly after so my mom could record all the shows. Believe it or not, but the Disney channel was actually amazing way back in the day. They didn’t have any original programming, so they just aired their entire archive of old movies and shows for probably at least five years or so.

Anyway, the reason I started thinking about all this was because I was reading my sister’s blog, and she had a link to another mom’s blog that posted about her experience raising her kids and monitoring what they watch.

I thought her post was pretty funny because while she normally showed them videos until recently, her kids had never seen any commercials on TV, and so got really confused when they came on. I kind of imagine something similar will happen with me. First of all, I don’t plan on even getting cable TV (I’m considering cutting it now), but you never know.

I can seriously see me saying something like this though, “I’ve amassed a huge library of shows that I’ve already decided are okay for you to watch. It took me 15 years to watch it all while growing up, so good luck, and have fun.”

If they come out of it not knowing what a commercial is, I’ll just consider them lucky.

So, the XM and Sirius satellite radio station merger went into play this week. I only happened to catch wind of it because of a leaked new program guide that I saw on some RSS feed. Unlike most, I wasn’t really affected.

I have 12 total presets on my car, split between two bands. The first six are just rock stations that don’t happen to suck. The second set is pretty empty. The only presets I care about are my New Age radio station and my Old Time Radio one.

As far as I can tell, the music selection has improved greatly for the rock stations, but the names of all the channels are a lot dumber now.

“Audio Visions” was the name of the New Age channel, and now it’s called “Spa” instead. What the crap? The two terms aren’t even closely related. The rock ones are okay, though I kinda liked the name “Flight 26″. Ah well.

I realize I’m a bit of a weirdo posting an entry about how the names of my radio stations changed, but I’m a real junky for metadata and tags, not to mention naming schemes, so I take a minor interest in the stuff.

I’ll still probably cancel my subscription this year. I’ve been threatening to do that for about two years now, and honestly it’s hard to beat when I’m only paying about $89 a *year*. My subscription is up in about a month, though, and I’ll have to keep an eye on the rock stations. Right before the merger, things had gone atrociously bad, where the playlists were really short, and it was seriously the same thing as terrestrial radio (let’s play the top 50 music songs *all the time* and nothing else!) minus the annoying car dealership ads. When you see the same band playing on three of my six presets *at the same time*, you know something’s going on. That’s honestly happened more than once the past couple of months.

Ah well, uncustomed radio is a lost cause anyway waiting to die. I’m just biding my time til I can get something like LastFM in my car. There’s so much music out there to listen to, I’d love to hear nothing but new stuff and suited to my tastes. I’d definately pay for that.

Here’s one post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.  Because of the firmware updates that just came out yesterday, it kinda poked me to get around to it.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, but I got a Playstation 3 not too long ago.  That in itself isn’t really interesting news, but it is when you consider I haven’t had a game console in 25 years.  I grew up on the Atari, and man, *those* games were tough.  After that, our parents never let us have one again, though, so I never really grew up with the joys of crippled thumbs.

I do have a lot of computer games, though, I’ve always been really into those.  Monkey Island FTW.  The thing I don’t like about it so much is having to dual-boot between Linux and Windows in recent years.  For one, it makes my desktop a lopsided powerhouse that I never use.  I have a really nice nvidia graphics card in there that can handle any game thrown at it, lots of RAM and a good processor, and 95% of the time I just surf the web and do programming.  It would be kind of cool to have a dedicated Windows box that I could fire up just for games, but I already have too much computer clutter sitting around that I don’t wanna do that.

So, I’d been thinking for some time about getting a console.  The idea of having a dedicated machine specifically for games seemed like fun.  I wouldn’t have to worry about rebooting, waiting for Windows, patching Windows, finding Windows drivers, fixing Windows, and using Windows.  The best part about gaming on a desktop, though, is that you can usually save your game at any point.  I still wish consoles would allow that.

When I got my HDTV not too long ago, I really, really, really wanted to try out Blu-Ray to see what 1080p was like, and if it was worth it or not.  Sony had some nice Blu-Ray players on the market, but they were freaking expensive.  The one I wanted was $400, and I *almost* had grudgingly convinced myself to get it, when I read one review that mentioned how it takes a long time to start up, and how it had moving parts.  Well, moving parts, in my mind, means noise.  I’m extremely sensitive to noise so any whirring coming from my entertainment center makes me want to chuck an AOL CD at someone’s head.

The thing that was interesting was that at the same price point, I could get a PS3 that already had a Blu-Ray player.  Not only that, it already had a network card on it (both wired and wireless I quickly found out) so that it could do the BD updates.  It’d be future-proof!  So, I got one, not at all with the intention of playing games, but instead just to watch movies.

I was really impressed as I started to unbox the thing and learned more about it.  One thing I have always hated about game consoles in general is that they use custom, proprietary input connections that only their hardware will work with, forcing vendor lock in.  If your cat chews on your power cord or if your little brother flushes your controller down the toilet, you have to buy a new one from them.  Annoying.  The PS3 was totally different, though.  The power jack was the standard one that computer power supplies use, so I can swap out that cord at any time.  It has a normal HDMI output port on the back, so I could use my existing one right away.  The SPDIF port was standard as well, and if all that wasn’t enough, the controllers connect using USB!  I was pretty blown away.  In fact, the only thing that was non-standard was a cord connecting to RCA and Component video output.  I didn’t care about those, since I’m using HDMI, but man, that is awesome.

I remember I went out and rented two Blu-Ray movies that night.  One was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (best Harry Potter movie, evah) and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I’ve already written about my Blu-Ray experiences in the past, and so far, while it’s impressive, it’s not nearly as mind-blowingly amazing as I was hoping.  So, I still haven’t switched.  On a sidenote, though, I’m really tempted to get Sleeping Beauty.  It’s supposed to be finally presented in its OAR (original aspect ratio).  Plus, it’s about the coolest animated movie there is.  How often do you get to see an awesome dragon fight like that one has?  It’s classic.

So, Blu-Ray discs was pretty much out of the picture.  Oh well.  I started playing around with the PlayStation Store a bit, and that also blew me away.  How cool is it that you can sit on your couch and just buy video games directly from your console, download demos, themes, wallpapers and movie trailers.  Okay, so maybe themes and wallpapers isn’t an exciting point, but the demos is my favorite part.  I’ve gotten burned by a few game purchases in the past, that had I had a few minutes of checking it out, I never would have gotten it.  Strangely enough, that’s actually really rare.  I seem to either have a lot of luck in buying games that I like or something.

PS3 games are so expensive, so I decided that I was only going to buy the ones that I would get *really* excited about and want to play repeatedly.  Which, again, kind of goes for almost all my games … Hmm.  The first one I grabbed (and I don’t remember how .. I think I had a GameFly membership or something) was Dark Kingdom.  Then I got Burnout Paradise, and then Bladestorm.  Bladestorm was the freaking bomb.  I remember playing it non-stop for an entire week, staying up til like 4 a.m. each night.  That was the game that pretty much sold me on my purchase for good.

I’ve gotten a few more games since then, and they’ve all been great.  Overlord is freaking awesome.  Civilization: Revolution is one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played.  And last weekend I picked up Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Lego Batman.

Somewhere along the line, I also bought myself a PSP-2000.  That is also a lot of fun.  They had a firmware update come out just yesterday which I installed last night, which finally lets you access the PSN store directly.  It’s really cool, too, it was a bit of a pain having to connect it to my computer or my PS3 to get data.  I wish it had better multimedia playback support, though.

I haven’t found a lot, or any, good games for my PSP yet, though I really haven’t gone looking.  Right now I just have Mortal Kombat and Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (I have this passive goal to get every Star Wars game, ever).  Looking online, it seems like there are a lot I’d be interested in, but I never get around to checking them out.  It’s still a great little console, though.

Overall, there’s just a lot of things that make up what I like about the system — games in 1080p, wireless controllers, UPnP support, large storage device, multi-user support, etc.  Probably the best of them is that this thing has a network connection and can receive firmware updates.  In fact, I think I’ve installed three since I bought the thing, and it gets a little bit better each time.  In my mind, this is how a gaming console should have been years ago.  There’s a lot of potential for this thing too, it effectively fill a lot of multimedia and on-demand roles.  I’m curious to see where things go.

I’ve spent a lot of last month cleaning up a few tweaks, bugs, and to do items on getting my media center completely setup, and one of the things on the list was to get movie trailers ripped off of my DVDs.

There were two things that surprised me: how many DVDs had trailers that I didn’t expect, and how many trailers that I expected to, didn’t.

I really wish that *all* the DVDs had trailers for their movies on them . In my mind, this is the most basic feature that they should all ship with.  Sadly, it’s not just one studio that I can pinpoint the lack of archival foresight on — it’s across the board.  Even then, it happens on all kinds of DVDs, both special editions (which is a total misnomer, if it’s the only edition) and normal releases.  What’s even more annoying is when they have trailers for other movies (not talking about just Disney here), but not their own.  There’s really no fast and hard rule of which ones you can predictably guess which DVDs will have them or not, and so it leaves me with the unenviable task of just checking every disc.

The first thing I did was just take a quick glance at the back of every cover to see if it lists trailers in its features.  This is where I got really surprised by the movies that did have them, that I wouldn’t think they would bother.  Case in point: The Glass Bottom Boat, The Rescuers Down Under, The World’s Greatest Athlete.  So far I’ve got about 43 ripped, which I’m probably about halfway through the “regular” editions, so there’s probably another 40 or so to rip.  My collection is about 150 or 160, so about half the DVDs have their own movie trailer on there.  Not really great percentages, in my mind.

Next up, I need to dig through the special editions.  Because of how I find the trailers — I lazily just use lsdvd to list out tracks that are between under 60 minutes long, and then just cycle through those tracks with mplayer — the multi-disc ones and SE DVDs are harder to find because there are so many tracks with deleted scenes, featurettes and stuff.  Plus there’s usually more than one disc.  On a normal DVD there’s normally between one to four possible tracks, but on the SEs, there’s up to 30.  Makes it kind of tedious.  It’s always worth it though.  Really good releases like Star Wars usually put out a lot of the trailers they created.

Time for a little tangent of history and nostalgia, though.  When I worked at the movie theater as a projectionist (I was also an usher, worked at box, in concessions, and later as a manager … good times), we would build the movies manually.  There are two types of trailers, though: teasers and trailers.  Teasers are really short previews that are generally just between 30 seconds to a minute long and will come out in theaters months and months before the movie is actually released.  It’s just that, too, a teaser of things to come.  Trailers come out much closer to the release date, and are between 2 to 5 minutes long.

Also, the reason they are called trailers is because back in the good old days, the trailers would come at the very end of the movie.  If you’ve ever seen an old movie, you’ll notice that they did elaborate credits and titling at the very beginning of the movie, and when it finished, you would see “The End”, and that was it .. it was *done*.  Not another 15 minutes of credits and notices and soundtrack rehashes and bloopers and copyright notices and special thanks to.  The reason for that was because the trailers really were trailing the movie.  Because of how a film is put together, or built, it’s a lot simpler if you just  put the trailers on the end.

The movie arrives at the movie theater in a couple of cannisters (generally two) split up on a couple of reels (usually about half an hour or so per reel).  The projectionist gets to stay up late putting the film together from three or four reels and puts it on the huge platter.  Before they build it though, they pick which trailers are going to go on there.  Well, the projectionist doesn’t.  Actually it’s all wrapped up in licensing deals with both the studios of who releases the film and the ones who want their trailers on what.  What will happen is the teasers and trailers will go on first, then the movie theater chain will usually have some kind of “help us not go poor and spend money on our 800% marked up popcorn and candy in the lobby while thin animal characters dance to a chorus of Butterfingers and a river of soda” and then after that, there’s usually a trailer by the studio that released the movie right before the actual feature film.  Oh, and sometimes there’s a Dolby / SDDS / DTS / digital theater ear candy insert somewhere in there too.

Anyway, the cool thing is this.  When theaters are done with the movies, they ship them back to Hollywood, but they get to keep the trailers.  They usually take them off just because they don’t know if they’re going to need them for another film or not, but they always remove them from the film regardless, as they are essentially their property anyway once the studio sends them to them.  The thing is, that nobody wants the teasers back, and every theater I’ve worked at will have a cabinet full of *years* worth of original 35mm film teasers and trailers just sitting around collecting dust.  I collected them for a few years, cherry picking the good ones — I distinctly remember having one to A Bug’s Life and The Prince of Egypt, but I know I had a lot more … dozens, I just can’t think of any — but eventually I got bored with it, when I realized I’d probably never buy a projector just to load them up and watch them.  I think I just gave them away or something.  I’m sure you could still buy some on ebay.

That’s the history part.  As far as nostalgia goes, I remember absolutely loving movie trailers even when I was a little kid and would go to the movies.  It was always an exciting part because with a good trailer, it would suck you in so much that you’d completely forget what movie you were even there to see.  That still happens to me today, and I’ll show up at a movie early just to catch the trailers with the true theater experience.  I love archiving them, too, because even now when I watch them it’ll get me all fired up to watch a movie.

Back to ripping trailers, I finished up ripping the “normal” ones, and started poking at the discs which I knew I didn’t have a trailer but I thought for sure there should be one on there.  The first one I grabbed was Peter Pan (which is actually the first DVD in my collection, which I could go off on a whole other long post on the story behind that).  The disc is supposed to be a special edition, and I trudged through about 15 tracks of commentary and grip buys talking about their jobs to verify that there was indeed, nothing on there.  Stupid Universal Pictures.

I remembered, though, that Apple’s trailer website had one on there, so I hopped off and wondered over to my desktop to search their website.  I clicked on the page to view the trailer, and it opens some page that says its trying to open up iTunes.  Aaaaaaaaaargh!  (Warning: Apple rant.)  So, annoyed, I reboot my computer for the first time in at least a month to get into Windows and load up iTunes to see if I can get this sucker or not.  I have to say that it really ticks me off that Apple, being a minority in the computer field, would think to remember what it’s like when stuff isn’t supported on your native platform and at least make it possible so I don’t have to use their own stupid software to access content.  I can’t blame them for making nice software and hardware, but when it comes to vendor lock-in, they are 10 times worse than any other software developer.

It gets worse, though.  The iTunes store did have a lot of movie trailers, but the downloads were near worthless, at least by today’s media standards.  For each trailer they had only Small and Medium varieties to download.  In some rare cases they had HD ones as well, which are the only ones even worth bothering with.  The Medium ones were so blurry and came in at a really low bitrate that it was pretty much a complete waste of time.  On one hand, it was fun to be able to get them, but they were annoying to watch.  The HD ones looked really nice, though.  I only got about 5 of movies I wanted, but that kind of made the trip worthwhile.

Well, this post ended up a lot longer than I wanted, but oh well.  Trailers are fun, that’s about it. :)  I wish more DVDs had them.  As a matter of archiving, they are almost a lost art.  It’s really hard to find originals online (and I’m not talking about YouTube), and while historians do a good job of keeping the actual films around, it’s a shame that trailers don’t get any love.  Maybe I should start a repository.

I’ve been spending part of the weekend working out small annoyances in my myth setup, trying to get it inching closer to my “perfect” setup.  I’m actually really close now, minor stuff is all that’s left.

Here’s a few things I want to remember as a point of reference, that took me a bit of research to figure out:

Printing options in MPlayer:

mplayer -list-options <command line arguments>

mplayer -input cmdlist <slave mode commands>

mplayer -input keylist <events>

Mapping Page Up and Page Down with my remote in MythTV:

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch+
repeat = 3
config = PgUp
end

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch-
repeat = 3
config = PgDown
end

Finally, I hit some snag with MPlayer and VobSubs (subtitles that originally come with DVDs).  I’ve got some movies in Matroska format, and with recent (SVN r27719) revisions, it will forcibly display the subtitles on playback, and I have no idea why.  I swear I remember reading something about this on the mailing list a while ago, but I haven’t had much luck finding anything.  Best option so far, go back to an earlier revision (r25993).  Not ideal, but it works.  Every sub, force and vobsub option I’ve tried does nothing.  I’m not passing anything by default like -slang or -sid to mplayer.

Another thing I’ve been working on (I’m really bored) is finding posters for the cover images in my movies folder.  Which got me looking at UK quad posters.  If you haven’t ever seen the posters from across the pond, they are so much better than our American counterparts.  They are a horizontal landscape, which allows for, in my opinion, a much more dramatic picture.  Check out this Star Wars one, for example.

It just looks so much better, in my opinion.  I gotta get some movie posters up on my wall (only two so far: Tron and The Adventures of Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth), and I’d love to hunt down some quads.  The old school Disney ones look even awesomer.

Speaking of cover images for Myth, I have a new patch I cranked out last night, which has an interesting story to it.  I’ll post details later, though.  I’m not in the mood for details right now.  I’m more about hunting down stupid bugs that don’t require too much brain power.

Well, I finally saw Batman last night. I’ll get right to it — I didn’t like it. It just wasn’t anywhere near what I was hoping for at all. It’s not an action movie, it’s an intense psychological thriller. A little long, too.

Don’t get me wrong, the film itself was great, from the acting to the script to the story, but it was a bit too intense for me, plus it just wasn’t anything like Batman Begins, which is what I was really hoping for.

The story was really well done, though.  The Joker was extremely freaky, and had the real feel of a sociopathic killer — someone who was in control of his faculties, but just simply insane.  There were so many rough pulls of moral dilemma in the movie, and I don’t really go for those — at least, not portrayed violently.  I don’t like war movies, either, and I imagine some of them would be kind of like this.  So, the type of movie just wasn’t my taste.

Of course, I really can’t stand the original Batman movie either. In fact, the only ones I really will even watch (as in, a second time) are Batman Returns and Batman Begins. Those were both excellent, and I didn’t like any of the others.

That’s about that. The soundtrack was great, too.