How did you like that movie / TV show / book?

[Isaac Sauvage]

dunno about that, steve. from what i've observed, in-line skates pretty much made roller skates obsolete in the US... going back to the early 90's, i think.

i guess i can see them not being as useful for tricks, but with their lower center of gravity and faster top speed, they are clearly the 'sexier' skate, which is certainly a big selling point in the US market. they are also perfect for playing warm-weather hockey, which is what they were originally invented for a long time ago, i believe.

i used to know this guy who could hit insane speeds on the streets. i had a ten-speed street bike at the time and couldn't touch him. oddly, he was also a jesus freak.

 

[StevOz]

I suppose it all depends on what's popular where you live, though these days both forms and ice rinks are pretty much a dead art, with skate boarding being the thing here these days.

 

[sleepy]

In Los Angeles Rollerblades made standard skates obsolete in '80.
They were everywhere, and moreso than the standard skates had been.

<center>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GctJqb1K9Aw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</center>

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

I suppose it all depends on what's popular where you live, though these days both forms and ice rinks are pretty much a dead art, with skate boarding being the thing here these days.

hockey is a pretty huge thing in the US, canada, and across europe... but i could definitely see skating being extinct in oz, africa and asia, yet thriving in other places.

maybe it comes down to climate before everything else.

anyway yeah... skateboarding is a perfect sport for the concrete jungle IMO.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

The University of Wisconsin hockey team apparently plays outdoor games when the temperature is cooperating... which happens more often than I'd like.

 

[GSGregg]

...in other news i just read that four award-winning scifi novels will be turned in to TV series:

"Childhood's End" - Arthur C. Clarke
"The Expanse" - James S. A. Corey
"Gateway" - Frederik Pohl
"Hyperion" - Dan Simmons

The first time I read "Childhood's End" (circa 1978-80), I was impressed, but when I read it again about 20 years later, it seemed dated; could that be because the stories about huge ships hovering over our cities can no longer be counted on a single mitt's digits?

Incidentally.....tell the blowers that be that I want a movie of "The Mote In God's Eye" before I stop sucking air! (Just sayin'...)

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i actually haven't read any of those books, so ya got me.

a.c. clarke in particular i remember for having a pretty awkward writing style. the "rendezvous with rama" series was interesting for its ideas but was quite a chore to get through. sort of anti-ray bradbury.

the series "man in the high castle" by PKD is set to resume this fall, i believe. that should be one that works out well, since the first ep was very well received.


...


well, lately i've been checking up on aardman's stuff. the wallace and grommit series seems the best, so far. today i found the entire "cracking contraptions" collection of shorts in one youtube video:


Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions Complete Series with Behind the Scenes (2002)

 

[Shooby Doo]

Last night I watched the Brian Wilson biopic "Love & Mercy". I'm not really a Beach Boys or Brian Wilson fan and would normally skip a movie like this, but for some reason I really wanted to watch it. It went back and forth between the younger "Pet Sounds" Wilson and the later 80's Wilson (played by John Cusack). I thought it was a pretty damn interesting story. Elizabeth Banks was fantastic in it.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i remember that malfunctioning droid ruby2dee2 and myself being BIG fans of brian, with sleep-master sleeps not far behind.

maybe that was just a pleasant cloud drifting over our heads, or maybe a portent upon impending evil?

but i DOUBT any of us old-heads could properly communicate brian's brilliance and impact upon music and the industry... even though a couple of us were indeed born right around the time brian was beginning to crash and burn rather violently.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

i'm not gonna repeat this, otherwise stevoz might discover this thread--

but i was going through some old DVD's when i discovered that the venture bros show is ridiculously great and hilarious-- i mean, just watch the pilot and skip eps 1-2 (they suck for some reason)...... and after that it's gravy. :)

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Yeah, you don't wanna miss Love & Mercy, Nic. But shame on you, Scooby! How could you not give props to Paul Giamatti? He is positively skin-crawling as Dr. Eugene Landy! I was pretty sure Paulie Gmail was gonna go a-rapin' during every scene he was in with Elizabeth Banks. Or a-stranglin'. Could be both and not necessarily in that order.
This has really been a Paulie Gmail kind of summer. In the last week I saw L&M, Straight Outta Compton and San Andreas and Paul Giamatti rocked them all!
I vaguely remember ads for Venture Bros. playing back when my stepson watched Ed, Edd and Eddie 24 hours a day... I think... or was that Johnny Bravo? Sealab 2020? Well, all I know is it wasn't Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. A great show. Michael Keaton really screwed it up in his "Birdman" movie... nothing like the cartoon!

 

[sleepy]

I've been working out on a very-old used Yamaha QY-10 portable sequencer that I picked up online for $20. I owned one of these back in '93. The current one arrived with the previous owner's songs and custom patterns on it, and I promised to send those back to him.

But what a POS MIDI is. This was Supposed to be a uniform standard of indexing the sounds and their controls; that the same MIDI file would sound Identical on any MIDI player, and sound well. By starting with a basic piano waveform, and then finding the next sound that is consistent to the piano waveform, and lining up all of the sounds by their Similarity from A TO Z in A Logical Progression.

Not only did the proprietary corporate mentality louse that whole thing up for profits, by assuming false competition among themselves, Yamaha vs. Roland vs. Kurzwell, vs. bla-bla. They also failed in the pre General Midi era to adopt a standard of banks and controls and their indexed ranges. The QY-10 has less than 127 voices, including drums. ANd the notes that are commonly used for standard drum voices are different from each other. If I play a snare drum, I instead get a high Conga when sent to Cakewalk or a rival company's device.
Every time I record the percussion, I have to remap the voices to correct for "those congas".

The MIDI in '83 was supposed to be a standard among different manufacturers and not a crash course in user computer science.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

paulie G, the baseball guy's son?
i haven't seen him recently, but he pretty much annihilates every scene his costars dare to share with him IIRC. sort of bill murray territory, altho i just hit my head and there's obviously a better example out there.


venture bros is a lovely send-up off stuff like johnny quest, superhero series, scooby doo and pretentious blowhards everywhere. it's hard to describe exactly, but if you like patrick warburton (puddy from seinfeld, johnny johnson from newsradio) and the concept of failure, the first few seasons are quite delicious.

and nutritious:
http://www.wallpapervortex.com/ipad_wallpapers/ipad_15362_venture_bros.jpg

 

[GSGregg]

The Matrix guys (guy and gal) are at it again---anyone checked out Jupiter Ascending yet? Quite a piece of work.....

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Yeesh! That movie was tough sledding. While I appreciate the fact that Mila Kunis was cast as the role of Neo (since I'd much rather look at her than Keanu Reeves), everything else was a Matrix rehash (harvesting humans? Again?!?!) Except for the cool-ass "I know Kung-Fu" bullet-time from the Matrix. You don't get that. You get roller-skates with rockets. Which is about as dumb as it sounds.
On a side note, my neighbor wanted a copy and I thought the film deserved a first-class porn title, so I labeled it Jupiter's Ass-Ending and told him it was two hours of hardcore anal. Which might have been a better movie.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

haha, ernest borgnine's face looks extra delirious right now.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Hey! Don't you ruin the good name of Ernest Borgnine by suggesting that he was into some weird shit like hardcore anal! Rather, he was into some weird shit like dutch ovens. Ethel Merman once sang the song "Everything's Coming Up Roses". I'm gonna guess she didn't think that after this happened.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x6346649

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

so EVERYTHING'S coming up roses when you're not in the dutch oven?


Airplane - Ethel Merman


also... shouldn't her right name have been "ethel merMAID?"

 

[StevOz]

Well now that this thread title has been changed via request, the last film I watched I'm going to only give a 6 and I'm most likely being a bit generous with that rating.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395427/

Yes the latest Avengers film, whilst I considered it entertaining enough to be worth viewing the whole underlying story, plot and execution there of was so superficial it really degraded the whole experience.

Also the whole nobody can or does die on our watch is just so ridiculous it may as have been called the New A Team with super powers!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

thanks, steve!

so one of my projects now is to read "condorito" comic books (from chile) to work on my spanish. in general this is a really effective way to learn a language, except for the fact that a good deal of slang, expressions and contextual meanings are involved in this case. so it's more of an intermediate or localised spanish than a beginner's thing.

still, there's a lot of great spanish, french, german and italian comics / graphic novels that are more universally comprehensible.

...

a nice tool i'm also using is "duolingo"... basically a free version of rosetta stone. it's available for tablet, which is how i've been using it, but it also needs a wifi-feed to work. i believe with other apps, if you purchase them upfront, you don't need wifi...... so there it is.

 

[sleepy]

Most folks were disappointed with Age of Ultron, for the same reasons as yours.
Like there was no intent to create a great film. But maybe the studio torpedoed that so as not to overshadow Star Wars? In order to prevent fatigue.

There is a trick around here. The locals Love to inflict disappointment indirectly while avoiding blame, in order to later spike excitement in other projects. It's like the other day.
Through their studio and business holdings, they managed to replace the pork sausage in the box at the store with lamb links. But it was still labeled as JD Pork Breakfast Sausage.

It's like 9/11 before Christmas.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Most folks were disappointed with Age of Ultron, for the same reasons as yours.
Like there was no intent to create a great film. But maybe the studio torpedoed that so as not to overshadow Star Wars? In order to prevent fatigue.

There is a trick around here. The locals Love to inflict disappointment indirectly while avoiding blame, in order to later spike excitement in other projects. It's like the other day.
Through their studio and business holdings, they managed to replace the pork sausage in the box at the store with lamb links. But it was still labeled as JD Pork Breakfast Sausage.

It's like 9/11 before Christmas.

exactly. this godamn metaphor of a spanish comic book speaks precisely towards ultron's poor planning towards contingencies.

foolish ultron!!

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Goddammit! I wrote this long, extremely-informative post and *POOF*, gone! Where the fuck did it go? Decisions were made, files were uploaded! That's it, fellas. Hand on bible, I'm never gonna post here while high ever again! Starting with the next post.
So here's the Cliff's Notes version. First, let me begin by saying that my post followed our strict guidelines here at Pinball Nirvana and included the subjects of movies, TV and books. Looks like you boys are having trouble keeping up. You'll be allowed to go back and edit your posts for content but just this one time! I agreed with Steve that Ultron was underwhelming at best, but it did have some nice moments, including that single-shot opening scene. I guess you can't call those "unedited" any more, what with all the computer special effects. Certainly not like you could that great tracking shot in Goodfellas. Fun fact: the people in line are also the people in the restaurant! While Henry and Karen are getting some back-door action, the people in line were running through the front door and grabbing a table before Marty and his camera showed up!

After that, I yabbered about how Joss did his finest single-shot in S03E01 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That space is now ceded to the Goodfellas rant.
And then I named my favorite book of the month and I excused Nic from this portion of the lecture since I already know his feelings on the subject. So Nic is free to go and read some back issues of Lil' Pendejo comics. Bye, Nic!
That's when I mentioned that my favorite book of the month was Archie #2 and how they're making that poor 75-year-old bastard go back to the starting blocks and do it all over again. And that they're doing a surprisingly good job on the reboot! It's almost like watching a real good CW network show, what with its sexual politics and cell phones. (for the non-Americans here in the didgeridoo, the CW Network is responsible for shows like The Vampire Diaries and Veronica Mars) And they haven't even thrown Veronica Lodge into the mix! She's only in one panel of ish #2. Then I showed you Veronica 5.0 (if my Archie history algorithm is correct), as drawn by Fiona Staples who's also doing a bang-up job with Brian K. Vaughn on the Saga comic. And then I said hubba... hubba!

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Seriously, though, nic, that app sounds cool as hell, and something I'd like to take a shot at. Maybe someday we'll both be chatting here en espanol and everyone else can go screw! Qu’est-ce que c’est?
I'd have to say that Veronica 2.0 was always my favorite. She wasn't quite "the stuff that dreams are made of" like '70s Veronica was to my fevered 13-year-old mind, but I always liked the style. It gives itself over to humor and whimsy without being too cartoony. Then again, she's no plucked Spanish rooster.



Oh, shit! Mentioned a book, forgot TV/Movie!
Intolerance!
ALF!

 

[StevOz]

Well one book from my youth I really should have another read and judge how or if I think it is any the lesser read after my time on earth since then.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525843.Supernature

Back then it really was a compelling read.