any sufficiently advanced blogging is indistinguishable from blather

I’d give Pan’s Labyrinth 7 out of 10 stars, the same as Children of Men. The film had some awesome special effects; visually it was wonderful, especially with its use of colors and just the atmosphere of the different locations. Even the bathroom was very stylistic and fantastical. The movie is by no means an epic, but I still thought the story needed something a bit more… and I wasn’t too happy with the ending. There were a lot of parallels between the real world and the fantasy world in Pan’s Labyrinth, but I felt there should have been more parallels that actually have to do with characters and their motivations. In fact, the director didn’t seem too worried at all about character motivations, and if I don’t understand why a character wants to do what he or she is doing, then why would I care about their decisions? Instead, much of the drive behind the story comes from the fear of the bad guys and the need to get away from them. The gruesome violence that makes the film rated R shows you just how horrible the bad guys are, but that almost seems like the most important thing in the film, which it shouldn’t be. But, oh well, the director and I probably have artistic differences story-wise, and he’s the director, not me. Overall, good film, check it out. If I was a director, I’d definitely want those visual effects artists working for me, and I wouldn’t mind the director’s eye when it comes to the visual experience of the film.

I don’t have much else to blog about so…

Sibelius 5 was announced not too long ago. (If you care, check it out here.) It looks like it has many new great features, its biggest being that it is a full VST host, like Overture 4, which I’ve been using for the past two years. Feature-wise, it looks like Sibelius 5 should be more impressive than Overture 4, but I’m so used to using Overture that I doubt Sibelius 5 will be on my shelf any time soon, even with its great looking features. This is all entirely due to usability. While I’d love to have the new features, I know Overture 4 too well. I downloaded the demo for Sibelius 5 and I’m having trouble figuring out how to do some basic things. Granted, if I bought and fooled around with it for months, I could work much quicker, but are the new features worth it? I don’t think so, not yet. And the demo doesn’t seem to allow me to test its VST capabilities (unless I’m missing something) which is a bummer.

Another big reason I probably won’t buy Sibelius 5 is cost. At over $300, a college student such as myself just has bigger priorities, like vacation expenses. (That’s a joke, by the way, about the vacation expenses.)

I saw the International Space Station tonight… (it was in the weather report). At least, I thought I did. I had never seen anything like it before. It looked like a star, small and bright, but moved faster than a plane, though not quite as fast as a shooting star. Unlike a plane, it did not seem to move in a straight line, it sort of curved across the sky, which looked very srange because my mind kept seeing it as off path. It was a pretty cool site, but nothing to blog about… oops!

In other news, wow… did you notice the new features in embedded YouTube videos? (If not, check one out from this blog here.) Pretty cool stuff!

It’s good to finally be reading a good book… The Black Swan, that is. Go buy it.

I was thinking you could easily apply (and I already have, somewhat, after reading Fooled by Randomness) the Black Swan idea to the “modern music” discussion I blogged about weeks ago. Some music scholars, theorists, and historians probably like to think that they can be certain of why certain composers and certain pieces became and/or remain popular. They then predict what music will be like in the future, and try to compose such music, while most of them will probably remain utterly obscure, while the real composers who stay famous from our time will be film composers and pop artists, who those scholars loathe for their simplicity and success.

What really makes a composer or a piece of music remembered for a long time? Like what makes a bestselling novel, the ingredients are not definite and easy to reproduce. They’re Black Swans. They emerge from a system far too complex for anyone to understand or predict. What makes something matter in a single human brain is far too complex to predict accurately; what makes people think they can know what makes fame emerge from the interaction of all these human minds? Yet that doesn’t stop people from buying a book on how to write a bestseller, or studying with a snobby music historian hoping to collect secrets on how to become the next Beethoven by being “innovative”, as if that was the prime ingredient.

What can I be certain of? That (insert a Black Swan here) will change music forever.

I’m on page 78 of I Am A Strange Loop and it’s a boring book. Hofstadter’s fascination with loopyness gets him nowhere fast. The ideas themselves are rather fascinating, but I’ve heard it all before (so far). And Hofstadter’s become another person since GEB… his style of writing is just much more stale, I don’t get the same sense of passion and interest I got with GEB, I get the sense of quite an intelligent professor who’s forced to give a lecture he doesn’t really want to give but gives anyway. And he seems much more defensive. I’ve got a few quotes from the book I want to add to the quotes blog eventually, but I’m really gonna have to take a break from this book and move on to The Black Swan. Surely I can devour Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s sharp, witty, and thought-provoking writing as I did with Fooled By Randomness, right? I guess we’ll see. Goodbye, I Am A Strange Loop; I shall come back for you someday to finish you, but for now I want to start seeing other books.