Long to Time Lose

"It takes a long time to lose it," sings The Wooden Birds on their album Two Matchsticks. Cheers to whoever recommended the song to me, I think it was Scott "Meat Shovel" Happel. It also takes a long time for my poor netbook to render 15 minutes of deshaked, uncompressed 640x480 video. I had the brilliant idea of just appending a bunch of clips together and letting Deshaker hog VirtualDub while I left to go tend tasks. I was gone for nearly three hours and it took about that long for full pixel processing to finish, now it's pumping the results into a 23 gigabyte AVI with an estimated time of an hour and a half. Afterwards I still have to reverse, chop, and filter (for levels, brightness/contrast, and possibly smoothing). Well, then I'll have steel instead of bronze to work with ...

"Hope is a drug (that uses you)," sings Gavin Castleton (thanks sis). On a pedantic note it gets you to see Transformers latest pile of stinking, twisted metal of a movie under the seducing idea it might actually be entertaining rather than garishly boring. Here is every possible theme, scene, and gleam of cinema blockbusters clobbered together into a buffet of deafening badness. I imagine the writer to be an retro-adolescent, MTV-gen adult whose idea of greatness is stringing together every cool YouTube video they ever saw. Gah, and did anyone notice that even the music hopped schizophrenically between Brave Heart and The Dark Knight? This film had no fucking clue what the hell kind of thing it wanted to be. "I want to be everything!" it screams as Shia Labouf screams and the girl screams and the metal against metal screams and the bits of stereotype fall off the lips of bits of characters and my mind screams in defiance of the impossibly explicitness of it all. Now I know what "non-stop action" is (everyone constantly talking, explaining, shooting, screaming, or running) and by golly it is grating to go through. "Retirement is wack," says black guy ... are they stealing lines from Movie Movies? Probably not the best idea. Anyway, I could nitpick practically every scene of this because it doesn't even realize it's a parody (P.S. -- I apologize on behalf of the filmmakers to President Kennedy for giving you "Tron face", you didn't deserve that) ...

"Don't get shy, don't get caught, with the world and its thoughts," sings Peter Murphy. I think it's important to listen to your own internal wisdom. Chances are you've been ignoring it so as to conform to something more amiable to your particular social group. Off of that vein I must protest the typical podcast: a couple of guys with a microphone talking about pop/nerd culture. What are you to find in these banal subjects, some witty criticism you can use in favor for or against the latest trend to raise in the next water-cooler conversation? I've been hearing these "through the wall" from my roommate and they boggle my mind. Who cares what these guys think of anything, what do you think? Neither might matter, given the topics, but at least you're not cloning someone else's silly opinion.