What a Grind....

Just after I finish with one rant about the questionable decisions of film studios another rant begins. This time I'm airing my frustrations at the decision by god knows who to release the double feature splatter extravaganza Grindhouse as two seperate films in Australia. I mean as if it wasn't bad anough that Grindhouse was coming out a good five months after the U.S. release, we now have to wait for an inferior product as the directors in no way intended originally. The newly seperated films will also come out at different dates, forcing australian audiences to wait even longer to see both of them.


The decision has obviously been made after the poor box office that Grindhouse recieved in America, and naturally instead of giving the film a chance with audiences over here, the studios would rather take the safer option, so even if the films do poorly atleast the will have double what they would of had. Half the attraction of this Grindhouse project was the fact that it was a double feature and it even had fake ads and traliers inserted into the intermission, and now we might not even get these extras thanks to the new format of release. What can you do? Studios can make whatever decisions they want and the cinema viewing public just have to wear it and fork up the money, and at any rate, Australian's have gotten used to paying for America's mistakes.

Blogger Post 22: Failure of the Franchise

This is not so much an angry post, its more of a sad one. The thoughts about to be expressed by myself haven't simply come out of nowhere, they've been developing over time and they relate to that popular form of entertainment known as the film franchise. Ths summer blockbuster has been an annual event ever since the success of Jaws oh so long ago. Every year in America the summer period is littered with all the BIG movies that this year has to offer, its not to say that all blockbusters come out during this time but a fair majority of them do in order to keep the country's population occupied whilst on their long holidays. More and more we are seeing sequels pop up during this summer blockbuster period and franchises have become a permanent fixture of the cinema landscape as we know it today.


I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with franchises, I love my event films and usually no matter how bad the reviews I will still go and see a movie if its one I've been excited about for a long time. Two recent films however, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Spiderman 3, have confirmed a fear that has been growing in me since this whole franchise thing started. This fear relates to the pressure put on filmmakers by studios who want as many films made from the one franchise as possible thus maximising their profit as much as possible. Both Spiderman and Pirates of the Caribbean end ambiguously and in such a way that if the intention was put fourth to make another entry in the series it could easily be done. So despite the fact that studios advertise these films as the last in the series they end up being just another entry. Long,overblown ones at that.

It's up to the filmakers to take a stand against this kind of thinking as it stops a film from being a full story and rather one which never really ends satisfactorily in the hope that someone will pick up the pieces and provide the prospect of even more money. Both Gore Verbinski (Pirates director) and Sam Raimi (Spiderman 3) have refused to rule out sequels to their films and its a little dissapointing to hear that neither of these guys can admit that they intended their film to be the last of a story. If studios insist on dreching us with sequels the least they could do is think of their audiences as more than just a source of income.

Technorati!

Technorati, as joh has pointed out on the metablog, is commonly defined as a search engine for blogs but it is also capable of letting the user save favourites where he/she finds them. This feature is kind of like saving bookmarks in delicious but its more of a network for just blogs. I joined up to Technorati earlier this month and have so far gained an authority of 7 which is simply the number of times my blog is linked to by others. My rank at this present time, which is a measurement in terms of where my blog stands in terms of popularity with all the other blogs, is currently sitting at 704,172. I defintely have a long way to go to reach number 1 and somehow I don't think I will do it before the end of semester...or indeed before I graduate.

Form and Content

I will now attempt to tackle the subject of form and content in a blog, whilst both are of equal importance, form is something that can significantly improve a blog even if the content is of a low quality. Aesthetics is a word being thrown around a lot in class at the moment and my interpretation of this word is the level at which the item is pleasing to the human eye. Crusing around the net I discovered that one site defined the word aesthetics as something with an artistically beautiful or pleasing appearance. This definition matches pretty well with my own definition of the word and aesthetics is something which I constantly strive for on my own blogger.

In my opinion a blog or website is less likely to be viewed if it is unnatractive on first appearance. A web site for the band MUSE is one which consistently catches my eye due to its innovative design and straight away this raises the appeal of the band despite whether the person visiting the page has heard any of their material. Its font and colours complement each other perfectly and the way in which the page loads immediately catches the eye in an ultra smooth fashion. I'm a big fan of simplicity in web pages, if a page looks good without having an abundance of information then its gone a long way to impressing me. A good example of this can be made by comparing the google and yahoo pages. Both are similar websites content wise but yahoo is far more cluttered looking than google, causing much confusion when attempting to perform a simple search. For this reason I think Google not only looks better but its simplicity wins me over.

Some also importatant factors in web design are the legibility of the content: it is important to ensure the background colour is picked to enable to viewer to read the text with the greatest of ease. Another factor is the bandwidth of the user visiting the page: A page that has too much different types of media that takes a while to load is going to infuriate someone using a lower bandwidth and thus detract them from visiting the page again. Media on the net is different from print media becuase its interative, in a book you turn to a specfic page to find what your after using the index, on the net you simply click on the link that relates to what you want to see and you are taken there almost straight away. This interactive quality highlights the importance of easy navigation in a website, a user must be able to find what they are after with the aid of headings and sub-headings.

At the end of the day a good web site is something that is not only nice to look at but offers you things that print media can't. It reminds you why we use the internet.

Crazy Techo Talk

What exactly is a feed? I used to see these crazy symbols at the bottom of web pages talking about rss feeds and all this kind of business and I chose to ignore them, now I see how they can greatly enhance your appreciation of the net.

XML or Extensible Markup language is a part of this whole thing becuase its yet another aspect of web use that I haven't known anything about until now. It seems to me as though its a more intelligent version of html, which for a while now has been the code of choice when surfing the information super highway. Although I'm still attempting to get my head around the whole XML thing and it does seem a little complex for my small brain I do think that it would be a useful tool in the ongoing construction of my online community. RSS or Rich Site Sumary is a feed service which I started using on my blogger just before Assignment 1. Its the perfect way of retrieving the latest content from a huge number of sources automatically and with zero effort.

As well as using RSS to automatically show my Delicious bookmarks on my blog I am now using it with the aid of Google Reader. As a requirement of the subject we had to subscribe to either Google Reader or Bloglines and the reason behind my choice is simple. If I had signed up with Bloglines I would of had to create yet another account where as with Google Reader I am automatically given a Google Reader account as soon as I gained a google identity. Another reason for my choice was because google reader looked like it would be so much more simple to use over bloglines and I'm an idiot, I want things to be as simple as possible.

Now the quest begins to see just what I can do with these new tools and how they can enhance my web tasks.

Assessment #1: the journey so far...

So here we are at the first assessing stage of MPI104, man am I sick of writing that subject code as a tag for pretty much everything this past term or so. Adding tags isn't the only thing I've been doing in this class so far...

Starting with good ol' Flickr which to begin with I was a bit skeptical about. I mean I immediately assumed that it would have a large amount of crap on it but what I realised was that thats what the whole internet is, a bunch of crap. The way you find the good stuff is by sorting through all the crap, and with effort comes rewards. So far I've uploaded three sets of photos, not as much as I would of liked but I've discovered that I really like flickr, especially after I'd added myself to a few groups and got my contact lists beefed up. I commented on a few pictures and even selected a few favourites while cruising around through the immense library of photos that can be found. In terms of my own photos I tried to limit them down to only things that would be interesting to others, that is, even if they knew nothing about me or my friends they might still be able to get a kick out of the images. I gave them all titles and descriptions and all that jazz and forwarded a few to the MPI104 group as well as a few others. Here's my favourite set of pics after I discovered the amazing face morpher.

Delicious, for me, was a bit of a waste as I could never find cool enough websites to bookmark and if I did I'd find that many others had got in before me. I didn't see the point of adding common sites that any idiot could find, i wanted ones that were hard to find and would be useful to people. I joined up to a network with almost all my workshop class and saved bookmarks for others whom I thought would enjoy them. I made sure to bookmark all my actual blog posts on my delicious as a quick way for people to find them. Tags were also used extensively, I made sure to bundle them and also subscribe to a couple which were of interest to me. I also chucked my flickr and blogger bookmarks up on there to make sure everyone would have a look if they wanted. Getting the RSS feed up onto my blog was a bit tricky but in the end it was pretty straightforward, I just wasn't looking in the right places. I hope to spend a lot more time on delicious, the webs a big place and I'm sure there's some cool stuff out there waiting for me to discover and tag.

Now to blogger which is where I, like most people I'm guessing, spent most of my time. I did 17 posts in total and the whole html thing is actually really fun and I can't believe I haven't done it in blogs before now as they really do add to the depth of them. I also put plenty of pictures in my posts as they helped brighten things up a bit. A little way through I decided to do a top 10 film list and as part of each entry I put a you tube player window into the post showcasing a scene from the chosen film. I'm glad I did the top 10 thing because it related back to my strongest interest and let me explain my reasoning behind each entry. In case you were wondering here's what ended up at number one. I worked a bit on my profile and found a nice little pic to put as my display image. I chucked a bunch of links to other blogs, mostly proddies ones, down the sidebar and created a list as a page element detailing the fictional rules from the movie Fight Club. I signed up to Technorati and added their stuff to the sidebar as well as a little counter at the bottom of the page. I played around with templates/fonts/colours to get the exact look I wanted and I made an effort to see as many other peoples blogs and comment on them as possible. Overall I tried to be as interesting as possible with my blog, I do hope some people bothered to check it out.

So there it is. Everything that I can think of at this point in time that I accomplished these past couple of months in MPI104. I'm not afraid to say that I've actually learnt some things during the process also...