This is really something. For this first time since I started reading it back in 1999 or so, slashdot has changed the look of the site.
This was really disorienting. It’s like seeing another face on Mt. Rushmore. There are some things that you just don’t expect to change.
My Neighbor Totoro is another Miyazaki masterpiece. Fledgling Otaku thought highly of it, and his daughter went nuts for it. Alex praised it as well.
My kids have watched this movie many, many times (although not as many as mini-otaku, I suspect) but I’ve only gotten around to watching it recently. I’ve seen little bits here and there as I passed through the room while they were watching, and I’d always tried to discern that it was about. Now I can see that this was a waste of time. Totoro is less about plot and more about many small, delicious moments.
The movie had quite an effect on me. The children in this story are unlike most anime kids. In fact, they are unlike most animated kids in general. They speak, move, think, and act like real children.
Here Tatsuo and her younger sister Mei are riding in the back of a truck. They are moving to a new home, and all of their belongings are stacked up around and over them, forming a little alcove for the two of them.
When I was a kid, there was no such thing as seatbelt laws. In the winter my brother and I used to huddle together in the passenger-side footspace, where we could be close to the warm air vent. I hadn’t thought about that in years, but this moment brought back that memory.
Children love to seek out little spaces to occupy. They seem drawn to crawlspaces. I’m not sure when we grow out of this, but at some point our “stay in the foxhole” instincts leave us and as adults most people find enclosed spaces irritating, not cozy.
Walking around on your knees! I remember doing this. As a kid it was amusing, but my knees hurt just thinking about trying it at my age. Ow. Ow. Ow.
And of course, when kids are in open spaces they must run. They can’t help it.
At one point Tatsuo notices a huge towering tree and asks her father about it. He informs the girls that it’s a camphor tree. Then the girls yell, “Camphor! Camphor!”, as they enjoy the new word. These little moments and details bring the children to life in a powerful way. I’ve never seen animated children this authentic.
From a clinical standpoint, this movie is nothing remarkable. The story is thin and the visuals – while charming – aren’t really anything groundbreaking. They certainly aren’t up to the standards of other Miyazaki films. But as a collection of slice-of-life moments and a study in the wonder of being a child, My Neighbor Totoro is in a class of its own. Highly recommended.
For ubu roi and anyone else who is interested in a few of the tricks used on this site, here are a few bits of code that might help you out. Sadly, you can’t really do this stuff as plugins, which means you have to edit the code yourself. This will either be very easy or a little confusing, depending on how comfortable you are with PHP. Also, this code is only going to be useful if you’re using wordpress.
First, the random quote. Create a quotes file named “quotes.txt” and put it in the /wp-content filder. The file should have three lines for every quote: The first is the quote itself, the second is the person being quoted (leave blank if you dan’t want this) and the third is a required blank line. Mine looks like this. Now, somewhere in the PHP code for your site (I suggest at the top of the header.php) place this code:
T w e n t y S i d e d
<?php
/*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pull out a random quote from the quote file and display it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
function random_phrase ()
{
$quotes = file ("wp-content/quotes.txt");
$num = rand (0, intval (count ($quotes) / 3)) * 3;
echo $quotes[$num] . "<br>" . $quotes[$num + 1];
}
?>
Almost done. Now just put this little bit of code where you want the quote to appear:
<?php random_phrase (); ?>
Several people have asked me to release the theme for this site so that others can use it. This sounded perfectly reasonable at first, but then I started taking a look through my code and realized that it is a mess. It was built a little at a time over the last nine months, adding on little gadgets and details as they came to mind without any thought for the long-term effects on the site itself.
As a coder, I should really, really, know better than this by now. But sometimes you just want to spend your time doing something, not making a tool for doing something.
When I write code for a living I’m always thinking about how I can re-use or extend it later. Barring that, I at least try to make it neat so I can make sense of it if I come back to make changes at some later point. I didn’t do any of that, and now the site has become a “code contraption”. It works, but you can’t change one thing without breaking three others. It’s sloppy and hard to read (the underlying code, not the site itslef) and now I’m getting nuts. Even when the hood is closed and I’m not reading the code, as I look at the site I know the bad code is there… hiding beneath the surface like so much duct tape, holding everything precariously together.
For example: Lots of stuff is hard coded. Even the title at the top. So, if you were to take this theme and put it on your site, the title at the top would be Twenty-Sided, no matter what you really named the site. The dice rollers are built into the theme, when they should be a plug-in. There are old, unused functions laying around, mixed in with in-use functions. No code comments. I edited the site in the wordpress admin interface and not in a proper editing program, which means the indenting is hosed.
So now I’m re-creating the theme from scratch. It’s far from done yet, but now that I’m doing it I’m curious what the strong points are. What is it about the theme for this site that works well? What would you change? What gets on your nerves?
I should add that I don’t plan to change the look of this site. My goal is to clean it up and maybe make minor adjustments based on feedback, but visually it isn’t going to change much.
Jay Barnson, in talking about the difficulty in rating open-ended videogames, has this to say:
After all, how WOULD the ESRB rate, say, the Star Trek holodeck?
Geeze. I bet Riker has a few password-protected holodeck programs that would make Larry Flynt blush.
He also has some great observations on Oblivion. Read the whole thing.
The very next comment on this blog will be the 1000th. Yes, it’s meaningless, but it’s still true.
That is all.
UPDATE:
I’ve always thought the powers of mutants in the X-Man universe were pretty off-the-wall. Aside from nitpicky issues like where all the energy comes from and how special DNA can manipulate the physical world, I’ve always wondered what other mutant powers there are in the world. The X-Men and the mutants serving under Magneto are obviously the best, and their powers lend themselves to warfare, whcih is why they are high-profile mutants. But even among these guys, their powers are really diverse. Controlling the weather. Teleportation. Laser eyes. Freezing stuff. Turning into metal form. It’s pretty clear that powers vary quite a bit, and there must be a lot of powers out there that aren’t nearly as cool.
So what about all the poor mutants who have stupid or pointless powers? Imagine all the wash-outs from Xavier’s school:
But these guys are the lucky ones. Imagine the poor guy who finds out he’s a mutant but doesn’t know what his powers are. How does he go about finding out? I imagine his journal would be fun to read.
I’ve just been to the doctor and the blood test reveals that I’m a mutant! Tomorrow I’ll experiment to see if I can figure out what my powers are.
Day 2
I cannot control the flow of elecricity. That’s a shame. That would have been nice. My hands are not immune to electrical burns, either. I also don’t seem to have any special healing powers. Still, I’m just getting started. I’m sure I’ll have better luck tomorrow.
Day 3
It turns out I can’t see through the wall of my neighbor’s house and into her bedroom. I can’t leap over her chain-link fence in a single jump. I can’t outrun a dog. I can’t use telepathy to convince a rottweiler to stop biting me.
Maybe I’ll stick closer to home for my experiments tomorrow.
Day 4
I learned an awful lot about my powers today. It turns out I can’t put out fires with my mind. I also can’t repair burned carpeting and furniture. Finally, I also discovered that I can’t control the minds of firemen to get them to stop laughing at me.
I’ve got some good ideas of what to try next!
Day 5
It seems that I can’t fly. At least, not from the roof of my house. My right leg is also not unbreakable.
With the cast on, I’ll have to limit my experiments a bit. One thing is for sure: My mutant powers don’t protect me from the itching underneath this #%@ cast!
Day 6
Not immune to rat poison.
Day 7
Oh geeze, I am REALLY not immune to rat poison. I think I’ll take it easy today.
Day 8
My skin is not immune to kitchen knives, thumbtacks, or hammers. My hair is not fire proof. I can’t regrow lost teeth. My eyes are not immune to tabasco or tear gas. I can’t leap over cars in oncoming traffic. I cannot command swarms of angry bees, hornets or wasps.
This is hard. I don’t know what to try next.
How upset is he going to be when at last he learns his mutant power is “can see into the minds of goldfish”?
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.