Two days to go before the end of 2009 and now I discover that it was the international year of astronomy. Bloody hell.
Anyway, these beautiful posters were exquisitely crafted for the fun of it by Simon Page and eventually adopted by International Astronomical Union and UNESCO for their promotional work.
When someone says “fax it to me,” I always feel like I’m being punk’d. A fax machine is nothing more than a printer, scanner and an obsolete analog mode that work together to waste time, money, paper and electricity.
›› Computerworld’s 10 technologies to kill in 2010
This Lord of the Rings Facebook parody is probably a bit funnier than the Star Wars one, only because of the language.
So which came first, the advertising idea or the editing technique? Does it matter?
Really?
A good behind-the-scenes report from Wired on the demise of Duke Nukem Forever. One of the many lessons that can be drawn from the whole story is that ideas make money and not the other way around.
In the last year or so, with a growing baby who is so much fun to be with, going to the movies has been a rare event. So nowadays, I find myself watching a lot of movies on HBO.
That’s how I caught Wanted. It was one of those movies that I wanted to watch on the big screen but never found the time to. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who also did Nightwatch and Daywatch, Wanted is quite a visual spectacle (and I am including Angelina Jolie in that). A dead-end office worker who turns into a deadly assasin, James McAvoy‘s Wesley Gibson realises he can bend bullets like Beckham. It was a fun movie, though I thought James McAvoy’s baby-faced assasin look could have been grunged-up a bit.
A great cover of an old classic by Florence + The Machine, and a very distracting video, I must say.
Tim Burton, master of the dark and the quirky, has an exhibit of his personal drawings, paintings and stop motion video at MOMA. Too bad the exhibit is in New York and not in Newton.
So yeah, I was kinda busy the last few days with some stuff, but that’s all done and dusted and I’m back.
“Done and dusted”, with some comprehensive flooding, is exactly what happens to our planet in Roland Emmerich‘s latest disaster flick, 2012. Some flaky Mayan Mesoamerican Long Count calendar interpretation and some dodgy scientific theories form the groundwork for this mother of all disasters movies.
2012 delivered some absolutely stunning special effects, where planet earth gets a thorough and destructive whacking. It’s not a classic dystopian sci-fi film or anything close to an epic, but it was quite spectacular entertainment.
The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.
›› Yet another anti-miracle for the LHC
For 24 years, this goal was only seen by those who were at Anfield for the League (then Milk) Cup match against Manchester United. Everyone else could only read about it because the TV crews were on strike.
The story goes that Ron Atkinson, then manager of Manchester United, was the only person who had access to the footage and magnanimously gave the tape to Jan Molby after the game. After all these years, that mythical goal has now found its place in the tubes permanently.