Too good to last: Grooveshark no longer free

I named Grooveshark as one of my favourite websites in a previous post.

I waxed about a site where you can play "song that takes your fancy in real time".

It was too good to last.

I tried to use the site this evening and I got the following message:

So it's back to Jango for me!

The great thing about Jango is that you tell it what (whom) you like and then it picks similar stuff for you. So you can hear stuff that you didn't even know about.

Sandimation

My last post (well, the animation part specifically) reminded me of the following:



There are differences of course:

• The fact that this one is done in real time
• The use of sand!

It's quite amazing.

To see Kseniya Simonova's website, click here.

What is the single best thing we can do for our health?

A link to this video was sent to me by my friend, Tony.

I love the message, and I love the medium.

Congrats to Dr. Mike Evans (for the former) and Liisa Sorsa (for the latter). And to the rest of the team too.

Now I need to get off this chair and...

Movie/TV Mashups: Wagon Train to the Stars

My last posting referred to the concept of combining the idea of a Terminator with the idea of the Borg.

In Robert Altman's "The Player" there is a scene where people pitch movie ideas to Tim Robbins. To help him to understand the concept, they summarise it by saying that it is a combination of other movies ("Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman" is one example). You can see the scene here.

I love this idea. It's so cheesy.

But not totally unrealistic.

The idea for "AVP: Alien vs. Predator" must have come from somewhere! (I can hear the pitch now: "What if we had a movie that combined both...")

And famously Gene Roddenberry pitched "Star Trek" to studio execs as "Wagon Train to the Stars"!

It is interesting that the memory of this fact seems to have outlived the memory of that TV show.

Here is an image I put together which shows how "Wagon Train to the Stars" might have looked:

T3: Rise of the Machines

I re-watched T3 the other day.

I re-watched it for 2 reasons, I guess:
1) As a precursor to re-watching T4
2) Because I read a review that said that it wasn't as bad a people made out and everyone should give it a second chance.

I'm afraid my first impression was right.

The main places where the movie went wrong (IMHO) were:
1) Thinking that a female Terminator (the T-X or "Terminatrix") was a good idea and a fitting sequel to the T-1000 in T2. There was no comparison between the menace created by Robert Patrick and that achieved by Kristanna Loken.
2) The attempt to inject humour at inappropriate places and in inappropriate ways.

When trying to raise the bar for T3 they should have tried something more ambitious. Such as a number of shape-shifting Terminators that could act separately or in unison. Some kind of Terminator meets the Borg. Here's my artist's impression of how that might look:

Scary, huh?!

Addictive game: Harbor Master

Surprisingly (well I think it's surprising anyway) I have never been a huge fan of computer games.

But a few days ago my daughter Ellen introduced me to an iPad game called "Harbor Master".

It is absolutely compelling. I don't know how many games I have played so far (but it's a lot!)

Like many great games, it is easy to learn but hard to master.

And it makes great use of the touch screen interface.

Give it a try. You won't be sorry (except perhaps about the amount of time you're spending playing it!)

Here's a link and a screenshot: