Blog of Nuke

I might have known that when I decide and announce that I’ll be shutting this blog down, that’s when I start receiving more comments from the public than I ever have before.

Maybe I’ll re-think shutting this blog down.

In order to reduce the amount of time required for maintenance, I’ll be shutting down this mirror blog on wordpress.org and moving all blogging activities to my primary blog site at:

http://www.frikafrax.com/mnuke/blog2/

I like the idea of having a back-up blog on a high traffic blogging network but I’ve been finding my content ending up on splogs as a result from being scraped from wordpress.org.

I can take measures on my primary blog site to make scraping more difficult but re-publishing them here (this is a back-up blog after all) makes them too easily accessible to scrapers.

I don’t have much control over the configuration and security of this blog unless I want to pay for it but that doesn’t make financial sense when I’ve already got a good web hosting plan in place.

I’ll cease blogging on wordpress.org but I’ll probably keep this blog around as an emergency contingency or perhaps re-task it in some manner.

A pair of Harvard psychologists, Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D and authors of the book “Grand Theft Childhood” surveyed 1,250 kids and 500 parents in order find out if there really is any correlation between teen violence and video games. jG7JE9J6ZH

Guess what they found?  That’s right.  The psychologists reported there was “absolutely no evidence” linking the two and that teen crime is actually on the decline.

They discuss their study in more detail in a recent interview on X-Play.  You can watch the video of the interview here.   Openeducation.net interviewed with Dr. Cheryl Olson on the study.  You can read the interview here.

The psychologists also stated that any studies linking the two tended to examine only the short term reactions of young players immediately after they’ve played a violent video game and that a “leap of faith” is required in order to draw any sort of long term correlation.

Their study turned up some interesting and revealing facts.  For example, male teens who play 15+ hours of M-rated video games a week were at the same level of risk of getting into trouble or engaging in bad behaviour than male teens who did not play video games.  Olson made a point to say that the game playing in this context was a “risk marker” and not a cause for getting into trouble.  

Another revealing fact is that the commonly held notion that a growth in video game sales and popularity is linked with a growth in youth violence is a myth.  The two trends have been moving in opposite directions since 1993.  As video game sales grow, youth violence is actually on the decline.

This study puts into question the numerous claims by parents groups and fools like Jack Thompson that video games are the cause of a lot of the youth violence.

It’s that time of year again when I have to take up arms against the invasion of the raccoon hordes. (jG7JE9J6ZH)

No structure intrusion this time (thankfully) but they are continuing to defecate on our garage/side entrance roof just outside our kitchen window.

It’s no fun living under the local raccoon toilet and makes for a rather unpleasant view during meal times.

I’ve identified their roof access points as being the two front and back gates that are attached to the outer wall of our garage on the neighbour’s side.

I plan to use bird spikes long the gate tops as a climbing deterrent and, if need be, directly on the rooftop itself as an area denial measure. While they are designed mainly to stop birds from roosting, they do still serve as effective barriers for climbing animals.

I find it surprising that these sorts of products aren’t easy to find in my area, given that I am in the “Raccoon Capital of North America.”

We have roughly 150 raccoons per square kilometre! That’s 40 times greater than the raccoon population in the wild!

It may be one or two weeks before I can actually obtain the bird spikes. I’ll keep this post updated with installation photos.

X-D

(jG7JE9J6ZH)

(Video link)

zekaric fired a link my way from Variety reporting that Steven Spielberg will be bringing Masamune Shirow’s “Ghost in the Shell” to the big screen. (Article) (jG7JE9J6ZH)

Variety writes:

Avi Arad, Ari Arad and Steven Paul of Seaside Entertainment are attached to produce and brought the project to the studio. Jamie Moss has been tapped to pen the adaptation.

Universal and Sony were also chasing “Ghost in the Shell,” but Steven Spielberg took personal interest in the property and made it happen at DreamWorks.

” ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is one of my favorite stories,” Spielberg said. “It’s a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks.”

It’s been reported long ago that James Cameron will be working on the Battle Angel Alita (”Gunmm”) film but apparently that’s on the backburner. Cameron is working on his sci-fi baby “Avatar” first before moving on to Alita.

It does appear that we’ve attained a saturation point both in terms of anime/manga penetration and visual effects technology.

Anime has proliferated to the point where it’s now virtually mainstream making it more financially feasible for the suits in the Hollywood studios.

Furthermore, technology has reached a point where even start-up visual effects houses can do some pretty sophisticated effects making many of the settings, story concepts and characteristic visual storytelling techniques in anime/manga possible on a budget. Meanwhile, the boom in new VFX studios around the globe has caused per-shot costs to drop by as much as 30%-40% due to increased competition; good for audiences, bad for the visual effects industry but that’s a topic for another article.

The Good Old Days

Having been an anime fan long before the big anime boom. Back in those days, today’s level of mainstream distribution and fan support was wishful thinking. It’s ironic that I should feel like something special has been lost in the transition from ultra-niche hobby to mainstream exposure.

In those days, it was possible to shock, surprise and even impress people with anime.

I recall one day when I was ‘working’ at Ryerson University in their computer graphics department during my high school co-op program. It was a slow day so I decided to screen an episode of Bubblegum Crisis (I think).

Eventually a small group of passers-by had formed. Like most people, the crowd had it firmly entrenched in their minds that “cartoons” were for kids. For these people, the most serious animation ever got for them was the death of Bambi’s mother.

They were all fairly impressed at how detailed (compared to ‘toons’), fast and dynamic the animation was and that animation could be used as a medium to tell stories for more mature audiences.

However, these days it’s come to the point where the mere mention of being anime fan can be a source of ridicule.

I suppose that ultimately greater acceptance is better for the anime/manga genre as a whole, for both fans and those who work in the industry. But I still do miss those days of ’shock and awe.’ ^_^

Gosh I feel old.

I haven’t played much Halo 3 lately but this video really makes me want to get into it again!

Unbelievable! (jG7JE9J6ZH)

(Video Link)

I have two impossible kills of my own in Halo 3 that I should try and dump to video some time if I can get the video capture hardware to do it.

I have a large collection of digital video files and it’s hard to keep track of it all— especially the anime series whose sheer number of episodes and Japanese titles sometimes make recall difficult for me. (jG7JE9J6ZH)

I had been looking for an automated way to create a thumbnail sheet graphic for each video file containing screen shots from the video but couldn’t find anything that fit the bill until I found this neat Windows command line utility called Movie Thumbnailer (aka Mtn).

Mtn is a no-nonsense, efficient and fast utility that utilizes the open source audio/video converter FFMPEG to generate its thumbnails.

 

Mtn Output Example

(I didn’t pick the scene with the boobs!  This was a blind capture! Honest! :-P)

Mtn’s greatest asset is its ability to work with almost any video file your system is capable of playing.  The other techniques/utilities I’ve tried can’t do this, even when I’ve got all the proper codecs installed and working correctly.

Mtn includes functions to control screen shot size, contact sheet size, capture interval, scene detection (including blank screen) tweaking, file information insertion, time code insertion and so on.

I’m going to be using Mtn to create “blind” screen shot contact sheets for my reviews.   Granted, it’s not as concise as hand picking frames, is lower resolution per screen shot and there’s a risk that it might reveal a few spoiler scenes (I’ll be careful about those), it does save me a considerable amount of time as well as reducing screen shot management to just one file per video.

Normally I’d have to spend an hour or two “scrubbing” back and forth in a video editor to find the right screen shots, tweaking each screen shot for web use, upload them to the blog, then use a third party in-line gallery plug-in to format everything in the article.

Doing this for every episode of every anime series I plan on blogging adds up to a lot of hours just managing screen shots.

With Mtn, I can run it on a video file (or whole directory tree of files) and it’s done in no time.  Plus having just one contact sheet per video simplifies file management.

I’m not too concerned with the content of each screen shot (if it’s not a spoiler scene) since I use screen shots to primarily give viewers more of a general feel for the art style and content of the video being reviewed as opposed to showing very specific scenes.  If I need to show something specific, then I’ll use the manual method.

If you’re writing video reviews or you need to catalogue your video file collection, check out Mtn.  You’ll need FFMPEG as well.  Both are no bloat/no footprint installations.

There’s even a third party GUI for Mtn if the command line scares you.

Recently I had posted an article regarding Acanac’s Online PC VPS service as a way to get around Bell’s traffic shaping. My sister pointed out that on Google, my blog showed up around the third or forth hit regarding Acanac’s Online PC VPS service. (jG7JE9J6ZH)

I feel that since my article shows up relatively high in the Google results, I should follow up because apparently Acanac has a big problem with customer service.

Here’s some interesting info about Acanac:

• Better Business Bureau (Canada) profile.
• Google search results about Acanac tech support’s alleged rude behaviour:

My sister sent this my way:

• dslreports.com Acanac review comment thread.

Having worked customer service I realize how some customers can be real assholes. They can be completely blind to their own behavior and how they treat company staff and their expectations can be very unreasonable.

So when people complain about a company, I tend to take it with a grain of salt until I can corroborate any claims. However, I think Acanac’s own performance in this review comment thread is particularly revealing.

This is a direct quote of what a manager at Acanac said in reply to a user who was having problems with a trial account:

“I am sorry I could not get to your PM’s earlier, but after all it is a free trial account. You not even a client.”

Whoa! Did I just read that right? A manager said this?!

Acanac gives out select free trial accounts as, I assume, part of a promotional campaign to attract customers, spread the company name around via word-of-mouth and so on.

When I read that response, this is how I interpret Acanac’s attitude:

“It’s only a free trial account so what do you expect? We provided you with this account but you should be thankful we’re even bothering to help you. You’re actually not that important because you’re not even a regular client.”

Okay, I may not be the CEO of a large corporation but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a bad idea to go out of your way to attract potential customers to your service by giving them free trial access and then treat them in this manner.

Sufficed to say, it looks like I’ll have to look elsewhere for service.

I just saw Charles Laughton’s film noir masterpiece “Night of the Hunter” for the second time tonight.  It’s a real shame that it was Laughton’s one and only directorial endeavour because it was really a remarkable film for its time. (jG7JE9J6ZH)

Despite being a film made in 1955, Night of the Hunter showcases the talent of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who’s surreal and haunting cinematographic style is something that you’d be more accustomed to seeing in today’s contemporary film making.   It’s no wonder it had a strong influenced on some of today’s top film makers like Scorcese, Lynch and the Coen Brothers.

Robert Mitchum is especially terrific as the deliciously evil ‘Preacher’ Harry Powell, the Bible-quoting killer who has the word “LOVE” tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and “HATE” on the knuckles on his left hand.

The film was not appreciated in its time and was a critical and box office flop.  It’s sad that Laughton didn’t receive the praise and recognition he now receives from today’s critics.   Many critics today label it as one of the best films of the 1950’s and the United States Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

I can only imagine what Laughton could have accomplished had he been given more opportunities to direct.