Who is Steve Konscek, Supermarket Manager?
Well, for one thing, he’s managed at no less than 44 grocery stores over the past weekend, and brilliantly so.
Mini micros pricing options
TidBITS (#764/31-Jan-05) reports, or passes along, news that Apple has reconfigured the “auto-gouge” feature the product shipped with initially in build-to-order configs at the online Apple Store:
The 1 GB memory upgrade was originally a fairly ridiculous $475 when name-brand 1 GB cards of the same type can be found in the mid-$200s. The price now is $325, which is low enough that it’s more reasonable to have an Apple-certified technician perform the installation – especially when you consider that Apple will warranty that RAM and replace it if you have problems. (Self-installed RAM is your own problem, a problem that bit me with my PowerBook G4 and Panther.)The wireless combination of Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme is now $100 instead of $130 when installed together. Upgrading the hard drive to 80 GB now costs $50 instead of $90.
Firesign
On the realization that I would regret not going more than going even if it sucked, I took Viv to see the Firesign Theater show tonight at the Moore. It was… rough. Still, it was a pleasure to see the act. I chuckled when I noticed that an image of a shack being apparently twisted by an encroaching tornado used as an element of the show’s stage dressing had appeared within the month on either FilePile or tmbo.
Viv found the act confusing and the apparent confusion onstage regarding scripted bits and sound effects did not help to clarify things. Firesign’s material is always murky and it wasn’t reaching her. They did mostly new stuff, I think, with a few recorded bits that were vaguely familiar used as scene transitions. Adding to the problems were sound mix issues, including bad cues, over-amped mics, and so forth. The second act was largely a Nick Danger piece, with the customary post-modernist fooraw. There was only one brief multi-voice bit, which is a shame, because the layered speaking bits have always been my favorite part of their material.
It felt like a workshop performance, as if what we saw is going to evolve into a new album and a touring performance. As it happens, this was stop three of six.
Also: Firesign podcasting – a huge trove of downloadable mp3s, right here.
Rathergood, with monkeys
Nothing beats the crisp, clean taste of a cold Monkey Beer.
You Can't Just Sing in the Supermarket
I met Dan and Jim at the U. District Safeway, where we discovered a produce section crowded with fifty or sixty folks, to the growing bemusement of the store’s employees. Eric Sooros emailed me that he was accosted by a store representative be cause he, his wife Rose, and their infant child “looked like they knew what was going on.” Both Eric and I, as it turns out, purchased some produce.
Jim took pictures.
In the midst of the crowded produce section, about seven people began by holding aloft a selection of produce, silently. Then one of the performers began to sing the Clash song, “All Lost in the Supermarket,” which quickly spread to the otyher performers and some of the rest of the crowd. Slightly anxious Safeway employees looked on from the edges of the produce section, which was very full.
Suddenly a guy in a white shirt, featuring the classic managerial combination of cheesy moustache, thinning hair, and black tie rushed in and began scolding the singers, saying “you can’t just sing in the supermarket,” whereupon, of course, Jason struck a chord and the whole lot broke into a Broadway-style hand-waving kick-kick-turn chorus line as they sang a little ditty based upon the phrase.
Then Jim, Dan and I waited interminably for my onions to be rung up, whereupon we headed off to the dank recesses of Finn MacCool’s for a beer and on to the brighter precincts of the Big Time, where we ended the evening, noticing that the brewpub both advertised free wifi and was remarkably uncrowded for a Saturday night, and as the de facto social comittee for MeFi Seattle, it’s on the list of potential venues.
Partway through the evening the ever-amusing Dan remarked that a neighboring tabe had brought a giant robot frog out drinking with them, an amusing wisecrack that improbably turned out to be true. By coincidence, I was wearing the hopkin tee that John and Mikey gave me.
Later, the people with the frog gave it to me.
Struts
We saw The Aviator with Spence last night. It was… OK.
The subject, Howard Hughes’ life as aviation-industry obsessive, is of intrinsic interest to me, and there’s a link filled post in gestation, prompted by many questions I had as I watched the film. But after sleeping on it, despite DiCaprio’s worthwhile performance, there’s no way that this should be the film that wins Scorsese his best film Oscar, even if it leads the pack this year. Even though Gangs of New York was a terribly flawed film, it had the power of obsession, and images from that film echoed around in my head for over a year after seeing it.
In The Aviator, Scorsese is fundamentally forced to rely on CGI visualizations of the key visual expressions of Hughes’ obsessiveness; thus, no full-scale reconstruction of 19th century Five Points, only digital ghosts of the Spruce Goose and the amazing in-flight sequences from Hell’s Angels. Unfortunately for Scorsese, I found the CGI to be sadly weightless and unconvincing. As much as it thrills me to have been granted the chance to fly with Leo-as-Howard in the H-1 and the H-4, in the external shots of these planes in flight, I was reminded of the physical unreality of the planes seen onscreen.
Too smooth, the perfectly even silver skin of aluminum airplane dope the CGI emulated exceeds even the factory-fresh finish of any plane from that era. Shots of the real Spruce Goose on its’ taxi run in Long Beach harbor show weight and mass behind the wake and spray the plane kicked up. Undoubtedly, the film’s CGI artists knew the imagery, and it’s very likely that there are frame-matches for well-known stills of the event on-screen.
But this problem – of accurately integrating CGI-based images into real-world photography in ways that capture the effects of mass and weight on the environment of the object – is the non-anthromorphic equivalent of the uncanny valley. It’s not unsettling to note these problems as one watches the imagery; but it just looks wrong, and distracts from the sought after illusion. Viv commonly critiques this observation of mine, saying that she doesn’t see the problems, and she probably represents the vast majority of moviegoers. But over time, as we become educated in the ways in which CGI fails mimesis, more people see the problems.
Remember the first time you saw Titanic, or Jurassic Park, or Twister? Flipped into one lately in the tube? Looks a whole lot more fake now than it did originally, huh?
I think, in the end, this is part of my concern. Films like Jackson’s LOTR trilogy and The Aviator are intended by their creators as works with a longer half life than even Titanic. Reliance on CGI, as long as the imaging techniques are in motion, shortens the effective lifespan of these films as accessible, ambitious works of art for a mass audience.
Right. Well, I gotta go. More on The Aviator soon.
Plug
So, a while ago, I posted to MetaFilter about the hilarity that is “Ron’s First Goatse,” which I had seen at an interesting image-sharing site known, variously, as [this might be offensive] and also “themaxx,” after the site’s domain.
At the time, the site was a silent filepile imagestream mirror. I was mostly unaware of this when I posted to MeFi about the image; I had seen a lot of FP references in the imagestream, but I see a lot of the same images on BoingBoing, so I hadn’t connected the dots in my mind at the time.
Shortly after my post, the site’s maintainer and developer, known as themaxx, ran a graphic illlustrating the dramatically escalated bandwidth demands that were placed on the site after the MetaFilter post. Since that time, membership on the site has climbed, to what I estimate to be about 2000 members; many are apparently also MeFites and/or Pilers.
Apparently, over the last week or so, some sort of huge drama broke out on FilePile about themaxx’s mirror. See, FilePile evokes the inexplicably cultish “Fight Club,” and the first rule of FP is, well, you either know, or you know how to use Google, and frankly, I find the topic tiresome.
It’s been interesting catching glimpses of the dustup on [tmbo]. I have been chuckling about it all week, and a couple of days ago, I pointed this out to that expert provocateur, Danelope, who immediately frittered an hour of his life away constructing an animated fumetti.
Fumetti are photo-based comics, best known in the US as having been an importat element in the 1970s National Lampoon. This month, the form has been pressed into service with remixes of scenes from, mostly, The Lord of The Rings, and so Dan’s choice was tres au courant, if I myself did not recognize the film he repurposed. I do not have a copy of his animation, but will link to it when I find a copy.
In his animation, he made light of the dustup and provoked a storm of comments on [tmbo], notably including remarks from one “andre,” which is the first name of the Southern California-based programmer who originated FilePile. (Since this was posted, internal evidence makes it much less likerly that this andre is the FP guy).
Shortly after Dan’s posting, themaxx posted a monochromatic image, similar to the color image at the head of this post; he’d disconnected the mirroring.
The image at the head of this entry is what occurred to me as I watched all of this, chuckling, from the couch. The internet is like a slow-moving sitcom that you have to poke at and peer into to get the jokes.
produce
A missive from my friend Jason:
Hello…Something is happening in the produce section of your local Supermarket this weekend:
Jan 29 – 12:30 pm – Ballard Safeway – 8340 15th Ave NW
Jan 29 – 7 pm – University Safeway – 4732 Brooklyn Ave NE
Jan 30 – 12:30 pm – Capital Hill QFC – 523 Broadway E
Jan 30 – 7 pm – Everett QFC – 2615 Broadway
Thus, my vague Saturday plans appear to begin to sort of coalesce.
Hands across the water
up in the air
Unreal Aircraft, via things, which I have been sorely slacking on.