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Today, this site participated in the SOPA Strike. Thanks for contacting your representatives in Congress to help keep the Internet free.
Here's the latest on my musical activities since, whenever:
I'm going to try to record a song each month in 2010. I just finished January. The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up. Check it out, and watch this space for more songs when I get around to them.
I first saw Avatar in 2D, and it was beautiful. The visually rich environment of the planet was extraordinary. Many of the scenes seemed to be lifted (unacknowledged) from Roger Dean paintings, but I love Roger Dean paintings, so this was a joy to watch. I enjoyed studying the extensive detail filling many of the shots---the luminous forests and arcane wildlife made every "shot" (to use the term loosely) a feast for the eyes.
I decided I should take advantage of the 3D version while I could, so I went and saw it in one of the highest-quality screenings around. While there were times that the 3D effect was very cool and gave the images a more visceral quality, overall I found the effect distracting and not enjoyable. While objects in the shots did seem to exist in three-space, I found everything to have a sort of transparent flickery quality. By the end, I had a bit of a headache and my eyes felt funny.
Reflecting on the experience, I realized the origin of this feeling might be rooted in a quirk of the way the 3D effect is created. While sending a different image to each eye does create a stereoscopic focal point in space, the optical focal distance is always the actual distance to the screen. When viewing normal objects, these distances are always correlated. However, in a 3D projection like this, the stereoscopic distance and the focal distance are different, forcing the eyes to operate outside their normal parameter space. I suspect this subtle visual anomaly is behind the somewhat weird look of everything and the cause of the discomfort I felt by the end.
There was another factor I found annoying, at a more conscious level---the omnipresent awareness of the "camera". Even though the 3D image appears "real" in some sense, the frequent cuts and camera motions collide with that sense of reality. But an even greater sense of the "camera" comes from the fact that many of the scenes are rendered with a limited depth of field, as if they had been shot with an actual camera. Thus, for example, when one of the seeds of the tree of life goes floating by in the foreground, it's a big white blur. You can cross your eyes and look at it, but it's still blurry. And, there's still the problem that it's least blurry when your optical focus is aimed much further away than the apparent distance to the object.
Depth of field is a useful compositional tool, and can be used to great effect to direct the audience's attention to different parts of a shot. But I still like to study the whole frame and look at things that aren't the central subject. That to me is part of the point of seeing a film on a big screen---so I can see little incidental details that might be overlooked on a small display. Unfortunately, the 3D presentation of Avatar makes it inconvenient and uncomfortable to let one's eyes wander around a scene.
I decided to look around and see if anyone else had similar observations, and indeed they did:
Bill Maher has written a great article on why you should move your money into a local bank. Check it out.
Today I got an e-mail informing me that someone I don't know wants to keep up with me on Twitter. That's really nice, but I don't want to keep up with Twitter. At this rate, I can't keep up with Facebook; the last thing I need is another social networking web site, on top of Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, my college's alumni web site, and even Barack Obama's web site.
I'm a completist, and the voluminious feed-based nature of a site like Twitter thoroughly annoys me. There's probably stuff I care about in that stream of gunk going by, but it takes too much effort to go back through it all to find what has happened since I last looked. I can either spend all my time habitually checking the feed, or ignore it completely. I choose the latter. I'll be playing my guitar instead. If you want to reach me, look around this site until you find my e-mail address.
And while I'm on a rant, why does the user interface for these supposedly modern tools suck so much? How am I supposed to peruse this garbage? Spin the scroll wheel on my mouse until I get carpal tunnel? Hit reload relentlessly to keep up with updates? Drag the scrollbar quickly to the bottom and give up? In 1991, I used a tool called 'trn' to read USENET news. Its user interface is still better than the horrible user interfaces on these web sites that people so adore these days.
And hey, what do you know; you can even find that horrible user interface right here on my web site. Enjoy.
This time of year, you might be asking yourself, "How should I mail my tax return?"
I'm not a lawyer, an accountant, a financial advisor, or a doctor, but this page at the IRS seems to support the idea that you should send your tax return certified return receipt via the US Post Office:
http://www.irs.gov/irb/2004-43_IRB/ar12.html
I used to always get a certificate of mailing because I once thought I heard that was what the IRS recognized, but the above page seems to suggest that might not be good enough if you need to prove you mailed it.
I found the above link here:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/597478
Here's someone who disagrees, in case you're looking for justification for just dropping it in the mail and not worrying about it:
"We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective." -- Iowa Supreme Court, 2009-04-03