 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stan Winston died yesterday. That's frakkin depressing. You've seen his work. You've been impressed by it, if you haven't shit your pants by his work. Some of the most iconic images of modern cinema were realized by Stan. Amongst his most famous works: The Terminator (skeleton, not the governor) The Alien queen (Aliens) The Predator The Jurassic Park dinosaurs (he created the animatronics that they used on set) The Iron Man suit Robert Downy Jr. wore The man is a make-up, animatronic, and visual effects god. When the news broke yesterday, everyone in the office was visibly bummed. He died of cancer. Seriously, someone needs to get rid of that damned disease. It's fucking depressing. He was 62 years old.
 ---------------- So, I bought a PS3 last week. Funny thing is, I didn't buy any games. I bought a shit ton of Blue-Ray movies though. Just bought a few more too. Canceled some Amazon.com orders in order to get the BD versions. First game I bought was over the weekend, MGS4. I haven't played it yet. The only game I can think of getting next is Resident Evil 5. That won't be out till next year. Heh... Go Wii. Wonder if Bark bought Wii Fit.... ---------------- The family's in the Bahamas. From the pics I've seen, it looks like they're having blast. Elaine and I leave for the Philippines in 2 weeks. Should be fun! ---------------- Work continues on PSD (our code for Pushing Daisies). They started filming yesterday, and we're supposed to have the city rebuild built and textured by the end of the month. Just in time for my departure for the Philippines. First episode is to deliver the end of July. Show comes back in the Fall. Fact: Pushing Daisies was ABC's highest rated new show last Fall. The Writer's Strike botched the season, so, rather than force a few eps, they decided to just start with Season 2. ---------------- Just finished re-watching Roswell. It was a damned good show. Woulda been interesting to see where it woulda gone next, but I'm glad that it at least ended properly. Stupid show facts: They mentioned working at a cheese factory on a couple occasions. Turns out the real city of Roswell has the world's largest mozzarella factory in the world. And I just read that the ever cute Shiri Appleby, aka Liz Parker, is going to be a regular on ER for its 15th and final season.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fact: The US spends $600 BILLION annually to purchase oil from the Middle East and Russia. Fact: Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado have oil shale deposits that have roughly 1.1-1.5 trillion barrels worth of oil. Fact: Alberta, Canada has roughly 1.7 Trillion barrels worth of oil in their tar sands. Fact: Saudi Arabia has roughly 1.5-1.7 Trillion barrels of conventional oil. Fact: North America has more oil deposits then the rest of the world combined, just in oil shale and tar sands. Now, if we add the oil in Alaska, in the Gulf and off our coasts... It gets kinda nutty. Fact: Democrats and environmentalists are stalling, in in most cases, preventing us from tapping into these resources, thus increasing our reliance on foreign oil. And now, we pay $4.30/gal for regular gas. Not to mention the rather large environmental footprint left by the transport of said oil from the Middle East to the US. In 2005, Shell ran a field test and extracted 1700 barrels of oil from the oil shales in Colorado. The cost of the extraction/refinery yielded oil that would cost $30/barrel and still be profitable. As part of the refining process, natural gas is also produced. The process uses a significant amount of water, which Shell intends to extract from aquifers that are not part of the water table, thus, not touching the (scarce) main water resource of the region. Oh, and lets discuss coal a little. 26% of the world's coal is in the United States. And we can't touch it. Fact: Ethanol is stupid. Food prices are up. Ethanol is made from corn. Prices are up. And environmentally speaking: creating ethanol fuel is actual worse for the environment then extracting from oil shale. For every acre of corn used for ethanol, we get 5-7 barrels. For every 1 acre of oil shale, we get 100,000 to a MILLION barrels of oil. It takes 1000 barrels of water to make 1 barrel of ethanol. It takes 3 barrels of water to make 1 barrel of oil via oil shale. Do the math homeslice. What about hybrid and electric cars? True, they don't use as much oil, but they're actually harder to build because the advanced electronics require rare minerals. Not to mention the need to mine nickel-metal for their batteries. Now, new technologies are making batteries more efficient, but ultimately, we need to charge them. And where does that energy come from? Power plants. Which are mostly oil or coal based! What about nuclear plants? Oh wait, we don't have that many of them, despite being a very clean source of energy, but people are afraid they'll blow up, even though countries like France have successfully been running off of them for decades (79% of their energy comes from nuclear power!). Okay, I just needed to blow off some steam. So, why Democrats? Because its been their drive to reduce US production of carbon emitting fuels, despite the fact the US uses 20 million barrels a day. We use the most. China is #2. They use 6.5 million barrels a day. 6.5. We use 20. Jeez... And we fucking buy this shit even though we're sitting on more of it then the rest of the world... Oh, and Democrats just blocked a bill that would end a yearlong moratorium on the start of drilling oil shales. I just paid $70 to fill up my Taco.... I'm buying a Segway.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 4th 2008 will go down in history for me. Tonight was Elaine's sis' birthday, so, we treated her out to a nice dinner at Craft. As we were waiting to be seated, I see a familiar lookin fella across from us. It didn't take long for me to realize who it was. It was this guy:  If you don't know who this is, it's JOSS MOTHERFUCKING WHEDON!!!! He who hath brought forth to this world, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Angel. Firefly. And soon, Dollhouse. There are only a handful of people I truly admire equally as I do this guy. His work has helped shape me in my creative thoughts, my writing. Put me in a room with Angelina Jolie and Joss Whedon, I'll ditch Angie and head to Joss. Seriously. This is a guy, a normal guy, with a good idea, a geeky idea, and he fucking ran with it. Then it spawned another geeky idea. Then another. I mean, seriously, the guy is a bigger dork then I am. And I'm a big ass dork! I sat there for a sec debating if I should introduce myself. After I pointed him out to Elaine, she practically pushed me to go say hi. And so, I did. Thanks hon! And yeah, he looked just like he does in the picture! All frumpy and disheveled. But man, I tried my damnedest to not geek out and be a fanboy. I walked over to him, introduced myself and proceeded to tell him how much I love his work, without totally geeking out. He was a really cool guy, totally normal, and appreciative. We even got to talking about his new show, Dollhouse, and in the hopes that Fox won't screw him over again (read: Firefly). He says they're being supportive, and we even discussed, briefly, about how his show, along with Fringe, are getting only 5 minute commercial breaks. At this point I felt like I needed to go before melting into fanboy-dom. The dude is seriously cool. I bid him a nice dinner and a fond farewell. I saw him later eating alone, iPod in hand. I joked with Elaine that I was leaving the table to join him. I would have had he invited me, but alas, working with THE Mutant Enemy must wait a bit longer. Is this is a sign? I don't know. But at least if I do meet him later on I can say, "yeah, we met once at Craft." Then he will say, "Oh shit, that's right! For that, I'll back up your next script!" A man can dream, no? Tags: joss whedon
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I crawled into bed around 10:30, feeling really really tired. It's 2 am now. WTF happened? I think it was just food coma and the 5 minutes I actually fell asleep for acted as a power nap. Dag nabbit!!!! Today was kind of a milestone on Pushing Daisies. For the last several days I've been working on the main building that the Pie Hole sits under. As it stood, from the model we received from Sandman (a now dead FX house in Utah), the Pie Hole Building was half a million polygons, WITHOUT the Pie Hole or the torch!  I brought it down to about 130,000 polygons. That's a significant improvement. Not to mention the fact that the model is cleaner and better detailed! Yeah, I know, I rule. Pics will be posted in the Fall. Sorry, NDAs and such, so I can't show it. Man, I got some new parts for my B44 today, and I'm itchin to install it, but I can't. I'm at Elaine's and everyone's asleep.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous 
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
