Archive for the 'Entertainment' category

We do not often see the sceenplay of a movie we like. Maybe it’s fortunate because they are hardly exhilarating except when they come from Alfred Hitchcock (the man was a maniac of detailed preparation) or when they describe all about animation movies.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

Trevor Cawood is a movie director that has been noticed in a number of short movies in the world of advertising. Personally, I noticed ads for Citroën and for GMC. But you must remember him for his participation to the special effects of The Matrix Reloaded (Matrix 2) or The Matrix Revolutions (Matrix 3). But in 2007, he directed this short movie that I found some time ago.

Synopsis

A mere business worker seems to be choosen by an impressive creature of cement (a golem, maybe). Permanently stalked and followed, he has to learn to live with it.

Weightlessness produces utterly weird effects. What does it do to an effervescent tablet?

Some musical scores are really out-of-this world:

• One musical score drawing up the map of the whole world:

Play Song

Buy Song: World Beat Music

• PI, the mathematical constant, can easily be transformed into a curious musical score may be honoring the memory of Bach and Pythagoras:

• But I really love the work of Atushi Ojisama:

With VozMe, it’s easy to have your computer read a text. In English (but also in Spanish and in Italian), you will get an MP3 file with your text read by the slightly-metallic voice of your computer.

One of the greatest minds and authors of the 20th Century just died. Arthur C. Clarke was very well known for some of his highly acclaimed books (think about 2001: A Space Odyssey and the collaboration with Stanley Kubrik on the movie with the same name). Some of them were only known to Science Fiction fans (Rendez-vous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, for example).

But Sir Arthur C. Clarke was also the author of significant steps for science like the observation that geostationary satellites would be the practical solution to many telecommunication issues. I can vividly remember my reading of Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics, where in 1950 he stated very clearly concepts like the multi-stage rocket or the geostationary satellite and why they should be prefered to other technical solutions.

The old man (born on 16 December 1917) was living in Sri Lanka where he appreciated the leisure of all-year-long scuba diving.

Science Fiction can no longer be the same after he left us.

Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90 from respiratory complications linked to the post-polio syndrome that forced him into a wheelchair for his last years.

Nothing is for sure, but Wired has an article about this issue: paying a monthly fee to have fully legal access to unlimited music download on P2P. Wired seems to believe that it would be a piracy levy on ISPs, but I think it would be a real license paid on a monthly basis.

If you have a nVidia graphics card on your PC, you can get a free download of recent games from Steam / Valve.

For a limited time, if you qualify (you only need your PC to hold a nVidia graphics card), you can donwload a free copy of the following games from Steam just by creating an account or having an account on Steam.

• Portal: First Slice (11 levels of this new innovative game from Valve)
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (networked FPS)
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (FPS technology demonstrator)
• Peggle Extreme (a relatively simple game inspired by old brick games)

Look! It’s a free offer for only half of the PC owners in the world.

All lovers of role playing knew -at least- the name of Gary Gygax, co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, the game that opened the path for all RPG (Role Playnig Games). This man who influenced the imaginations of countless players and inspired many other creators, just died at 69.

No curing spell is going to bring him back.

Source: NY Times (thanks to Xtian).

This is really a pity when some of the best old games disappear just because nobody even think of leaving a way to use them. They usually call this “abandonware” (software that has been abandonned by its creators).

Their legal status is flimsy, but some companies try to give us access to them. Somehow, they grab the software and put it on sale (really don’t ask me how; I feel that it involves getting an old copy and transfering it to an Internet web archive). I found it freshening (for my old age) to see at Abandonware Games (also known as C:Dos) that they had a large choice of old games still (partly) usable on your modern PC. Like Day of the Tentacle or Worms or even Panzer General 2.

Also, they include a lot more than just the download links (reviews, screenshots and media), but the choice of games is still quite limited in the Classics category. However, if you are ready to dig in the box, you can find wondrous amounts of less well-known games in the Rare category (by Rare, you should understand that this is nearly impossible to find somebody who remembers about these games, most probably because they did not encounter the success, leaving open the options of “this was a sucker” or “this was a little gem that nobody had a chance to discover”). And there even is a forum for fans.