Thursday, October 27, 2016
The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy (just the good parts)
For my million and one loyal followers: you're already aware that this blog is extremely gif-heavy. Ever since I learned how to make a decent 15-second gif a couple of years ago, I've decorated my blog with them, watching the action run in perfectly-executed little circles. I particularly like to boil down a movie to its bare essence, and never is this more effective than in the case of poorly-dubbed, low-budget Mexican horror films.
Can you guess which one I have in mind?
Since I'm bringing you just the good parts, and I hope these don't run slow and jerky for you as they do when the net is a little busy (they straighten out after one cycle), I'll need to explain that this movie is about a robot vs an Aztec mummy. It eventually comes down to a cage match between the two of them, and I won't tell you who wins - you'll figure it out, I think. In between all this feverish activity, there is an unbelievable number of reaction shots. People also spend a lot of time tromping through graveyards, but I left most of that out. As with most films in this genre, it's incredibly slow-moving: believe me when I tell you, this really IS the best part of it, and it comes in under less than two minutes.
This mummy kicks ass. This mummy wants revenge. He has come back from the grave to get some goodies stolen from him by some greedy archaeologist (or something like that). Something about a breastplate and bracelet, though who knows why? Must be because he's Aztec and all.
This is an action scene. There aren't that many of them. People fall down a lot, and cover their faces and scream, and one guy gets real scarred up because the mummy touches him (or is it the robot?)
Sorry this one is so long, but this guy kills me! He looks like Orson Welles, or a crazed opera singer or something - and the human heart, which I guess ends up inside the robot, is straight out of Frankenstein. But the special effects are a tad simpler. That old heart just kind of sits there stewing.
This is a great example of endless, tedious reaction shots. I suspect a good many of them are repeated, a common trick in the low-budget horror industry where recycling footage saves cash. It takes forever for the robot to actually DO anything, and until then all we can do is watch a lot of flashing lights.
At last, the beast is on his feet! This is a magnificent construction which appears to be made from a large spray-painted cardboard box and some furnace ducts. I'm still puzzling out why there is a thing like a mail slot in his chest. My favorite part of the ensemble is the remote control, wielded with fiendish glee by The Bad Guy.
This is really unfortunate. It's just some Mexican guy with a serape on, hanging out in the graveyard, and look what happens to him! Orson Welles just pounds on that remote, and look what it makes the robot do. I'm not sure what it does, but like a lot of people in this movie, the Mexican guy runs away screaming.
CAGE MATCH! Here is where it gets good, and it happens in the last two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The robot is smokin' by now, and is reducing our poor mummy to pulp. Things look pretty grim for the Aztec guy.
But just when you think - ! Once more, the mummy kicks butt! Could there be hidden symbolism here, i. e. ancient spiritual tradition beating out shallow man-made technology? Or is that robot, when you think about it, just a piece of shit anyway?
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Monday, October 24, 2016
Face-meld: I cannot believe this worked!
But never mind all that.
When my novel The Glass Character came out, I was a bit gobsmacked to see the cover. In spite of what the reading public thinks, authors have little or nothing to do with cover art, and the several suggestions I gave my publisher (because they asked me) had been completely disregarded. So I was left with half a green Harold-face with his hair standing up. The hair-on-end picture is almost as iconic (forgive me) as the man-on-the-clock shot, but on my novel it simply doesn't work. I don't think it represents the story very well, if at all. But the novel still holds up, as far as I am concerned, just waiting for that elusive movie deal.
So today I got looking at that half-a-Dylan face, and wondered how it might look put together with MY book's half-a-Harold-face. After all, these are both world-famous images of world-famous men from wildly different times/places.
What did I have to lose? Oh, a couple of hours I'll never get back. But I had to try it!
First I had to split the Dylan face so that it looked like this:
Then I had to convert my book cover to black and white, an easy task. I didn't have to worry about cutting faces in half because my publisher had already done it for me.
Can you see it, is it starting to take shape? But it was not as easy as it sounds. Face-scanning equipment can tell you that even if two faces look similar, features can be totally different in relation to each other. I'd never get an exact match.
But the results surprised me.
Creepy-looking, I know! But take another look at it. The hairline is very close, though it's hard to see under Bob's curly thatch. If Bob bugged out his sleepy eyes a little, they'd align almost perfectly. The nose - just look at how that nose matches up! It's incredible. And the upper lip is so exact that it scares me. I swear I did not retouch this thing in any way, just tried to match photo sizes. The biggest discrepancy is in the jaw and chin. Harold had a sort of leading-man jawline, and Bob does not. His facial features back then were almost childlike. But just look at the rest of it!
So what's the point of all this? I just had to find out what it would look like.
And take a look at this. Since the chin is the feature that matches the least, I decided to crop it out. Now you see the close harmony between eyes, nose and mouth in two men who look not even remotely like each other.
This is a negative of the original cover photo. Here is the same effect with the black-and-white of my cover:
I once had an editor who liked to say, "It doesn't matter what they say about you, so long as they spell your name right on the cheque." And I guess it doesn't matter how bad a book cover is, so long as they can still read your name.
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Saturday, October 22, 2016
Friday, October 21, 2016
Cats that look like Donald Trump
And now, by popular demand. . . (which I'm still waiting for), my gallery of Cats That Look Like Donald Trump. This was created to fulfill a need: when I looked up Google images of cats resembling Trump, there were lots of them, but they were most unsatisfactory: just pictures of cats with messy red wigs sitting on their heads like bird's nests. That is NOT what it means to look like Donald Trump! It's more than orange hair - it's bombast. It's a certain repugnant attitude. I do apologize profusely to the cats. These are but fleeting facial expressions caught in a moment of peevishness. With Trump, the obnoxiousness is forever.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Grab yourself a pussy: NOT!
Windsor Humane Society apologizes for Trump-inspired campaign asking public to ‘grab a pussy’
Dalson Chen, Postmedia News | October 19, 2016 3:59 PM ET
The Windsor/Essex County Humane Society's controversial cat adoption advertisement that made reference to Donald Trump's controversial "pussy" comment. After multiple complaints, the advertisement was deleted - less than three hours after it was posted on Oct. 19, 2016.
If the Windsor/Essex County Humane Society wanted to court Donald Trump levels of controversy with its latest cat adoption ad, they surely got it on Wednesday morning.
The organization received multiple complaints — and hundreds of social media shares — because of an advertisement that made explicit reference to Trump’s infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” comment.
“You don’t have to be a star to grab a pussy… cat,” the ad joked, informing the public that all shelter cats over six months old can be adopted for $50 from Oct. 19 to 23.
Reaction was swift. “Tasteless” and “vulgar” were common responses. Some members of the public decried the ad as perpetuating “rape culture.” Others found it humorous — no different than a joke one would hear from a late night talk show host.
Blogger's Blather. This steaming nugget from the National Post (a. k. a. "Postmedia", which to me sounds like an obituary for the death of rational journalism) talks about an uh-oh committed by the Windsor Humane Society. Myself, I think it was stupid of them to use Trump's pussy-grabbing remarks as a cheap way to get attention for their cause. It's still too sickening to be funny, as far as I am concerned, and probably always will be.
Besides which: it's damn disrespectful to the cats!
But I was interested to find that prior to this campaign, which has been much reviled and Tweeted to death on social media, PETA did something very similar in its ad campaign for adopting cats.
So what's the difference? some people are saying. Well. . . PETA blows things up, and the Humane Society doesn't. So people are more afraid of PETA. They set up hidden cameras in hog farms and stuff, then get the footage shown on W5. I know they probably do some good, but fanatics of any stripe (even a striped cat like this one) frighten me because they have lost their perspective. Without perspective, the human race is pretty much doomed.
I prefer the PETA ad because it's simple, clean-looking, and has one graphic only, of an adorable kitty. The Humane Society threw everything into the cement mixer, including an obnoxious picture of Trump inside a star (one of those American flag thingies - in fact, the American flag is all over this ugly, garish thing). The cats in it don't look like any cats I would want to adopt, or be in the same room with. They're anxious and paranoid and even angry.
This points up how the same idea can be handled in radically different ways. I don't particularly like what PETA did, but it's OK, I guess, and the other one just isn't. It's loud and jangly and anxiety-provoking - just plug-ugly, is what it is! It gave me a migraine, whereas the other one is just
Wait a minute.
Wait wait wait wait wait.
What's that - image - behind the lettering on GRAB A PUSSY?
Hard to see at first, isn't it? - but it's the American flag! So this thing is hardly neutral. It's almost subliminal in its effects. Sneaky. Is there a microscopic image hidden somewhere of Trump doing that tunnel-mouth thing, or perhaps grabbing someone's . . . cat?
This wasn't the direction this blog post was going to take. At all. Originally, I made the usual mistake of looking at the comments section. The National Post readership sound so right-wing they'd be right at home in the Trump cult. Most of them were delighted with all this pussy-stuff. They thought it was "a scream". Like most National Post fans, they're dull and stupid and don't have the wits to know it.
All I really care about is the cats. I showed this to Bentley, and he turned ass immediately and walked towards the litter box.
Sample Comments (with responses by a friend of mine named Ed):
I prefer the PETA ad because it's simple, clean-looking, and has one graphic only, of an adorable kitty. The Humane Society threw everything into the cement mixer, including an obnoxious picture of Trump inside a star (one of those American flag thingies - in fact, the American flag is all over this ugly, garish thing). The cats in it don't look like any cats I would want to adopt, or be in the same room with. They're anxious and paranoid and even angry.
This points up how the same idea can be handled in radically different ways. I don't particularly like what PETA did, but it's OK, I guess, and the other one just isn't. It's loud and jangly and anxiety-provoking - just plug-ugly, is what it is! It gave me a migraine, whereas the other one is just
Wait a minute.
Wait wait wait wait wait.
What's that - image - behind the lettering on GRAB A PUSSY?
Hard to see at first, isn't it? - but it's the American flag! So this thing is hardly neutral. It's almost subliminal in its effects. Sneaky. Is there a microscopic image hidden somewhere of Trump doing that tunnel-mouth thing, or perhaps grabbing someone's . . . cat?
This wasn't the direction this blog post was going to take. At all. Originally, I made the usual mistake of looking at the comments section. The National Post readership sound so right-wing they'd be right at home in the Trump cult. Most of them were delighted with all this pussy-stuff. They thought it was "a scream". Like most National Post fans, they're dull and stupid and don't have the wits to know it.
All I really care about is the cats. I showed this to Bentley, and he turned ass immediately and walked towards the litter box.
Sample Comments (with responses by a friend of mine named Ed):
Windsor West MPP Lisa Gretzky was not amused, stating she was “profoundly, deeply disappointed and disturbed” by the ad. What a bunch of snowflakes! The ad is funny, but to these idiots that feel unsafe and offended, go to your room. PC morons!
The world is a wonderful place too bad its just overflowing with people looking for something to be offended by. (Ed.: And with people who can't write.)
Farewell humour. It was nice having you around until the brigades of the "progressive" SJW's came streaming forth from their safe spaces in their quest to see who could become more enraged and offended.
Wikileaks, Guccifer, even the FBI has put out a tonne of information this week showing the deep level of corruption surrounding Clinton. This is what rises to the top of NP stories. (Ed.: Bravo! . . . What the hell did it mean?)
Trump troll alert!
What moron would complain about this brilliant, humorous and socially relevant ad campaign? (Ed.: I would.)
If this means a few more homeless cats get a home, I'm for it.
Shows how far the Lefties are out of touch with normal people! (Ed.: this raises the horrifying spectre that "Righties", i.e. Trump enthusiasts, are 'normal people').
It's a joke. It's funny. Have a laugh.
I never did like cats!!!!!
I agree. Delicate flowers for sure if this campaign bothers you. Canadians are smart enough to know that the ad is totally tongue in cheek, tough enough to handle it and intelligent enough to separate out cat adoption from sexual assault. I guess if you are offended by the ad then you should go out and adopt a cat or two so that no advertising is needed to help out homeless cats...
Great! What a scream!
They have a bunch of Pussy's in Washington now! (Ed.: Pussy's WHAT? What belongs to Pussy? Explain it to me!)
Even I would have double checked that thought......
The end of humor brought to you by 'progressives'
Made me laugh!
LOL
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