because ... well ... why not ...?

it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Tuesday February 5th

_20:21PM

The Film that Launched a Thousand (space)Ships:

We've been selling the movie, Terrarium, by the amazingly multitalented Mike Conway for a few years now, but unless you live in one of the select regions of the world where it's actually known by that name, you probably don't know it.

War of the Planets (Lionsgate US release)

Mike himself had named the movie Terrarium, but when Lionsgate brought it out on DVD in the USA, they renamed it War of the Planets and came up with the cool artwork to the left. I'm a lot happier with what they did for War of the Planets than The Shadow Walkers. where they apparently tossed out all the behind-the-scenes stills and promotional artwork for the movie (and I know they got them, because I'm the one who prepared the materials) and used the leftover artwork from an entirely different movie instead. (grump) Plus it sucked. If you're going to go to the trouble of creating up artwork for a monster movie, surely you could come up with *something* more scary and eye-catching than a woman from a different movie sitting on a chair. At least you could find a *scary* chair. Or a ravenous-looking footstool. A killer dustbunny, even. But not so for War of the Planets. They've got a guy in a spacesuit, a vast field of human skeletons, and some cool-looking aliens. None of these are actually in the movie, but they're interesting enough that I'd be tempted to create them in CGI and edit them into the movie for the upcoming "Special Extended Collector's Edition" version.

But even if they're not in the movie itself, it looks cool and just from the cover you know you're getting a sci-fi space action/horror flick. That's the most important thing--a potential purchaser should be able to judge a book by its cover. No matter what the old saying says about that sort of thing, judging books by their covers is what shoppers do and you should design your packaging with that in mind.

I liked Lionsgate's design enough that it inspired me to design a new poster for Terrarium for our own sales purposes. (Though I cheated and used things that were actually in the movie to do my design.) I didn't copy their artwork, but I did try to go for a similar feel. This week Trans-World Associates, Inc., the Japanese distributor of Lost Voyager was kind enough to send me a couple of copies of their DVD. That's also Mike's movie, Terrarium, with a different name and different artwork, but both pretty cool. Guy--or gal, it's hard to tell from thsi angle--in a spacesuit, cool-looking planet, big explosion and a giant transparent bubble covering it all.

Lost Voyager (TWA Japanese release)

Lost Voyager (back cover)

Which is, shockingly, stuff that's in the movie--it's the impenetrable bubble on the alien world that was the inspiration behind the original name, Terrarium. There's even a big explosion in the movie. No spacesuit quite like the one of the cover, but that's no biggie. For all we know, the person in the spacesuit pictures could even be one of the actors. Hard to be sure.

It's fun, anyway, getting to see what different distributors do with the same movie. A lot of small territories will take whatever the filmmaker originally came up with and just add the title and other information in their local language, but the bigger distributors usually have their own artists and come up with something original and unique. Sometimes it's really good. Sometimes it even has something to do with the movie.

Sunday February 3rd

_21:29PM

The Spamityville Horror:

If you look carefully on your right, you'll see an icicle, which is not the subject of today's blog entry, but I thought it was cute, growing spontaneously like that on the end of a piece of galvanized baling wire that's holding one of the downspouts in place. What you don't see in this picture is that the wind had pulled the top of the downspout away from the gutter, so that some of the water from the melting snow that should have been coming down the inside of the downspout was, instead, dripping down near the downspout...and, purely by chance, onto that piece of baling wire where it solidified into an icicle. (The one on the right, in case you've only just now tuned into our blog, already in progress.) So I'll have to fix the top of the downspout. Probably with more baling wire. But in the meantime, it's pretty and it's quieter than windchimes. But if you remember back up a few paragraphs, that's not what this entry is about. You were warned. So there. What I am writing about today is spam. And baling wire...or at least its electronic and metaphorical equivalents. I think it's because more and more people have discovered that the average internet user will very happily and obligingly infect his or her computer with your choice of trojan if you just ask nicely. Well, yeah, that's a bit of an exaggeration. The "nicely" part is really not necessary. One result of this is that there's a been a huge upward trend in the amount of junk email traffic I've been dealing with over the last few months. The other result is that the overwhelming majority of that traffic is appallingly stupid and useless traffic.

an icicle (not spam)

Not that the general state of junk email shows much sign of cleverness or utility. I'm not likely to respond to a demand that I "verify my bank and credit card numbers" from someone who obviously lacks even rudimentary spelling and grammar skills, nor am I likely to trust similarly ill-spelled assurances that just three bottles of Placebolan T-10000 will cause certain parts of my body to swell until they dwarf the Lusitania, or at least the second-largest of its aft cargo holds.

(Um, that would be *before* that whole unfortunate torpedo incident. Besides--it could be worse. You could be using that *other* brand of body-part-enlargement tablets with that little "Hindenburg" side-effect they don't want to tell you about. I'm not saying you'll necessarily go down in flames after exposure to their "secret ingredient," but, seriously, would you really want to risk it?)

What makes me say that the overwhelming majority of the new breed of spam is so appallingly stupid and useless is that not only would nobody respond to its content if they did read it--unless, I suppose, they were the type of computer user who obligingly downloads a trojan any time a virus-writer sends him an "e-card" invitation--but also that there's obviously no chance that anyone would ever read it because it's all being sent to email addresses that no one would ever have.

Addresses like "1111aaaaaaaa1111111aaaaaaa1111zzzzz" or "jkhbvwalfevublwvpwkefnew"; what's the point in sending junk mail to names like that? Moreover, what's the point in sending tens of thousands of emails to an address like that which nobody would ever read?

"Hi, I'm P5WDG2-WS-Pro and I'll be your server today"

Lately, even with a bit of tweaking of IP connection limits and the like, what has swelled up to the size of the Lusitania has been the torrent of spam, to the tune of 20-150 junk emails per second coming in to my own little mild-mannered mailservers. That's a lot, and it's pushed me into pulling out the hanger tape and baling wire to tie together some new mailservers to cope with it all. Up until last night, this lovely (but well-worn) little black box housed a 333MHz Pentium-II heart, the fastest beast that the Intel 440LX chipset could hang a saddle on. That trusty old CPU and chipset have now gone on to the great CPU pasture in the sky (or "in the ground," if you have a preference for accuracy) and been replaced with an Asus P5WDG2-WS-Pro mainboard with an Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo and 4GB of memory. The controller is now a few generations less obsolete AMI/LSI MegaRAID--an ultra-160 capable PCI-X series 493 AKA "Elite 1600" and a trio of 10K 73GB SCSI drives.

...and why is it that one relatively small controller card has to have *that* many different names and abbreviations? It's just a computer part, not a member of the British aristocracy.

So, yeah, it's not exactly state-of-the-art, but the P5WDG2-WS-Pro does feature pairs of both PCI-X and PCIe slots, allowing it to support any of the recent-model RAID controllers I'm using these days, whether SCSI or SAS. With a mid-range C2D chip, it's a mite faster than the old mailserver, which was definitely showing signs of strain anytime the incomining mail flow got much above fifty emails per second. Not that I blame it, really. I know I have a hard time reading even half that much. I'm it's up to the task with enough ooomph to spare that I don't have to upgrade it again for a while.

Now, lest you get the wrong idea, not *all* Spam is bad. For a taste of the better stuff, check out SPAM Singles. I haven't actually sampled them myself--and I'd never even known such a product existed until someone mentioned a sale on them--but I think whoever wrote the website had more fun doing it than most advertising people manage to squeeze into a week.

But I don't think even my new, improved server above is up to the task of handling a sudden influx of SPAM Singles. For starters, they'd clog the air intake filters. So for now I think I'll just be leaving the SPAM Singles on their website.

Saturday February 2nd

_14:38PM

Black and Red all over:

I may be a little blurry, but there I am on the cover of the February 2008 issue of Student Filmmakers Magazine

Student Filmmakers Magazine February 2008

But that's intentional, because it's really the RED Camera that's the star of this shoot. I'm just a supporting actor. In more ways than one, considering that when that particular shot was taken, I'd already spent the previous three hours in a 77-pound suit of armor holding a spear and other weapons of metallically-enhanced heaviness while they worked out the details of the lighting and such. Fortunately, I've spent quite a bit of time in the gym over the years preparing for just this type of supporting role.

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