:: The Blurst of Times ::

:: 1.21.2004 ::

Fuck you digital era! Fuck you machines! Fuck you DVD's! I fucking hate all of you.

Watching State & Main last night. It was a good movie - I enjoyed the whimsy and moral turbulance incurred by such a film. I am almost positive my DVD player skipped not one but two chapters on the DVD - and because I had never seen the movie before, I didn't know they were missing until I was left with questions at the end. And if you recall back, this happened to me with the Cowboy Bebop movie skipping the second to last chapter (and thus the climax of the film) and going straight to the resolution, showing me the outcome without any of the actual events.

So you're thinking: Okay, Fred, you are upset, and you may have a point since it has happened in two movies, but to blame the whole digital era? Is that really necessary? Aren't you really just intimidated by the fact that the digital era just has larger hands and feet and is a champ with the ladies, while you are so often left at the edge of the dance floor wondering whether the pretty girl in the blue dress would have danced with you but you were too afraid to ask her?

And I reply: No. I don't trust this digital thing any further than I could throw it. If I have a record that skips, I can manually take the lever and place it beyond the skip; if I have a tape that runs, I can manually rewind the tape and fix it to play what is screwing up; if a DVD or CD skips, the best I can do is press buttons and hope the machine is able to understand what is supposed to be happening and fix teh problem. Computers are the same way. If I create a huge drawing of a design (or, more likely, a whole bunch of drawings of a very thorough design) and print it all out and have hard copies, then I can take those copies and store them someplace safe and nothing will happen to them. I can protect them from fire, from water, from mice, from the sun, from thieves, from about everything as long as I take the proper precautions. If I take that same file and save it on my hard drive it may be there just fine when I get back. But there is also the possiblity that I may come back and that file will be no where to be found. I don't know what happens - maybe an electrical surge, maybe a magnet, maybe the thing just got dropped off a bad piece of the harddrive. In any case, I never believe that there is a garauntee that the data will be there when I want to see it again. This studio has seen enough files lost, hard drives fried, computers blitzed, and data zapped into limbo someplace to fill a warehouse and frankly, that is where my distrust of digital comes from.

I think the real problem is a lack of tangability. I can't touch it, I can't retrieve it, if my machine won't get that info for me, then it's lost. Maybe all fingers point back to me and say that I just don't know how to communicate to my machine well enough to tell it to fix teh problem properly. Maybe I am just a weakling who cannot embrace change because he feels threatened by it. Maybe that is all correct - or maybe we are just trying to come up with "better" and "faster" machines that do too many things without creating the safeguards necessary to make them as secure and reliable as their analogue counterparts. My entire future, career, and livelihood are relying upon the fact that people still have a need for contact, still have a need to relate to things they can see, not just things we trick their brains into thinking they see, not just optical illusions. Maybe my fear stems from the fact I could lose all of this if the world becomes convinced they would rather "virtually" walk through a building, than see a scale model of it. Maybe I am just afraid of things I don't understand. Maybe that makes me no better than, say, George Wallace. Maybe I am just a technology bigot.

I just know I don't trust them and when it all comes crashing down, I'll still be happy to build chipboard models by candlelight.

"I cross the desrt, past a lizard and a rattlesnake. I tip the bottle and bite the lime..."
:: Freddy F. at 4:04 PM [+] ::
:: (0) comments ::

I've flipped through the whole thing, and there's nothin' on the Internet.

Boo.

"Calling on in transit, calling on in transit - Radio Free Europe..."
:: Freddy F. at 4:42 PM [+] ::
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Running? What the fuck is that? Answer: something I haven't done in a dog's-age. Maybe tomorrow.

I saw Boondock Saints. It wasn't what I thought - as I was expecting something with the gravity and violence of Reservior Dogs. But no, it was almost light-hearted to the extent of almost being whimsical with all the slow-mo action shots. Can't say I'm al about vigilante justice, though they make a good point and you just can't beat the religious Irish boozer - what a character. They killed the cat - fuckin hilarious.

You should never lead a discussion group - but it was very funny none-the-less. I will keep you posted on the progress.

As for the rest of you: the hair of the dog that bit'cha!

"Hook me up a new revolution, 'cause this one is a lie..."
:: Freddy F. at 6:47 PM [+] ::
:: (0) comments ::