• \’Dawn of the Dead\’ Tops \’Passion\’

    Audiences feasted on zombies as the fright flick \”Dawn of the Dead\” ruled the box office, debuting with $27.3 million and bumping \”The Passion of the Christ\” from the top spot.

    I just find this very amusing. Who would\’ve known zombies are bigger than Jesus?

  • Today\’s the 4th anniversary of this blog. Christ, 4 years already?! I should celebrate somehow.

  • Awesome paper Star Wars models. That Star Destroyer rocks.
    [ From Boing Boing ]

  • The New York Times has an article about Kerry Conran, the guy behind Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The movie uses real actors against completely computer-generated sets and backgrounds. I watched the trailer and it looks really unique, it has a CG retro futuristic noir look. Angelina Jolie looks hot with an eye patch.
    [ From Slashdot ]

  • Comedy Central rips off the iPod commercials with rednecks instead of hipsters. Heh heh, nothing beats a good ol\’ hoe-down.

  • I recently finished reading William Gibson\’s Pattern Recognition. I liked it a lot. Not quite as good as Neuromancer but much better than the Virtual Light trilogy. Pattern Recognition is set in the present but it still feels very cyberpunk.

    I think the only problem is that the book might sound dated in a few years because Gibson uses a lot of brand names. For example, Cayce, the main character, uses a Mac Cube and an iBook. Apple doesn\’t even make the Cube anymore. Yeah, they currently have a laptop called iBook, but Gibson might\’ve gotten lucky here cause I have a feeling he was referring to the original fruity iBook. Neuromancer used a lot of brand names too but they were all made up; so that book still feels very modern, even though it\’s 20 years old now. I don\’t know if I can say the same for Pattern Recognition in 20 years.

    The good thing about using a lot of modern brand names is that these are real products. I was halfway through the book before it occurred to me to look up some of the things mentioned, like the Buzz Rickson\’s jacket that Cayce wears, and the Curta calculator that she buys. It\’s neat to know what something that\’s mentioned in the book actually looks like; unlike Neuromancer where some of the descriptions (like cyberspace decks) are rather vague. Incidentally, in the book Cayce stays at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which is also where Bob and Charlotte stay in Lost In Translation.

  • Epson revealed their R-D1 Digital Rangefinder camera today. The 6 megapixel camera can use Leica lenses. A rangefinder is supposedly easier to focus than a SLR because you only need to superimpose 2 views of a scene. So a scene is either in focus or not, there\’s no in-between like with an SLR. Damn, there\’s been a lot of cool cameras coming out lately.

  • A Californian\’s Conception of the Continental United States. Heh heh, the Mississippi runs \”up and down.\”
    [ From Rebecca\’s Pocket ]

  • Fascinating article about musical hallucinations, a rare medical condition where a person hears music inside their head over and over again. Often times it\’s music they heard long ago.

    The music-processing regions of the brain are continually looking for patterns in the signals arriving from the ears. As these regions recognize a tune, they amplify certain sounds that fit the music and minimize extraneous sounds.

    Sounds like it\’s an extreme form of getting a song stuck in your head.
    [ From Boing Boing ]

  • A woman in New York got a new cell phone and her number is Chris Rock\’s old number. She chronicles all the celebrity calls she\’s gotten on this site. Pretty neat. If I were her I\’d tell everyone to piss off, just to spite Chris Rock.
    [ From Boing Boing ]