The Top 10 Cult Movies of the Decade.

Battle Royale looks like an interesting film.  Moulin Rouge is a good movie, but I don’t think it’s the number one cult movie of the Decade.

Play Pong in Dreamweaver!

Want to play a quick game of Pong in Dreamweaver?

1. Save your work and close all files.
2. Restart Dreamweaver.
3. Create a new HTML file.
4. Type any text in the document in Design View.
5. Select some text.
6. In the properties panel locate the color value box.
7. Type “dreamweaver” (without quotes) in the color value box and press Enter.
8. Pong should begin (with sound!). Use the mouse to move the bat.
9. It is Game Over, if you miss. A sound comes from internal speakers.
10. Sometimes, Dreamweaver hangs when the game ends.

Jan Ove Waldner

Table Tennis has been a favorite sport of mine since school days. The best thing about Table Tennis is the nature of defense and offense and how easily great players switch from one mode to the other. One of the fantastic players of the game is the great Swede Jan Ove Waldner.

The rallies can be long, delightful and hypnotic or sharp, powerful, precise and short. The melody of the bouncing ping pong ball while players limber up with counters is something relaxing. I usually close my eyes to listen to the rhythm of their strokes.

Like every sport, table tennis has some great highlights. Here is a set of spectacular points.

Two of the best table tennis players ever, having some fun. 1991 World Champion Jörgen Persson in blue, and all-time best player Jan Ove Waldner (Champion 1989 and 1997).

The sport is played with extreme seriousness and aggression and the rallies are no longer playful and elegant like this anymore. However, for me, the spirit of table tennis is in its fun and entertaining aspects. I would rather see these kind of matches than the tense , quick, sharp ones that are the norm.

I played it I did, many days and nights
Merry went the hours and merrier were the fights

Few games since then got it all quite so right
I think of OMF now and a few words I write…

What is One Must Fall: 2097?

‘OMF 2097 (or simply 2097) is the best fighting game ever made for the PC, made in 1994 by Diversions Entertainment. It features an innovative pilot/robot combination similar to the Bushido Blade system, a completely unique RPG-like tournament mode, and oodles of secrets. (Not to mention a catchy soundtrack and 90-foot giant robots!)’

- Robyrt(robyrt@marney.org, http://robyrt.coolserver.net)

Back during the days when I was putting myself through a formal multimedia course, I’d happened to come across a few of my fellow students playing the demo version of OMF.

At first I was drawn to it due to my interest in animation and game programming, not to mention the terrific game title.  Later on though as I started playing the game I began to like it for the gameplay and music as well.

The storyline for the game went something like this: In the far future (2097), the world has changed as we know it. Governments are puppets of multinationals conglomerates. World Aeronautics and Robotics (WAR) is one such conglomerate that has decided to use Human Assisted Robots (HARs) to colonize Ganymede (Jupiter’s moon). WAR has decided to conduct a tournament of HARs to find out which of the executives will get the chance to lead the colonization.

The game has a series of competitions that progressively unlock powerful HARs to choose from. Each HAR has it’s own unique strengths and special moves, which are revealed through a combination of key strokes during combat. The best part of the combo moves is that, unlike other combat games, the key strokes are rather simple to remember and use.  This however doesn’t bode any good for the keyboard and my friends and I are guilty of ruining many a good keyboard in pursuit of this mad game. : P

A few of my favourite HARs included the Jaguar, the Thorn, Katana and the Shadow. I particularly liked the Jaguar and created a 3D model with a few animations of my own as tribute to the HAR. ; )

Though we initially played on the demo version a lot, we later got to play the full version thanks to it’s creators – Rob Elam and Ryan Elam of Diversions Entertainment, who released the full game as a freeware in 1999.

Being a die-hard fan of the game I have collected a few links and videos for you, dear reader, to enjoy and perhaps induce you into downloading the game and playing it as well! :D

OMF official site

Robyrt’s OMF Site

X-BoT’s OMF Universe

Quick Gun Murugun (Dr. Rajendra Prasad),  what do I say about this daring South Indian Cowbhai movie?

It has everything.. action.. camedy.. sangs..and lats and lats of balls.. sorry bullets I say!

Our hero is yeverything that yany decent south indian school-dropout would dream of becoming. His bullets speak when his words fail him. His words of wisdom and love for the locket lady brings tears of joy and fills the heart with warmth of passion.

Rice plate Reddy (Nazar) is the arch villain wanting to dominate the world with non-veg dosas from his evil McDosa corporateion. Helping him in this evil endeavour are such stalwart cohorts like Gunpowder, MBA Rowdy and Dr. DJango.  He’s unstoppable.. that is until Quick Gun Murugun steps into the scene.

Our heroes quest to stop RPR brings him across the scintilating and wannabe Miss India.. Miss Mango Dolly. What may her hobbies be one wonder’s?
I will tell you what they are. They are Cooking and Secretly loving QGM!

The movie has a love triangle and a mother (anni) angle and a trip to heaven on a modified motocart to boot!  I will keep my silents on our heroes re-entry on earth.

All in All..I can canfidently say that ..Yany Yindian who has drunk tha cow’s milk will go watch this movie I say!

PS: It’s worth watching once , but leave your thinking/critical cap outside the theatre. Mind it. ;-)

After watching the Oscars in 2006, I was very curious about the movie Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), which had won three Oscars and was nominated for six Oscars. At that time I did check out who the director was and found out that it was Mexican director named Guillermo del Toro, who’s earlier Hollywood movie “Hellboy” I had seen.

Lately I got the opportunity of seeing Pan’s Labyrinth and was totally blown away. I would totally agree with one of the reviews in IMBD who said that’s its “Beautiful, violent, magical and Sad…” What stood out for me in addition to the cinematography and the art direction was the acting by Sergi López who played the villainous “Captain Vidal”.

The story is set in Spain during 1944 at the peak of the fascist regime of “Francisco Franco”.  The story is  about a girl who with her pregnant mother goes to live with her step father who is a captain of the Spanish army. The girl Ofelia meets a fairy who takes to an old faun who tells her that she is a princess and must complete three grueling tasks in order to prove her royalty. If she happens to fail then she would never see her real father who is the King.

In the movie the whole fantasy world can be interrupted as being created by girl who wants to escape the harsh realities of life. Well that’s left to the audience.

Guillermo del Toro is going to be  directing “The Hobbit” and I can’t think of a better person to fill Peter Jackson’s shoes.

Icons of Susan Kare

The Paint Bucket icon for the fill tool and the Lasso icon for the freehand selection tool are now part of everyday computing for millions of people worldwide. Their designer, Susan Kare , according to the Museum of  Modern Art, in New York, is “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, Kare has designed thousands of icons for the world’s leading software companies. Utilizing a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”

She began her career at Apple, Inc. as the screen graphics and digital font designer for the original Macintosh computer, initially advertised as the “computer for the rest of us.” The computer with a sly smile, watch, trash can, bomb, hand and the arrow are some of the initial icons that have now become part of computing culture. The Macintosh set the standard for how computers could appeal to a broad new group of nontechnical people. Every software designer has dreamed of having his or her program achieve the same level of quasi-religious adoration as the Macintosh.

All sorts of interesting characters stumbled into the personal computer industry in the early 1980s, but Ms. Kare’s entry was more serendipitous than most. After receiving a doctorate in fine arts from New York University in 1978, she moved to the San Francisco area to work as a freelance graphic artist. One day she received a call from Andy Hertzfeld, a high school friend who was a programmer at Apple Computer Inc. He was working on a new computer and needed help creating graphic images by turning on and off the tiny dots, or pixels, on the computer’s screen.

“He told me to go to the stationery store and get the smallest graph paper I could find and color in the squares to make images,” Ms. Kare recalled. Ms. Kare was soon a full-fledged member of the Macintosh development team. She also designed the original type fonts that shipped with the Macintosh and were named for cities: Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

Since leaving Apple in the mid-80s after the chairman, Steve Jobs, was forced out, she has created hundreds of icons, including most of those featured in Windows 3.0, which was Microsoft’s first successful attempt to reproduce a Macintosh-like experience on IBM-compatible personal computers. She even designed many of the playing cards in the solitaire game included in Windows programs.

Ms. Kare favors a minimalist approach. Much of what she does when asked to give a program a face lift, she said, is take away elements rather than add them. “I tend to think of icons more like traffic signs than as illustrations,” she added. “It’s much more successful if it is simple.”

Her restraint also applies to the use of color. “Just because you have millions of colors doesn’t mean that you have to use them all the time,” she said. Her icons tend to be rendered in bright, primary colors.

But the secret to her art is not just pruning or rendering an image in light but also coming up with a cohesive metaphor for whatever action the icon must represent.

Nouns are easy, she said. Verbs are hard. The toughest commands to illustrate are “undo” and “execute,” she added.

She does not strive to make the action represented by each icon instantly recognizable. Her goal is to make them easy to remember. “I would say an icon is successful if you could tell someone what it is once and they don’t forget it,” she said.

It is also a challenge to come up with a fresh idea for a well-worn concept. “I’ve done trash trucks, trash bags, plastic garbage cans, aluminum trash cans, wire trash baskets, wastebaskets and even fires,” she said, referring to the variations on icons for “delete.”

For each icon that ends up in a program, she said, two or three others are rejected. “I always have many more images than actually ship,” she added. “The image graveyard is littered with things that might have been.”

“My work has continued to be motivated by respect for, and empathy with, users of software. I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way. I try to optimize for clarity and simplicity even as palette and resolution options have increased. I rely on common sense; when I designed buttons, icons, and other screen images for Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 in 1987, I was able to use the 16-color palette to replace black rectangles with images that looked like three-dimensional “pressable” buttons. I was also challenged to fine tune many images for applications by using dithered patterns of color to offset the constraints of the limited VGA palette.”

“Although I’ve designed thousands of icons for hundreds of clients over the past eighteen years, I still search for better metaphors-perennial brain twisters such as “undo”, “save”, and “run program” come to mind. I have endeavored to make all kinds of software more intuitive: programs designed for users, for experts in vertical markets, for technical audiences, and for more or less everyone.”

“The nature of user interface design is collaborative; much great software is the result of a team effort among engineers, marketing types, and designers. My design work-installed at the top level of software-has often been inspired by imaginative and breakthrough engineering. Current work that intrigues me is having the opportunity to improve the quality of small monochrome icons and typefaces in fast-proliferating handheld devices, in addition to the larger and more colorful images on computer monitors. I work to hone the meaning and appearance of each image, and I hope the cumulative effect makes the process of interacting with machines-the way people “see” the software-more gratifying.”

“I feel much happier that people are looking at my icons every day than having my sculptures in five living rooms across the country.”

A collection of font and typography related jokes

Mark Twain was the first author to use the typewriter. He supposedly typed a manuscript for his publisher who wrote back that he left out the punctuation. Twain sent back a sheet filled with periods, commas, semicolons, etc. “Insert where necessary”, he said.

“Did you hear? Comma and Period got married.”
“Really? Comma’s a great guy, but who’s Period?”
“Some moody chick he picked up at the Crossbar a year ago.”
“I bet she’s perfect for him.”
“Yep, she’s always finishing his sentences.”

“Wow, you always have so many fonts, where do you get them from?”
“Oh they come from Monaco, Geneva, Chicago, New York… I get them delivered at various Times throughout the day…”
“By who?”
“A Courier!”

A sans-serif face walks into the street and is hit by a Swiss Modernist truck. The carnage is grotesk… but you know, akzidenz happen.

One font meets the other in Rome. He asks: “Hey, are you a Roman too?” “No,” says the other, “but I am an Italic!”

A font walks up to Gill Sans and asks: “Do you want to go out with me?”
Gill Sans says “No!”
“Why don’t you want to go out with me?” the other font asks.
Gill Sans: “Because you’re Grotesque!”

Two fonts walk into the bar, and the barman says, “Sorry lads, we don’t serve your type.”

There is a new revival of Cooper Black rolling on to the market which only contains ordinals. It is called Mini-Cooper.

What type of diabetes is a graphic designer most likely to get diagnosed with? Type 1

What kind of relationships do typophiles prefer? The open type

What did the typographer say to the printer who wouldn’t stop talking?
“Get to the point.”

What is the type designer’s favorite breakfast?
Kern flakes!

How many typesetters does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but be sure to specify how tight you want it.

‘Font’ is a four letter word that starts with an ‘F’.

How long does it take for a type designer to change a light bulb?
It depends on if you need it to be normal, bold, or heavy.

In an ancient monastery, a new monk arrived to dedicate his life to subservient solitude and to join the others copying ancient records. The first thing he noticed was that other monks were copying, by
hand, books that had already been copied by hand.

The new monk had to speak up. “Forgive me, Brother Mark, but copying other copies by hand allows many chances for error. How do we know we aren’t copying someone else’s mistakes? Are they ever checked against the originals?”

Brother Mark was startled! No one had ever suggested that before. “Well,that is a good point, my son. I will take one of these latest books down to the vault and study it against its original document.” He went deep into the vault where no one else was allowed to enter and started to study.

The day passed and it was getting late in the evening. The monks were getting worried about Brother Mark. Finally, the new monk started making his way through the old vault and after he searched for a while, he heard sobbing.

“Brother Mark?” he called. The sobbing was louder as he came nearer. He finally found the old monk sitting at a table with both the new copy and the original ancient book in front of him. It was obvious that Brother Mark had been crying for a long time.

“What is the matter?” asked the concerned new monk. “Oh, my Lord,” sobbed Brother Mark, “the word is ‘CELEBRATE’ !!”

Cache (Hidden)

I have not seen anything like this movie before. It is an exercise in frustration. It is however an interesting, tense and positive kind of frustration. This type of orchestrated frustration is worth examining.

On the surface, the story is about a famous TV personality (a writer and book reviewer). He receives tapes which show recordings of his house. This recording is very direct, like a security camera recording. Is it a joke? Is it the handiwork of a stalker? The sinister, relentless arrival of tapes with seemingly childish violent drawings creates a tension and frustration between the husband and wife. The images and tapes bring to the surface long suppressed memories and lures the main character into a deeper trap. All the events culminate in a moment of tragedy which is unexpected and shocking.

This story is interesting, but not exactly the main force of the movie. The interesting aspect is the sheer ruthlessness and coldness of the story teller, the director. He offers no explanations. No easy storyline with defined positions for the viewer to hang on to. He is simply like the tormentor in the movie as far as the audience is concerned. The frustration and helplessness felt by the family is similar to the one felt by the viewer. The movie shows something and hides something else.

The viewer begins to pay attention, interpret things and watch out for things on the screen. The tension created by the unfolding movie drives the viewer in the same way it drives its main character.

The curiosity generated and the ambiguity of the movie are balanced masterfully. The director is teasing, or is he? In the hands of lesser craftsmen, this treatment will fall flat, however, here it stays on for days and months after viewing the movie. A questioning begins of the visuals we see. Are there things hidden in all visuals? Is the very nature of visuals ambiguous? Don’t we always bring to bear so many things to what we see, which are not visible, in the form of interpretations?

This brief description itself is actually an attempt to reveal the hidden! It is one of the many attempts I make to look beyond the visible in the movie into the realm it shows by hiding. This is a good movie for people who wish to focus on the silence in speech, the untold in the telling and the hidden in the revealed. You will love it, if you like the process of reading between the lines!

Dreamspaces

Dreamspaces was a brilliant BBC documentary series with high production quality and visually stunning stories. Sadly, the series was of only 12 episodes. It covers great buildings from New York, Helsinki, Puerto Rico, Chicago, Romania, Brazil, Israel and many more international destinations looking at various aspects of design and architecture and their relationship with contemporary living. It is part travel show and part architecture appreciation with emphasis on the appreciation.

Architecture is a narrative of our culture. The things architecture creates, the spaces, forms, shapes and patterns, tell us about ourselves. Buildings anchor and mould our lives – some say we can read our lives through our buildings – but who are the people who design our world? What do they believe in, where do their ideas come from and what challenges them?

The presentation was top class. David Adjaye, Charlie Luxton and Justine Frischmann provided the show with a fresh, clear, relaxed and well paced informative narrative. Guest presenters added cameos of their own favorite buildings. The choice of subjects was made this show one of a kind. Music, visuals and camera work, was superb. The contemporary soundtrack was outstanding.The focus was on bringing out the uniqueness of the architecture of the subject, its history, character and use.

There was a bit of irreverence and funkiness which actually enhanced the message of the show. The wonder of architecture and the brilliance of the architects who build dreamspaces was very well showcased. The episode list reveals the vast area they covered in the course of just 12 episodes. Jam packed with goodness, you would miss out if you don’t keep up with the fast paced narration of the show. This in some way makes it stand out from other slower paced highly detailed architecture documentaries. Dreamspaces was a successful attempt to make architecture and design relevant, interesting and stylish.

Some of my favorite moments were the the Art Deco of Miami, Brasilia, Moroccan Architecture, Architecture of Libraries, the renovation of Ireland’s National Gallery,  Archigram (Beatles of Architecture!) and buildings in camouflage.