D-War: Dragon Wars

ancient dragons fighting each other in LA? how did i miss hearing about this movie completely?!

TRAILER

yes, i embedded the higher quality mp4 version; you need to add '&ap=%2526fmt%3D18' to the src url in the embed code, but only '&fmt=18' if you're going directly to the url.

this is the biggest blockbuster movie to come out of South Korea since My Sassy Girl. of course, it flopped this side of the Pacific, and flopped hard; it might have had something to do with the inane plot and the overuse of CGI. if that is the case, why do Michael Bay movies make money? can you answer me that?
perhaps it should have been a cartoon instead. looks like Darryl (Craig Robinson) from the Office is in it! here's a clip from the final showdown in the movie. i think i lost about 3500 brain cells just from watching it. make video game please.

EDIT:
i've gone and done you all a solid on this one: i watched the movie to spare you the tremendous suck. the acting was substandard and the writing seemed to have been written by a grade 10 student (i.e. Eragon level). the dialogue was worse than Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and nearly put this movie out of the B range and into a solid C (for crap). the sole redeeming quality of the movie was the action, the most noteworthy of which was the final battle between Good Dragon vs. Bad Dragon. yes, it was obvious and cliched to a fault, but it was well executed by whoever choreographed the CGI. see for yourself:

background: every 500 years, a heavenly power is incarnated into a girl who, at the age of twenty, must be presented to an imugi (proto-dragon) for it to ascend to full dragon status (and power). the girl has been assigned a protector who is to ensure she does not fall into the wrong hands, i.e. the Bad imugi. Throughout the entire movie, the Bad Imugi and his army of Lord of the Rings rejects has been tailing her, sowing mayhem and destruction about. to make a long story short, they catch up with her, strap her down to an altar for the Bad Imugi to eat and the Good Imugi finally shows up in the last 10 minutes of the movie, only to get OWNED but good. in this scene, incompetant-Protector and Girl are facing down Bad Imugi, who has just knocked out Good Imugi, now lying on the ground. i totally called the ending, down to the finish. i totally did not expect the KO to be so awesome though. you don't have to watch past 3:20. it is reminiscent of WarGreymon vs. Metal Seadramon (but i could only find it in Spanish).

no more squinting

in case you missed the memo, YouTube has been testing out higher quality videos.

just append a video link with '&fmt=6' or '&fmt=18' and you will see a significant increase in video quality, provided that the source video was of greater quality than the standard flash video quality that YouTube uses.

regular: 320 x 240, audio sample rate: 22050 Hz

&fmt=6: 448 x 336, audio sample rate: 44100 Hz

&fmt=18: 480 x 360, H264 video encoding (MP4), AAC audio encoding

this means that the higher quality videos (&fmt=6) carry twice the information (which also at least doubles the filesize and download time). &fmt=18 uses video and audio encoding that is significantly more efficient, so for nearly the same file size, they can pack in more than twice the information. this is the same encoding being used on YouTube videos that are being converted for viewing on iPhones and iPod Touches.

however, audio is still being converted to mono (single channel), even if videos are recorded in stereo (multi-channel). uploaders can circumvent this restriction by converting their files into flash video at the correct resolution (and in stereo) before uploading so YouTube will forgo the conversion process. not every video has been converted for higher quality yet; recent .wmv uploads seem to be the first batch. if a video does not have an HQ version, all you will see is the black loading screen.

Sample Video: regular; higher quality; MP4. it's easy to see the difference in video game videos.

The Plan

this does not refer to the plan in which i get married off to a cute, very nerdy girl with a deceptive wrist shot and the hand-eye coordination of a ping pong champion by the time i'm 24, but to the plan in which i purchase a Macbook Pro.

i will purchase one late Q3 '09, just before the holiday crush. incidentally, i will be 24, so the following is dependant on that first plan. if plan 1 (wife) does not work, i will have the funds to follow through with plan 2 (MBP).

Apple's notebook lineup was recently updated (last Tuesday) with the latest Penryn processors being dropped onto the Santa Rosa chipset. some time in June 08, the Montevina chipset will be released by Intel and the second iteration of even more efficient Penryns CPUS will coincide with that release. the Montevina chipset will require quite a bit of hardware tweaking due to different architectural requirements, so it would be the prime opportunity for the Macs to undergo redesigns. the Macbook Pro chassis has been around pretty much since Aluminum Powerbook G4s (2003), with only minor modifications to keep pace with new technology.

as is always the case with 1st Gen hardware, there will be flaws and issues and hiccups and burps, so i'm waiting until the next chipset (Calpella) is implemented with the second generation Nehalem CPUs. by then, SSDs will be fairly reasonably priced, the redesigned MBP chassis will have matured reasonably and the operating system will have hit 10.6 by then (18 month revision rate, ideally).

my new obsession

Stop Motion Optimus Prime videos

Optimus Prime - The Evolution of Dance


Bumblebee Beats Optimus Prime

Meet Market

Cosmopolitan recently published a list of locations that desirable single men will congregate. at the top of the list was Apple Stores, followed by gyms, steakhouses, sports bars and Jacksonville, North Carolina. this was echoed by a TUAW post, which is how i caught wind of it. i would not have otherwise (i read YM instead, but only when friends subscribe to it on my behalf without telling me).

while it's hard to take anything that comes out of a magazine that spouts softcore sex slogans seriously, there is a morsel of truth to their asinine and alliterative assertions this time. the premise is that most guys gravitate towards gadgetry, computer gizmos, meat and sports. so chances are that Apple Stores, replete with gadgetry and computers, would boast a bumper-crop of male representatives. of course the same can be said for Best Buy or something like that, but i suppose that demographic is not quite as desirable (i.e. married?).

of course, Apple Stores will now see an influx of vapid Cosmo subscribers and desperate Mac geeks hoping to score on said influx of vapidity, on top of the beleaguered parents who've succumbed to their children's wheedling for a new iPod.