So Much Skill Just Wasted

Yesterday I posted about Falcon 1, a YouTube series done in the vein of Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series.

If any of you went to look, you would have seen very primitive puppets and sets made out of actual cardboard.

The Steve Jobs Of Robots

Nao (robot)

I keep wondering if a Nao robot is a realistic replacement for a marionette and some puppets.

It’s actually more lively than the puppets in Star Fleet and unlike those in Terrahawks, can actually be shown walking in full shot as well as move its arms. It makes me wonder.

TV Sharing Dumps AVI For x264

The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012

This is both my current nightmare and future dream.

Current nightmare: My crap desktop cannot play these x264 files. They’ve already started showing up this week and I’ve tried.

Future dream: When I can finally get an iPad, I won’t have to go through the hell of converting from AVI to x264.

That said, I grabbed the AVI file instead of the x264 of the season (series?) finale of A Gifted Man to watch.

The future will have to start without me.

Why Schools Fail

Toys

The trouble is, a ten-year old doesn’t just get swept away to these imagined worlds and then saunter back into his regular life. He can’t just cleanly bracket the fantasy. A ten year-old who reads about Hogwarts wants to go there, badly, and believes somewhere in the happy shadows of his mind that he one day will. That wonderful prospect might brew in his unconscious for years.

Entertainment for children is the crack cocaine of distraction but also the fragile nucleus of imagination.

R.I.P. Artist Ralph McQuarrie

‘Star Wars’ conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie passes away at age 82

Unless you lived through that time, you just have absolutely no bloody idea what a revolution Star Wars created. It was like nothing that came before and everything after it was never the same again.

I recall all the articles back then. I think Steranko‘s Mediascene had the definitive issue, even trumping Cinefantastique. The McQuarrie paintings were — to use the current term — just epic. And that so much of what he visualized actually made it into the movie was probably also unprecedented. I don’t think even Derek Meddings of Supermarionation fame had that degree of influence on a single production.

McQuarrie elevated design in film much the same way Apple’s Jon Ive today has shown the importance of design in technology. It’s not something that’s an afterthought, it’s there at the beginning.