multi-post #1: castro, shreddies, hitman hangers & mario paint

in an effort to blog a bit more, i'm going to introduce a new style that is less long form and more a couple of things that i encounter, pique my interest or have a relatively strong bent toward writing about but none that warrant a full post unto itself. so i give you the multi-post blog. i'll still do the dedicated posts, but i find those harder to compose regularly.

fidel castro steps down
upon hearing that castro was stepping down as the leader of cuba, and reading some stories about it, i was immediately confused. i heard words like parlaiment, and legislature. we are talking about the same dictatorial, communist regime right? a quick stroll through the cuban government section on wikipedia confirms an enigmatic political structure that seems nothing more than a thin coat of pseudo-democratic paint over tyranny.


but man can castro rock the hell out of a track suit at political functions


diamond shreddies... for real?


has everyone seen the new ad campaign for diamond shreddies? the word audacity comes to mind. i'm well aware that post has their tongue planted firmly in their cheek on this one, but it does take some gall to invest that much money in a piece of faux news and to splash it across that many advertising channels. while it's kind of scratch-your-head funny, the risk to me is consumer perception of the brand veering toward "this is stupid." vs. "ha ha ha, that's kinda funny and clever."


better endings


on the weekend we saw another tale of hitmen called 'in bruges', the week prior having seen 'no country for old men.' while both were okay movies, both suffered from an unsatisfying ending. i won't spoil either, but they were sopranos-like in that there was no finality to either picture. i don't get this style of film making where the audience is left wanting more and will never get it. neither will have a sequel, and neither warrant one. so why can't the movie makers give us an actual ending that, as movie-goers, we require to complete our experience? and "in the sake of art" isn't a good enough excuse. movies are meant to give you a story and stories have endings. otherwise it's just an unformed thought and negates the existance of the picture altogether. why tell a story with no outcome?


mario paint mixer


anyone remember mario paint on the snes? probably not. not many people had it much less played it. i did though. it was a really basic proagram where you could draw 8 bit pictures that could have vitually no detail, make animations of no more than 8 frames and make music of 100 beats or less using the sounds from the mario games to date. well apparently there is a bit of renaissance around the music maker. i came across a number of youtube videos of people making popular songs using it. someone ported it to the pc and made a little program out of it that you can find here. as with any extremely limited and archaic form of production, i commend those who are able to recreate any semblence of the real thing with these bits of computer generated sound.