NearlyANerd.com » Books

Gandahar [1988]

Dippold — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:21:29 +0000

Part 1 [Contains moving drawings of non-sexual, topless nudity, aka boobs.]

Gandahar, aka Light Years is a truly mindbendingly bizarre animated fantasy epic based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon‘s novel “Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men versus Gandahar).”

The english language version is from Miramax Entertainment and according to Wikipedia there are currently no plans for a DVD release in the States.

The plot summary from Wikipedia:

The paradise world of Gandahar is threatened by a mysterious power, so Queen Ambisextra and the Council of Women send the warrior Sylvain to scout for this danger. He discovers metallic humanoids with a paralyzing ray who send the bodies of those they capture through a portal. Later these individuals return, also encased in metal.

Airelle serves as the love interest for Sylvain. He meets “The Deformed,” a group of mutants who Sylvain at first mistakes for the enemy.

The cause of this terror is traced to the giant brain Metamorphis, although Metamorphis is puzzled about how he could be the cause. The metal humanoids are coming back in time from the future, so Metamorphis offers to place Sylvain in stasis until that time. Sylvain awakens in 1,000 years as planned, and destroys the old, weakened, and now insane, Metamorphis.

Gandahar likely contains many political, religious, cultural, societal and technological thematic undertones I’d rather not attempt pondering for fear of my head spinning faster.

Watch the remainder of Gandahar after the jump.

Part 2

Part 3
Note: Start (this) Part 3 at 46 seconds in and end at 6 minutes 30 seconds — then go to the overlapping, better quality version of Part 4 below.

Part 4

Part 5

Part 5b/Part 6ish?
Note: Actually start this one at 7 minutes and 50 seconds in. After starting at the 7:50 mark and playing until its end there still appears to be a gap — because of no subsequent overlapping video — until any next part of Gandahar online. [I went through the (Gandahar) uploads of YouTube users "xeokym" and "woof221". Please contact me if you find any (of the) missing footage or a full and complete, decent quality version of Gandahar, online, in English, and legally posted.]

Part 7

Part 8

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The dreaded ‘Idea’ — Part 3: eReading & Music

Dippold — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:41:49 +0000

The Multi-part postings “The dreaded ‘Idea’” addresses minor world needs that I’d like to see happen but don’t believe any single one is important enough (for me) to go to anybody with.

Part 1 spouts freely about Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas.

Part 2 explores needs in the web media landscape.

Reading

Service to access all your ebooks anywhere. Any platform on any device.

UPDATE: Enter Google ebooks

Accomplished with web service using the following steps in the user process:

Step 1: Provide login info for all your eBook accounts and/or upload existing eBooks.

Step 2: Choose where and how you want to read your eBooks.

Step 3: Read

Directly adding email newsletters/lists to ReadItLater

UPDATE: Official and user created Read It Later apps for this.

ReaditLater lets you queue up words from the Internet to read later. When you find something you don’t have time to read now just click a bookmarklet button in your browser’s bookmark bar. Later, when you find time to read, you can tear through all your reading material at ReaditLaterList.com or from their app on your phone. And you do so with any ads stripped away and the text formatted for quick reading.

ReaditLater’s only qualm is its individual nature. Material must be added from a single web page. It needs an option to add RSS feeds or subscribe to everything on a site via Feedburner. The basic notion here is to enhance ReaditLater by also making it a bullshit-free RSS reader.

One way to accomplish this would be for ReaditLater to give its users their own unique ReaditLater email addresses to use when subscribing to mailing lists. For example, Twitpic.com gives its users an email — like username.3749@twitpic.com – to tweet photos via email.

No clue on how they’d do RSS. Perhaps a custom field on ReaditLaterList.com to paste in a site’s RSS feed?

Music

Lossless Audio upgrade subscription service

Since storage for music is hardly still an issue, why doesn’t iTunes offer upgrading your music collection to true, lossless, CD quality tunes? Seems like many can’t tell the difference between a CD and an MP3, but some can and want better sounding stuff.

Or if Apple won’t do this, a web service could offer to scan your music library and upgrade your tunes with better sounding lossless versions like FLAC, Windows Media Lossless and Apple Lossless.

iTunes local

Any older folk remember the record store where you’d actually walk inside this place and buy music sans computer? When done proper, record stores still turn you on to great tunes and usually with plenty of patrons ready to engage in back-and-forth band banter.

Why can’t the local record store be revived and be revived with the help of the music behemoth that is Apple’s iTunes?

How? One big way would be for iTunes and music labels to offer exclusives and early releases available — for a set time – only at local record stores that partner with iTunes. Bring in your iPod/iPhone to load it up with this music.

And perhaps provide incentives to pack bodies in the music shops. One possibility would be offering credits to play 30 sec preview clips or full songs for everyone in the store to hear. Get more of these jukebox credits when you buy something from the stores.

Subsequent installments of “The Dreaded ‘Idea’” will address Computing/Internet/Telephony and various miscellany that eschews its own category.

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The dreaded ‘Idea’ — Part 2: Media

Dippold — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:36:32 +0000

Part 1 of “The dreaded ‘Idea’” spouts freely new notions concerning Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas.

Media

Monetizing great content stuck on crusty websites

An opportunity exsists for acquiring old, but authoritative content that ranks good. This written treasure is often buried on neglected websites. There’s plenty of great information hiding on pages two, three and four of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) that could be providing more benefit.

Some would just offer to buy the whole site and domain outright. But dealing with some of these codgers is tough. They’re often sentimentally attached and want far too much money. And trying to strike these deals is a time suck.

Why not go after smaller slices of the pie? Go after the valuable content and leave the relics and ruins of entire sites designed in 1998 to Gramps.

A service company could “crawl” (old) websites for good, well ranking content. Offer to buy (the rights for) it. Both buyer and seller sign a (mostly pre-formatted, pre-made) contract and payment is rendered.

The purchased content “goes to work” for the benefit of the buyer and will hopefully reach a wider, improved audience. Value for all involved.

Doing this manually wouldn’t be worth it. Either an automated program could seek out the content, or go the other route and get content holders and publisher to come to your site and sell good articles to you. Some sort of valuation system and/or algorithm would be ideal to kill the many man-hours of sifting through content to determine worth.

Web video channel

The great video programming on Cable and Satellite TV comes with commercials and it’s expensive. The Internet offers way more video entertainment options than Cable, but herding all the sprawling internet video is often difficult and time consuming.

The move is on now to make traditional TV more Internet interactive-like while the Internet players — like Apple TV, Boxee.net, Google TV – continue with vast menu systems.

I say go the reverse direction. I want to fire up an Internet video channel that’s just like an old TV station. Hit play and walk away. That’s it. No sign up, no account. Instant, continuous Internet Boob Tube with zero interaction.

Unless you want interaction. (Stop reading here if you’re already sold, but it’s not likely because viewers will probably want some control. Some other stuff to do.)

Just hit a button and an interactive, overlaid interface could come up (– and/or this interactive interface/menu would show up on a mobile phone app that could also double as a remote.)

Naturally this optional menu for the video channel would contain all the lofty features we’ve come to expect from our Internet media applications:

learning your view tastes and preferences
ability to share what your are watching
skinning & customizing appearance
fetching programming info and recommendations
option to integrate and merge with other media sources and service

How will this happen? How the hell should I know. That is why nerds exist.

A master/parent channel would be set up and programmed by the company who creates it. This tech could be used as a platform for others to build and program their own (custom, branded) channels.

The general idea here is switch on an internet TV channel and plop down on the couch. Less choice, less control, less hassle is the primary intent. But that won’t fly for everyone who may like it, so also offer hidden menus and controls that’d also empower a premiere, TV-like Internet video channel with a more meaningful interactive experience.

Video mute button

Add a Video Mute Button to web video players. Press it and the video folds down, or hides, but audio still plays.

Perfect for the workplace where you want to listen but not watch or fiddle with minimizing, maximizing, resizing, popping out, or otherwise hiding video.

Simple mass photo sharing

Most everybody wants widespread sharing of their photos and there’s a slew of photo sharing services. But everyone is not on the same photo sharing services.

Why isn’t there a decent service to distribute your photos to all the popular (online) photo places?

We need a web service/app where you upload your photos once and your photos go all over: Flickr, Facebook, Twitpic, Photobucket, Picassa, etc, etc.

The user process would be simple:

1.) Sign up.
2.) Link up the photo sharing sites you’re already on to this new service — either using openID/OAuth and/or old fashion usernames and passwords — and give options to sign up for additional photo sharing sites.
3.) Upload photos once.
4.) Photos appear at the sites you’ve just approved. Like:

flickr
photobucket
webshots
Picassa
shutterfly
smugmug
snapfish
Twitter
Facebook
Posterous
tumblr
WordPress
Blogger
ireport

After upload is complete, there could be and option to:

Email your photos
Ofter to try to sell your photos — to perhaps Getty Images, Stock photo sites, etc. This proposed service could take a cut.
Crawl/search for local, tradional media outlet (websites) to submit photos to.
Send photo(s) as picture text (MMS)
Fax your photographs to Grandma and insurance companies (Ha!)

Also, a setting to put copyrights/copylefts on all your pictures, like Flickr does would be vital.

One-click micropayment button

Professional content creators bitch and moan how no one wants to pay to read. But if rich people would get on it, they could overcome the hurdles of micropayments, namely, the high cost of individual transaction fees.

Once micropayments take off, there will likely be a button next to content and article teases/previews/summaries to click. The button could say something like: ”Pay $0.005 with dippold@gmail.com (via Google Checkout) & read.” Click and you’ve just instantly paid for what you are now reading. That’s it. No other bullshit in the way. If there is, people won’t do it.

Warning screen preference and all user settings could be configured from something like Google Checkout.

Subsequent installments of The Dreaded Idea will address reading, music, Computing/Internet/Telephony, and miscellany not fitting neatly into a category.

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Stuff David Foster Wallace circled in his American Heritage Dictionary

Dippold — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:22:26 +0000


David Foster Wallace circled “Osmium” and about 500 other word entries in his American Heritage Dictionary.

My near obsession with David Foster Wallace continues. As I exert concerted effort to finish the last 16th or so of Infinite Jest, I keep happening upon other DFW internet material like the DFW Audio Project (horrible picture of him there, BTW, but that site is for listening, not photos) and this list of words you see here; words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary — shamelessly ripped from a Slate article:

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$1,000 edition of ‘On the Road’?

Dippold — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:58:22 +0000

In my youth I idolized Jack Kerouac. Ran across this upcoming edition of his “On the Road” on Amazon. It lists for $1,000. I’m sure it is extremely limited with many great unreleased photos but still. I’m almost curious to learn more. I won’t ignore more details about it if they present themselves, but I’m not seeking out anything further either.

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Distilling ‘Ten rules for writing fiction’ into one or two words

Dippold — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:11:22 +0000

I’ll now slaughter the multi-authored Guardian.co.uk article “Ten rules for writing fiction” by cutting several of the “rules” down to one or two words which may make more sense after reading the article. Many of the rules could apply to other forms of writing, and possibly, some to life.

Write
Write
Write
Avoid prologues
Excise skippableness
Read aloud
Cut
Rewrite
Safeguard text
Hold attentions
Don’t whine
Show friends
Pray
Read often
Write quickly
Quality later
Title early
Less Internet
Hide thesaurus(es)
Change mind
Create rhythms
Reread, rewrite
Trash it
Memorize poems
Take walks
Forget posterity
Love survives
Write privately
Shun commerciality
Better-ize autocorrection

Journal entries
Regrets fuel
Simultaneous ideation
Beware! Clichés!
Write daily
Give up
Come back
Persevere
Use pens
Use pencils
Type
Fill pages
Take stands
Be accurate
Necessity matters
“Realness” doesn’t
Break rules
Change it
Changes you
Frees you
Have fun
Marry believers
Be childless
Shun reviews
No shit-taking
Autobiographical inventions
Uninteresting verbs
Cut metaphors
Cut similes
Magic aloud
Trust readers
Discipline
Eliminate interferences
Finish it
Put aside
Read anew
Fix it
Keep moving
Assurance
Confidence
Say something
Master jokes
Choose understandability
Increase vocabulary
Read widely
Read discriminately
Study others
Have experiences
Have humility
Push limits
Defend others
Defend writing(s)
Defend yourself
No fear
Love writing
Edit
Write

There’s a Part Two to this article!

87 misrepresentations from Part One is enough. I’m off to read the second part. But first, three rules verbatim:

“Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.” –Jonathan Franzen

“Only bad writers think that their work is really good.” –Anne Enright

“Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.” –David Hare

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Man-Gifts at ‘What to get Guys.com’

Dippold — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:31:06 +0000

A shout to Rob Stretch and his man gift site What to Get Guys. Rob cherry-picks products for you, so when buying for males, go there first — it saves time and prevents frustration while delighting all involved in the resulting consumption.

He pointed me there to check the Digital Harinezumi Video Camera — a tiny, future-retro type camcorder that instantly applies a 60′s-ish Super 8 effect to everything it records.

The actual camera

Freeze frame from footage shot with the Digital Harinezumi

It’s a fun novelty concept, great for quickly achieving an aged analog feel, but for film heads, a very similar effect could be hand-created with your editing program once, saved as a template, then applied ad infinitum to any footage.

The Absinthe Gift Set slays. Buy it, but don’t wait for the experience. Lucid Absinthe is now available in all 50 states. I quaffed some around the corner at the Heidelberg a while back so check your bar.

I still want to check Thomas Fink’s “The Man’s Book: The Essential Guide for the Modern Man” which allegedly answers many questions including:

Do you know how to tie a bow-tie, mix a martini, or make a potato gun?

Do you know when to get married and how to break up, or the difference between a bock beer and a bitter?

Do you know which urinal to choose or how to start a fire with a Coke can?

It would reside perfectly next to “The Alphabet of Manliness” on your bookshelf.

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Mail Me Art (2)

Dippold — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:56:37 +0000

Mail Me Art is a fairly simple concept. Create a piece of art that can be mailed then mail it to:

Mail Me Art
37 Thames Court
Victoria Avenue
West Molesey
Surrey
KT8 1TP
United Kingdom

There are some stipulations, but that’s basically it. The project’s first round is done and a book of several submissions has been bound.

Mail Me Art is now on to round two, called: Mail Me Art 2. Each month an art related prize is given away to the curator’s favorite submitter along with a copy of Mail Me Art: Going Postal with the World’s Best Illustrators and Designers

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Win the Sword of Blood by ‘spreading the word’

Dippold — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:49:38 +0000

I recently stumbled upon a somewhat novel Guerrilla marketing effort for a audio novella prequel that involves a broadsword giveaway stamped with a unique and exclusive flash fiction story that will be signed in blood by the author.

The sword is the object/subject of J.C. Hutchens’s free prequel novella podcast Personal Effects: Sword of Blood. This story precedes his new novel Personal Effects: Dark Art. There is a full blown “out of book transmedia experience” going on involving not only the sword but also IDs, business cards, documents, phone numbers and Googling the characters and institutions in the text to reveal real websites.

But what I feel makes this promotion somewhat unique is that you must spread the word person to person not just tweeting or blogging about it. Here’s what you must do, according to the site, to win the sword:

You must have a copy of Personal Effects: Dark Art on hand. (Borrow one from a friend. Order a copy here. If you can’t obtain a copy, play them the videos at my homepage.)
You must conduct a “show and tell” of the novel and its transmedia items (IDs, biz cards, documents, etc.) to several family members or co-workers.
Simply show off the book, and tell your pals about the novel and its “out of book” transmedia experience.
You must pass out copies of the Order Form PDF (found below) to each person you chat with.
You can do this in your home, at a friend’s house, or at your workplace.
You must document this Show And Tell session with at least one photograph.
Email that photo to J.C. at 7thSonNovel.com by July 31.

I won’t be going person to person doing a “show and tell” but I have listened to two episodes of the podcast. So far, it ain’t bad. Lets hope whoever wins the sword will either blog, tweet or post the flash fiction story emblazoned upon it.

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Meet Wordnik, your new meta lexicon

Dippold — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:25:25 +0000

Wordnik — a suped-up and glorified word mecca-nexus — has a goal:

. . . to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.

Enter any word and the online lexicon spits out a myriad of information, including:

Examples — sample sentences of how the word is used
Real time tweets — recent search results from Twitter
Related words — including cross reference and synonyms from various thesauruses
Pronunciations — written and a spoken recording with an option to record your own
Images — from Flickr
Etymology — multiple sources
Notes — must be logged in to add them
Tags — I really don’t see much need for this feature. Or it should be auto-tagged with synonyms
Statistics — nice bubble graph on word usage and unusualness

Wordnik’s Bubble Graph

I like the feature of being able to register and contribute, but I don’t like the absence of an auto suggest for misspellings.

I also couldn’t find the parts of speech (ie. whether the word is a verb, noun, adverb, etc.) of the word or how to make the word plural.

And why no Wikipedia integration?

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