Month: May 2009

Chaos and Numbers

I finally have the bones of my new design. It’ll be a 3-column layout, 960px wide. Spent so much time fiddling with the widths, and then it hit me: all I had to do was take a clue from the 960 grid system and let column widths be fractions of the total width. Easy-peasy.

I finally have the bones of my new design. It’ll be a 3-column layout, 960px wide. Spent so much time fiddling with the widths, and then it hit me: all I had to do was take a clue from the 960 grid system and let column widths be fractions of the total width. Easy-peasy. After a bit of experimentation I settled on a 5-column grid, with the left and right sidebar each taking up one column, and the main content section taking up three. The main page will be built on a four-column layout, and will feature a bit more than just a list of recent posts.

And you know, there’s something deeply There’s something deeply satisfying about these proportions. Something clean and orderly. Ancient Greeks (as I understand it) dabbled in numerology, getting all mystical about numbers like the Golden Ratio even as they practised solid mathematics. I can understand that a little better now.

Now comes the hard part: fleshing it all out. But I’m working on that.

In other news, the Team Vancouver is coming along. I had some good breakthroughs in the last week, but I’m one step behind my own site. Instead of seeing everything coming together, I’m at the stage of breaking everything down, trying to forget the present design. It’s all right, though, that’s another kind of satisfaction, to ignore what is, and start seeing the possibilities…

Out of chaos, I bring order. Out of order, I create chaos. To everything, there is a season.

Movie Review: Star Trek

That was awesome. And not quite what I expected, which was even more awesome.

That was awesome. And not quite what I expected, which was even more awesome.

See, I expected a straight-up prequel: the story of how all the old familiar characters met, their first adventure together, that sort of thing. But without going into spoilery details, the story we got is not the one that will lead to the events of the original series. I kept waiting for the reset button to be pressed, for the writers to pull a time-travel eraser whatsit out of their asses and make everyone live logically every after, but they never did.

And that was a brilliant move. The problem with prequels is that you know how the story’s going to end. But here? This story is something totally new. If there are any sequels to this, writers will be free to go wherever the hell they want. Will there be any? I have no idea. The word “reboot” has been bandied about on the intenetz, though I’m not sure how I feel about that. Part of me still feels the franchise has exhausted itself. But damned if this movie didn’t make me fall in love with Trek again, if only for one night.

Judged as a standalone movie, Star Trek delivered on all counts: stunning visuals and FX (thank gawd they didn’t try to duplicate 1960’s future tech!), great action, and very nice character development. The focus was on Kirk and Spock, but everybody else got a chance to shine: Sulu the swordsman and rookie pilot, Chekov the enthusiastic math geek, Uhura the laser-sharp linguist, Scotty the genius tinkerer, McCoy the no-nonsense doctor—in an eerily dead-on performance by Karl Urban, last seen by me riding on the plains of Rohan with flowing blond locks. DeForest Kelley should have lived to see this.

It wasn’t perfect—there were a few silly plot holes, and some of the interpersonal drama came out of nowhere—but it came pretty damn close. This is Trek for the 21st century, fresh and fun, both shinier and grittier, mindful of its heritage but not bound by it, boldly going where no Trek has gone before.

Movie Review: Wolverine

Not enough naked Hugh Jackman, in my opinion. Not enough Gambit. And I squeed a little when Patrick Stewart came on screen.

Not enough naked Hugh Jackman, in my opinion. Not enough Gambit. And I squeed a little when Patrick Stewart came on screen.

Yeah, it was… all right. Not bad, but not that good either. Just sort of… there. Which I expected, I’d read a couple of reviews and few of them were glowing. Okay special effects, and Hugh Jackman is welcome on my big screen anytime, but it just couldn’t gel into something coherent. Screaming, fighting, is Logan more animal than man?

I don’t know enough about Wolverine canon to say how faithful the story is, but from what I understand it’s been retconned to hell and back for years, so who knows? And maybe because there’s so damn much of it—150 years, give or take, which is apparently canon—they had to just hit the highlights. I was expecting that too, but it still bugged as much as Spiderman 3.

They did tie it in to the wider X-Men universe, though, with Scott Summers, Blob and Professor Xavier (again, squee), which I liked. But you know what I would have liked a lot more? If the couple who took Wolverine/Logan/Jimmy in after he escaped from Stryker’s facility had been James and Heather Hudson. Wolverine was a founding member of Alpha Flight after all, and he’s the one whose backstory kicked off the series, when he was only Canadian and not 150 years old, so was a cameo too much to ask for? Anything? Kayla’s sister with “diamond-hard” skin didn’t even turn out to be Diamond Lil. Hmph.

A few things that bugged: no blood on claws or Deadpool’s swords. Did the special FX people just not think about it, or was it a deliberate choice, to show off Wolvie’s shiny new claws or not traumatise the kiddies too much? Yeah, because with all the stabbing and slicing and death, a little blood would have put it way over the top (eyeroll). And though Hugh Jackman does a good primal scream, the kid who played him in 1845? Not so much. Finally, Creed/Sabertooth’s animal jumps looked very silly in the war flashbacks (with only so-so special effects, too), and kept on not looking any less silly.

But, all in all, it was entertaining enough. It’s a good thing my expectations were pretty low.