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COTTON THISTLE CLEARANCE
Random musings from the noggin' of Knolltrey
(Best viewed on a monitor running Mozilla Firefox, with a brain running on a case of Grolsh...)
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Associative Fugue
Mood:
 lazy
Now Playing: ...see post.
Topic: General
I'm not really a big fan of rewriting organ music for strings... Shane thinks that guitars are best suited for more... well, electrical pursuits... Ah, well. I'm making the first three notes of that song the official 'jingle' chime of TYPERS' own Gouden Preek Corporation. No reason, other than I really like it. I don't think it's really significant, or anything (other than the fact that the first two notes happen to be a ' perfect fifth', if you're going by JUST INtonation, that is...) God, that was awful... nevermind... G-P's Senior VP, Serafino Grafsteen, is into racing cars, too. I'm toying with having one of his cars' license plate read 'BWV-578'. That might be taking an insignificant joke a bit too far, though, huh?
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 7:15 PM ADT
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Legendary tomfoolery...
Mood:
 incredulous
Topic: Entertaining Insights
Here's the next summer blockbuster.... So... yeah, no: it's an obvious joke (given the date and all) but a pretty elaborate one at that. Someone (better yet ALOT of someones) over at IGN have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands, methinks. An LOZ adaptation is near and dear to my heart because, well, of all the possible video game adaptations you can do, it might prove the hardest. It's kinda the last frontier in a long line of f**ked up movies based on videogames. ...I've seriously thought about how it can be done properly. And on a regular basis. No joke...
I won't get into any of my own ideas, but let me be clear from the start: there are NO GOOD MOVIES based on video games out there, period. It just doesn't happen... (...right: so The Last Starfighter is decent, but that's based on a fictitious VG: it doesn't count.) Novelizations get more respect: that's how bad it is. Look at some of the Doom books, the "World of Power" novelization of Master Blaster (which actually established canon for the resulting VG sequels!), the NYT-bestselling Halo novels, TYPERS... ...well, not exactly all of those are valid examples, but you get my point... What's the problem with adapting VG's, anyway? Is it that the people behind them make a shoddy manufactured product without any spark of desire or creativity on their own? No: I'd say. At least, not in every case. In fact, alot of VG adaptations show genuine creativity. Admit it: Super Mario Brothers the Movie, the creature that kicked off this whole enterprise, is anything but uncreative. Seriously: it is a wholly unique take on the game world. ...And it's also one of the wost movies ever made... but you already knew that. I think the problems are many-fold. For one: directors look to present THEIR OWN story, but with the trappings of a game behind it to boost name-recognition and get butts in the seats. In other words, they don't let the game-worlds 'own' the story: the movies are literally scripts to other projects cut-and-paste into a familiar setting for gamers. When that happens no one, game-fans or movie buffs, can be satisfied. The finished product's not close enough to the game to warrant the fanboys/girls interest, and its not an interesting-enough movie by itself to attract cinephiles. Studios are no help: are the execs gonna treat the film project itself as anything other than the lightest popcorn fluff, to be rushed out under reviewers' radar screens and gross as much in its opening weekend as possible before word-of-mouth spreads that it's vapid tripe? Don't get me wrong: in the push to sell product to the 'lowest-common-denominator' they do that with all films, really, but doubly so for a lowly VG adaptation. Their product ain't for sophisticated adult fans who grew up playing the game, but for retarded adolescents who don't check RottenTomatoes often enough. In summary: the directors, I think, want to make the movie too unique. The studios want it out too fast. Both are wrong. Another point of contention is that, in the end, these kind of films will only work if they're, in a sense, 'love songs'. I wanna use the opposite example here: a movie translated into a video game, to prove my point. Goldeneye 007 is one of the finest games of all-time, cobbled together by a relatively inexperienced design team. One of the factors for its success, I think, is that many of these guys were avid Bond-fans; the project wasn't treated as some hired-gun job to be shoddily constructed, nor was it simply an independant idea given a "Bond-in-name-only" moniker. Goldeneye 007 was, as I would put it, a 'love song' to its subject. (By the way, though this should be taken as a given: a proper love song requires at least SOME THOUGHT and clarity of thought on the writer's part. That SHOULD be a given, but... well... y'know.) Basically, I think the first we'll ever see of a decent videogame adaptation is something outside a major studio's control. Y'know: like one of those "Fox Searchlight" kind of things where an independant team of talented moviemakers (and not one single prima-donna director or studio exec) is making the movie. Then again, how can an indie-group afford the rights to any kind of popular videogame storyline? The answer is, quite simply, that they can't... For now, then, it's all about the fluff...
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 5:40 PM ADT
Updated: Thursday, 3 April 2008 5:48 PM ADT
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
...what's possibly impossible to be impossible...
Mood:
 caffeinated
Topic: Pseudoscientific Musings
Here's a news flash for 'ya: The impossible is always possible, unless it's not... Now, this guys got his laurels and all, but why do I hear a whole lot of quacking in my head as I try to understand his logic? Alright, yes: there's truth to Clarke's adage that, "if a learned man of science says something is possible and the public says its impossible, the scientist is almost assuredly right", but here's my problem: this guy thinks that breaking the light barrier is doable, but that it's impossible to see into the future (however you want to describe that phrase)? Now, as I understand string theory (and believe me: I don't) isn't one of the hypothetical conclusions from certain assumptions in the discipline that the universe is built-up around a slew of dimensions, and that the multiverse itself shapes objective reality by virtue of which way the linguini noodles are pointing?... (...I haven't had lunch today, sorry...) ...forget it. My only point is that given how little we understand objective reality at the moment it's far more likely that we'll be able to divine the future at some point, well... in the future... than the idea that we'll ever be able to go faster than a photon. Although, in my book, both of these things are impossible. ...unless they're not. And the next chapter of TYPERS isn't called "Evolution", anymore. It's now called "On the Razor's Edge". It's more appropriate for the subjectmatter and, on top of that, it just sounds cooler! And... well... it's not done, yet...
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 8:15 PM ADT
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
...I'm thinking of Frodo for the lead...
Mood:
 cheeky
Topic: Entertaining Insights
So Harper-Collins just picked up my manuscript, 'The Reign of Eden', and I'm in talks with Paramount pictures right now on how best to adapt it as a big-budget blockbuster by next summer... ...check today's date, turkeys... ROE isn't even finished yet. It's sailing smooth, though. In a lot of ways it's a godsend to be writing in third-person limited exclusive (one person, one POV, that is): don't have to jump from head-to-head-to-head-to-head like I'm wont to do in TYPERS. The only challenge is making sure my scrappy hero has a plausible reason to be around when important plot points come up, but that little challenge is more than offset by the sheer amount of focus I'm able to put on the central story by only having one cranium to be bothered by... 
I'd say I'm about half-way finished, but there's no real way of telling, truth be told. Technically I was half-way done when I started ('Journey of a thousand steps', and all that...) but I can't say how far along I am because, frankly, I don't know how much polish I'm gonna squirt out of the bottle of perceptivenes to use with my rag of editing righteousness... Feel free to quote me on that last sentence... Y'know, for some reason I keep thinking that, if ROE were ever picked up for translation into a movie, that Dewey kid from Malcom in the Middle would make a good Kairos... ...not sure why I think that, to be honest...
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 9:00 PM ADT
Updated: Tuesday, 1 April 2008 9:06 PM ADT
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Soon to be an off-Broadway musical !!! (...no, not really...)
Mood:
 energetic
Topic: Copyright-Infringementish
My li'l foray into Windows Movie Maker continues... this time with a bigger 'TYPERS'-themed slideshow (and there's nothin' more interesting than that!!!) Anyway, a montage of art, set to SMB's "Serenade", natch... That's a MediaFire link (which you'd already know... if you clicked on it... but in case you... well... didn't... it is) Anyway, due to my noob-ness with compression the file weighs just north of 16 MB. If you're all high-speed cable or DSL or whatever, it shouldn't take more'n a moment, though. If you're dial-up... well, if you're dial-up...
...egh... Well, anyway, my free-time's going to be taking a nose-dive soon, so I don't see myself wasting much more time on stuff like this... Especially when I should be writing, too... although I'll continue to waste my time on that regardless of what may come.
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 3:56 PM ADT
Friday, 28 March 2008
It is put down by everyone far too often...
Mood:
 celebratory
Topic: A Hello to Arms
I'm making things official today: It's the newest linguistic holiday of the year: passive-voice day! Ah, yes: that great modifier of the English language, providing grace and nuance to our words for over 1000 years, and a stick to the craw of many a modern high-school and college English teacher. Honestly, a language without the passive voice should be shunned by all; such a thing would surely be hated by me; really, wouldn't such a stale language have your disgust? I'm really not being glib, either: next to Paralipsis and Litotes, passive voice is my favorite thing about English. My bell is really rung by it! Right, I'm being an a**hole about it, here, but I had way too many teachers in my time who would go into convulsions at the mere sight of a phrase written in passive; the obvious thing to assume about such a phrase is that it's lazy writing, and that there is no possible way one could use the passive to add nuance to a passage. In such cases we've got Occam's Razor working against the voice, plus the fact that about, oh, 80% of the time or so a teacher is actually right in telling their pupil that the passive voice should be shunned. (...did it again: hehehe...) But there's that 20% when it works, either as a subtle driver of understatement or, especially, a qualifier in a character's dialogue, and simply using its active counterpart would be less effective. Alas, finding an educator willing to listen to such arguments is rarer than finding gold nuggets in a stream. (unless, of course, the nuggets would be found by someone with enough dedication and, oh... ...sorry...) As Wikipedia so kindly informed me, even arguments made by those who hate this style of voice are given while bolstered by its use! Hypocritical, that could be! (alright: now it's just getting ridiculous...)
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 3:58 PM ADT
Updated: Friday, 28 March 2008 4:11 PM ADT
Tuesday, 25 March 2008
Your Favorite Webservice Sucks...
Mood:
 accident prone
Topic: A Hello to Arms
Bloody f**king fantastic... Tripod's HTML source code editor is flubbed beyond recognition: it won't accept any of my manual changes such as (hypothetically...) adding a quicktime movie embed into this post. Geeesh! The only solution would be to upload the movie directly into the account I use for this blog and let the idiot-proof script automatically determine how to display my movie, but I'm maxed out on space here... Anyway, if I want to link to a movie, then, I have to do something retarded and unimpressive, like this: http://shanekentknolltrey6.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/czechhedgehog.mov Believe me: if I knew how to actually work at teh interweb I'd make my own website from scratch, but of course I can't, and I'm not willing to put in the hours to make this place respectable... but facts are facts, and Tripod sucks! The vid's nothing special: just me playing around with Windows Movie Maker and some sill pictures of the Czech Hedgehog from TYPERS. I found the images whilst cleaning out my HD recently; they're rejects, or at least they were, 'cause I hated 'em. But, tone down the color, add a jaunty tune (My obsession with One Wing Angel continues...) and make the pictures move around a-la Ken Burns, and it's tolerable. Came out better 'n I thought, anyway... EDIT: I've got a second version where I show a bit more of The Creature at the end (too much in my estimate) but seeing's how the framerate and resolution of the version I did post suffered in the translation, I might put that one up at some time, too.
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 1:46 AM ADT
Updated: Tuesday, 25 March 2008 1:45 PM ADT
Saturday, 22 March 2008
The Stag at Eve had Drunk his Fill...
Mood:
 sad
Shane's been drinking tonight, and that has a way of making a person pine for stuff... ...in my case, I'm pining for the northern part of the non-emerald isle... 
I took that picture a couple years back from the Eastern shore of the Northern section of Loch Lomond (got that? good). Them's the Arrochar Alps in the background. Left to right are The Cobbler, Ben Ime and, last but not least, the might Ben Vorlich (...not the tallest, but thanks to Scott... ah, well: long story...)
At least, I THINK those are them. I'm pretty sure about Vorlich, anyway... The three hills of my memory, soothing the pain.  Aaaaaahhhh....
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 12:19 AM ADT
Updated: Saturday, 22 March 2008 12:41 AM ADT
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
And there's nothing to do downtown, anyway...
Mood:
caffeinated
Topic: Entertaining Insights
I'm checking out the stats on the hypothetical new Al Burj building they're semi-planning to put up in Dubai at some undetermined date. The specs are all horseshit, I must say. They want it twice as big as Taipei 101, for one thing, and that entails 228 floors and a first-to-last-floor height just above 850 meters (I won't go into spires or antannae. Hey, developers: nobody f**king cares....) It's already planning to be downgraded: there's no feasible way to cobble together such a structure, and this kind of sophomoric bravado really towers over anything I've ever seen... ...sorry... Anyway: the thing won't be half-as-tall as expected, likely, but I thought I'd do a little experiment: given that this place was SLATED to be the tallest building in the world, I thought I'd do a little hypothetical side-by-side with TYPERS' own Distelspitze Tower, seat of the Allied Military and headquarters of the Superior Joint Command: 
Yeesh... This is one of those reality-laced moments where I get to savor some bitter herbs: this is indicative of how far I sometimes overshoot. Let's assume Distelspitze is exactly 700 floors (I'd envision that some floors would have VERY high ceilings, so this number is again on the low-side, but let's not muddy the waters...) a tower that tall would be, at a minimum, THREE TIMES as big as this Al Burj nonsense in its planning stage. Its height, again a minimum, would be around 2550 meters or, for the rest of us Americans, 1.58 miles. That means that an executive anywhere in the upper third of the building could effectively join the mile-high club just by nailing his secretary from the comfort of his own office (gotta admit: that would be a GREAT pick-up line!) A base-jumper would experience 43 seconds of free-fall (factoring in terminal velocity... I think...). Actually that's not right: roadkill would experience that time of free-fall: a base jumper could wait a little under 26 seconds before even deploying their chute and reach a safe landing (provided the prevaling winds haven't smacked 'em back into the tower's side... that's one way to ruin a Friday afternoon board meeting you booked in the good conference room with the window...) I'm not finished, yet: given modern flexible skyscraper frames (designed to ride-out mother nature, not withstand her and get broken in two for its trouble): if Distelspitze were rocked by a particularly windy day (as one might often have in a place like Spindlespire Ridge) and, as a consequence, it listed to and fro at an angle of one single degree at its base, the occupants of the very top floor would rock back and forth in the air a distance of 89.25 meters, side-to-side-to-side. That's one rollercoaster I wouldn't pay the price of admission for... EDIT: On later consideration, I recall that Chenine Chovert lives on the 250th floor of her superskyscraper in Nash Ultima, so if the Al Burj actually does get built to order (Which it won't...) we'll already be well on our way to the civilian-version of the superskyscraper as I describe it. 700 floors in still WAAAAAAAAAAAY futuristic... but maybe possible, given where we are, now... And you gotta admit: Ainsworth would have a really killer view, if not for all the clouds in Spindlespire...
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 11:26 PM ADT
Updated: Thursday, 20 March 2008 4:22 PM ADT
Rendezvous with his Maker
Mood:
 down
Topic: General
Rest in Peace, Sir Arthur C Clarke. I don't know what else to say, really. I was gonna give this post a day to mull it over, but the news makes me depressed. Really depressed. And that's just the way it is, so I can't be eloquent and sagacious about it. He was a scientific researcher, an author, and a speculative futurist. And now he's gone over the eternal falls: beyond the confines of special relativity, the limits of light, or even the scope of mathmatical singularities. Not all journeys into the infinite aether require Monoliths, after all... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I suppose I can make myself feel better by getting angry about something... Well, not angry, really... just creeped out. You see... there's this site out there, somewhere... and it contains... ...it has... ...eeegh... ...R-Type porn. Yeah: you read that right. Now, to be fair, not all the images are actually pornographic, but I ain't linkin' to the damned thing because a) it creeps me out and b) we're talking loli and shota stuff, here. Not the worst the 'net has to offer by any means, but still... eeegh..... So how do you make R-Type porn, you might ask? Well... think of it like... if a bunch of underage girls wore spaceship-model suits for Halloween... eeegh...... You should've seen how the Platonic Love turned out.... UGH: never mind: just never mind. I'm gonna go throw up for awhile. Then I'm going to church....
Posted by shanekentknolltrey
at 4:25 AM ADT
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