Bugs and Flowers

Let the bugging and the flowering begin!

I've also been scanning the heck out of old film negatives and slides, and have a backlog of them for posting. 35mm slides from 1978, scanned at 3200dpi as 24-bit TIFF images, saved with LZW compression. About 26 megabytes EACH. Good thing blank DVD-Rs are down to 20 cents. (How's that for acronym overload?)

Oh yeah, and I've been obsessively writing on my old Palm V and fold-out keyboard. The 'Journey In The Dark' essay about Apple II-era graphics is shaping up nicely.

Props to Kashms and Alikat for being fellow photographers, props to Mistah E. for the free ice cream and the enjoyable chat about tweekers, and M4D PH4T PR0P5 to my Beloved, for studying her little fins off for her impending Japanese final. And props to Arekkusu for the Japanese voice readings! Those were very useful.

Hop hop

Recently the schedule at a local movie theatre aligned just right, allowing me to see four movies in a row, by walking from room to room:

• House of Wax
  1:35 - 3:05
  
• The Amityville Horror
  3:15 - 4:55
  
• XXX
  5:20 - 6:54
  
• Kingdom of Heaven
  7:05 - 9:30

The last one, at least, was worth seeing.

Every time I mention my movie-hopping behavior, someone just has to point out that I'm a criminal, a law-breaker, a trespasser, a thief, a pickpocket, a hooligan, and just a generally disappointing human being. And to that person, I respond: I'll tell you what's really disappointing. Disappointing is seeing the price of a movie DOUBLE in less than ten years, even though, during the same time, the price of every single aspect of movie production has become cheaper - from cameras to post-production to distribution. (Sure, the movie "Titanic" cost almost 200 hundred million dollars to complete. Producers are sure willing to spend a lot. But "Napoleon Dynamite" cost only 400 thousand - and pulled in 44 million bucks during it's theatrical run.)

The theatre experience itself has also changed - the rooms are smaller, the screens are smaller, those FOUL commercials and that FOUL muzak have replaced the expectant calm that used to precede every showing...

And that is why I theatre-hop. Because while the price of admission has gone up, the quality of the experience has gone down. At least this way they get their nine dollars from me even ONCE, instead of not at all. You dig?

Anyway, I'm posting this because I wanted to mention that, if you get the chance, you should try going to an early showing of a late-run film, in the middle of the week. A horror movie, if possible. If you're lucky you'll get the chance to be the ONLY person in the room. The experience of looking around at all those empty seats, and realizing you can heckle the film and yell as loud as you want, may actually be worth the price of admission.