Tron Mix Side A

I'm finally declaring this "done" and kicking it online to share and enjoy.

Tron Mix Side A (Lossless version)
Tron Mix Side A (AAC version)
Tron Mix Side A (MP3 version)

This is a fast-moving mix of electronic music, old and new, including pieces of soundtrack and dialogue from Tron, Tron Legacy, and Tron 1.5 (the unreleased early "sequel").

This isn't really meant to be background music, like many other electronic music mixes. The tone and pace varies too much for it to settle into the background. Instead, the idea is to guide your imagination as you explore "the grid". Think of it as a music video without the music.



( Tracklist behind the cut, for those of you who want to keep it a surprise. )

Seraphim Falls Soundtrack (UST)

Seraphim Falls sat in my queue to be watched for two years. Then it got released on Blu-Ray, so I decided it was time to give it a shot.



It was better than I expected. Also darker, less complicated, and more grisly than I expected. Unfortunately all the ways it was interesting were ways that it strayed from the Hollywood formula, and consequently it only made about a quarter of its money back upon release.

It was also, I think, misunderstood by critics. One wrote, "as an anti-war statement, a call to lay down arms that's clearly intended to be relevant today, it's a bit too clunky in its literalism." I don't know what that critic was smoking. I saw no anti-war statement, intentional or otherwise.

The lesson I saw was more personal. When an incident occurs that takes away everything you care about, or challenges everything you are - that is when then the urge to seek justice or revenge is the most destructive, because there is nothing in place to turn to when you finish. Rather than face that, you will be tempted to escalate your pursuit forever.

Anyway, since the film did so badly, a soundtrack was never released, which is a shame. It's atmospheric and creepy. With the Blu-Ray DTS 5.1 mix in hand, I decided to do something about that.

Seraphim Falls Unofficial Soundtrack Rip.zip

This large download contains almost every scrap of incidental music from the film, with a few pieces of dialogue left in for flavor. You'll probably only want to keep half of them, with your particular choices depending on whether you want a playlist that tells a story, one that keeps atmospheric sound effects, or one that is strictly music.

My favorite tracks are "Distant Riders", "Desert Edge", "Curative" and "Themes II".

Oh also: Some of you may be looking for the knife used in the movie, and pictured above.

Arthur C Clarke Round 4: Clarke On Parade

Castaway, 1947

Just a brief exploration of a "what if" scenario. My first reaction was to think, "a being made of ions? How absurd."

But on further thought I had to admit that I don't know enough about the behavior of matter in the depths of the sun to declare that it could not be a sensible environment for the evolution of life - at least, SOME kind of life, in a carefully defined sense of the word.

All you would need is for some common pool of matter to eventually churn into a pattern that perpetuates itself, and then for that pattern to fold in on itself to create distinct entities, and then for some method of variance in reproduction, and then some outside force to perform selection on the entities. We can simulate most or all of those steps for various environmental conditions, inside a computer, so .... What have astrophysicists learned about the environment inside the sun? What do our simulations look like?

I'm tempted to launch into a research project.

Nightfall, 1953

Kaboom! Apocalypse! Oh woe, oh dearie me, everything's in the crapper. The end.

History Lesson, 1949

Oh, if only Venus had turned out to be that interesting!

What I like about this story is the way two civilizations miss each other almost completely due to the "greenhouse effect". On the one hand, Earth declines into an ice age, and on the other, Venus emerges from runaway heat and begins a tropical phase, spawning reptilian life.

Unfortuantely for Venus, scientists now understand that the greenhouse effect has been going on far too long. The water that used to be on the surface of the planet was blasted so high into the atmosphere that it bled out into space, and is gone.

Venus will never be tropical again.

The Wall of Darkness, 1946

I had a feeling the story would end that way, due to the way it was framed in the beginning. Actually, what I expected was that the protagonist would return only to find that the stairway was abandoned, and appeared to have aged several thousand years.

One thing irritates me about the story: It stops well before any scientist would want it to. Having had such a phenomenon described to me, my mind was immediately bursting with experiments to conduct, to explore the details and technicalities of the phenomenon.

What happens when a single person walks in trailing a rope?
If someone walked in with a stopwatch, would it be possible to find the "halfway point"?
If two people walked in, and one turned around at the halfway point and walked back, what would happen?