Why hit a Corgi?

Yes I know YouTube’s rife with stuff like this but I feel the need to push this on the world just cos it made me chuckle, also somebody’s got to continue supporting the Mon-stars of rock.

Also while you’re there check out the Saturday morning Watchmen video posted up by the same guy.  A tribute I feel more in tune with Alan Moore’s original intention for the material than the lackluster movie.

Tags: comics, movies, music, video

Wrestle Jam

A couple of weeks ago I managed to spend every night of the week at the cinema catching up with the Oscar nominations. While I didn’t get to see the Oscars, as subscribing to Sky movies is daylight robbery, I did manage to see some excellent films such as Frost/Nixon (my movie of the year) and Darren Aronofsky,‘s The Wrestler, otherwise known as Mickey Rourke Strikes Back.

For those not into watching excellent pieces of cinema; The Wrestler is the story of a washed up 1980′s wrestling superstar. Now destitute, Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson is living life the only way he knows, and how that affects the relationship with his daughter and would-be squeeze. A major part of the film is Randy’s ties to his past fame, with one particular scene showing him and a young boy playing Wrestle Jam ’88, a fictional NES game from The Ram’s heyday. Kotaku ran a great article about the making of this piece of game art, I suggest you read it and be enlightened. I also suggest you see The Wrestler, it is not bobbins.

Apparently Aronofsky demanded a playable game, which was provided by brother and sister team Kristyn Hume and Randall Furino. All in all the game was a lightly featured clone of Wrestlemania, and even had it’s own 8-bit theme song (linked below). I adore this kind of commitment to building a film’s versimilitude, sure you could have run a video of any old game, or cobbled together some footage but here the production team seem to have gone one step further and made a work of homage from something many would consider no more than set dressing. Bravo!

Tags: art, film, games, movies, video, wrestling

I thought no-one was supposed to talk about fight club…

shhhh (laughings ok…)

http://www.maniacworld.com/dont-show-off-before-a-fight.html

Tags: irony, pain, video

Machine Intelligence

Most folks laugh at this phrase, everybody has had fun with their backwards printer and rebellious cellphone. Working daily with the facepalm worthy exploits of folks I’ve come to laugh at the notion of human intelligence as well, but that’s another story.

Even now work is going on to create synthetic brains, devising simple heuristic rules which can guide the creation of artificial neural networks. New hardware and software is being created right now to facilitate the growth of true intelligence from a machine, and that makes me excited.

It’s worth noting the differences here between artificial intelligence and machine intelligence, there’s a big gap. Artificial intelligence can only respond to stimuli that it has specificially been created to work with, an example is bots in videogames. A bot can act like a player, and even though you can tell them apart from humans they still react in what would be considered a lifelike way within the simulated situation in which they exist, but without special markers built into those game worlds the bots cease functioning correctly and begin to act erratically. Machine intelligence works by creating models from available data and building scenarios within it’s neural network, allowing it to come to decisions that the original designers of it’s heuristic software may not have anticipated; taking my example above, the intelligence would learn the rules of the game through observation not through intentional prompts. There are different methods to achieve this but their goal is the same, to create a thinking model.

Isaac Asimov famously wrote about devices built with such an intelligence in I, Robot (and later Cory Doctorow took his ideas and ran with them in his I, Robot and more playful I, Row Boat) defining three rules which should govern the behaviour of a machine intelligence. The question is though, should we artificially restrain what thoughts a synthetic mind can entertain? Does the simple act of rationalising and coming to decisions based on available input constitute sentience?

It’s more a question for the philosophy students out there, me; I’m looking forward to the Turing Test being beaten and robot equality movements. It’s all a long way off, but we’re a clever bunch, eh? In the mean time watch this video and be enlightened:

Thanks to Andrew C. Hoyer for the aweome photo and having the ‘nads to Creative Commons licence it!

Tags: computers, futurism, geek, robots, video

Tilt Shifting Straight to My Heart

Tilt shifting is the art of using a special lens, usually used by architecture photographers, to create incredibly shallow depths of field in images. The resulting images look like they’re of miniatures, rather than full size subjects.

Unfortunately real tilt shift lenses cost an insane amount of money, even old M42 and K mount ones, but you can still try this using technique with Dennison Bertram’s homebrew solution. You can also Photochop the same effect, but where’s the fun?

My favourite use of this effect is in Metal Heart below; just like Micro Machines but, y’know, awesomer. Check out Keith Loutit’s other videos. The man has a sharp eye. Also, great music track.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Tags: cars, monster trucks, photo geek, photography, video

George Formby Grill

C’mon, it’s been in your brain since they came out too, right?

Tags: george formby, grilling, music, video

Watch Stalker now, free

I’m sure some of you non-neanderthals have played S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, GSC Game World‘s magnum opus. What you might not know is that the game takes much of it’s inspiration from the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

In 1979 the book was adapted into a motion picture by Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed the original (and by far the best) version of Solaris. Shot in Estonia, the film apparently suffered a great number of setbacks and conditions during shooting have been blamed in causing the early deaths of cast and crew.

The full version of the movie is linked below. Watch and enjoy:

Via Warren Ellis

Tags: games, movies, video