The Earth Observatory project is an educational website created by NASA to provide high quality satellite images for educators or just individuals.
Images are featured according to current events such as wildfires in California or massive solar flares.
Check it out for some beautiful examples of pictures of our home and neighborhood.
"Silly caucasian girl who likes to play with samurai swords.... "
It is rare these days why I get to spend some time in a movie theater. Even more rare when that time is spent keeping my jaw from hanging and telling to myself ... Oh My God.
Kill Bill - Vol 1. was one of those movies. A movie that polarize whoever watch it - you either love it or hate it. There is no middle ground. The last one before that was Moulin Rouge... which I happened to love too. Go figure..
Where to even begin. The story of the revenge of the nameless bride against her former team mates, the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad and her former employer, Bill, is outrageous, comical, and yet noble and sad throughout the movie.
The characters are tormented or mad, or both. The Bride lost her loved ones, including her unborn child on her wedding day and spent four year in a coma. She wakes up with an obsessive goal in mind - payback. Vernita Green is a deadly stay at home soccer mom. O-Ren Ishii watched her parents be executed by yakuza when she was a child. Fortunately for her, the murderer of her parents was a pedophile. She got even with him at 12 while he was trying to take advantage of her. Go-Go Yubari is an insane schoolgirl in uniform. Even the Man from Okinawa, Hattori Hanzo, is haunted by a promise to never make a sword to kill someone again. And finally, the Crazy 88, O-Ren Ishii�s private army.
The cheezy music from the 60s and 70s is as much a character as the others. It carries the movie as efficiently as the dialogs, playing on contrasts and enhancing the drama. Throw in some over the top gore effects, arms flying, heads splitting, and the mix becomes an electrifying story between Bruce Lee, Anime and Sergio Leone.
Favorite moments:
Now... if the next movie doesn�t have a long scene of standoff under the sun, with close ups on the eyes of Michael Madsen�s sad eyes, I am going to be seriously disappointed..
It has now become some sort of ritual. Come November, I wait impatiently to receive my copy of Spectrum and enjoy one of the best collection of Fantasy Art available..
This year was no exception. With this year�s edition, Spectrum 10: The Tenth Annual Collection of the Best in Contempoary Fantastic Art celebrates a decade of science fiction and fantasy illustrations.
Each year, artists submit their entries to a jury made of a small selection of their peers such as Rick Berry, Michael Whelan or Bob Eggleton. Their selection represent a view of some of the best artworks in book covers, comics, illustrations, figurines or statues.
I received my first copy as a present from my brother. I bought the second copy as a present back to him. After that, I was hooked. finding the missing issues was dificult but not impossible thanks to eBay
This series is a must have, a reference for anyone interested in fantasy artwork, be it to study them or just enjoy watching them. each volume is a beautiful display of a variety of styles, from baroque paintings to colorful acylics or dark sketches.
The introduction to each book is an overview of the passed year. Like last yeat, I was surprised to see little mention of the growing part of digital medium in the selection. Digitial artworks were once limited to elaborate works using Bryce - chromes, geometric shapes, robotic figures - or mixed with oil or photographic elements. This year, some digital artworks have the same quality and feel as paintings (take Blendboy 2000 by Brian Despain for example).
Just as the Spectrum series is a brilliant demonstration that Fantasy and Science Fiction art is as legtimate as classical masterpieces, the growing part of digital artworks helps the recognition of computer aided art as an legitimate artform. For many of us, this seems like stating the obvious. Just think of what it would be like to create a Museum of Digital Arts and you will see how far we have yet to go.
About a year ago, I received my first piece of Apple hardware.
The ipod was simple, slick and incredibly cool. I can�t remember the last time I have been that happy with an object like that. The ipod borders the status of piece of art. No wonder its followers are quasi religious about it.
Of course, it also has shortcomings. The chrome body takes about every finger-print imaginable. The screen is easily scratched. The harddrive skips when you run with it. The battery needs frequent stops to a power station (although this has improved a lot with recent firmware).
And last but not least, the simplicity of its design is a challenge itself after years of being used to complex options, panels and buttons. One of the first things I remember what I started using it was to ask �how do I turn this things off ?�. The answer : you don�t. It turns off by itself when you stop using it.
Now, a year and a few scratches later, the ipod is still as loveable as it was the first time I took it out of its box, and as a way of celebrating this anniversary, Apple even thought about another surprise - the release of iTunes for windows.
Once again, it is love at first sight, but this time, with some Apple software. iTunes is simple, sleek and cool just as the ipod is. There is no menu to edit titles or album information - just click on it and edit. No �search� or �go� button - just type in the search field and the list of songs is filtered as you type. After years of Winamp, Sonique and MusicMatch, using iTunes is refreshing.
Now if Apple would release OS.X for PCs...
Three years since the first screenshots published in a magazine, Halo has finally landed on PC and despite some technical difficulties, it was worth the wait.
This title brings a level of immersion rarely achieved in video games. The blend of dramatic music, amazing graphics and incredible amount of details is near perfect.
Just as in Half-Life, the opening scenes seamlessly work as a tutorial to handling the game, but as soon as the initial exercises are over, it becomes appearant that this is not just another shooting gallery.
In fact, the sense of immersion I felt with this game is high enough to forgive the nagging reminders that the experience could have been much closer to an interactive 3D movie.
The game IS a shooting gallery. There is actually not much to do other than kill aliens and find your way in numerous, repetitive corridors. The game turns a boring shooting range into an experience in survival by allowing to carry only two weapons at a time, forcing the player to constantly plan for the next time his current weapons run out of ammo and scavenge the battle field for supplies.
There is not much interactivity, with aliens and marines alike, but the level of artificial intelligence enhance the feeling of figthing side by side with squads of teammates. On the marines side, characters have little problem following, they run for cover when necessary and even call for backup. On the alien side, the sense of intelligence is even more challenging with one notable exception - aliens seem to have a fascination with grenades coming their way. Although they scream �grenade !� when they see one next to them, they invariably stay around long enough to be blown up to pieces.
The level of details is exceptional. You just have to see shells bursting from your gun and rolling down an alien hallway, or the light from your gun illuminate a dark corner, or even a semi transparent cloaked alien coming out of nowhere. Unfortunately, this level of details comes at a price. Although the game runs smoothly with full details on a decent configuration (P4 2.4 GHz, 1 Gb of RAM with a GeForce fx 5900), it comes to a screetching halt in indoor scenes. I have still to understand why four walls and a few doors takes longer to render than an open landscape with trees, waterfalls, rocks and dozens of aliens.
The story is pretty much linear, but it contains enough twists and turns to make it interesting to follow and actually wonder where this is all going and care about the plot. This is rare enough in current games to be worth mentionning.
Actually, Halo for PC can be considered as what Unreal II might have been. The level of graphism between the two games is similar. The type of story (race to recover an ancient alien artifact/weapon) is nearly identical. The only difference is that Halo actually succeeds in bringing the player inside its world.
That and driving a Warthog...