Via From Bricks to Bothans comes the offical announcement of another jaw-dropping Star Wars Lego model to rival their previous Millennium Falcon.
Miscellany
23 posts
This site has a page on facebook, which has for the past few months not been updating; it seems the import blog function simply doesn’t work (and nor does their bug-reporting system). However, with my post on Disney World this morning I have confirmed that my work-around (updating the page through Networked Blogs) is working. So if you find it convenient to receive page updates via facebook, you may want to give it another go.
There is, of course, also a feedburner feed and my twitter account; links to both are in the right hand column.
I was googling myself the other day – I know, I know – and stumbled across this page squirreled away on the Age website, where Jason Hill had blogged about my Planning News article on SimCity (which is reproduced in full here).
What made my day was this comment underneath by “RealityCheck:”
Stephen Rowley is quite obviously a drooling, mouth-breathing moron.
“OMGZ, no MS Flight Simulatorz, who willz flies all de planes!?” … retard.
On a sidenote, this article does explain the absolutely horrendous state of australia’s capital cities.
Love ya work Rowley.
Today saw the delivery of the last issue of Planning News for which I was co-editor, and my last post to the magazine’s facebook page. So I guess we really are done. I hope you can excuse a few self-indulgent thoughts.
It has been a privilege to work on the magazine. No other Australian state has a monthly planning magazine; Victoria is very lucky to have one, particularly since it also sustains the three-times a year VPELA newsletter as well. It is a tribute to the establishing editors of the magazine that they had not only the vision to see how important monthly publication was, but also the persistence to ensure that it happened. All the subsequent editors owe them a lot, as they proved the monthly turnaround could be done and established Planning News as the key channel for debate in the Victorian planning industry.
Okay: as promised a couple of months ago on my old website – Cinephobia – I’ve completely redesigned, rethought, renamed and relaunched my website.
Created in honour of Tony Abbott’s ascension to the Liberal leadership, and his blocking of the ETS.
Well, I’ve dived into the world of Twitter. My original intent was just to create another option to alert people to my infrequent updates, but I ended up using the site frequently. You can find me here. My main account will include stuff about both my main online interests (film and urban planning) as well as my various other obsessions.
As to my impressions of Twitter itself after a couple of weeks of using it – well, its a strange beast. Obviously, given I’ve taken it up with some regularity, I understand the appeal. Basically, it’s not so much a social networking site as a kind of rest-stop for tired bloggers (this is why the description of it as a micro-blogging site is much more accurate than lumping it in with things like Facebook or MySpace as a social networking site). Certainly the 140 character limit on posts seems liberating compared to the drudgery of maintaining a webpage or blog. When audiences expect sites to update with new content at least daily, that’s a huge demand on the author; 140 characters allows for the faster turnover without the chore factor. Twitter is basically reducing our expectations of on-line content so that they better align with expectations about how fast sites should update.
I occasionally feel like I should just give up on this site and just re-register this site under the domain name www.pointingoutgreatstuffDavidBordwellwrites.com. As I said at the start of October, other writing and projects have been taking me away from the website. But I can still find time to point out something good that Bordwell has written. This time, it’s his fantastic post looking at the US election campaign, and the attempts by Republicans and Democrats to shape “narratives” around the candidates, from the point of view of one of our foremost theorisers of cinematic narrative. Head on over: it’s a great read.
A far less intellectually rigorous link between the election and films was offered by the inimitable Shaun Micallef on Newstopia:
Watching it all unfold over the last twelve to eighteen months, it struck me how similar it is to the film Trading Places. An elaborate social experiment with Barak Obama in the Eddie Murphy role, elevated to a position of great power and influence in a normally Anglo-Saxon world. John McCain is the Dan Aykroyd character: moneyed, born to rule, and forced to work with a woman he normally wouldn’t be seen dead with. In the end, the combined efforts of Obama / Murphy and McCain / Aykroyd wipe out the share value of all the stocks owned by the people who put them where they are.
Yes, I’m going to give some thoughts on the final Harry Potter book. It’s sort of film related; this is obviously going to be one of the major film releases of 2009 or 2010. But I’ll be the first to admit that’s just an excuse to jump on board the subject of the week.
(Major spoilers for the final Harry Potter book follow).
Most of the way through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I was thinking the suits at Warner Bros must be cursing: the first three quarters of the book isn’t terribly suited to film, despite the frequent magical / action interludes. The fact that the book eschews the Hogwarts locale for most of its length robs the film of the setting that has united the series thus far, and the long months of travelling that the kids do is going to mean a lot of passage-of-time montages that are going to be tough to keep interesting.
Yes, it’s true – it is ten years to the day since I uploaded the first version of this page [ie my old website, Cinephobia]. So if you can allow me just a small moment to reflect…
When I first started this site it was really just an exercise in designing a web page: I was trying out this whole new-fangled internet thing and the only content I had to hand was stuff I’d written about film in my spare time. And it’s continued in that lackadaisical fashion since. Particularly in early years there were some enormous gaps between updates (very close to two years in one instance), and there were many times I nearly declared the page retired and took it down. But every time I was about to do so I’d think that no, I did actually enjoy maintaining it , and vow to write more often.