Avatar was a disappointment

I did not like Avatar. This is hardly surprising; I do not like most movies. Still, I watch in horror as Avatar starts gaining some serious Oscars momentum, and I feel like I need to vent a bit. I sat down to watch I thought would be a fairly formulaic action movie that is at least expertly and entertainingly executed. But instead, I sat through a series of thwarted expectations.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Here, for example, are some basic expectations for a movie in this genre:

• Bonding with nature -- Usually in these movies, the hero goes through some profound experience in which he gains appreciation for nature. But all Jake did was learn how to run around in the jungle and, indeed, overcome nature by learning how to ride and control two creatures. These are feats that could be accomplished by anyone with good hand-eye coordination, but don't really require much wisdom beyond that. Just to move the plot along though, Jake randomly (and conveniently) confessed in his video blog that he has learned to respect the planet after three months. I didn't know that; good thing he told me.
• Clever underdog strategy -- Typically, in the pivotal final battle, the underdogs are out-gunned, but they come up with some clever strategy to overcome their disadvantages. As Jake said, they have the home field advantage! And apparently, the best plan they could come up with was "CHARGE!!!" And so they sent the bird warriors to attack the airships, and the riders to attack the foot soldiers, head-on, with zero strategy. In the middle of the battle, the natives retreated; Norm: "We're being gunned down!" No shit. Seriously. Even the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi took the time to make some traps!
• Some cool thing at the end -- The most disappointing thing about the final battle is that it introduced absolutely nothing we hadn't seen before. No new creatures. No new weapons. When Jake gathered all the clans on the planet together, none of the clans contributed anything that was new (why bother even telling us about this?). When Eywa decided to heed Jake's call for help, she sent in the exact four creatures that we'd seen before -- more birds, more rhinos, more hounds, and that big black thing. Pandora feels unsatisfyingly tiny -- like I'd already seen everything it has to offer in the first half of the film. There's nothing here approaching the awe of, say, the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke. Avatar blew its load early, and then just kept going.

These are just some of the most basic genre pleasures that I expected to enjoy. I'm not saying that Cameron should stick more closely to formulaic elements; but in their place, he has substituted nothing. It's a movie that follows the formula, but takes away the rewards.

I don't even want to go into the smaller faults of the film -- the quickly abandoned conflict between Jake's loyalty to the military and the natives, the extremely uninspired design of the mechs and airships that are straight out of any other sci-fi movie, the always-annoying way in which Jake's betrayal was needlessly revealed, the mildly insulting way in which Jake waltzed in and became a better native than other natives (though still way less insulting than Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai), the lazy use of narration that tells but does not show, and the overall lack of subtlety in everything.

But now I sound like I'm nitpicking. The movie is beautiful to look at, and the CGI is very impressive. But it never awes, it never inspires, and ultimately, it's just not very satisfying.

Conan vs Colbert vs Stewart on Huckabee

The writers' strike has produced some amazing time-wasters in light-night television. Among the best -- the multi-episode, multi-show "tiff" between Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart on who made Huckabee. Here's the series of videos for the whole thing:

Stephen Colbert, 1/16:


Conan, 1/17:



Colbert, 1/29:


Conan, 2/1:


Stewart, 2/4:



Colbert, 2/4:



Conan, 2/4


Stewart, 2/5:

Google Maps for iPod Touch!

When I got Mel an iPod Touch for her birthday, I knew that the awesome Google Maps app for the iPhone wouldn't be on there. But I didn't know how poorly the Google Maps website would work on the iPod Touch -- dragging the map doesn't work, and all the navigation controls were too small and hard to hit with my finger. It also didn't redirect me to a more appropriate mobile version, and after hunting around for the super-stripped down version, I found it was, err, not "cool" enough for the friggin' iPod Touch! Google Maps Mobile also unfortunately doesn't work on the iPod (no Java :'( ). So I set about writing my own Google Maps interface for iPod Touch with the Google Maps API and the Google AJAX Search API.

I really wanted to be able to drag the map around on the iPod Touch; otherwise, it seems like such a waste of the touch screen! Unfortunately, as I understood it, the webpage doesn't get the normal drag events at all. After hunting around for a while, I found Mihai's attempt at writing a scrolling game for the iPhone and learned that though you don't get the single-finger drag events, you do get two-finger drag gestures, intended to scroll scrollable divs within a page, as scroll events. I placed the Google Maps container inside a scrolling div half its size, so you can "kind of" drag the map around by actually scrolling the containing div. When you scroll to the edge of the div, it resets the scroll position and recenters the map (almost seamless with a fast wifi connection). That works pretty well. (I've also tried translating all scroll events to map.panTo, but it was way too jerky on the iPod to be useful)

I store recent geocodable addresses in a cookie. When you want to go somewhere, you can either type it out or pick it from a drop-down box -- the iPod Touch Safari browser has a pretty nice interface for picking an item from a <select>.

Anyways, here it is! Check it out at www.grapier.com/maps.html. Here's how to use it:

• Drag the map around using two fingers
• Zoom in and out using the buttons on the upper left
• Switch map type, or toggle traffic overlay using the menu on the upper right
• Go somewhere, get driving directions, or search for businesses using the menu on the lower left
• Paginate through local search or driving direction results using the left and right arrows on the bottom right. Hit the "X" button to get out of the search.
• Set a business result as current location by using the pin button on the lower right after you've done a local search. You can then get driving directions to there as usual.
• Open a more detailed page on a business by using the pop-out button on the lowe right after you've done a local search.
• See all directions or local search results at once by scrolling down below the map after you've done a search.

Radiohead releases new album!

Titled "In Rainbows", it will be available for download on October 10th, 2007. The track listing is amazing. Radiohead play-tested many of them on the road in a global tour last year; here are their videos.

CD 1

15 Step -- extremely groovy


Bodysnatchers


Nude, aka Big Ideas (don't get any) -- an old, cult-favorite that was first played live, twice, in 1998, and then never again. One of my favorite Radiohead songs!


Weird Fishes/Arpeggi -- the first song of this album that Radiohead started playing live


All I Need


Faust Arp -- no one has any idea what this is

Reckoner


House of Cards


Jigsaw Falling Into Place, aka Open Pick


Videotape -- super beautiful


CD2 (only available in the Discbox set)

Down is the New Up


Go Slowly


Last Flowers


Up on the Ladder


Bangers and Mash -- not such a big fan of this one


4 Minute Warning -- amazing

I'm search-engine optimized!

Wow. Try a Google search for "existential blogs". Scroll down the page. ZOMG I'M THE TENTH RESULT!!1

Now, try a Google search for "funny existential blogs". Chances are, this blog will come up as either the first or second result!

Amazingly, this blog is already search-optimized for the keyword "existential"! Holy shit. Incredible, considering how commercial a keyword "existential" is. You'd think all the merchants would be jumping on that.

In fact, this awesome placement on Google is so effective that, just LAST MONTH, the phrase search for "existential blogs" got me TWO referrals from Google! It's a wonder I'm not already a millionaire off of this extremely well-run and interesting blog.

The Road to Cup-a-mochi-no

A few weekends back, a few of my Google friends held a dessert-making contest. I used to bake a little bit (way back in high school), and decided to take a shot. Armed with what little baking knowledge was left in me, and a manic devotion to all things mochi, I created the Cup-a-mochi-no. It is -- yes -- a normal cupcake wrapped around mochi wrapped around red bean paste. It is topped off with coconut frosting and another dollop of red bean paste. And it's delicious!



The idea came easily enough -- mixing mochi with other kinds of pastry has, in the past few years, been on the forefront of Chinese-American pastry in bakeries all over southern California. In certain bakeries, you can find bread with mochi and cream, red beans or taro paste in it. And some places even sell birthday cakes that have a layer of mushi mochi in the middle of soft pound cake. It was easy to imagine such a creation, but shrunk down to cupcake-scale (though it was difficult to persuade Mel that this was a good idea!)

The whole thing is pretty straightforward to make, though very time-consuming. First, you make the red bean mochis.



The easiest recipe that I found online for mochi dough -- using sweet rice flour and a microwave and taking little more than four minutes -- worked out pretty well. Instead of using 1 cup of water, I used 3/4 cup of coconut milk and 1/4 cup of water. I bought some red beans paste from 99 Ranch instead of making my own -- the dessert is already too experimental without that! I tried to fine one with as little sugar as possible, but it was still too sweet to my taste. Next time, I'll probably make the red beans paste myself to have more control over the sweetness.

Fresh out of the microwave, the dough will be very hot and very sticky. Cover your hands, a flat board and a round roller with corn starch. Take little balls of mochi dough, flatten into wraps, insert a dollop of red bean paste, and pinch the wrap together. The wrap can hold more red bean paste than you might think -- the mochi is very flexible, so just stretch it a bit when you're pinching it close.



Next, I made the cupcake. I took this reference recipe, but cut the sugar in half (out of necessity -- I was out of sugar at that point!). I also substituted coconut milk for milk (probably not all that wise, but it turned out okay). Lacking any electrical beaters, I had to cream the butter by hand, which was hard work.


I put a spoonful of cupcake batter into the cupcake holder, plopped a piece of red bean mochi into it, and covered the mochi with more batter. Be sure not to fill it up too high, or it will overflow!



While the cupcakes are baking, I made coconut-cream frosting from this recipe. I used only 1/2 cup of powdered sugar, which was plenty. Put the frosting on the cupcakes once they're nicely baked and cooled.



Finally, decorate the cupcake with some toasted sesame seeds and almond slices, garnish with more red bean paste and some hint, and you're good to go!



We didn't win the dessert contest, but it was very yummy nonetheless :-) Here's the full slide show of pictures I took in the process. Enjoy!

FUTURAMA IS BACK

One of the most brilliant shows ever created, and then brutally canceled by FOX, may have life left in it after all!

Travel photos!

Randomly! Some travel photos of my recent travels... EXCITING!

First, a trip to Hawaii's Big Island with Mel at the end of April:



and a cool My Maps to go with it!

Next, a trip to China with my family at the end of May:



Pretty cool! But mostly, I wrote this blog post to test embedding Picasa web albums :-)

while (true) break;

This is the saddest and, therefore, the most beautiful of code fragments:

while (true) {
  break;
}

First it starts with the promise of forever, an infinite loop with no end in sight. And then, abruptly, rudely, and immediately, all hopes are dashed and the loop is no more. You are transported suddenly from nothing, to everything, and to nothing again.

Radiohead captured the same beauty eloquently in Nude:

Now that you found it, it's gone
Now that you feel it, you don't

It's beautiful not just because it's ephemeral (what isn't?). Rather, it's beautiful because it's destroyed just as elegantly -- in a single word, in a single line of code -- as it was created.

Sausalito & Muir Woods trip with Parents

We took our parents to Sausalito and Muir Woods when they came up in October. Some highlights:








OMFG THE PIRATES ARE ATTACKING0RZ!!!!11






At Muir Woods, there's this awesome plank of wood that a lot of ladybugs are inexplicably attracted to...


Yum!

Rest of the album here:

Sausalito & Muir Woods with Parents