Mark L. Van Name's Blog, page 184

DVD and Blu-ray vendors are trying to make me a video pirate

I have never pirated a single piece of digital content.  I know that's probably hard to believe, but it's true--though I have to admit to having watched a few pieces of pirated content that friends downloaded (and then deleted).  I don't avoid pirating out of fear; I actually like owning copies of my digital content.  I buy CDs and DVDs and Blu-Ray discs in vast quantities (really; I own over six thousand music discs and about the same number of film discs).  I also like paying money to content creators.  I do, after all, create content in book (and ebook) form, and I greatly appreciate it when others pay me for that content.

So why are DVD and Blu-Ray vendors working so hard to make me a pirate?

When you pirate a movie or TV show, the process is simple:  you download it, and then you watch it.  That's it.

When I plunk down my hard cash for a DVD or Blu-ray disc, I expect to do roughly the same thing: Put it in the player, pick the "Play" option from the menu, and watch the movie or TV show.  I don't mind the disc's menu, because I like the extras that come on the discs and the ability to make my choice of their audio and subtitle options.  This simple process is what, in the very early days of DVDs, actually happened.

Today, though, vendors have engineered these discs to piss me off.  I put the disc in the player and wait while the device and the content work out with each other whatever copy protection and special software hoo-ha the vendor has put on the disc.  Often, the wait is long enough that I could more quickly have downloaded the content.

When the disc finally starts to play, however, the truly annoying shit begins.  Disclaimers appear.  Trailers start.  Sometimes, even commercials assault me.  I can't easily skip this crap; no, if I press the "Menu" button on my remote-control device, the disc tells me that this function is not supported.  (I fucking hate that passive-voice construction.  It's not, you assholes, that the function is not supported by the hardware; it's that you chose to turn it off.)  So, one by one I have to fast-forward through the trailers.

Finally, the menu appears.  More and more, though, the menu is not simple.  No, it's some designers idea of how to turn something clean and functional into something so pretty and unnecessarily complicated that you have to figure out how each one works.  That process doesn't take long--there's only so much they can do to the menus--but it does waste time, particularly on collections of TV shows.

Once I find the "Play" option, I expect to finally watch the movie, but on quite a few discs I now have to read warnings that the FBI, Interpol, the CIA, and two thugs named Mick and Larry are going to come bust my kneecaps, throw me into jail, confiscate all my possessions, sell my children into slavery, and pimp my dog if I pirate anything--even though I'm watching on a disc I purchased!

Again, contrast this with the simplicity of the pirating process, and you can easily conclude that the DVD and Blu-ray vendors must want me to stop buying their products and instead pirate the videos.

I really hate this.

These companies should wake up to a basic human truth: if you want to encourage people to do something, make the process simple and reward them for doing it.

Until they do, I'm going to keep cursing my discs and fighting the temptation to pirate content.  I wish they'd help me in that fight.

The Hobbit

Second alphabetically in the big four films I saw over the holidays is Peter Jackson's sprawling rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien's relatively small novel, The Hobbit.  As Jackson has publicly said, this first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is the beginning of a trilogy, each member of which will run nearly three hours.  To provide the material for so many hours of film, Jackson is weaving in bits from other Tolkien material. 

This first installment clocked in at 169 minutes, just 11 minutes short of three hours.  I can honestly say that I was never bored and always entertained.  At the same time, long scene after long scene after long scene felt too long, as if Jackson was so enthralled by his material that he lost sight of any notion of telling his story in the most compelling manner and instead just indulged himself.  By making a dozen or more two- to three-minute cuts all through the movie, he could have made a much more effective story--and none of us would have felt the lack of the cut bits. 

Such plot as Jackson gives us is more than a bit weak. After taking entirely too long to get our intrepid band on the road, they then follow a winding path that seems to exist entirely at Gandalf's whim.  By the end of the film, when giant birds literally fly in out of the blue and save our gang, it's hard not to feel that Gandalf could have just called in the birds at the beginning, put the team on them, and in a few hours had our boys right where they were when the movie ended. 

Having said all that, I have to also say that I enjoyed the movie, had a good time in the theater, will go see the next one, and recommend it to fantasy fans.  It was fun, though it never achieved the sense of soaring greatness that Jackson so clearly wanted. 

As a side note, I should address the much-discussed issue of the 48 frames-per-second technology Jackson used to make The Hobbit, but I can't. The only way to catch a 48-fps version in my area was to watch it in 3D, and none of us wanted to suffer through nearly three hours of wearing 3D glasses. 

Want to see No Going Back win a Hugo?You can make that happen.

Yes, it's that time of year again, the week in which many SF writers, including yours truly, take to the InterWebs to push their works as award contenders.  I've joined the crowd for the last few years for a lot of reasons, chief among them the grief I took from friends when I didn't do this embarrassing bit of self-promotion.

Nominating a book (or any other work) for a Hugo is easy:  go to the WorldCon's Hugo nomination page, read the instructions there, and fill in either the paper or the online ballot.

Well, it's not that simple:  to do those things, you have to be at least a supporting member either of the current WorldCon, LoneStarCon 3, last year's WorldCon, or next year's WorldCon.  These memberships aren't cheap; a supporting one is sixty bucks, and an active membership, which you need to attend the con, will now set you back two hundred smackers.

For that sixty bucks, though, you get the progress reports and the right to nominate works for a Hugo for two years.

My only eligible work this year is my novel, No Going Back.  I think it's my best book yet, and I'd love to see it win, but I think it has far less chance of even being nominated than Billy Mack's "Christmas Is All Around Us" crass song did of being the bestseller of the Christmas season in the movie Love Actually.  The difference is that the song won in the movie, while I've never had a work on the Hugo ballot.

To place a book on the Hugo ballot requires a surprisingly small number of nominations:  most years, sixty or so will do the trick, and I believe a hundred would do it in any year. 

So, if a hundred or so of you would like to see No Going Back gracing this year's Hugo ballot, please get busy and nominate it.  I'd certainly be grateful. 

Tomorrow, I'll return to my regularly scheduled programming--at which I'll be less embarrassed than I am now. 

Sometimes a book's title is all you need

to convince you that you absolutely have to check out that book.  This is one of those titles:

How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Yes, with those 15 words author Hiroyuki Nishigaki has my attention and my interest. 

The best part is that I don't care if it's serious (and thus unintentionally funny) or intentionally funny; I'll be happy either way. 

Did I order it?

What do you think?

Django Unchained

Over the past few weeks, I caught several of the hot movies of the season but didn't get around to reviewing them.  In the course of the next week or so, I aim to catch up.

Simply because it is alphabetically first, I'm starting with Quentin Tarantino's slavery-focused western, Django Unchained.

The first roughly sixty percent of this 165-minute-long film is an odd sort of buddy tale, the story of dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz and former-slave-turned-bounty-hunter Django Freeman.  Though plenty violent, this story adds to Tarantino's usual staples of snappy dialog and strong hits of violence a touching human story that made me think Tarantino had developed new depth.  Jamie Foxx turns in an excellent performance, but the real star of this part of the movie is Christoph Waltz, who is completely engrossing and who owns the screen whenever he's on it.

Once the duo set out to rescue Django's slave wife, Broomhilda, from the evil plantation and slave owner Calvin Candie, Leonardo DiCaprio in a full-on scenery chewing mode, the movie changes to a much slower pace and a much darker tone.  It confronts the horror of slavery more directly, which is a good thing, but it also ultimately surrenders much of its seriousness to Tarantino's obsession with bloody violence.  Now, I'm all for a good bloody violent movie, but here the violence often feels over the top for no good reason and to no real effect.  Tarantino's own death in the film--he plays a mining company employee taking several slaves to work in a mine where they will most certainly die--is a perfect example of his inability to resist piling on silly violence: he dies in a spectacular explosion from being shot in a saddlebag of dynamite he was holding. 

That said, I ultimately enjoyed the movie, and I believe it's worth paying to see in a theater. I just wish the second chunk could have been as good as the first. 

Hello, 2013

I started you by sleeping very late on a cold, gray, rainy day that made sleeping late the very best choice.  I hope to be more energetic, though, in (most of) your remaining days. 

A lot of folks have asked about my resolutions for you.  I almost never talk about that subject, partly because I rarely make new year resolutions and partly because talking about such goals feels like it weakens them.

This year, though, I do have one overarching goal that I hope to achieve:  I want to learn how to be the person I want to be without paying such a high price in health.

That will be a big challenge indeed, one that seems large enough to fill you, my brand new year.

Goodbye, 2012

To say this past year has been mixed is to commit grievous understatement.  Towering over it all is the death of my mother on February 11.  Tonight is the last of the big holidays for me to celebrate without her, without our annual call and chitchat about nothing whatsoever.

Many grand things happened, of course, including the publication of my fifth--and best, so far--novel, No Going Back.  As if to keep my ego in check, the world largely ignored the book, though I shouldn't complain in that it sold enough to keep me a hardback author (I think and hope). 

I could go on and on with the year's ups and downs, but I haven't the heart right now.  Instead, I'll go spend time with family and a few friends, think of Mom often, and resolve at midnight to do better next year on so many fronts. 

Support Jain's art!

Long-time readers may recall that I am a huge fan of the work of local artist (and friend) Jain Faries. Jain is best known and makes her living from her work in fabric, which you can see here and which though I appreciate it is not the sort of thing I seek. The art she creates that I love is her weirder stuff, some of which you can see on her personal site and at the occasional convention.   She gave me one of her "balls onna stick," and I adore it; for more on them, read
Lately, though, Jain has expanded into small, hand-built libraries, one of which she made for me and gave me as a Christmas gift.  Here it is standing up; sorry for the crappy photography and the glare off the protective plastic sheet, which I left in it.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.
For a sense of the size of this wonderful creation, here's a (less glare-covered) picture next to a Mac Magic Mouse.


Every compartment in the library is a little box that you can remove.  On the back of each box is a burlesque image.  Jain made every single wee volume, each of which features different texts or images and a variety of binding styles.  Yes, that's a skull in the lower center, and an acorn above it. 

Why? 

What does it all mean? 

What I love about this piece of art is that I suspect no one, including Jain, can definitively answer those questions.  Each viewer mixes her or his perceptions with what Jain builds to create her or his own meanings. 

Jain's weirder art generally does not sell as well as her more conventional stuff.  That's a damn shame.  I think this little library and others like it should be going for many hundreds of dollars in galleries and at conventions. 

If you like what you see, contact Jain, bring real money, at least a couple hundred bucks, and commission her to build something for you--but leave the commission just that vague.  You'll be glad you did.

This is not, by the way, a paid advertisement.  I even violated my own rules for the blog and wrote this without first consulting Jain.  Jain's first knowledge of this blog entry will come when she stumbles upon it.  I simply feel strongly enough about the quality of her work that I wanted to pimp it.  If she's a bit embarrassed by this post, she'll just have to get over it. 

Imagine the hours of enjoyment you could have exploring your own little library. 

Now, make that dream a reality. 

Two upcoming movies I really want to see

I caught these trailers at recent films, and now I'm hooked and ready to see them.

First, this offering from Guillermo del Toro. 



How can you not want to see giant, remote-controlled robots fighting giant sea monsters?

Second, on a completely different note, we have this crime comedy.



Just the scene of the Rock (sorry, Dwayne Johnson) encouraging Marky Mark (sorry, Mark Wahlberg) to get his pump is enough to get me to the theater.

Four movies I want on Blu-Ray

that are almost certainly never going to appear in this format:
Streets of Fire
LA Story
The Serial
WhiffsI'll defend the first three, though you can make strong cases against any or all of them.  I'm not sure it says anything good about me that I love the fourth, but there you go; it's a sick movie that somehow works for me.  It worked for my mom, too, for whatever that tells you.