Category: General

Back on the radio

Just a quick update to say that:

a) the website is back up. My hosting provider is not being particularly good at the moment, but I’ll assume it’s a blip in their otherwise exemplary service record… for the time being, and

b) I’m back on bFM as of tomorrow. ‘Sunday Breakfast’ may well have gone the way of the dodo, with its host now a TV man, but the successor show, ‘The Cryptid Factor,’ with Rhys Darby and David Farrier, is a perfect replacement and I’m very pleased to be doing my schtick with those two ‘crazy’ guys.

I’ll be discussing Kerry Thornley and his various conspiracy theories sometime about ten.

04/03/2010

Horror

I gave up on reading as a pleasure activity a while ago; I spend too much time working with words to truly enjoy reading them. I’m told this isn’t uncommon for PhD candidates in their endgame, and I’m eagerly looking forward ((I feel “eagerly looking forward” sounds like a cliché. Perhaps I should read some Edward Bulwer-Lytton.)) to getting back into fiction by the end of the year.

Oddly enough, although I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at screens, the PhD hasn’t robbed me of my love of cinematic trash and excellent TV. I suppose it’s the lack of subtitles…

I’ve rediscovered, over the last few weeks, my love of horror. As a movie genre, it’s inconsistent and often poorly written.

But, crucially, it keeps me entertained.

“Vamp:” Grace Jones as a vampire. It’s the Eighties writ large; all bright colours and big hair. I remember it being much more tense and well-plotted, but the gods above and below what state I was in when I first watched it.

“Pandorum:” German SF Horror, with Dennis Quaid acting his socks off on two sets whilst the rest of the cast wander about the place, passing time between the initial mystery and the unsurprising resolution.

“End of the Line:” Evil Christians start killing peole on a subway. Except maybe they have a point. Not a bad flick, if only because the plot kind of works.

“Boogeyman:” Terrible. It’s always going to be a difficult sell to have an adult character be afraid of monsters in the closet; this film doesn’t even try.

“Half Light:” Lighthouse horror needs to be its own genre. This film need not be in it. On the plus side it has Desmond from “LOST.” On the minus side it has Demi Moore.

“The Amityville Horror:” The original films were dire; the remakes stays true to them.

“The Skeleton Key:” The first question I asked, after the rather predictable resolution, was “So, why are they doing that?” It seems the evil the protagonists commit has no real purpose, other than, well, banality.

“The Colour From the Dark:” Essentially an Italian version of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” it’s a film which is far too long and needs to be completely redubbed. Half the cast are Italian and half the cast are Irish; they all play Italians in their native accents, which gets truly bizarre when the main Italian character’s missing brother comes home and he sounds like he comes from County Cork. Add to this a pointless plotline about a Jew being killed by a Nazi and you have a mess of a feature that could have been a fairly good half-hour adaptation of a classic mythos tale.

“Legion:” Poor Paul Bettany and poor Dennis Quaid. That’s all I’ve got to say.

When I look over this list, it does look as if the return from watching these films isn’t minimal but actually quite negative; I suspect it’s just one of those “You have to be there” situations; such films, in the right company or mood, can be fun. This is why MST2K was so successful and why the “24 Hour Movie Marathon works” so well.

Back to work for me. Pointless filler post complete.

04/02/2010

To do with teaching, somewhat

Morning all.

It’s almost the end of the first “half” of Semester One and rather than working flat out on my thesis I find myself working flat out turning a course designed for hundreds of students into a course that functions for six; this is very difficult to do and I wish I had been advised just how small the enrolment was going to be before taking it on.

Still, one must make do.

As some of you are doubtless aware, I record my lectures and provide the narrated slides to the students. It’s a good idea for two reasons; I have to keep on my toes and make sure I’m actually being rigorous in my pedagogy… and the students benefit because they can revisit my explanations at a latter date (as well as catch-up should they miss a class).

The long-term plan is, once the thesis is finished, I will put, online, a series of videos on Critical Thinking; a sort of online primer made up on ten minute chunks of argument detection, extraction and analysis.

Which leads me to my related point; at the moment everything I put up online for the students is H264 video with either MP3 or AAC audio. Some of you might be aware that H264 is currently not the darling of internet nerds and geeks because it has patents attached to it and someone, somewhere, has to pay a license fee for you to watch material encoded with such a codec. There is a good argument against the use of such patented video codecs; programmers in developing nations are not usually in the position to pay the MPEG-LA group the necessary monies to license H264 and there are issues even in the developed world, with Firefox, famously, refusing to pay that license (and thus needing a little ledgermain to view H264 outside of a Flash container).

Theora is the darling of people who argue this way; it appears to be patent-free and Wikipedia, for one, is pushing it hard. Theora is based on a much older encoding algorithm than H264, but it’s free and, the argument goes, we should prefer to use free software whenever possible.

It also produces much larger, uglier files than H264, and this is what concerns me. I need my recordings to be small and tight; I don’t want my students to waste their precious bandwidth downloading these files (for foreign readers: most citizens of Aotearoa/Te Wai Pounamu do not have unlimited bandwidth in re their internet access) so size matters. Visual quality; not so much; it is mostly text and I can happily reduce the framerate down to about 8 frames per second, with infrequent keyframes, to little visual detriment.

The other issue is that Theora encoding is slow; in the time it took to write this post I could have outputted my H264, remuxed the audio and had coffee; I’m only 42% through the Theora encoding at the moment, which, to use the vernacular, sucks.

[TIME PASSES. YOU MIGHT GET EATEN BY A GRUE]

The resulting file is, well, bigger and slightly blurrier than the H264 encode. 20% larger is a significant difference in size and it seems pretty consistent; I’ve tried re-encoding several other lecture recordings and the results are bigger and blurrier every time.

I’m keen to use patent-free video codecs and when I do the video primer I’ll look into this in more depth to see how things stand, but at the moment, it seems patent-laden codecs really are more user-friendly and easier to work with.

Sad but true.

03/29/2010

“The Dentith Files” – Updated

… will return on Sunday the 4th of April (back on 95bFM), at a slightly earlier time (just before 11am).

I’m expecting to get Darby-facted by Rhys, but I’ll have the ever tall David Farrier to hide behind in case I can’t cope.

Have pity on our non-existant souls.

03/22/2010

“Bad Archaeology?” More like “Good writing.”

From time to time my blog’s base system likes to tell me that people have linked to my posts. Most of the time these links are from sites that seem to specialise in Russian pornography, which indicates the fine taste of my international readers. However, on ocassion, I do get a more academic-y link, like this one from “Bad Archaeology.”

The article deals with one Badger H. Bloomfield, who I\ve had dealings with in the past, and basically says things I could be saying, only the author has a way with words and isn’t suffering the apathy I seem to currently have with the typing of characters into text boxes on computer screens. I recommend you read the post, for it is good.

03/21/2010

The Mystery of the Missing Website

I’m aware that some of my readers browse the site rather than rely on the RSS feed to find out what Messrs. Dentith and Ransome are up to. For that former group, the site being down the last few days must have been miserable, so I apologise to those three people profusely.

It was not, however, a fault on my end. My host’s network went bottom’s up and I was a casualty.

Anyway…

Normally, this being an ‘every second Sunday’ morning, I’d be entering the studios of bFM to do the “Dentith Files,” but with José gone and a new show in place lead by David Farrier, Rhys Darby (and produced by Buttons) I’m at home and not burning my fingers on the bFM coffee machine (that’s not a euphemism, by the way; José liked me to make him coffee ((And to do other things, but that’s another story for another time))).

I’m not sure what the future of ‘The Dentith Files’ will be; David has indicated he’s keen to bring me in to the new show, the “Cryptid Factor” but he, Rhys and Buttons will need, I suspect, some time to settle into their new bFM roles and work out how, if at all, to accommodate the old “Sunday Breakfast” regulars. I mean, how will people cope on a Sunday morning without a dose of James Coe’s patent-formula newsrage? Or the superbly titled “Games Burnett?”

Which, because I’m on a “break” ((And using too many quote-marks.)) leads me to ask “Has the slot run its course? Is it time to put the Dentith Files to bed?”

I’d like to think “No.” Whilst the quality of the slot was variable (sometimes, for example, José and I were more concerned about TV than we were about conspiracy theories, and sometimes we played it for laughs), it was never, I’d like to think ((It seems I’d like to think a lot of things…)), dull. Longwinded; yes. Pretentious; almost certainly. In-jokey? Perhaps overly.

But never, ever, dull.

I hope.

I have given thought to producing the “Dentith Files” as a podcast, should the slot not reappear on the Sunday schedule. I’m also vaguely interested in doing it as a vodcast, although the timing of it would be crucial. I think I could get away with fifteen minutes of “radio” but not fifteen minutes of “film,” for example. I mean, unless I have fancy graphics, exciting guests and exotic location filming (replete with car chases, explosions and beautiful companions), fifteen minutes of a vodcast will feel like a chore for the humble (and not-so-humble) viewer. Five minutes is probably optimum. Seven… even that is pushing the viewer’s patience.

Of course, podcasting and vodcasting takes time, which, strangely enough, the radio slot doesn’t. I just had to turn up with a topic prepared, answer José’s questions and then go home. There was no editing involved, no need to listen to it to make sure it sounded okay and no need to redo segments if they didn’t quite pan out. A podcast (or vodcast), not being a live recording, needs to be an altogether more polished affair, I think.

There’s also the direction it would take without José as the interlocutor. A solo effort would be… weird. Due to the often byzantine ways conspiracy theories develop, describing them really requires someone else to direct you in the explanation of them. I mean, imagine trying to explain Lyndon LaRouche’s theories? Where do you start? What part do you focus on? I don’t necessarily think that I need some kind of creative partner to make it work, but the “Dentith Files,” as a show, would need much more planning than it ever did on the radio should I go it alone.

So, I guess, it’s wait and see. I’m certainly going to do something with the “property.” Until then, I’m on a media holiday ((Although not much of one; I’ve been asked to create a portfolio of my media interactions last year in the vain hope of winning the media prize offered by the New Zealand branch of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.)). No off-kilter comments about the squid conspiracy this week, nor an references to my obsession with primes.

03/14/2010