Recently I’ve been watching a lot of Asian films, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint the attributes that make them so personally endearing when compared to western cinema. The results are…inconclusive.
How are they different from western pictures? I’d like to say that their smaller budgets and more local target audiences make them rely less on canned special effects and expensive actors – but there’s been more more internationalized (e.g. westernized) big-budget movies in recent years. I’d like to say that they’re willing to try newer things, but I personally can’t strike the right chord with most indie films who do try and Asian films have become formulaeic in their own right.
Maybe it’s my Asian blood? I dunno, I still don’t get a lot of the cultural references, and some of the Japanese stuff is just crazy. For every quality film that I do get a chance to see, I probably had to endure some fifteen really bad ones.
Must be the non-Matrix-bastardized kung fu.
[click]
It’s ironic that, for all the supposed technological superiority America holds over other nations, our American telecommunications industry seems to be made up of 80-year-olds who sit around muttering about the good old days of business. I usually wouldn’t care less about their archaic ways until I’m forced to switch cell phone carriers.
As it turns out, the cheapest way was through Chinese ninjitsu, otherwise known as using shady corporate policy loopholes to one’s advantage. My parents had a plan via Verizon Wireless, and one reseller had the means to sign me up for a new plan (with complimentary new phone), then switch me over to a family plan with my parents in a month. Since I don’t even use that many minutes on a given day, this made perfect sense and saves me $20-$25/month. ()
Just finished reading a book on site design – the one I exchanged DHTML and CSS Advanced for. Thankfully, this tome was much closer to what I wanted when I went out (on a whim, really) to conduct some book-learnin’.
Sites usually have two parts: the backend work (keeping, processing, and managing all that content) and the frontend design (all those pretty pictures, navigation, colors and text). Traditionally, software engineers dealt with the former and graphic designers dealt with the latter, with very little overlap in expertise.
Originally, I wanted to write a quick blurb about how the coming of the Internet doesn’t negate the importance of reference and learning textbooks. But then today, I had to promptly return a copy of DHTML and CSS Advanced as it merely told me 90% of what I learned via online tutorials and experimentation, and I realized that the subject matter isn’t that clear cut after all.
If you’ve never met a programmer, you might imagine that, being on the forefight of technology, he (forgive me, I only use “he” because it describes 90% of the programming population) would use a combination of online manuals/tutorials, search engines, and maybe a bit of knowledge sharing among peers to get his work done. All the code driving this site – from the backend database management to the interface and the glue that holds them together – I learned from a few select sites and the magic powers of Google. Creators and owners of these technologies have put up extensive manuals on their work for free, and anybody with a bit of free time and an inquisitive mind can be self-educated with much less effort than it used to take (e.g. via sneaking into lectures in universities you weren’t enrolled in).
