Palfrey's life

For those who aren't watching warrenelliscom and/or those who haven't had their daily portion of weird shit yet, go and watch the trailer for Drawing Restraint 9. The film's own description of itself:

The core idea of Drawing Restraint 9 is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid Vaseline, called “The Field”, which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film.

Provided I can hold down my replusion on very art-school "let's disappear up our own backsides"-esque things, I may well have to see this one...

Or First in a series of many, with your help

I'm in a high-density media state right now. My weekdays are spent rebuilding T-MAC for the 3rd time (in my 3rd year of the PhD oddly enough, having started it in the first year), and my evenings are spent watching films and TV episodes, watching all the things I felt I should have watched before.

Tonight's film was Primer. It's odd, it's quirky, the actors are wooden, and it had a budget of ~$7,000. For a movie about time travel, and how fucking with causality would break anyone, this might not seem like a good setup. But, it's perfect for that. Especially for anyone who is or has spent significant amounts of time around engineers, this movie has that je n'est c'est quoi that every sci-fi movie needs - the feeling that this could be how it happens. There's no flashy hollywood VR interfaces, there's no dry ice fumes coming off the equipment, there's no legions of flashing pointless LEDs. There's a bunch of guys in a garage, and one day one of them effectively goes "that's odd...". Hell, even the thing they eventually use looks like a proper prototype, not one of those Hollywood devices that look like fusion tokamaks. I'm reasonably sure that the explanation of the science is mostly a load of BS, but for an explanation of something we can't do right now, it's pretty damn good. And that's why it won the Grand Jury prize at the 2004 Sundance festival. Ok, it's seriously confusing, I'm going to have to watch it again to fully understand, and if you didn't like Pi I'd avoid this, but it's well worth it.

So, that was tonight (along with the latest episode of House). Tommorow will probably be a delightful looking little B-movie called Ice Pirates, and possibly some more of the second series of GitS:SAC, but suggestions for things I should watch are welcomed.