Longshot City

The technology of Avatar required a decade of incredibly hard and discerning work to perfect.  Lots of very smart people spent years asking each other the toughest questions they could and testing out their best answers.

So I’m still baffled at how an effort like Avatar, the technical achievement of which required years of aggressively smoking out and chasing down “what are we missing”’s and “how can we do better”’s, has a Swiss-cheese story that left me distracted with “wait a minute”’s and “hey what about”’s during the show itself.

The technology was tight as a goddamned drum and consumed ~1000X as many person-hours of debugging effort as the story, which blue-screens many times during the film itself.

What does that mean?

…

Yeah so anyway, here’s my list that I threw together the night I got back:

• When the good guys ran off in that helicopter, why didn’t anyone chase them?  Why didn’t they do a remote-shutdown via radio?
• When the Na’vi were fighting the humans, why not just drop rocks/logs/ropes into the helicopters’ rotors?  (It worked in Vietnam, after all.)
• Why would the Na’vi frontally attack the soldiers instead of ambushing them guerrilla-style?
• Why did Pilot Homegirl just strafe the Colonel’s ship instead of firing directly through the windows in the one advantage-of-surprise sucker-punch chance she had?
• Why not camouflage the stolen transmitter station with leaves and branches and stuff to make it less visible from the air?
• If missile tracking didn’t work in “the vortex”, then how could they drive their Avatar’s around?
• Why couldn’t they circle back to find Jake before his first night outside?  Huh?  They don’t have flashlights in the future?
• In the final battle, why not just run up and drop the fricking bomb already?  Why slow down and creep up on it and give the Na’vi a chance to attack?  Huh?
• Why not drop it from higher up where the Na’vi can’t fly?

And finally…

• Why did the humans just give up?  If Cameron were really channeling  the colonial experience, you know they’d come back with more guns and just murder everyone.

At least my last gripe has an answer: “He [Cameron] has stated that if Avatar is successful, two sequels to the film are planned.”

…Marty McFly would go back to the year 1980.

I’m old.  You’re old.  We’re old.

–Craig

Nothing earth-shattering today, but I wanted to share this:

I just got one of these $400 wireless headsets at work:

It’s the super-duper-s#$t because it has this button on it that activates a mechanical “lifter”.  The lifter is a motorized doodad that you stick onto your deck telephone that physcially picks up the handset from the telephone, thus pretending to be a person answering the phone.

That and the sound is so good that no one knows you’re using a headset.  And it works like 200 feet away.  For ten hours.

So yeah, anyway, its’ one of those things I don’t know how I lived without.  If you do a lot of telephone stuff (not with your bluetooth/cellphone anyway), then I recommend it.

(Surely we have people at the church who do nothing but talk to people on the telephone about questions, crises, etc.  I think of them first.)

Word.

Even in their workshop, and they always came out clean. How about that.

Oh I’d love to have one of those.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum to the women and men to gather wood, and divide the work, and give orders.

Instead, teach them to year for the vast and endless sea.

–Antoine De Saint-Exupery, “The Wisdom of the Sands”

A leader is best when people barely know he exists.

Not so good when people obey and acclaim him.

Worse when they despise him.

Fail to honor people and they fail to honor you.

But of a good leader who talks little,

when her work is done, his aim fulfilled,

the people will say “We did this ourselves.”

–Lao Tzu

You will NOT be disappointed:

http://www.cabel.name/2009/09/kashiwa-mystery-cafe.html

For the past couple weeks I’ve been spontaneously waking up, like at 5:30am, which is way earlier than I plan or intend.

And it’s not because I’m going to bed earlier.  Oh no.  Last night it was midnight, ferdingdangs.  I’ve got dark circles under my eyes and everything… but still not sleeping until the alarm goes off.

(Alcohol has not been involved, I’m happy to report.)

Have you ever gone through something like this?  What turned out to be the cause?  What was it about?