DVD special features

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These things irritate me. Why? Because they're all the same. They were fun to begin with. "Oooh! It shows how they made the boat sink!", "Oooh! An interview with the director!". But that's exactly what you get on every single DVD. I just watched The Emperor's New Groove. The movie's great. Possibly Disney's best. But the special features on the bonus DVD...stink. Sure, I'd love to see how they made the movie, and look at a bunch of preproduction designs and whatnot. It's fascinating stuff. But I don't want to see it narrated by two fecal goitres dressed in costumes rejected by The Wiggles claiming by means of subtitled nametags to be producers or directors or somesuch of the film itself. Sweet Jesus, these guys look like they'd have a hard time negotiating traffic on a one-way backstreet.

What further annoys me, particularly with the more average DVD (i.e. the ones without a bonus disc or whatever), is that the special features usually amount to being nothing more than clips from the movie interspersed with random interview dialog with the actors, telling you things you already knew. Example? Mel Gibson's Payback. Right. You've just watched the film. Unless your eyeballs are in backwards, you know fairly well by the end of it that Mr. Gibson's character is a bit of a moral enigma. He makes his own rules, and generally obeys them. He has a goal and intends to pursue it. So what do you get on the "special" features? Random out-of-time clips of Mel leaping about like a gibbon on speed with the voice-over from the interview, "My character makes his own rules, and generally obeys them. He has a goal and intends to pursue it..", et al. Give me a break.

And who ever watches the theatrical trailers? HM. THERE'S THE ENTIRE MOVIE SITTING THERE. I COULD WATCH THAT, OR I COULD WATCH THE TRAILER INSTEAD. HMMMM.

Conclusion? "Special" features are for "special" people.

Technology, communication, independence.

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I yearn for the days when you could go for an evening walk without a phone in your pocket so that God only knows who can call you to tell you something that probably has no real bearing on your life. I'm sick of seeing people in supermarkets actually call home to ask if there's any Uncle Toby's Oats in the cupboard before buying a box. Sweet Jesus, there's a thing called a shopping list. I'm sick of being sat on trains with a horde of school children, all pointlessly SMS-ing each other and calling each other from feet away. I was on a train once, and bore witness to a foursome of teenage girls -marrying- their mobile phones to each other..replete with one phone regaling the other trio with a digitised desecration of the Wedding March, followed by the four phones - including the self-proclaimed minister phone - "getting it on" by means of the vibrate function. I'm not against technological dependence. I'm against communication dependence. The constant need to be in contact with people, oft cases people you don't really know to begin with. After all, that's what internet addiction really is, in most cases. I'm not addicted to surfing the 'net and staring at site after site of potentially entertaining crap (although I concede that a lot of people probably are, and I'm not talking about pr0n...much), I'm addicted to conversing with the people I've come to know through it.

Mobile telephones are for ringing up on, usually in emergencies or in cases of extreme importance. SMS is teh sux0rs and should never be used unless under duress of castration, and if you can't deal with being away from the ability to communicate with people, get a life.

I love both the irony and honesty in that last sentence.

Back in the '90s: Kaleidoscope Schemes

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This article is hideously backdated to reflect the time that it's content, the gallery below, was created. Sorry for the confusion. If you're curious, I'm writing this on June 9, 2013. This is about the oldest part of me that lives on the internet. Back in the late '90s, there was an interface enhancement for Macintosh computers called Kaleidoscope. It was essentially a version of the "themes" concept that Apple kind of introduced into their operating systems, but really didn't. You could download any number of new interface themes (or "schemes", as the creators called them) for your operating system. Some of them were pretty cool. I made a few of them. In hindsight, they don't seem to have strayed too far from the general appearance of the Mac OS (version 9, at the time). They looked like this:

All of these are still, inexplicably, available at the Kaleidoscope Scheme Archive. You can access my stuff directly here, though. If you're really excited by the potential of this awesome piece of 1990's tech, be sure to check out the "scheme spotlight" area, wherein the best of the best are framed and hung on the metaphorical wall.