I finally saw Avatar, and left the theatre with lots of conflicting reactions to the movie.
cinematically gorgeous
amazing visuals
fascinating biology
but… why are the Na’vi simply caricatures of humans?
but… in a fully 3D-modeled-and-rendered world, why are the Na’vi so human?
why is Cameron so heavy handed in his Gaia-theory stuff?
this is largely just a mashup of every Cameron movie I’ve ever seen, right down to characters and gadgets.
what would this movie have been like had Cameron really let go of terrestrial biology, psychology, and sociology?
My first reaction, one that hit me strongly when the Na’vi first appear on screen, was: “A rasta jar jar binks would not seem out of place in this movie.”
I’d actually held some hope for meaningful change brought about by the discussions in Copenhagen this month. But everything I’m seeing and reading lately sounds like it’s pretty much just political greenwashing and crushed peaceful protests.
Elizabeth May has been blogging from Copenhagen (see comments by Hugo Chavez - who would have put him in the role of speaker-of-truth? - and Prime Minister Zenawi of Ethiopia - a country that has committed to carbon neutrality by 2025, not just a slight de-escalation to 2006 levels). Things don’t sound good. Non-G8 nations are super-pissed about the lack of transparency, and about the non-democratic nature of the whole process. And they have every right to be super-pissed. We all do.
I had to cut back on the scope quite a bit to keep it to a 15 minute length. This could have easily turned into an epic documentary… Lots of very difficult decisions.
Thank you SO much to everyone for the contributions.
It’s too much to describe in 140 characters. But I can’t stand the “e” in eLearning. (I can’t stand the “m” in mLearning, either.)
It’s just learning. The “e” is counter-productive. It forces people to focus on the technology. To see it as separate. As an isolated thing that must somehow be fit into the regular flow of teaching and learning.
I just heard about TEDxYYC - an independently organized TED-like event to be held right here in Calgary. This should be awesome. I can’t wait.
I have no idea how many people will be able to make it. From poking around on the internets, it sounds like it might be held in the Karo warehouse, with room for ~100 folks. Possibly on Jan. 22, 2010.
If there’s anything I can do to help get TEDxYYC off the ground, count me in.
On UCalgaryBlogs, I’d modified the adminbar to include a link to the current site’s dashboard if a person was logged in, making it easy to get to the members-only side of WordPress without having to go through My Blogs and finding the right blog, then mousing over the pop-out “Dashboard” link. Most people never found that, and it’s not very intuitive.
So, I hacked in a hard-coded link to Dashboard in bp-core-adminbar.php. This worked, but meant I had to remember to re-hack the file after running a BuddyPress update. I forgot to do that right after I ran the last upgrade, and got emails from users asking WTF?
Scott Leslieposted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.
This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.
I’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:
How do YOU connect online?
More info is available over on the project website - but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.
If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…
(sorry for the banal feed noise - I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation - and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)
