It’s been a while since I last posted a redesign idea; I actually thought v3.6 was it, but after some discussion we decided that a slightly more conservative approach was the way to go. The image that we’d like to project is young, exciting but still very professional, and although the past 3 design ideas were certainly “exciting,” it’s the “professional” part that might have been slightly lacking. SO. Here we all are, again. Version 4.0:

(as always, please click the image to see the full-sized version)

Well, another season of Lost has come and gone, and I’d love to say that I don’t resent the show’s creators just a little bit for not telling me the truth behind that god-forsaken island, but well. Man. I love this show.

If you haven’t already seen the final two-parter, you will probably not want to read beyond this line. Otherwise, carry on; I have a few thoughts that I’ve been aching to write down.

I’ve been waiting an entire season for Desmond to come back, and I’m glad he finally did. Unfortunately, he brought a shitload of new questions along with him, but hell, I guess they have to set things up for season three, after all (four months away, btw. argh.)

Some bits that really screwed me up:

Desmond couldn’t get away from the island. A man who has considerable experience sailing wouldn’t just get lost like that. Either the island’s electro-magnet is pulling him back, or he’s lying. Interestingly, Henry Gale gives Michael the exact bearing one needs to be headed towards, in order to get away. Of course, we’ll have to wait until season 3 to see if Henry is actually on the level.

That huge-ass pile of notebooks. To me, this says a couple of things. The first being that the observation room was, in fact, also an elaborate setup, as Desmond guessed. The second was that it indicated just how long the project had been “officially” abandoned. I’ll go into more of this later, but it seems to me that if the project was still in official hands, someone would come along to clean all that crap up every now and again, even if they weren’t actually being read (the reason being that Dharma wouldn’t want some of the other participants stumbling on to the pile inadvertently).

Oh man, four toes. There’s a theory stating that with continued human evolution, we will eventually lose our fifth toes, as they are largely unnecessary. Could this statue be some kind of allusion to that idea? The Dharma Initiative has a genetic modification project, so it’s possible that one of their ideas is to streamline the anatomy somehow.

They’re not in the future. One of the prevailing theories from mid-season was that the Losties were in fact in the year 2012, as theorized here. It fit in rather nicely with the idea that the hatch was somehow preventing the end of the world, and was supported by dates scattered throughout the show. Well, since we now know that the world isn’t really ending, this theory is not quite as compelling as it used to be. Also, the fact that Locke agreed that their plane crashed on September 22nd of 2004, tends to debunk that theory considerably (it’s been 65 days since their crash, so it should currently be late November, 2004 on the show).

So here’s the New Theory, based on evidence found by fans of the show and its alternate-reality game.

The Hanso Foundation and Widmore Labs (the company Desmond’s girlfriend’s father owns), as well as a Korean company called Paik Heavy Industries, are responsible for a whole slew of world-changing experiments, initiated to harden humanity against a potential asteroid collision in 2880. Our island is one of four test sites, the other three being in Iceland, Zanzibar and Korea.

The problems start when the US government gets involved and hurries R&D along at a reckless pace. Accidents happen, and one of the key experiments, the electromagnetic research initiative, goes awry. In order to keep the machine from overloading, someone must manually stifle it every 108 minutes. Why Hanso goes to such elaborate lengths to conceal this knowledge is beyond me, but so far, all this sounds pretty plausible.

The “Others” are gathering people to become part of the various experiments and tests; they pick children and a few adults they feel are “good” specimens. In the last 5 minutes of episode 24, Henry Gale remarks that Walt was “more than they bargained for,” so it seems Walt’s pseudo-psychic abilities have nothing to do with the island.

Here’s the big question, the answer to which I suspect will have a huge impact on the third season: why were the Others not concerned about the big “boom”? Henry Gale just resumed his conversation with Michael like nothing happened. Does that mean that it’s happened lots of times? (It couldn’t because the Swan station apparently gets trashed when you don’t press the button.) Does that mean the hatch doesn’t really mean anything? Do we even know for a fact that the act of turning the key was actually responsible for the sky turning violet?

The final scene, with the snow-bound researchers, confirms Widmore’s involvement with Hanso, as well as the fact that we will be seeing a whole lot more of Desmond and Penny’s romance throughout the third season. It’s quite likely that either Penny or her father were aware of Desmond joining their open ocean race, and were responsible for bringing Desmond to the island. Of course, what all that means is unknowable at this point.

God, so many secrets. Can’t wait for the third season.

So I’ve been trying to learn how to cook as part of the Big Move, and I find that I’m constantly being reminded of just how intricate a system the culinary arts are. Case in point:

I’ve been struggling with making pancakes on my little electric range for the past week, with mixed results. So far, they’ve all tasted decent, but I can not seem to get the color right, no matter how hard I try. I am probably one of the few people outside of a professional chef that would care this much about what color my pancakes are, but there you go.

Recently, as if by some cosmic coincidence, I came upon this blog entry by Sacha Chua, which I will summarily copy and paste here so we’re all on the same page:

use a teflon pan. heat pan. put very very little oil on the pan. pour batter. turn down heat so pancake (first bottomside) will brown evenly. When pancake (topside) starts to bubble, watch and flip pancake as soon as bubbles have burst and batter looks dry. pancake is cooked when it rises (thickens) You can check if the second face is done. If not, you may turn the heat up just a little bit. Remove pancake from pan. Turn up heat again for the next pancake. Use the thickest, flattest pan that you have so your pancakes will brown evenly.

So I tried it this morning, placing the power dial at about half and waiting with the proverbial bated breath at the kitchen counter. After nearly ten minutes the top of the pancake had still not bubbled (because I think half-power on an electric is only good for keeping your drink warm or something), so I turned up the heat a little more. When it finally started showing signs of bubbles (like, 3), I turned it over (because by then I had been standing there for almost 15 minutes) and discovered the pastiest looking pancake I have yet created. At this point, I left the kitchen and checked email for a few minutes. When I came back I checked the underside and found another pasty-looking pancake, albeit less pasty than the side currently on top. SO I tried turning it over one more time. Big, big mistake. It was newbie night at Olympic Heights, what can I say.

The pancake promptly collapsed into three separate pieces as soon as I tried to lift it (with a turner, not a fork, mind you).

At this point, I had pretty much chalked this particular attempt as a failure, so I just pulled the whole thing out, poured maple syrup on it, plopped a generous helping of fruit salad on the side, and hey presto! A really sad pancake breakfast.

Oh well.

I’m not completely certain what went wrong, but I do have some ideas: 1) I didn’t heat the pan long enough, 2) I made my batter too thick to properly use this trick, or 3) pancakes just hate me. Whatever. There’s no reason to be depressed for too long anyway. I’ve already resigned myself to having pancakes for breakfast every single day until I figure out how to do this properly, so there’s always tomorrow.

X3 isn’t showing until the 26th in the US, so this may spoil the movie for a handful of my non-local readers. (On the other hand … so what?)

* This review originally posted on FilmCrowd.com. Check the X3 page here.

Mildly entertaining, but certainly not the way I was hoping they would end the franchise (considering the title of this movie, an X-men IV seems a bit self-indulgent … although a Wolverine the Movie seems to already be in the works).

Good stuff about this movie:

1. Bobby Drake finally ices up. Wow, it took 3 movies for him to figure out how to do that. Still no ice-slides though.
2. Madrox the multiple man actually has a scene! They neglected to show the little gestures he has to make in order to create his multiples, so that kinda sucked.
3. Professor X goes splat. Best scene in the entire trilogy, imho.

And the Bad Stuff:

1. What exactly was the point of the whole Iceman/Rogue/Shadowcat love triangle? Apart from the team being one-person short during the big finale, I mean. What a total waste of screen time that was.
2. And what was the point of bringing an entire army of low-level — and weirdly enough, asian, black or latino — mutants to storm the Worthington facility? Magneto went to all the trouble of convincing Jean to come along and yet he never once thought to just ask her to pull Leech out of there. For that matter, he had a huge-ass suspension bridge behind him; he could have simply roped up all the soldiers and done it himself. (And, in the back of my mind, I was thinking, why didn’t he just drop an oil tanker over the whole facility and have Pyro go nuts?)
3. Do they REALLY have to have extreme-closeups of Storm’s eyes going white, every single time she controls the weather? We get it already.
4. Does it bother anyone else that Wolverine was probably responsible for more mutant deaths in one movie, than all of the evil government agencies combined?

Overall, this third (and hopefully final) installment was probably the weakest in the trilogy, and I have to say I’m fairly disappointed. And the music was terrible! Where’s Danny Elfman when you need him?

Our development team’s official website is up. It’s still pretty bare at the moment, but it’s black so that means it’s ok. I have a brief entry here talking about myself and the stuff I’ve been doing with Pandora Squared and Prometheus Fire.

Excerpt:

As the newbie on the team, I’ve had my hands full over the past few weeks playing catch up with the rest of Prometheus Fire. Example: I spent most of this afternoon fussing over a relatively simple module for one of PF’s secret projects, and was so frustrated I actually deleted all of the code at one point and had to bring everything down off of the server all over again.

Check us out here. 

Well, it’s X3 day today,folks. In what is essentially the franchise’s last attempt to shine onscreen, we’ll finally get to see if director Brett Ratner has indeed signed the death warrant for the X-movies, whether an X-tinction Agenda storyline can be told with a little Dark-Phoenix-saga on the side, and whether Kelsey Grammer really does make a good beast.

Whatever you do though, remember that there is one more scene after the credits have rolled, so stay in your seats. Happy viewing everyone!

FilmCrowd: The Da Vinci Code

michael316: "Were it not for the associated controversy and bestselling novel this would be just a boring thriller."

imafungi1: "With the storyline stripped to its bare essentials, I never realized how lame it could be. Cheesy flashbacks, bad exposition and wooden dialogue plagued this movie."

watanabe: "I’d like to point out that the producers can afford millions of dollars on the production of these film but they can’t hire a decent hairdresser for Tom Hanks? Hell."

acer3ya1: "LOUSY."

brianbehrend: "Entertaining but far less exciting/enthraling than the book but that’s always the case."

aquaticstar: "cheers to Ron Howard for a beautiful interpretation - the cinematography was in a word, BREATHTAKING. that last scene alone with Langdon kneeling at the grave of Mary Magdalene was well worth the more expensive than usual movie ticket."

hooverdst: "ultimately, you’re going to walk away feeling like you’ve seen much better examples of the genre before."

tor: "The pacing was just right: exposition, chase, exposition,chase. Some of the chases were a little silly, but never boring."

luis: "Suprisingly unexciting, considering that the book it was based on is nearly 90% cliffhanger."

If you’ve seen this movie, you can submit your own review right now at FilmCrowd.com.(If you enter a blog-url on your profile page, a link will appear at the bottom of every review you submit, so it might even generate a bit of traffic for you blog.)

I posted idea #3 internally over the weekend and got some quickfeedback from the team before going back and revising some of the colorchoices I made. (Originally, the background was near-black, which Hansand Kevin both thought was too dark.)

The quote bucket atthe top of the page is supposed to be an ajax widget which slides in anew quote every time you click it. Our philosophies are pretty muchwhat sets us apart as a company, and this is an appropriately modernway of helping users become acquainted with them.

Click on the image below to view the full-sized design study.

So it’s finally finished. In 1999, Henry Sy said that it would take 5-10 years to build this 7-billion peso monstrosity; nice to know that the construction was completed on the lower end of his guesstimate.

Interestingly, the 3rd largest mall in the world occupies a land area that is less than twice the size of SM Megamall (MoA - 19.5 hectares, Megamall - 10.5 hectares) and has a gross floor area that is only slightly larger (MoA - 381,075 sqm, Megamall - 331,679 sqm).

Design-wise, I can’t say I’m too impressed with the exterior architecture of this mall. It seems to try too hard to slough off the shoe-box look (a visual pun of the highest order) that SM has been known for all these decades, instead going for the freestyle architecture of malls like Shangri-la Plaza and Greenbelt 3. (The blue arches decorating the carpark building, in particular, seem like a child’s interpretation of GB3’s gracefully nordic frameworks.) I appreciate the attempt, but Mall of Asia’s exterior doesn’t seem to have any of the originality of the other two malls. That said, neither West Edmonton Mall or South China Mall (two other malls vying for the title of "largest mall in the world") are really much to look at either. I guess it’s just hard to come up with a very unified look when you’ve got that much land to cover.

Here’s a brief table of how Mall of Asia stacks up to the competition:

(Most of these statistics were taken from ECSU’s Shopping Malls Studies page.)

By 2010, we can expect the Mall of Asia to drop out of the global top 10 completely. As this page points out, 7 of the world’s 10 largest malls will soon all be in China. 

Originally posted at FilmCrowd.com:

Suprisingly unexciting, considering that the book it was based on isnearly 90% cliffhanger. Although it is quite faithful to the original,it has a hard time depicting the one thing that made Dan Brown’s workso compelling a read, i.e., the little historical details andconspiracy theories about the Catholic Church and the Priory of Scion.Instead, we have broad-strokes lectures from all the charactersinvolved, many of whom don’t go deep enough to be really veryconvincing.

The thing about Da Vinci Code the book is that, inall honesty, it’s terribly cliche-ridden. The one and only thing thatmade it worth talking about (and I suppose, making a movie about) isits potentially-belief-shattering subject matter. And if you take thataway, if you don’t give it as much screentime as humanly possible,well, then you’re left with a pretty predictable, average thriller. Andthat’s pretty much all this was.