I'm a happy camper

I got a promotion last week. Yeah me. Only draw back is that my job title now officially has the word "engineer" in it. Oh well. lol

Acting Style Star Wars Prequel Trilogy

America has been so over exposed to traditional Hollywood-style method acting and other "realistic acting" styles, we've come to consider any other form of acting as bad. Also, movies that fall outside the traditional Hollywood way of making movies tend to be either jeered or at least under appreciated. The Star Wars prequel Trilogy stands somewhere in the middle. The style of these movies today is considered very Hollywood in the action, filming techniques, etc. However, when the first Star Wars movie was released, it was anything but Hollywood. Hollywood has since adopted the original Star Wars style for its own science-fiction films. Before this point, the classic style of the old 1930's films had long vanished, and there wasn't enough interest in making sci-fi's to create a new genre in Hollywood. So, even though the original Star Wars movies were groundbreaking, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy films today are very Hollywoodish by today's standards; except for its acting style.

There are several forms of acting. Each is used to tell a story for which it is best suited. "Realistic acting" (Method Acting, and also variations of Stanislavski Acting), have dominated Hollywood since the 1950's.  In particular, Method Acting best tells strong emotional character driven stories. Unfortunately, such styles are used for almost every movie these days. These acting styles do not fit many types of stories. But, us Americans are so accustomed to them, we are adverse to any other acting styles.

There's a quote from George Lucas about the acting style of the Prequel Trilogy: "It's not deliberately camp. I made the film[s] in a 1930s style. It's based on a Saturday matinee serial from the 1930s, so the acting style is very 30s, very theatrical, very old-fashioned. Method acting came in the 1950s and is very predominant today. I prefer to use the old style. People take it different ways, depending on their sophistication."^[001]

Taken in context of filmmaking, without regard for American prejudice, the acting in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy is very good. The formal acting style (derived from theatrical or stage acting) is used very effectively. It allows the story to be told through a balance between dialog, plot, and character development, rather than being over-driven by character development (as is the case for many Hollywood movies of any genre).

I too used to have a prejudice in favor of "realistic acting". However, the Prequel Trilogy has opened my mind to other forms, not just of acting, but filmmaking in general. I now understand Non-hollywood films and can enjoy them as much as I enjoy Hollywood films. I don't believe I'm alone. I think the Prequel Trilogy is, in part, responsible for the growth of the independent film industry since the 1990's. Thank you George Lucas.

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Yesterday

I was in Fresno for my friend's graduation from Fresno State. Afterwards we had a bbq and fairly busy house party. It was a fun, long day. :) The drive was over two hours to get to Fresno. Today, I headed up to my folks place. They live about 1.5 hours from my place, so I'm still debating whether to head home tonight or tomorrow morning.

I did check out the Chocolate Festival in Oakdale today. Kinda lame. Hersey's Chocolate sponsers this thang cuz I guess they used to have a factory there or sumfin. Anyways, the festival doesn't have a whole lot to do with Chocolate, dispite its name.

::que Star Wars theme::

I got in line early for the digital showing of Revenge of the Sith at
Century 22. Big, bold and almost brilliant. I had a lot of fun at the
theater before and during the movie. I really enjoyed it. I felt the
handling of the Emperor and yoda was a little cartoonish, but the movie was
good over all. There was a lot of plot in this movie...kinda feels Lucas
should have made the prequel trilogy on the story of episode 3 alone.

___
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What a mess

The Bible has many authors, the majority of whom are completely unacknowledged by traditional theology. Modern biblical scholarship widely recognizes that the first five books, the Torah, were compiled from at least four distinct source documents known as J (Yahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomist), and P (Priestly). While the final text is presented as a singular, harmonious narrative of world history and the Israelite people, it is actually a patchwork of competing documents stitched together long after the events occurred. When you closely track these individual sources, the seams show. The text is filled with direct contradictions, frequently clashing within the exact same story.

Stories of Kingdom of Israel

Each individual tribe within the ancient Israelite alliance likely maintained its own localized oral traditions. These stories functioned as political metaphors, granting divine legitimacy to each group's territory and status. They were never originally intended to be read as literal, chronological history. The push to assemble a unified narrative came later, born of political catastrophe. When the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria, and the Southern Kingdom of Judah was subsequently exiled to Babylon, the surviving priestly elites faced an existential crisis. To survive as a conquered people, they merged their disparate traditions into a single history. Because the northern tribes had already been scattered, the final collection heavily favors the perspective of the surviving southern kingdom and its priestly hierarchy.

This composition implies that the grand "United Monarchy" of biblical lore is fundamentally a myth. Modern archaeology indicates that Israel was never a monolithic empire from its inception, but rather a fluid confederation of distinct clans. The historical David was not the ruler of a sweeping superpower; physical evidence suggests he was a regional chieftain ruling a modest, tribal hill-country polity in the south. The Bible itself betrays this fragmented reality by preserving several radically different lists of the tribes across various books. The concept of a vast, centralized nation spanning both the north and the south was an anachronistic fiction, invented centuries later by Judean scribes to give their local tribal lineage a glorious, unifying backstory.  

Reality of Kingdom of Israel

The further, more radical implication is that the early Israelite clans were originally polytheistic. Each tribe aligned with its own protective deities, and a fierce theological civil war ensued. The bitter struggle between the worshipers of Baal and Yahweh survives in the text simply because the Yahwists won the conflict and wrote the history. They framed the defeat of Baal as divine judgment to legitimize their own monopoly on power. Yahweh himself appears to be a composite deity, absorbing the attributes of other regional gods to unify the tribes and expand the authority of the central priesthood.

Traces of this suppressed polytheism still break through the surface of the text. Consider the bizarre narrative of the Nehushtan: Moses crafts a bronze serpent on a pole to heal the people, a relic that the biblical text admits Israelites worshiped for centuries until King Hezekiah destroyed it during a monotheistic purge. This story was almost certainly an editorial attempt to rewrite history, retroactively explaining away evidence of ancestral serpent worship.

Ultimately, both gods and alternative histories vanished at the hands of the victorious scribes. Later generations mistook these highly political, edited anthologies for literal fact, eventually attributing the entire work to Moses. Over centuries of tradition, political propaganda solidified into undeniable divine truth, forming the fragile foundation upon which three major world religions stand today.

References: 101 Myths of the Bible (Book); Kingdom of Israel (Wikipedia); The Primacy of Genesis: Part 10 (Article)

Fighting the Future, One Square Root at a time

Find the square root for Y
Stage One:
1. Determine the largest squared whole number less than Y.
2. Use the square root of the largest squared whole number to be the first part of the answer. Place this number to the left of the decimal place within the answer.
3. Find the difference of Y and the squared whole number.

Stage Two:
1. Multiple the difference by 100, designated as A.
2. Multiple the answer so far by 2 (without the decimal point), designated as B.
3. Multiple B by 10.
4. Give C one of the following values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9
5. Find D where (B+C)*C equals the greatest value less than A.
6. C becomes the next digit right of the decimal in the answer.
7. Find the difference between of A and D.
8. Repeat Stage Two until the answer reaches the desired number of digits after the decimal.

Example:

PDF File: Example to find the square root of 3

(Sorry, I had to make it a PDF file because html isn't good at showing math equations and I didn't want to scan in my chicken scratch writing. Free Acrobat Reader is a must, but if you don't already have it, go here to get it: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)

Now, is anyone ever going to use this? Hey, if anyone has seen this method in print, please let me know.