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.

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, most of which are not recongized by modern religion. For example, the first five bible books, or Torah have four or five sources. These sources are often called J, E, P and D. There may be a fifth source as well. There is also evidence of significant redaction from any number of additional sources. I’m not going into detail on this. It’s just important to know this because the Torah is presented as though is it one continuous and harmonious inspired work detailing the history of the world and the Israelite peoples. It turns out that it is made up of several competing set documents that were meshed together long after the original texts were written. When one starts to identify the sources of each section of the Torah, one finds just how poorly the sources have been combined. Very often, there are direct contradictions between sections of the various sources, even within the same story.
Personally, I believe the four sources themselves have many other sources from which they were derived. The sense I get is that each tribe in the Israel nation had its own set of stories to give itself legitimacy, serving as metaphors for their place in the region. In fact, I believe they were intentional written as metaphors, and never were meant to be taken literally. When all of Israel was finally conquered by an outside power, there appeared to be an effort to assembly a unified history of the Hebrew peoples, maybe to find hope or meaning in their new role as a conquered people. Since most of their other tribes of Israel had already vanished by this time, this assemblage (which became the Torah) mostly reflects stories of the last surviving tribes and priestly establishments.
Given this view, it is possible that Israel was never one nation. It appears that it was an alliance of different nations that changed through time. Fact is the bible has several different lists of the tribes of Israel. These lists vary substantially. It wasn’t until King David established his empire that all these various nations become one country. At that time, the fluid alliance formalized under one central power. If I remember correctly, the list of tribes doesn’t change after this period.
The further implication is that the peoples that made up the Israel alliance where originally polytheistic, with each tribe choosing which gods to represent them. The struggle between Baalist and Yahwehist survives in the bible because Yahwehist (the winners) got to write the final versions of that part of Israel’s history. They used the struggle and defeat of the Baalist to justify their position. However, Yahweh himself is a composite of 3 other gods, prolly combined to unify the religion, link up the various tribal stories and expand the priestly orders. Some early images of Yahweh (before he was declared an invisible god) show him as a lion with legs as serpent bodies. Hmm, there is an underlining serpent story to the earliest parts of the Torah. God used serpents to punish his people. Then Moses made a statue of a serpent for people to seek salvation from the serpents. It’s possible that story was created in order to explain away evidence of early serpent worship by Israelite ancestors. What other gods disappeared from Israelite history at the hands of the victorious Yahwehist?
So, both gods and peoples vanish from Israelite history. The victors wrote stories justifying their conquests. Later generations took these stories as fact, combining them into the Torah. They also informally attributed the Torah to Moses. The informal credit to Moses as the writer later became fact by tradition, and the Torah become undeniable truth. And there stands the foundation of three great religions.
Reference: 101 Myths of the Bible

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.