Just got through watching the director's commentary on Requiem for a Dream. A really interesting commentary track, during which Darren Aronofsky points out many of the subliminal (and not so subliminal) filming techniques employed to make the film into the total mind warp experience that it is. (He even points out several scenes where budgetary requirements forced the crew to resort to the technique of "guerilla" film making. I'm sure at least one reader in this audience would know something about that. ;) It is truly a work of masterful craftmanship though.

Rarely do I go out and purchase a film without having seen any of it, not even trailers. This one was an exception. Given the (almost) unanimous praise from others, coupled with the knowledge that one of the cast has a leading role in another of my favorite films, I decided to skip the rental phase. (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which cast member that is. Of course, this assumes that readers -- or anybody -- ever feel like exercising at all in this day and age. A dubious assumption I know.) So, on my way home from work, I managed to get my hands on the last copy Best Buy had for sale.

Alright, I had a nice several paragraph rambling partially typed -- over the course of the past two+ hours. In it, I said what amounted to very little. I may or may not post the text of it. Haven't decided yet. If I have so little to say, what have I started up a second rambling? lol.

Tonight when I went to the store, I got a nice BIG bag of sunflower seeds, so this time, I hopefully won't run out so quickly. Seeds are so great! They taste yummy, you can eat through many an X Files episode without getting full (or reaching the bottom of the bag), and as a souvenir, you get a nice big pile of remains after you're done. (A feature, not a bug. Hah!)

I ran out of Mulder food. My bag is empty, but it sits on my desk next to the keyboard, teasing me to reach my hand in, just on the off-chance that there might be a little bit left. But there isn't. Just an empty bag, and a messy pile of shells. Woe is me.

And what could I say about tonight's season finale? Um... To me, it seems like the show has lost some of the psychological intensity it had in earlier years. Maybe it was just my mood. I dunno. But when Doggett, Skinner, Mulder, Krycek, and those other guys were chasing each other around the building, I was thinking, "Were it not for the fact that I already knew otherwise, this could be just about any random cop show."

With this movie, we have what is arguably the best CGI animation to date. Fluidly rendered faces -- human faces -- landscapes, animals, castles, and, um, fairy tale characters. Lots of fairy tale characters.

Since I've actually reviewed this movie before, I think this time I'll just babble about random things on the periphery that happen to pop into my mind. That's not to that I wouldn't just do that anyway.

[Bitscape listens to music which is being sung in Spanish. However, it bears no resemblence whatsoever to Mexican death metal.]

Sorry, but my capacity for thinking up original titles seems to be waning with each passing day.

I like this song.

So...

And so, I must admit the obvious, and say that my ramblings frequency seems to have decreased of late. As to the true reason for this, speculation abounds (or so my own mind would have me believe), but a single conclusive answer has yet to be found. Carry on.

Having downloaded Mozilla 0.9 a few hours ago, I hereby dub it the best browser yet. The trend towards zippier, snappier, and more responsive which has been progressing through the last several versions continues. As most probably already know, they redid the cache, libpr0n, and all that good stuff for this version.

Agent Harrison, is it? What, oh what is the world coming to?

I just discovered that today, my order arrived at least! Two games, hot off the presses from Loki. Interestingly enough, packaged in less bulky, but very cool DVD style cases. So if I disappear without a trace, for, say, a month, everyone will now know why. :)