Category: Uncategorized

Avatar by Roger Dean

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been a fan of Roger Dean’s art for a long time now – I bought his book Views when I was a teenager. As soon as I saw the Avatar previews, I could see the similarity to Dean’s work from the nineties. There is a bit of controversy about how much Avatar’s designers have borrowed Dean’s ideas – a quick Google search will give you a sense.

I did love Avatar. It’s a great rollercoaster ride that kept me mostly engaged for the three hours and it was worth travelling to a city with a 3D theatre to see it with specs on (yes, I live in a rural city). I do think the designs and ideas were extraordinary, and the 3D unobtrusive.

Certainly the covers of the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe – Live and Yes – Keys to Ascension albums predate Avatar’s design. I would guess that many of the Avatar designers were infants when ABWH came out. There is some good discussion of the similarities – like this post: more than I can say. I guess if it had been my paintings at the very least, a credit would have been nice, some consultation would have been nice, too, even without the idea of remuneration. I wonder now, though, how Dean’s long-held idea of a movie dealing with his floating islands would pitch to the studios.

Streamined website – why?

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to those who’ve given me feedback on the updated venusvulture.com website – I have made a couple of minor changes. I am certainly a fan of minimal and streamlined and tired of sparkly ads, flash player required, complex links and pages stuffed to bursting or that scroll forever. The index page is 1kb of html and 31kb of images. I’ve avoided Dreamweaver, etc. and just hand-coded the html (yes, typed it as a text file). Too old school? Probably. Anyway, this is the code for the index page, for those who are interested.

Ah, no metadata, no java. That’ll probably cost me hits too. Oh well. I do have a favicon, but I still can’t figure out why it’s not working – something missing in the code?

My pick for game of the year …

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment
Osmos
Osmos Screenshot

Okay, I don’t play many computer games – I don’t have the patience or the mental/physical reflexes for most. Usually the first level starts and my car crashes, my warrior is slain, I’m stuck out or sacked or have already gone broke. But I’ve just found Osmos, which takes you into a delicious immersive world, filled with gently drifting motes which coalesce and burst, grow and shrink. The idea, usually is to grow your own mote until you’re the biggest. Usefully this game has sucked away hours of my life I’ll never retrieve, but it’s sure more calming than other games I’ve played. Great soundtrack too from including tracks by a couple of my favourite ambient artists Gas/High Skies and Biosphere. The game is a $10 download, which is cheaper than seeing Avatar – actually, do both.

I won’t use the five star system with half-stars (I could rant about that, but another time), but will give this a four and four-fifths star rating. Which means, nothing, of course.

Grrrrr trackbacks/pingbacks/whatever

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

… so I thought I had set the option to have no trackback and pingbacks when I write a post here, but my last post has put itself up as a comment at Flashes in the Dark. Crappy. I like to put the direct link in on my post, but it looks naf, I gotta say, and I feel like a fool when it happens.

I found another checkbox buried in the options today which might have been doing it, so hopefully it’s fixed.

Literally … figuratively

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

Pedantic hat on, I guess, but I seem to notice that often when people use the word “literally” they mean “figuratively”. It’s just lazy writing (or speaking).

“The car literally took off like a rocket!” No, it figuratively took off like a rocket. Even the word “like” is a clue there – that means it’s a simile.

“The opening band literally blew the main act off the stage.” What? You mean after they were done with their set they came back with some of those big Hollywood fans and made a little windstorm? I guess it’s really a metaphor – the opening act was so good that the main act struggled to hold the audiences attention. It’s an okay metaphor, but don’t tell me that it’s literal. If you need to emphasise it, use a better metaphor.

Torn asunder … well tutoring just about over

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Well today is the deadline for getting my creative writing tutoring back to the university. It’s done, bar one student who had an extension, and once that’s done the summer is mine to write and create. Current plans involve a new project of stories and inter-linked stories and a new blog to separate the writing out from the music.

Meantime, check out this cool new flash story from Joshua Scribner – Closer to pure – on Flashes in the Dark. Very creepy twist on the vampire idea.