Yes, there were more pictures from Disney World. How could there not be?
I’ve been messing with the Now Reading Reloaded plugin to put together the new library section here. It’s a great plugin that really only lacked one thing, and that was support for multiple authors.
I just finished adding some functionality that allows for a comma separated author list, and links to separate author pages. If you use the plugin and would like to see this available for download, let me know.
I was blessed to marry into a family that has a regularly scheduled trip to Disney World. We typically go in November, but this year we got to go for the whole week of Christmas. It was a lot of fun. The parks were crowded, and our schedule was crazy, but I’m glad we got to do it.
Over the last few months I’ve heard and read time and again that “things are changing more rapidly than they ever have before.” I wasn’t buying. In my mind there were just too many things that are the same as they were 50 and 100 years ago.
We still use phones (though not tied to the wall or party lines), watch TV and listen to radio (though with higher fidelity and more options), and travel in vehicles powered by fossil fuels.
The one major change that I’ve acknowledged over and over (since the telephone and telegraph) is the computer processor. It’s the common thread in most of the advances I can pinpoint over the last 50 years: advances in space travel, science, engineering, communications, the internet. But I wouldn’t admit that any other change was more than cosmetic, or a shifting of emphases.
Then I asked John Dyer an open-ended question: “What do you think about the idea that things are changing faster than ever before?”
“I think it’s statistically verifiable.” Then he proceeded to walk me through just how wrong I was.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the reviews I’ve read that panned it, but I loved it, and I’m ready to go see it again. The CG is unbelievable. There were moments when I had to remind myself that nothing I was looking at really existed. I found the story totally engrossing and detail of the alien people and their world to be incredible. The one major flaw—which happened in the first act and made me think crap, this movie’s gonna suck—was the name of the metal being mined: unobtanium. But it turned out not to be an indication of crappy writing. The story is somewhat predictable, but it’s still intense and moving.
Some of the characters, like Giovanni Ribisi’s business executive, were over the top; that just makes it kid friendly. I thought the screenplay included a good balance of show and tell, and developed the major characters well.
Go see it, get lost on Pandora, and don’t think the movie to death.
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The Golden City
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