Museums\/Galleries
<\/strong>- Cooper-Hewitt<\/a>
- MoMA<\/a>
- PACE-Wildenstein<\/a>
Bars:
<\/strong>Death & Co.<\/a>
P.D.T.<\/a>
Mayahuel<\/a>
Milk & Honey<\/a>
Food:
<\/strong>Someone tell me where to go, I know nothing about NY food. I\u2019ll stick to drinking if no one wants to eat fancy food.
You:
<\/strong>Board games and hanging out, it\u2019s up to you.
New Years Eve:
<\/strong>Currently undecided since I can\u2019t remember the beer\/whiskey bar I always go to for NYE in Brooklyn (which I don\u2019t think is Spuyten Duyvil). It\u2019s mostly wood-finished inside, has TVs, pretty good and serious bar food (not just snacks but steaks and veggies), and an amazing selection of beer bottles. (Peat-smoked beer, anyone?) There\u2019s a rain-splattered page in my old notebook in SF with a map but that doesn\u2019t help me now. It was a couple blocks from a highway overpass if I remember the cold and wet bar crawl from two years ago correctly.","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/270047.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/269727.html","pubDate":"Sat, 18 Dec 2010 18:44:22 GMT","title":"Tron: Tragedy Part 2","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/269727.html","description":"So what is actually so wrong with this movie that I woke up early on a Saturday and couldn\u2019t fall back to sleep without writing it down?
1) The Grid is too real.
The Grid is not the Matrix or even the Matrix\u2019s Construct. It is not a simulation of reality, it is a metaphorical representation of emergent behavior (unintended consequences) within computer software. In the original movie, the computer world is obviously computer-generated. The rotoscoped actors floated in a sea of special-effects. The effects were twitchy, and you could tell they held Frisbees and wore spandex, but through the magic of suspending disbelief you would see the circuits and the flowing energy. It was constantly obvious that it was not supposed to look real. Tron: Legacy\u2019s<\/i> choice to go with beautiful but often realistic CG environments and practical effects for costumes destroys this. The entire movie is real actors in real glowing clothing walking in (due to our advanced CG technology) physically-real-looking environments. It doesn\u2019t feel enough like we\u2019re in another universe, it just feels like we\u2019re looking into a club that\u2019s too fancy for us to afford matching costumes. It looked real, and there was no disbelief to suspend, no reason to take your mind where they wanted it to go. It felt better when they were playing games, but again, the breaking glass and bodies and machines disintegrating into physical fragments were choices that make the world feel more real, more solid, and less like another universe with different rules.
I am not saying the original makers of Tron<\/i> wouldn\u2019t have made the same mistakes presented with today\u2019s technology, but they couldn\u2019t and didn\u2019t and now we have our reading of the original film to inform our decisions about how to make a sequel. (And I would argue that the choices they did make among the techniques available to them does suggest they intended and desired the otherworldly-feeling they achieved.)
The flashbacks to Flynn in leather jackets on the Grid just made me roll my eyes.
2) It is too long.
While there were a few unnecessary scenes in the original, this movie at times felt interminable. People talking about things we don\u2019t care about often in ham-fisted attempts to evoke the original film I can do without.
3) It isn\u2019t a good sequel. (Spoiler + fanboy alert.)
The characters and motivations don\u2019t make a whole lot of sense coming forward either in or out of the computer. I\u2019m not convinced Flynn would be motivated only a year or two after becoming the helicopter-flying, Wall Street suit-wearing CEO of Encom (as he did at the end of the original movie) to go back into the system and \u201ccreate a perfect society.\u201d I\u2019m even less convinced that after fighting the MCP he would be so na\u00efve as to create such an obvious replacement.
Moreover, since we eventually learn that TRON still exists, the place where Flynn goes to do this was either the actual network at Encom (which is doubtful since the monumental changes wrought would presumably have destroyed the day-to-day functions of the company) or a copy of the entire system that lives in the basement of the arcade. Sure. And what about TRON? TRON\u2019s purpose was to restore the freedom of the system. What justification are we given for his conversion?
Even harder to understand is the manner in which Flynn (even with Yuri\u2019s help which he did not seem to have) could develop a way to make the laser work backwards and create humans out of programs.
The original CLU program was deleted by the MCP; it isn\u2019t clear to me why Flynn would name his new doppelg\u00e4nger after a flawed hack. (I could see him naming it after his son or a trusted friend of one of his Zen masters.)
In the original movie Flynn interacts with the programs written by his friends in real life. These programs reflect the personalities of their creators which is often cute and touching. This aspect is almost completely missing in the sequel. Though they go through the trouble of introducing several new real-world characters, none of them show up as programs on the Grid. Due to the vagaries of the story, this is true even of Flynn, who is three different people in the film, none of which is a direct real\/program parallel.
The movie has flashbacks that bear no resemblance to the original movie. There isn\u2019t even a hint that the world we see in the new movie evolved from the world we saw in the original.
4) Sometimes the movie doesn\u2019t even try.
Would it have been so hard to show us Quorra* and Sam materializing back in the real world?
* I had to look up Sam\u2019s name (since I cared so little about the brat) and saw the girl\u2019s name wasn\u2019t spelled \u2018Cora\u2019.<\/a>","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/269727.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/269459.html","pubDate":"Sat, 18 Dec 2010 06:18:11 GMT","title":"Tron: Tragedy","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/269459.html","description":"If you have any love for the original Tron<\/i>, stay very far away from the new one. It isn’t like Iron Man<\/i>. It isn’t even like the new Star Trek<\/i>. The original Tron<\/i> wasn’t a great movie, but it had a charm the new one can’t even see on the horizon. Tron: Legacy<\/i> is racially offensive, over-produced, derivative, often boring, and occasionally nauseating both due to 3D and scriptwriting. With a female protagonist stolen from Mirror’s Edge<\/i>, internal inconsistencies worse than the original, and allusions to its predecessor and other movies that more often than not come off as awkward, forced, inaccurate, or inappropriate: to all those who warned me off seeing Iron Man 2<\/i>, I humbly attempt to provide the same service to you regarding Tron: Legacy<\/i>.","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/269459.html?view=comments#comments","category":"movie"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268819.html","pubDate":"Tue, 14 Dec 2010 04:54:31 GMT","title":"People are supposed to look forward to vacation, right?","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268819.html","description":"So how come I feel like I'd have more fun stabbing myself than planning my winter vacation? Right now my delayed-gratification circuits just aren\u2019t making the connection that planning days of plane rides, hours of train rides, dragging luggage halfway up and down the east coast, making countless sets of plans and reservations, and coordinating all of this with twenty different people is going to pay off more than just staying the fuck home.
On the other hand, since staying home isn\u2019t an option (my family would kill me and there are too many people I want to see) I better get my ass in gear. Who\u2019s gonna be around? :-)","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268819.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268669.html","pubDate":"Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:10:55 GMT","title":"Rock Band 3 Fail","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268669.html","description":"Harmonix, you've broken my heart.
When I pick a song and \"Pro Drums\" are available as an option, I assume you actually have a pro drum part (with differentiated cymbals and toms) for me to play. \"Children of December\" by the Slip has a long drum solo played on the toms, but the screen tells me to play the hi-hat and crash. Playing it is like trying to read a bunch of color words written in the wrong colors. (In Pro Mode if you hit the drum instead of the cymbal it counts as missing.) If you couldn't update all our old content for Pro Mode, fine, I have to live with that, but this is just wrong: a classic case of a half-assed feature being worse than no feature at all.
The idea that we might not ever get pro mode for old songs (even if we pay more) is sad, too.","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268669.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268318.html","pubDate":"Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:19:41 GMT","title":"At least I did when I was in college...","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268318.html","description":"
Cory Doctorow<\/a><\/div>
I Write Like<\/em> by M\u00e9moires, Mac journal software<\/a>. Analyze your writing!<\/b><\/a><\/p><\/div> Your result for The Director Who Films Your Life Test...<\/em><\/p> Your film will be 52% romantic, 43% comedy, 38% complex plot, and a $ 29 million budget.<\/p> Take The Director Who Films Your Life Test<\/a> at OkCupid<\/a><\/p>","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268092.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/267390.html","pubDate":"Thu, 20 May 2010 20:40:09 GMT","title":"My bed from NYC","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/267390.html","description":"
","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268318.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268092.html","pubDate":"Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:01:21 GMT","title":"Please tell me this doesn\u2019t actually make sense\u2026","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/268092.html","description":"David Lynch<\/h4>
![](\"https:\/\/cdn.okcimg.com\/php\/load_okc_image.php\/images\/0x0\/0x0\/0\/4843418057065683097.jpeg\")
<\/p>![\"IMG_2471\"](\"https:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2677\/4470446814_6d4d1bb400_t.jpg\")
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\t\t\tIMG_2471<\/a>,
originally uploaded by deeahblita<\/a>.\t<\/span><\/div>I'm sure some of you have heard me lament the loss of the bed I built back in NY. Dee just uploaded a picture of it stripped down from when she moved out of our old place. *Sniff*
","comments":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/267390.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/266981.html","pubDate":"Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:40:02 GMT","title":"Past Relationships in Six Word Memoirs","author":"pyrogenic","link":"https:\/\/pyrogenic.livejournal.com\/266981.html","description":"A couple days ago I woke up way too early and couldn\u2019t stop thinking about this trite idea: that I could write six-word summaries of past relationships. (Simple intimacy was required to make the cut.) Some of them are terrible, not at all fair, or stretch the truth, but they\u2019re all evocative for me. Fun times!
Based on Smith Magazine's Six Words<\/a> project.
![](\"https:\/\/l-stat.livejournal.net\/img\/userinfo_v8.png?v=17080&v=915\")
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