mattmoore.blog()

his attitude seriously
makes you question:
has good gotten eviler
or evil gotten softer

maybe those terms
are indefinitely blurred
and no longer useful
for the games we watch

I helped my friend Nathaniel design his website. While we were working on his website, we were having an issue with how to display his artwork. Nathaniel is an illustrator and his work is very detailed. We wanted to be able to show his artwork where you could see all the detail and text but also be able to experience the whole image–in addition to browsing next and previous images. We were also constrained by a 1024 x 768 monitor size as well as a reasonable image download size under 300KB. I thought the best solution would be to create an image viewer in Flash that would easily allow the user to zoom and pan the image. What I created was an handy little gallery viewer that uses XML to store information about the images. The viewer is also very customizable with the ability to edit colors, font formating, etc. While the documentation still needs some love, you can view the demo here and the Subversion site here.

This is a little space ship that I modeled in Maya and built into Flash. Experience the boringness of outer space using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

This weekend was one of the best weekends I’ve had in a long time. Here are the top twelve reasons why:

12. Swam in the Pacific Ocean
11. Got phone calls from Cassandra and Stephanie
10. Hung out with Matt Howell
9. Rode my bike with Alex & Matt to Venice and back
8. Went to the Elf Cafe, ate a delicious salad and had a crush on the waitress
7. Went to the Machine Project to learn how to make jam
6. Made friends with Kline & Alexi
5. Met Sahra, Mike and Andres at the il corral for the recycled music show
4. Ate some insanely spicy and delicious spring rolls at Pure Luck
3. Thoroughly enjoyed Superbad with Matt, Alex and E. McGrath
2. Made my much anticipated return to Food Not Bombs LA
1. Didn’t use my computer at all this weekend!

On Thursday night Alex and I got advanced tickets from our friend Prahbat to go see the movie The 11th Hour at the Landmark Theater in Century City. I knew a little about the movie from the trailer and from the buzz about Leonardo DiCaprio’s new pet project. I assumed that it would be Leo’s Inconvenient Truth and just another celebrity’s naive, however admirable, attempt to sensationalize science for the movie-going elite. Overall, the movie surprised me as a thought-provoking and important piece of popular documentary work (“popumentary” or “pop-doc”) .

Anytime that you see a movie, the context in which you see the movie is an important part of the experience. Entertainment is a fairly subjective experience. I can see Super Troopers with the right people and have it be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Or I can see Transporter 2 and make-out with my friend Christyn the whole time and be grateful the movie was terribly vanilla. That Thursday night I wasn’t feeling in the highest spirits. The whole experience of getting home late from work, driving to the Landmark in a hurry, finding a seat and listening to all the people chat senselessly around me annoyed me to tears. The last thing I wanted to do was see a movie about how global human actions were destroying the environment–which seems like a fairly obvious point nowadays.

As soon as the movie started, however, my eyes were glued to the screen and only occasionally veered to see a reaction from Alex. Right away, one of the methodologies of the film I appreciated was that all the facts and figures used in the movie came directly from the mouths of top scientists studying these issues. In other words, it didn’t fall into the trap of the Inconvenient Truth or of Sicko of being filtered through a seemingly polarizing figure. Al Gore is no Stephen Hawking–who gives some of the most sophisticated and intelligent sound bites in the whole movie.

Even on the surface, the issues of this movie are vast and complex. You cannot talk about the environment without considering issues of over-population, food production, poverty, mass consumption or even the near-sightedness of the human mind itself. In this regard, the movie doesn’t miss a beat. There’s as much intelligent analysis that one could conceivably can cram into a two hour movie without completely losing the viewer–even though a handful of people left the theater about halfway through. It touched on issues from biological evolution to the effects of advertising has on our populous. In addition, the movie has an emotional arc. The first two-thirds of the movie continually build to the worst, humanity-loathing feeling I’ve ever experience and then exhales into a very hopeful message.

The talking heads in the movie were surprisingly candid, passionate and eloquent speakers, with the exception of DiCaprio himself. Throughout the movie Leo delivers several emotionless, poetic tirades that are amazingly unmemorable. The one person in the movie who’s professional job it is to convey feeling on a movie screen fails miserably. Yet, these interstitials did allow me to space-out and catch my breath for the next roller coaster of facts, quotes, and disturbing image montages.

There are several criticisms Alex and I had after seeing the movie. I think, however, in a larger way they are more criticisms of the larger genre and movement of work being done of which this movie is just a part. Global climate change is a serious subject. The movement of the people that are actively trying to change the consciousness of people is, unsurprisingly, also serious. There seems to be a real opportunity, especially with the medium of film, to add some self-depreciating humor. Humor is an important aspect of any political, environmental, social movement because it is so much about how we cope with the world. I’m not implying that The 11th Hour needed to be a comedy–far from it. I do, however, believe that people respond much more open-heartedly to humor, satire, sarcasm, etc than they do to zealotry.

Before the movie started, the first thing that came on the screen was a message warning that having a video camera and recording in the theater is prohibited and if you see someone doing this, you turn them in to the theater management immediately. After the movie was over, my first thought was about that title warning. There was lots of talk during the movie about how we have trumped the concept of an ecology (something that doesn’t grow and lives in harmony) with an economy (a system that perpetually grows). Also, the other points the movie drives home are how consumer binging is inherently destructive to our environment and we need to change people’s consciousness around all these issues (there is a quote in the movie that said, “humans will do the best thing with the awareness they have”). In my mind, there is something incredibly hypocritical about creating a movie to change minds but that is designed to earn money for Warner Brothers and that will have a very small, limited and controlled release around the country. I hope to god that someone pirates this movie so that more people that don’t live in major urban areas or don’t have $10 to spend at an indie theater have an opportunity to see it. I wish the method in which they distributed this movie didn’t rely on existing, capitalistic channels which are part of the environmental degradation the movie preaches about.

After the movie was over, Alex and I stayed for a Q&A. Three people were answering questions about what you can do locally: a green architect, someone from Greenopia and someone from the City of Los Angeles. The solution that all three people (and the movie) kept reiterating, was smarter consumerism will change our economic tendencies from exploitation and pollution to preservation and green. In other words, ‘vote with your dollar’. They cited the Toyota Prius as a good example that has transformed the auto industry’s priorities over-night. There is an inherent assumption in this solution that the market will do the best thing if only people buy more. But this is exactly the problem: buying more stuff, perpetual growth, being vulnerable to advertising. The only way to hold corporations accountable for their destructive practices and products is government regulation. It has worked in the past (Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act, creation of national protected forests, etc). Corporations, when left to their own devices, will only do what is ‘right’ and ‘just’ if it fits within their profit motive.

In addition, the idea that you can ‘vote with your dollar’ is unfair. It means that people that spend and have less, vote less. Therefore, they must rely on those who can afford a new fancy, eco-friendly car to do the right thing. But our society and country is run by people that have the most money and they consistently make the wrong decisions. I don’t want to discount the fact that buying intelligently is important, but it is not the end-all solution. Buying some green shoes or a shirt made from organic cotton is the quick fix. You’ll probably spend more, but you never have to change your wasteful habits. You can still throw those shoes and shirt away in a landfill when you are done with them. People that are well-off, like those in the theater in LA, latch on heavily to the idea of ‘voting with your dollar’ because it means you don’t have to change your habits and you can still feel comfortable and self-congratulatory afterwards.

When Alex and I came home, we came up with a list of habits we want to change about how we live in our apartment. Some of these things include: biking and walking more, not buying canned food, use our water filter instead of bottled water, no more plastic bags at the grocery store (use our canvas bags), unplug all our electronics at night and take shorter showers. I don’t think if I saw this movie I would have so firmly committed to these ideas. Alex and I are going to a workshop next week about how we can live even greener. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Overall, a great movie. Definitely worth seeing. Also, Alex thinks it should have been called, “The Departed 2″. Here are the release dates and cities.

The last week has been pretty painful for my right shoulder. I’ve been playing a lot of ultimate frisbee, biking too much, and sitting at a computer for long, uninterrupted hours. I took the day off of work yesterday to visit the a doctor’s office for the first time in two years. Here are the top ten reasons I hated going to the doctor:

10. Dirty waiting room carpeting
9. Filling out paperwork and realizing I forgot something
8. Unfriendly receptionists
7. Stacks of outdated issues of Highlights magazine
6. Waiting for the doctor in a tiny room covered in diplomas
5. Over-reliance on pain medication as treatment
4. Those scales that remind me of 9th grade science class
3. Seeing other sick people
2. Co-payments, deductibles and insurance
1. Getting the diagnosis that I have tendinitis in my shoulder!

While my wave of empathy for LA has subsided from my last post, I wanted to point out one thing that completely infuriates me about this city. I’ve rarely experienced this in any other large city except Los Angeles.

I take the subway a portion of my commute to work. And I have to admit that I enjoy the subway system here. It is convenient (for me), easy to use and inexpensive ($1.25 for a ride). There are also no advertisements on the subway other than those pleasant ads for the public transit system itself. Maybe it’s that way because generally only poor people use the subway and buses here.

The thing that makes me mad is that people never wait until everyone is off the train before they board. There’s always three or four people that push their way on to the train as people are simultaneously exiting. What is even worse, however, is that even the people on the platform waiting to board don’t give an opening to allow others to exit. This is usually an issue for me because I have a bicycle and end up accidentally smashing someone in the shin with one of my peddles.

The lack of respect on the subway can probably be partially attributed to the fact that the subway is still a relatively new phenomenon to LA. The red line, the line I commute on, didn’t open until 1993 whereas in places like Boston, New York and Chicago their transit systems have been around for the better part of the twentieth century. Maybe the culture of respect of riding the transit system hasn’t fully developed. Or maybe the subways never are congested enough so that people are forced to rely on strangers.

While on the train, Alex and I were discussing how easy it is to hate Los Angeles. Cynics like us have plenty to say about how inhospitable this town is, how superficial and flaky people are, how polluted the air is, how congested the freeways are, etc. These are all cheap shots and obvious facts for anyone that has spent more than a couple of days here. While it is fun to commiserated, it also must be incredibly insulting for native Los Angeleans to have to hear these things over and over from the largely transplanted section of the population. Empathetically, Alex and I shared with each other our favorite things about LA. I said that mine were: great produce, getting to see movies before they are released elsewhere, vegan restaurants, Griffith Park, year-round biking weather, and a decent public library system.