Cash of the Titans:

“Some day somebody is going to have to make a stand. Some day somebody is going to have to say enough!’ Enough take-the-money-and-run crap remakes of our beloved movies by hacks out to cash in!!! They have remade King Kong twice and never came close to the original, what makes them think they can do better with Titans? Nothing, they just want your money. And the name Clash of the Titans has box office draw.

Why else is some damn fool redoing Clash of the Titans in CGI of all things? Titans was one of the Harryhaysen films that had a real cast of real actors that came kind of close to almost matching the acting chops and greatness of their foam latex brothers.

Now there are a couple of Harryhausen movies that I would not mind seeing remade. Not the stop motion animation parts mind you (you don’t screw with the master’s work) but a lot of the live action acting (sic) was very lame and could use an update out of the too cardboard zone.

Sure Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen were forced to use actors that were not really talented enough for porn. It was the only way they could afford to make their movies.

After the Hollywood scum dog producers scapegoated Willis O’Brian and his stop motion animation technique as the reason that Might Joe Young did not make the super mega bucks of King Kong a brand new business model was needed to even make stop motion possible at the box office. (Only in Hollywood could a profitable project be seen as a complete failure because it did not make as much money as the bean counters had planned for it to make. Only in Hollywood would you have to find someone to blame for this perceived failure.)

Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen created the workable business model that made stop motion possible again. (I put Schneer’s name first here because he enabled the process). Basically he made a “B” drive-in movie that could be composited with Harryhausen’s stop motion wizardry and turned into something great (if you could overlook the live actors. And we did)

And sure we had to put up with sub standard acting from the cast of wooden “Z” movie extras they had to employ to be able to fit in the budget and make their business model possible for stop motion to even exist. It was the Dark Ages of Animation (1952 to 1972) and there was no other way. But they made it work. They made magic.

And now some ass sees a way to turn a fast buck on they name with a so called remake. This is not Clash of the Titans, this is Avatar in togas. Doing some big screen FX movie ala Avatar and calling it Clash of the Titans, does not make it so. You are just cashing in on the name.

Now if you wanted to update the bad live actors to real talent on some of Harryhausen’s early movies I am all for it and I will even buy a ticket. Buy not for this. I still haven't forgiven myself for seeing the second remake of Kong at the dollar theater.

Nightmare in Cyberspace

I reported that my FTP has stopped working to my web hosting company and got the following helpful (sic) advice:

Shiyas changed my password for me.

Please try with the username "l********" and password "*******".

Thank You,

Shiyas T A
WebHostingPad

This next one is good advice since they had changed their FTP protocol to SSL/TLS without telling anybody, but useless to me because they refused to admit that they had made any changes to their system for another 8 email even when I asked and asked.

Hello,

Please make sure you are using FTP with SSL/TLS

Thank you

Christopher
www.webhostingpad.com

The next 4 emails are from Christopher trying to figure out what FTP client I was using and if it had the SSL/TLS protocol.

The next one is one of my favorites:

Hello,

You use filezilla to upload files
http://filezilla-project.org/download.php
http://manual.amstechdns.com/ftpssl/

Thank you,
Victor Sexton
Webhostingpad Support

Is that a request or and order? I then started bombarding then with the question "have you made a change to your FTP protocol?" Email after email and nobody would admit that they had done anything. The attitude was that I was doing something wrong. Finally someone was brave enough to say that yes they had changed their FTP.

Hot on the heals of this admission comes the email from the company announcing the changes to FTP. A full two days and 11 email support emails too late.

Finally I downloaded the client that they said would work and was able to get FTP to work for a full 2 hours and then nothing. Dead again!

And on the third day, finally FTP from my Blog feed worked. Which is good because Google, who bought out Blogger, is forcing everybody onto their server. No more FTP posts. And if the FTP feed from my server is blocking FTP from Blogger then I am screwed with the deadline for the change over looming.

So now Webhostingpad will accept FTP from Blogger but not from an FTP client (me) and Webhostingpad will not answer any more email requests from customers. Dead silence on the old customer service (sic) front.

I expect that Google is forcing everybody onto their server so that they can have control. Why, I ask myself, does Google want to control the new frontier of news reporting?

Are the people at Google thinking advertising revenue? Maybe? A money grab would be the least evil action on their part. I don’t think that they are going to try a cheap copyright grab like Yahoo did in the early days of the Internet. I think that fight has been fought. But still, I wonder what is really behind their actions?

So the digital cat eat my homework. Which is why I have not been able to post of late.

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The Old Man and the Sea

Last Saturday was the Afternoon Of Remembrance. I just got a group of photos of the event from Art Leonardi. I spoke for my teacher Ric Estrada. Ric’s son Seth was also going to speak but he got their just as I started speaking and I didn’t see him until the break.

Life is strange. Here I am with Seth on my left and one of the Hemmingway boys from Cuba on my right. This gentleman, I forgot his name – shame on me, grew up in the village where the Old Man and The Sea was filmed. He therefore met Ric Estrada because Ric was there with Hemmingway during filming.



“Ernest Hemmingway built us a boxing ring and taught us all to box. We also knew the Spanish fisherman that the story was about. He lived in the village too.”

How strange is that. Seth didn’t even know that his father was a cameraman on Old Man And The Sea and here he meets a cartoonist who knew his father during the filming of that movie.

(NOTE: This post is so late due to my server company, their decided to make a major change to the FTP protocol without telling anybody. It took me 2 days and 10 emails before they would even admit that they made changes. It has been a nightmare.)