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Roundtables

11:06 AM / Cinema / Web / 2 Comments

A couple of very interesting filmmakers' roundtable discussions for your enjoyment. Up first is the LA Times' roundtable with feature animation directors Mark Andrews (BRAVE), Peter Ramsey (RISE OF THE GUARDIANS), Chris Butler (PARANORMAN), Rich Moore (WRECK-IT RALPH, classic SIMPSONS) and Genndy Tartakovsky (DEXTER'S LABORATORY, SAMURAI JACK and the recently released HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA.

Up next is the Hollywood Reporter's interview with Quentin Tarantino (DJANGO UNCHAINED), David O. Russell (SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK), Ben Affleck (ARGO), Ang Lee (LIFE OF PI), Tom Hooper (LES MISERABLES) and Gus Van Sant (PROMISED LAND).

Both are well worth a look and provide a fascinating insight into two different sides of the Hollywood film industry.

Changing the blinds

8:27 PM / Web / No Comments

You've probably noticed that there have been one or two cosmetic changes to the site in the last day or so, most significantly the new background image and larger text. This version of the site has looked more or less the same since its inception three years ago - a record length of time given that, back when I had time to spare and the inclination to constantly tinker, I was completely redoing the entire site on (at least) a yearly basis. In the past, I've found that the site sees the most activity in the months following the launch of a new design. So, I thought, let's see if doing so again will encourage a new phase of productivity.

Originally, my intention was to go with a completely new design, using a pre-existing Movable Type template rather than creating one myself - the logic being that I would have a swanky new design with only minimal effort required on my part. I actually started playing around with a rather nice-looking template on a separate Movable Type installation... but things went a bit pear-shaped and I ended up accidentally overwriting all the tweaks I'd made with the default template, and I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I've also made some significant changes to the way the category and monthly archives are displayed. When I first launched this design, I was with a different web host and was having severe performance issues. (If you've been following this site for a while, you'll probably remember a period three years ago when it would literally take upwards of two minutes just to post a comment.) In an attempt to lessen the load on the server I devised a drastically pared-down archive system whereby, rather than displaying full entries, only the title and a brief excerpt of each post would be displayed. In the end I ended up switching to LDHosting in July 2009, which has always been lightning fast for me. The old design remained in place, however, and to be honest I quite liked the fact that it was a bit different. I've come to the conclusion, though, that it's not exactly the most user-friendly way of displaying old posts, given that you have to open each entry individually in order to read it. As a result, I've gone back to a more conventional setup that looks more like the front page (see, for example, the BD Impressions archive). Much better, as I'm sure you'll agree.

I'll probably continue to tweak the layout as and when the inclination takes me, provided it doesn't result in any disruption. Any thoughts on the changes? Positive? Negative? Don't care?

Letterboxd invitations

11:59 AM / Web / 10 Comments

I've got three invitations for Letterboxd to give away. Let me know if you want one. It's first come first served, and remember, I'll need your email address to send the invite. If you don't want to post it publicly, you can contact me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com.

Sayonara BD & DVD section

4:55 PM / Blu-ray / DVD / Web / 7 Comments

As part of my ongoing efforts to streamline this site and give me a few less lists to keep up to date (see my removal of the film diary back in May), I've decided to junk the "in-house" BD & DVD section and simply have that page redirect to my DVD Profiler page from now on. Their site isn't as purrty as mine, but it's much less of a hassle for me to update, and it contains more information on each disc, including bonus features, audio and video formats, and even (if you're in the mood for a giggle) parental advisory information.

Please note that the DVD Profiler page doesn't show discs that I've since sold or given away, so a number will have disappeared.

Quick note

2:01 PM / Cinema / Web / 10 Comments

I've decided to retire the movie log section of this site. I originally started it back at the beginning of 2005 as a means of cataloguing and reviewing every film I watched. It quickly became clear that the latter wasn't feasible, but I studiously kept up the cataloguing aspect, both listing and rating (out of 10) every film my eyes ingested - 1,307 since January 1, 2005.

I may no longer be updating this section of the site, but that doesn't mean my film log is stopping. On the contrary, it's simply migrating over to Letterboxd, where I've been maintaining a film diary since the beginning of the year. Letterboxd has all the same functionality of the old Land of Whimsy movies log, and a lot more besides, plus it looks a lot nicer too. The site is still in beta at the moment and is currently invite only, but I have a couple of spares, so leave me a comment if you'd like one. In the meantime, you can browse the site without an account.

My film diary is here.

Kentai on grain and noise

5:33 PM / Web / 2 Comments

My good friend Kentai has written a very informative piece on the whole "grain vs. noise" argument that refuses to die down with regard to the numerous recent BD releases of cult Italian titles - TENEBRAE, THE CAT O' NINE TAILS, ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST and the like. Be sure to give it a read.

Thoughts on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three BD

10:53 AM / Web / 5 Comments

Microphone is still crap and boosting the volume just makes it sound worse. Might have to look into a standalone mike...

Preliminary thoughts on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition BDs

12:26 PM / Web / 7 Comments

Hello, beautiful people

12:56 AM / Web / 10 Comments

I picked up a webcam and did a thing with it:

In praise of LDHosting

7:33 PM / Web / 5 Comments

I thought I'd take a few moments to say some kind words about my web host, LDHosting. I've mentioned them a few times now, but I should do so more often, as I really can't say enough good words about them. After a string of ventures with other hosts who either started out good and went down the tubes or were simply not very satisfactory to begin with, I've now been with LDHosting since July 2009, and (touch wood) have no intention of going anywhere else. For €4.95 a month I get their silver plan, which gives me 10 GB of disk space, a 100 GB monthly bandwidth allowance (now reduced to a still generous 60 GB for new customers), unlimited FTP accounts and MySQL databases, support for cron jobs, Perl, SSI and a whole bunch of other services - actually, far more than I'll ever need. That, and the longest I've ever had to wait to get a response from customer support has been about 20 minutes. Oh, and they boast an uptime of 99.97%.

It gets better. Thanks to Bucks4Banners (an unrelated service), I get £5 every month simply for hosting banners on a handful of the sites on this page. (When I signed up, I put them on my most accessed DVD image comparisons.) In effect, this means that this site costs me less than nothing to maintain.

So yeah, basically if you're in need of cheap web hosting with excellent customer service and a solid range of options, go with LDHosting. Their cheapest plan is €3.50 a month (I went for the slightly pricier silver plan because I need the extra disk space, but for those not hosting a massive archive of BD screen captures, the bronze plan's 5 GB should be more than enough). They're the best web host I've ever used, and I don't say that lightly.

And no, they didn't pay me to write this post.

Comment away!

12:37 PM / Web / 1 Comment

As mentioned in my previous post, a couple of days ago I enabled the TypePad AntiSpam spam protection system. It actually comes installed by default on recent Movable Type builds and only requires that you apply for a free API Key, but I didn't realise this until recently.

In the couple of days that it's been enabled, I've seen my incoming spam cut drastically thanks to the system's adaptive nature: it actually learns what you report as spam and rejects future incoming comments that are similar or come from the same source. Now that I feel reasonably confident that it's not rejecting legitimate comments, I've decided to leave it enabled for the time being.

Because TypePad AntiSpam is proving to be so much more effective than the SpamLookup system I was reliant on before, I no longer have a massive pile of junk to wade through every day, so I've decided to re-enable immediate comment posting on a trial basis, bypassing the need for me to manually approve every message that comes through. Obviously, if I end up being inundated with spam, I'll turn moderation back on, but I'm hoping I don't have to: I'd much rather have the immediacy of people being able to post a comment and know that it will show up straight away (unless it accidentally gets tripped up by the anti-spam software and sent to me for moderation).

Site stuff

1:06 AM / Web / 11 Comments

I'm trying a different spam-blocking system at the moment (TypePad AntiSpam). Can I ask people to reply to this post (with anything - doesn't matter what) so I can ensure it's working properly and not just junking everything?

Pixar, I are impressed

10:24 AM / Web / 3 Comments

Site maintenance

10:58 PM / Web / 2 Comments

I've been informed by my host, LDHosting, that they will be carrying out routine maintenance between 1.30 and 4.00 CEST tomorrow. As a result, my site may be inaccessible at certain points during these hours.

I know who you are

6:28 PM / Games / Web / 5 Comments

In the time since I last posted about STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY, my most anticipated game of the year, the beta has been taken offline and brought back for a final brief round of testing, an actual release date has been announced (July 27th), and developer Blizzard Entertainment has announced and swiftly retracted plans to force all users to display their real first and last name when posting on their forums. The whole thing seems rather moot now that Blizzard has climbed down in the face of an outpouring of public wrath, but I'd like to say a few words about it anyway since it touches on a pertinent subject that I don't believe I've ever brought up on this site: privacy.

As you've probably noticed, my real name is visible on this site, as is a picture of my face. Anyone who has met me in real life would have no trouble connecting the site to me if they came across it, and those who know me at all could probably do so even without the headshot, given that the site makes clear what my hobbies are. I personally don't have a problem with this: I could easily post anonymously, giving away nothing personal about myself, but I've chosen not to hide behind a veil of secrecy. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't really have anything in particular to gain from letting the whole world know that I'm a heterosexual white male in my twenties from Glasgow with fairly left-leaning libertarian political views and an addiction to Pepsi Max. Then again, I don't really think I have anything to fear either. While I have clearly defined views that not everyone is going to agree with, I don't consider any of them to be particularly outrageous or likely to cause widespread offence. Dig into the past and you'll probably find that I was at one point a whole lot more blunt and antagonistic, but these days I prefer to take a stance of not saying anything to anyone that I wouldn't happily repeat to their face. (I have been guilty of lapses in the past. For instance, in my BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER reviews, I got pretty accusatory about who I personally held responsible for the episodes and creative decisions I didn't like. I doubt I would make the same mistake today.) Larger entitles, such as DVD and BD publishers, are a whole other matter: if I'm not happy about something, I'll make no bones about it, but I always do my best to stop short of blaming and/or attacking individuals.

Other people, however, are a lot more cagey about their identities - and rightly so. If, for example, you're a gay rights blogger living in Iran, chances are you don't want to broadcast your name, location and face for all to see. Other people, for whom the threat of their identity being discovered is far less life-threatening, can also have valid reasons for not revealing who they really are. Perhaps you don't want the teenagers on Xbox Live to know you're a screaming homosexual, or maybe you don't want the company you work for to know that you've bad-mouthing it online (see the Bastardstones scandal). Or perhaps you simply want to keep your online and offline personas separate, for no other reason than that's the way you like it. That's entirely right and proper. I personally have no problem telling people I run a web site that reviews the image quality of BD releases, but I understand that not only are there valid reasons for remaining anonymous online: you shouldn't NEED a reason.

Which brings us on to Blizzard's Battle.net forums and their plans to lift the veil of secrecy, revealing the real names of everyone posting there. Barring a couple of posts I've made in the STARCRAFT II beta technical support section, I haven't personally been active on the Battle.net forums for years. They were a hive of spam, insults and general stupidity when I last used them circa 2002, and while the situation has improved somewhat in recent years, they still have problems. The logic of the so-called "Real ID", according to Blizzard, was to facilitate better conduct. It might very well have worked. In the past, I've posted on a couple of forums that have required real names rather than nicknames, and have found them to be very civilised. However, that didn't stop one instance of a nasty little shit finding his way to this site and being very uncivilised to me via the comments function. (He never admitted it was him, but his distinctively dreadful grammar and punctuation gave him away.) He dicked around for a couple of days before I eventually blocked his IP address after he made some thinly veiled threat to the tune of knowing where I lived and that he wasn't a million miles away from me. I haven't heard from him since. However, I know from my hosting provider's log that, for a number of weeks, he continued to visit my site with a frequency that bordered on obsessiveness.

I suspect the individual in question was simply a dickhead and an attention-seeker with nothing better to do, but it serves as a good example of the sort of thing you're setting yourself up for when you create an online presence. You can understand, therefore, why so many people were up in arms over Blizzard's Real ID plans. I won't regurgitate all the arguments here, but one of the most persuasive demonstrations of how bad an idea this could be comes in the form of this screenshot of a forum discussion relating to the announcement. Fair enough if you create a forum that requires users to display their real name AND make this clear from the outset. That way, people who don't feel comfortable revealing their true identity can simply look elsewhere for their forum fix. However, to apply it retroactively to a board on which people were previously able to hide behind nicknames, and to essentially tell players "you won't get online technical support for our games unless you consent to your identity being broadcast to the whole world", is a step too far.

To Blizzard's credit, they climbed down pretty quickly when they realised just how negatively Real ID had been received. The company's president, Mike Morhaime, wrote a direct letter to the players. They didn't have to do this. In spite of the unprecedented backlash, they would have continued to rake in massive quantities of cash per month from WORLD OF WARCRAFT subscriptions. The fact that they actually paid attention to public feedback and reacted accordingly in my opinion puts them several steps above the likes of EA and UbiSoft, who have ridden roughshod over their customers with excessive and unpopular DRM schemes. The sinking of Real ID is people power at its finest and proof that not all rich corporations are completely deaf to their customers' concerns. (Of course, the fact that one forum member demonstrated the folly of the system by Googling the real name of one of Blizzard's forum representatives and, within a few minutes, providing links to his Facebook and Twitter accounts, home address, a satellite photo of said address, phone number and the names of some of his family members, may have been a contributing factor too. Because I'm not a fan of that sort of invasion of privacy, I won't be linking to any of it here.)

Still, though, the above may give you pause for thought next time you choose a user name when signing up to the official goat porn message board.

Spamalot

5:07 PM / Web / 6 Comments

I've been receiving rather a lot of spam comments recently. Spam has been an issue for this site almost from the get-go, but I've tended to take care of it simply by deleting messages as and when they appear, and more recently implementing a "comment freeze" on all entries over a month old. In the last week or so, however, the volume of spam has increased quite noticeably. So far, I've been doing a reasonable job of keeping it under control by checking my inbox regularly and deleting any dodgy entries more or less immediately. If the volume becomes any heavier, though, this is unlikely to remain feasible.

Because of this, I have had no choice but to enable moderation for ALL comments that are posted. I'm sorry to have to do this, because I've always liked the "real-time" nature of simply letting comments be posted instantly (unless flagged as suspect by Movable Type's anti-spam filters), but that's the way it is. I'll do my best to be as prompt as possible when it comes to approving any comments, and hope that this doesn't discourage you from posting as frequently as before.

One benefit of this new approach, it must be said, is that, because it no longer serves any purpose, I've disabled the "comment freeze", so you will now be able to comment on entries that are older than one month. Every cloud, as they say...

Comments now functioning again

7:21 AM / Web / 5 Comments

Just a quick note to alert readers to the fact that commenting functionality has now been restored to the site. If you attempted to post a comment in the last few days, you more than likely got a submission error. It took me a while to work out what was wrong, but eventually I realised that, when I redesigned the header at the top of the page, I accidentally deleted the reference to the JavaScript file required for commenting to function.

Muchos gracias to ChuckZ for alerting me to the problem. It would probably have gone unnoticed for days otherwise.

Question for visitors

7:57 PM / Web / 5 Comments

Here's your chance to do something really important. No, I'm not talking about voting in the upcoming election (although that's nearly as important): I'm talking about making a contribution to how this site looks. As you may have gathered, I've made some fairly noticeable adjustments to the way the top half of the main news page looks. I'm currently trialling this to see what people think of it, and if the consensus is that it's an improvement on the previous version, then I'll be rolling it out across the site. (To see how it used to look, just go to any other page - such as the individual entry for this post.)

So, love it? Loathe it? Couldn't give a damn? Your views matter!

Updated Friday, April 23, 2010 at 10:13 PM: As you've probably noticed, I ended up applying the revised design to the whole site. Looks like it's here to stay.

Cleaning up this site's act

9:28 PM / Web / No Comments

In an attempt to cut down on the spam that's been accumulating on this site recently, I've installed the Blog Janitor plugin for Movable Type and set it to disable commenting on all entries over 30 days old.

It's rather irritating to have to do this, but it should hopefully cut down on the amount of maintenance I'm currently having to do (most of the spam comments end up being posted in entries that were written several weeks ago), and in any event it's fairly rare for anyone to want to reply to anything older than that. If you want to comment on something from an older entry, you'd probably be as well leaving it on a more recent entry and linking back to the post you're referring to.

What just happened?

10:46 PM / Web / No Comments

I forgot to renew my domain, that's what.

Yes, I'm a boob. Mea culpa. In my defence, I didn't receive any form of email notification from NameCheap, the service I use. (Either that, or for some reason my email provider flagged them as spam. Either way, I never got them.) In their defence, rather than simply releasing the domain immediately they held on to it and gave me an opportunity to reclaim it, which I did without delay. Earning them further Brownie points, they restored my site in the space of three hours.

During the downtime, I did something I swore I'd never do and created a Twitter account. I've no idea whether I'll continue to use it in the long run, but for now consider it a little experiment into micro-blogging or whatever the heck you want to call it.

Normal transmissions will resume shortly

10:46 PM / Web / 4 Comments

Apologies for the rather scarce nature of my posts recently. I've got a bit of a backlog of BD Impressions pieces to get through and will hopefully make some headway on them before too long, but I've been a bit under the weather lately and the prospect of the laborious process of wading through several discs to take screen captures doesn't really appeal while my head is all clogged up. To tide you over, here is a YouTube video of Amber Benson doing the Macarena.

No, I've no idea what the Macarena is, but I stumbled across the video this evening and it cracked me up. Apparently she made a bet with some fans that, if her recently released book got 85 reviews on Amazon, she'd do this video.

I'm back!

12:58 PM / Web / No Comments

Well, yesterday was a laugh and a half for me as I spent it wrangling with a web site whose performance when it came to PHP and CGI scripts had become nothing short of outrageous. As I've mentioned a few times now, the site had for some time been a little on the sluggish side when it came to executing these functions, but on Saturday night I got back from work to find that it was taking upwards of two minutes just to post a comment, run a search or, in my case, edit or post an entry. Not good enough! I contacted my host, Domains Priced Right, and was initially informed that the customer support representative was "unable to duplicate the error". I persisted, offering specific URLs to test, and was then told that:

...as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance.

I was then presented with what amounted to little more than an advertisement to sign up for a dedicated server, the monthly fees for which were completely beyond my means. Rather than persist with my complaints only for them to fall on deaf ears, I decided to up sticks and arrange alternative hosting. Unfortunately, back in January of this year I renewed my Domains Priced Right subscription for twelve months, only six and a half of which have passed. Faced with enduring abominable performance for the rest of the year, I decided to simply write that expenditure off as a loss and jump ship immediately.

I searched around for a bit, reading testimonials from various web site owners, and eventually ended up at LD Hosting, a Germany-based company whose prices and services seemed to me to offer a more than acceptable trade-off between cost effectiveness and features. I went with their Silver Plan, which, for €4.95 per month, provides 10 GB of disk space and 100 GB of bandwidth - more than enough for my needs. It also supports cron jobs, subdomains, unlimited MySQL databases and all that jazz, giving me everything I need to run the site exactly as before. (As it happens, permission to execute cron jobs was unintentionally denied to me at first. I contacted their support department by opening a ticket, and within ten minutes I had a response and the problem had been rectified. That's what I call first class service!)

Transferring my data over to the new server was incredibly straightforward - surprisingly so, as I'd been dreading finding that I'd lost all the Movable Type custom fields I spent so long setting up and all the custom field data I spent even longer entering. Luckly, Movable Type 4.x's backup function is all-inclusive, creating a complete archive of everything, from entries to comments to custom data to spam filtering preferences, in a couple of mouse clicks.

Everything's up and running again now, and I'm sure you'll agree that the whole thing is much faster now than it was before. (Try running a search, or better yet posting a comment.) There may be a couple of kinks here and there to be ironed out, but I doubt it. If you come across any funny business, though, be sure to let me know.

Happy sailing!

What's wrong with you, lazybones?

12:00 PM / Web / No Comments

If you've been trying to post a comment or use the search function within the last twenty-four hours, you may have noticed that the site seems to be executing CGI scripts more slowly than normal. It's been a little sluggish for some time now, but as of Saturday it has become even worse, in some cases taking upwards of two minutes for a script to execute. I'm just glad I'm using static publishing, when means that general browsing of the site is unaffected even if the underlying database is wheezing and puffing. If you're trying to post comments, or in my case actually interacting with the back-end (editing and adding posts, approving comments, etc.), then the word "unbearable" springs to mind. (Edited to add: over a minute elapsed between me hitting "Save" on this entry and it actually publishing. This sort of thing should be damn near instantaneous.)

I've contacted my host, Domains Priced Right (formerly Donym), about the issue, but the representative said she was "unable to duplicate the error". They're still investigating the issue, however, and it must be said that, this morning, things do seem to have improved somewhat when compared to last night. Hopefully, the situation will continue to improve and we'll be back to normal before too long. If, however, the problem exists and my hosts are unable to rectify the problem, then the HMS Whimsy may have to hoist anchor and set sail for another harbour in which to dock. I hope not, because I've been a satisfied customer of Domains Priced Right for a number of years now and would rather not have to go through the palaver of arranging new hosting.

Google Chrome

5:28 PM / Web / 3 Comments

Does anyone use Google's Chrome browser? I've just downloaded it for the first time and I must say I'm very impressed. It has a slick, minimalist interface, very similar to Apple's latest iteration of Safari. More importantly, while I haven't done any actual number-crunching on it, subjectively it does feel very fast. (This may have something to do with the DNS pre-fetching option, which it claims improves page load performance.)

I'm not sure if I'm ready to give up my trusty Firefox quite yet (just as it took me forever and a day to trade in Internet Explorer for Firefox back in the day), but if you're looking for a sleek, efficient alternative browser, I heartily recommend giving Chrome a look. You can read more about the features on offer here.

New look site OMG LOL WTF!?!11

12:48 PM / Web / 16 Comments

As you've probably noticed, the site now looks a little different. The response to my preview of the redesign last night seemed to be pretty positive, so I decided to go ahead and make it official. While the new look isn't drastically different from its predecessor in appearance, I did rewrite most of the style sheet under the hood - a testament to how easy it is to redesign a site if the major design elements are handled via CSS rather than HTML.

At the moment, only the News section bears the new look, and I'll be converting the rest of the site on a section-by-section basis. I don't foresee any major difficulties, but I want to do it one piece at a time to ensure I don't run into any bugs.

By the way, can any CSS/XHTML gurus suggest a way of achieving the effect I've gone for with the main menu that will actually validate? Currently, each menu button is a separate div, each of which is wrapped with an "a href" tag. Unfortunately, this doesn't validate. I can get it to validate by placing the link inside the div, but then the .png overlay doesn't work. I don't consider it the end of the world if I can't get it to validate, but the perfectionist in me would prefer it if things were just tickety-boo.

Updated Friday, June 12, 2009 at 04:25 PM: The entire site has now been converted to tweaked layout. That was pretty painless!

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