The Conscientious Objector

This is me...

2009-07-27T23:55:00.000-07:00

... when I've had too much to drink.

Kerfuffle!!!

2009-07-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

You know I've been a goof. Let me just, firstly, cop out to that one. For as long as I'm the guy you know, I've waited for someone that cares so decidedly and profoundly for me. That'd be you.

I'm so thoroughly sorry for choosing to forget how much it mattered to me to find someone like you, the most doting person I've ever known that didn't actually have something to do with me being born in the first place.

So, yes... all the good things I've done for you, simply aren't enough. That I may react sometimes brashly and to my own detriment is proof only that I'm inexperienced and so far (though not for much longer) unappreciative. But hell, it's pretty easy for me to just take a step back, think of you, the whole of you... and just find myself out of breath.

I love every curve that there is to ya, that I'm able to see how life flows through every inch of your body and your eyes... that pair of shade-changing wonders that lifts my soul every time I'm lucky enough to stare at them. And boy, am I lucky. Nowhere else in this life of mines do I find something so soothing and complex. You are the challenge I'll forever want to take on. You don't stand still or react, you are this wonderful person that compliments and tries to better mines, a perfect problem I want to solve every single time.

I have made the most special find of my whole life. Or maybe it's that you found me. That part is irrelevant. You are now with me everywhere I go, and I walk a few inches above the ground because of it.

I love you Jessica.

p.s: I pinnnnnnch ^_^

The Year In Ligaments

2008-02-16T00:54:00.000-08:00

3 A nightmare befalls the nicest guy in sports

2 Alonzo Mourning effectively ruins the Miami Heat 07-08 season

1 Ronaldo is human and finite, after all

3 Greg Oden gets drafted number one over Kevin Durant only to have season ending surgery before it even began... Portland stops to breath. The team responds, and Oden is relieved of tremendous pressure. Still, a superstar career in its infancy is put on hold. Enthusiasm has turned into dread and the question now follows: Well... what if?

2 Alonzo Mourning, the Heat's true big, bad defensive center, falls on the other side of the "untimely shit" spectrum when he breaks a tendon in his right knee, only a few dozen games away from what would have been a much more dignified retirement. The Heat become the worst team in the league without him. The question now is: Does he retire this year, unfulfilled? Or does he come back one more year to tie up loose ends and ride off into the sunset?

1 Ronaldo, the most feared striker of the past decade, had already been through not one, but two of these on the same right knee. Then, he became a deity to the soccer world by coming back from that and winning the world cup. Well, Ronaldo is human again. The greatest offensive talent ever, bound again by its vessel. And I can't imagine any man in sports feeling more defeated.

Dear Tom Brady

2008-02-16T00:27:00.000-08:00

Even the best quarterback ever will fail to throw a pass with his back to the ground.

Regards,
yours truly.

Tipsarević

2008-01-19T00:17:00.000-08:00

It's 12:17 am of a nascent Saturday morning and the only thing keeping me awake is this young, fine, gutsy Serbian player, who's as the time, on his way to have a one set advantage over the FED.

His body language screams never-say-die, and by now, I feel I owe him a sleepless night.

... and it just happened, he's gone one set ahead.

I know the Roddick debacle came just 24 hrs earlier, but this... would be so much more GRAND.

Stay tuned, fellas.

Dear Tony Romo,

2008-01-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

"Respect is a lot more important, and a lot greater, than popularity." - Julius Erving

Regards,
yours truly.

Getty

2006-11-30T19:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it gets too crowded.

This poor Chinese kid was getting yelled at for having untied shoes.

This guys probably didn't appreciate the snap.

It's a cezanne, and Igor looks eerily similar to the subject.

<3>

P2PTV, two years later.

2006-11-28T20:24:00.000-08:00

Around this time two years ago, I had just about had enough of not being able to watch my favorite Soccer leagues on TV due to their relative narrow demographic and lack of profitability. So I researched, and thought I had found the solution, at least as far as my Champion's League cravings were concerned, with UEFA.com's RealPlayer streaming of matches. A paid service which turned out to provide little satisfaction, filled as it was with buffering problems and some pretty dumb choices (no commentary, really?).

So I did my research, and learned about Coolstreaming, a faulty but promising new take on InternetTV, using Bittorrent technology to decentralize distribution of video streams. Though I had limited success with it, I was able to watch streams in full screen (resolution) at a quality (bitrate) that I felt content with. This, was clearly the way to go.

Then the P2PTV development community exploded.

Suddenly there were a handful of efficient programs to choose from (ironically competing with each other for the user base necessary to sustain a quality stream) which seemed to appeal mainly to asian viewers and starved american soccer fans. Sure, the commentary was often in Cantonese, but the emotions came across loud and clear.

Unlike CoolStreaming, some still exist today: PPlive, Sopcast, Feidian, TVAnts

The most english-friendly? Sopcast.
The most widely used? PPlive.
The better one? Sopcast.

Why?

Well, they let you broadcast your own streams. Which, in case you want to be fanciful about it, means you can broadcast your own channel. That's why.

Soccer content is almost impossible to come by on them nowadays, which is why I stopped caring for it as a resource. But I never stopped caring for it as an idea.

After all, if enough people wised up to it, no, if the masses somehow came to accept to sharing their upload in exchange of download as a second nature, we could stream a lot of very pretty content. If that's too idealistic, at least we wouldn't have to put up with the seemingly eternal nature of HD downloads (the only way they're available nowadays: Microsoft).

I wonder just how many people make any tangible use of their upload bandwidth nowadays. Sometimes I send friends songs I like, and I find myself uploading pictures to my server often, but I am me and I do more with a computer than some people do with their whole lives. I am demanding, and the only thing that ever ticked me off about uploading is crossing the line between caring for others and having your upload bottleneck your download speed. Which means with the right formula, someone as easily irritable as myself would have no objection to entertaining such a noble thought.

If you don't bother me, then you're free to go ahead and service me with forward thinking stuff like P2PTV. So please, someone out there, BRING IT.

<3>

The Fountain, or how to misunderstand a medium.

2006-11-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

Film, as I see it, is capable of delivering some of the most amazing and praiseworthy art the creative mind can produce. Not only that, but unlike most mediums, it's highly attractive and readily accessible to the masses, presenting a sort of ideal condition for an artist striving for excellence while also desiring to reach a broad, fully representative audience.

Unfortunately, this idealistic view of what the medium is capable of can sometimes bring about displeasing results. Such is the case with Darren Aronofsky's latest, The Fountain.

The Fountain has been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey for it's equally maddening and ambiguous staging of whatever it is their respective directors where trying to imply, and, at first glance, seems a plausible enough analogy. Both movies seem to stand beyond description and force the viewer to interpret more, digest less, of what's presented before them. Both movies are incredibly austere when it comes to delivering the storytelling we would otherwise expect. Both appear to be decipherable only under a different, dazed state of mind.

So where does one become a masterpiece, and the other, a painfully expensive mistake?

Unlike The Fountain, Kubrick's movie came not out of merely himself. Expanding on Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel", both minds worked simultaneously on 2001: A Space Odyssey as both a screenplay and a novel. Taking the ideas of a man as established as Isaac Asimov himself and expanding on them, Kubrick's exercise in storytelling abstraction had the benefit of a strong philosophical foundation. The Fountain lacks this all too important advantage.

I have not bothered trying to interpret The Fountain. Why should I? Aronofsky may be a genius filmmaker, but I'm not so sure I want to obsess over his absurdly presented philosophical musings. A conclusion that ultimately means I have little to no desire to work at making the connections a disjointed film such as this requires, and which leaves me with no choice but to take it all on face-value. A disastrous outcome for this type of film, and this film in particular.

If you're going to deny me the simpler pleasures of storytelling, whilst giving me no motivation to decipher whatever else you've presented before me, then I'm just not going to care.

Aronofsky just missed the point. However much he believed in his ideas, he made a terrible choice of medium. Abstraction works fine on a painting or photograph, which are relatively cheap to produce and cost nothing to appreciate to anybody but their potential owners. Films are costly ventures, and he had no right pursuing this material as a film. Perhaps as a book, where a more selective demographic would have been prepared to put the necessary effort into his ideas.

As it stands, it is likely that unsuspecting individuals might stumble upon this film only to feel robbed, bored, or just plain disappointed. Imagine a kid oblivious to everything but the attractive poster committing ten dollars to this movie. Then imagine the same kid picking up this story as a book. One is immensely more likely than the other, and having seen this film with a crowd either asleep, displeased or restless to leave, I deem his choice of medium a tragic and irresponsible oversight, and the film, ultimately, a failure.

Cannavaro... Ballon D'Or?

2006-11-27T20:35:00.000-08:00

Today was France Football's official announcement of the year's Ballon D'Or honoree: Fabio Cannavaro. Scarcely a surprise, since Spanish and Italian newspapers had reported on this as early as November 16th, when the magazine's editor was spotted in Madrid presumably to inform the thirty-three year old of having won the race for Europe's (and perhaps the world's) most coveted individual award for the sport, the first for a defender since Matthias Sammer was awarded the Ballon D'Or a decade ago in 1996.

The early announcement felt just shy of surprising. And today's confirmation, while not a woeful choice by any stretch of the mind, feels myopic, based solely on his performance in the summer's World Cup, which in hindsight, was almost completely bereft of remarkable games and individual performances. In a charmless tournament, Italy perfectly exemplified the adage... you don't have to deserve the World Cup, you have to win it.

It is not hard to contemplate players more deserving of the award. Even without having to go past the Italian squad, there was the choice of Gianluigi Buffon, his amazing save of Zidane's powerful header late in the final, and a long, legendary career of safekeeping behind him. Certainly the most well regarded since Russia's Lev Yashin, "The Black Spider". That he came second place in the overall vote tally for the award is indicative of his abilities and of the unappreciated nature of his position. And had it not been for Zidane's career suicide-cum-headbutt, I wouldn't be writing this at all.

But when a seemingly unremarkable team performs such a feat, defensive stability becomes the focus of praise. And thus Cannavaro more or less stumbles into the award. Incredibly, the first in a long line of legendary Italian defenders to have won the award. The difference? His World Cup in Germany 06 to Franco Baresi's third place in Italy 90 and to Paolo Maldini's second place in USA 94.

In a way, I have an easier time seeing this decision as honoring Catenaccio, Italy's defensive legacy, their raison d'etre and their particular way of living the sport. And it suits. A tolerable choice until Messi blooms, Eto'o claims sole ownership of Barcelona's attack or Henry stops underperforming on the big games.

Hello, world.

2006-11-27T15:36:00.000-08:00

It's hard to tell how some ideas become recurring thoughts which the mind cannot do away with. After all, the desire to do is a capricious imperative in us all.

I guess there was something about the many disparately remarkable things that transpired this weekend which first let me to entertain the thought of creating a blog, then concluding that I could not, should not, do without one. After all, there are very little differences to appreciate between a well written blog and a well written editorial, both having the potential to be equally influential but the former being more accessible. Blogs are ripe for exploitation, of this, I'm no longer unaware. Better late than never.

What, if anything, may you anticipate?

I can't quite say what this words might illustrate, but I promise, something of interest you'll always read. If this not be the case, heavens! curse my fate!