WAS1 Productions

I  thought of this idea while re-watching the the movie Jurassic Park with friends. It goes back to an oft done joke about how powerful tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs were, but with one obvious physical deficiency. I joked how T Rex porn would highlight that and how it would be subversive and scary to society and they would make movies like Refer Madness about the problem.

I haven’t done any real writing for a few years, so I’m rusty. This may be a little clunky and not as funny as I’d originally hoped, but I like the idea and it’s good to be writing again.

On the Dangers of Unattainable Perfection in Fantasy Imagery and the Effects on Saurian Body Image 

by Will A. Sanborn, 11/01/12

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Cloud Atlas is both a compelling and challenging film. It has a sweeping narrative and stunning visual style, which is to representative of the Wachowski’s work. It also expects something from the viewer as it consists of several parallel and interconnected story-lines. These stories flow linearly in their own time frame, but the plot of the film cuts between all of them, sometimes quickly so. The editing, pacing and theming of these cuts was wonderfully done.

The stories are all inter-related, but the film is not totally clear on the mechanics of that. It is eluded that the characters could possibly be reincarnated souls, but that is not strongly suggested. Several links between the parallel lives are shown, but they don’t always make logical sense. Even so, thematically it all works.

The characters are played by the same actors in each of the different periods, sometimes with some impressive makeup which loses them in the character. The acting and characterization is brilliant and the stories make for some wonderful character drama. The film also works across several different genres and tones between the stories, which made things balanced and interesting.

There were some major themes throughout the stories: man’s violence against man for greed and more basic human drives, selfish and selfless acts, falls and redemptions. Deconstructing the film, it felt like the stories fell into two types, major arcs which dealt with the fight against systematic injustice, and minor arcs which served as connections between the other stories and showed more of humanity’s mix of weakness and potential.

The movie isn’t perfect. Some of the connections between stories felt a little superfluous. The points the film made did get a bit heavy handed at times, but at the same time the drama and overall intrigue of the stories were still definitely entertaining. If you’re willing to watch a film which takes some degree of active engagement from the viewer, and which could definitely use a second viewing to aid in the understanding, then it’s well worth the effort and a rewarding experience. 4/5 stars.

I don’t have as much of a personal presence on the web as I used to, with time going to other things these days. Here is where my creative work can be found on other sites.

My photography can be found on flickr.

My writing can be found in spoken-word form in these podcast episodes, and in print form in these books: New Technicolor Dreams, That Old Time Religion and The Journey.

I run a small press, Anthropomorphic Dreams, focusing on story-telling with anthropomorphic animals. I have published print and e-books in single-author novels and collects as well as multi-author anthologies. I continue to publish stories in spoken word on the podcast.

Being a wizard is supposed to be exciting and prestigious, but what if it was more like being a programmer or an engineer?

Podcastle, the fantasy podcast, has a fun story Zauberschrift, about an apprentice brought in to do sustaining work on an old wizard’s buggy spells.

Reading the eulogies on the passing of Steve Jobs prompted me to comment on my thoughts on Apple and my relationship with their products over the years.

When I was in college, my impression of Macs were that they were toy computers. It was certainly true that in the early 90s, the price differential between Macs and PCs meant that you could get a lot more computing power for your buck on a Windows machine.

Back then I felt that people should be smart enough to use a computer and not have it dumbed down. Macs were used by hippies, or “illiterate bikers” as I quipped to my machead friend Steve after watching one of their commercials back in the dorm at RPI. The whole “Think Different” ad campaign struck me as arrogant, yet I ignored my own engineering-biased hubris.

It’s funny that as I dabbled in writing and video editing and then digital photography, that I didn’t appreciate Macs earlier. I remember being seriously underwhelmed by the desktop video solutions of the late 90s; I’m curious how it would’ve been on Apple products back then, if I could’ve afforded the hardware.

I was first exposed the “Apple Virus” as one independent Macintosh store salesmen called it when I purchased an iPod Gen 4 back in 2004. I smiled at the notion then. The virus was slow to infect, but it got me in the end. I bought an iPhone 3G in February of 2009 and they slowly had me hooked.

I replaced my aging Dell laptop last December with a Macbook Air and the speed and lack of weight were well worth the money. I grew to like and was impressed by the Mac OS as well. This June a hard-drive crash pushed me to finally get the iMac I’d been pondering for months, and I haven’t looked back.

Back in the 90s the power of the machines mattered for the number crunching work I was doing, but in time processors got powerful and cheaper. It’s amazing what we have for computers today and now what matters is the user interface and quality of the software tools.

Steve Jobs understood what took me years to figure out and appreciate, that technology as tools should be simple to use, not as dumbing down, but empowering users to do more with it. After getting tired of crappy software, underwhelming consumer products and complicated tool chains, Apple products stand out, along with Garmin auto GPS units and the TiVo, as shining examples of products that just work.

Thanks for pushing for quality, Steve.