Well, in all honesty, I think that was the saving grace. The CGI, that is. Lucas's love of craft came through so strongly that it elevated the VFX to the level of art. Without that, well... I shudder to think.
Anise
I'd like to wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day, both the paired and the unpaired.:) And remember, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence!! What does everyone have planned for that day? Personally, I'll be working a film shoot for 14 hours.
My inner geek was cruelly suppressed at a very young age. (I blame the entire thing on Computer Class with Father Casper in the basement at Benilde St. Margaret's High School...) So, I repressed everything, and only dated geeks.:) But now, the inner geek is BREAKING FREE!!! Mwah ha ha. (Ahem.)
However, believe me, if you have been discouraged from understanding anything about computers for years, it is very daunting. I'm lucky enough to have some wonderful mentors now (a good reason to stay friends with exes.) I'm learning more every single day. The project is using essentially all of my free time. That's how I like it. I cannot bear being ignorant any more. But the average person has been led to believe that basic technical profiency is impossible to achieve, and the older they are, the more likely this is to be true (which really is sad.)
Anise
A superstitious loathing? Goodness no. It's just that they don't like me. And they're PLANNING something behind those innocuous-looking silvery cases... (glares at Macs.) My geekiness has been and is of the good old-fashioned apprenticeship variety, and my mentors refuse to say anything good about 'em. Aside from that, I've decided NOT to get into the whole argument with people anymore!;) I'm sure they do hold their value pretty well. The real problem, though, is that in an educational setting, they always have at least one major application (in our case it's Avid) running on the older ones, and nobody ever knows how to fix/maintain/anything them. I've spending two hours a day with "Mac OSX-- the Hidden Manual" all semester.:) Everyone else thinks I'm nuts and keeps giving me surreptitious glances, but bit by bit, I'm learning. I guarantee you-- I know more than anyone in the building right now, which is *not* a compliment to me. Once again, though, I always get caught on problems largely caused by the orangutang sys admin. I do wish they'd hire someone else, but it ain't gonna happen.
Oh, lordy, no. I wish people at school were a lot more willing to consider SOMETHING besides Macs all the time for everything, OR at least we had someone there who actually knows how to manage the systems, or SOMETHING, because unless we're using the brand new G5's we're NOT satisifed with the performance. It all seems so great at the beginning when the schools get educational discounts,but then the systems get to be a few years old, the money goes to getting new 24P cameras instead, problems develop, and nobody ever knows how to fix them. For example, last semester, everyone in the entire editing class had all our footage disappear. Just gone. Nobody was ever able to find it. The omf files were still there, but the source files were mysteriously gone. They weren't erased, because they weren't in the trash. Nobody ever figured it out. The sys admin at the school has absolutely nothing to do with the Macs. There are literally about two people in ALL of Nashville who even could fix the problem (I've looked,) and none of them are going to do it for what the school could pay. We're stuck with someone doing tech (not really, but I don't know what else to call it,) whose primary job is something else, and who took three weeks to figure out that the reason why some people couldn't log in was that their passwords were less than eight letters long. So there you have it. My experience with Macs has been that if you can upgrade to the newest ones constantly, everything is fine. But if you're stuck in a situation where you can't, unpleasant things happen because nobody can help you!! If anybody has any ideas on this, I would love to hear them.
(shrug)
To each his own, I guess. Certainly Linux doesn't have a video or film editing program that I know of. Premiere is actually very good, but it doesn't have match-frame, which would improve it greatly. I just can't imagine not wanting to understand what you use, why you use it, what else you could be using, how it all works, how it got to where it is, what its predecessors were... I'm wired that way.
Part of the time, anyway. It's all Macs at school, since it's a film school. Final Cut Pro is a good program, no doubt about it,but given my choice I would not be working on a Mac. The thing that I don't care for at school is that people are not making an informed choice. Nobody-- I mean NOBODY-- even knows what Linux is or does. I have yet to find anyone else here who has EVER HEARD the word Unix (I'm really not kidding.)
How likely does everyone think this is to carry over to the Oscars? Or will that awful wallow *Cold Mountain* win everything? (Yes, I just had to watch almost 2 and 1/2 hours of Jude Law covered in mud, blood, and fake beards, which kind of makes it pointless to have him onscreen, and Nicole Kidman getting her hair mysteriously re-highlighted during the middle of the Civil War.)
Let's face it. Most of the guys who work in stores like Best Buy or CompUsa are really not experts, but they desperately try to sound as if they are. So how do you behave when you're projecting a false persona? Often you become arrogant, and come across like a jerk.I think that's the real explanation for why the women reported being treated worse when they weren't shopping with men. If you're working at one of those places and know that you're not exactly an expert but are trying to conceal that fact, you sometimes will see a female shopper and think "AHA! Now THERE'S someone I can feel superior to." Of course, the irony is that 90% of the people who shop at electronics/computer/tech whatever stores aren't all that well informed either, no matter what gender they are.
There was a place in Nashville where I went many times named-- maybe I'd better not name it. Oh, what the heck, they're closed now. Javanco. The people who worked there were the worst possible example of what I'm talking about. They loved to sound so superior and so arrogant (that was with the male customers. I can't tell you what they were like with the female customers because there weren't any. Now at the time, I was still suppressing my inner geek, so I would just stand there quietly with a geek boyfriend and look purty.:P It wasn't until a couple of years later that I learned the staff at Javanco almost never knew what they were talking about!! They'd learned a few things, and stretched them to sound like grand expertise, which they most definitely weren't.
Anyway. I think that's what's really behind it. I don't think it's actually pure sexism so much as the fear we all have of admitting our weaknesses, and our lack of knowledge. We go to great lengths to hide these things. Kinda sad.
Personally, I think they SHOULD create an "Open Source Geeks of 2004" calendar (or whatever that idea was called; it's been a long week.) *I'll* buy it, anyway.:)
Anise
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Well, in all honesty, I think that was the saving grace. The CGI, that is. Lucas's love of craft came through so strongly that it elevated the VFX to the level of art. Without that, well... I shudder to think. Anise
I'd like to wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day, both the paired and the unpaired. :) And remember, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence!! What does everyone have planned for that day? Personally, I'll be working a film shoot for 14 hours.
Um... yes, there are. I know I'm not the only one, because I've seen others.
My inner geek was cruelly suppressed at a very young age. (I blame the entire thing on Computer Class with Father Casper in the basement at Benilde St. Margaret's High School...) So, I repressed everything, and only dated geeks. :) But now, the inner geek is BREAKING FREE!!! Mwah ha ha. (Ahem.)
However, believe me, if you have been discouraged from understanding anything about computers for years, it is very daunting. I'm lucky enough to have some wonderful mentors now (a good reason to stay friends with exes.) I'm learning more every single day. The project is using essentially all of my free time. That's how I like it. I cannot bear being ignorant any more. But the average person has been led to believe that basic technical profiency is impossible to achieve, and the older they are, the more likely this is to be true (which really is sad.)
Anise
A superstitious loathing? Goodness no. It's just that they don't like me. And they're PLANNING something behind those innocuous-looking silvery cases... (glares at Macs.) My geekiness has been and is of the good old-fashioned apprenticeship variety, and my mentors refuse to say anything good about 'em. Aside from that, I've decided NOT to get into the whole argument with people anymore! ;) I'm sure they do hold their value pretty well. The real problem, though, is that in an educational setting, they always have at least one major application (in our case it's Avid) running on the older ones, and nobody ever knows how to fix/maintain/anything them. I've spending two hours a day with "Mac OSX-- the Hidden Manual" all semester. :) Everyone else thinks I'm nuts and keeps giving me surreptitious glances, but bit by bit, I'm learning. I guarantee you-- I know more than anyone in the building right now, which is *not* a compliment to me. Once again, though, I always get caught on problems largely caused by the orangutang sys admin. I do wish they'd hire someone else, but it ain't gonna happen.
Oh, lordy, no. I wish people at school were a lot more willing to consider SOMETHING besides Macs all the time for everything, OR at least we had someone there who actually knows how to manage the systems, or SOMETHING, because unless we're using the brand new G5's we're NOT satisifed with the performance. It all seems so great at the beginning when the schools get educational discounts,but then the systems get to be a few years old, the money goes to getting new 24P cameras instead, problems develop, and nobody ever knows how to fix them. For example, last semester, everyone in the entire editing class had all our footage disappear. Just gone. Nobody was ever able to find it. The omf files were still there, but the source files were mysteriously gone. They weren't erased, because they weren't in the trash. Nobody ever figured it out. The sys admin at the school has absolutely nothing to do with the Macs. There are literally about two people in ALL of Nashville who even could fix the problem (I've looked,) and none of them are going to do it for what the school could pay. We're stuck with someone doing tech (not really, but I don't know what else to call it,) whose primary job is something else, and who took three weeks to figure out that the reason why some people couldn't log in was that their passwords were less than eight letters long. So there you have it. My experience with Macs has been that if you can upgrade to the newest ones constantly, everything is fine. But if you're stuck in a situation where you can't, unpleasant things happen because nobody can help you!! If anybody has any ideas on this, I would love to hear them.
(shrug) To each his own, I guess. Certainly Linux doesn't have a video or film editing program that I know of. Premiere is actually very good, but it doesn't have match-frame, which would improve it greatly. I just can't imagine not wanting to understand what you use, why you use it, what else you could be using, how it all works, how it got to where it is, what its predecessors were... I'm wired that way.
Part of the time, anyway. It's all Macs at school, since it's a film school. Final Cut Pro is a good program, no doubt about it,but given my choice I would not be working on a Mac. The thing that I don't care for at school is that people are not making an informed choice. Nobody-- I mean NOBODY-- even knows what Linux is or does. I have yet to find anyone else here who has EVER HEARD the word Unix (I'm really not kidding.)
How likely does everyone think this is to carry over to the Oscars? Or will that awful wallow *Cold Mountain* win everything? (Yes, I just had to watch almost 2 and 1/2 hours of Jude Law covered in mud, blood, and fake beards, which kind of makes it pointless to have him onscreen, and Nicole Kidman getting her hair mysteriously re-highlighted during the middle of the Civil War.)
Let's face it. Most of the guys who work in stores like Best Buy or CompUsa are really not experts, but they desperately try to sound as if they are. So how do you behave when you're projecting a false persona? Often you become arrogant, and come across like a jerk.I think that's the real explanation for why the women reported being treated worse when they weren't shopping with men. If you're working at one of those places and know that you're not exactly an expert but are trying to conceal that fact, you sometimes will see a female shopper and think "AHA! Now THERE'S someone I can feel superior to." Of course, the irony is that 90% of the people who shop at electronics/computer/tech whatever stores aren't all that well informed either, no matter what gender they are. There was a place in Nashville where I went many times named-- maybe I'd better not name it. Oh, what the heck, they're closed now. Javanco. The people who worked there were the worst possible example of what I'm talking about. They loved to sound so superior and so arrogant (that was with the male customers. I can't tell you what they were like with the female customers because there weren't any. Now at the time, I was still suppressing my inner geek, so I would just stand there quietly with a geek boyfriend and look purty. :P It wasn't until a couple of years later that I learned the staff at Javanco almost never knew what they were talking about!! They'd learned a few things, and stretched them to sound like grand expertise, which they most definitely weren't.
Anyway. I think that's what's really behind it. I don't think it's actually pure sexism so much as the fear we all have of admitting our weaknesses, and our lack of knowledge. We go to great lengths to hide these things. Kinda sad.
Personally, I think they SHOULD create an "Open Source Geeks of 2004" calendar (or whatever that idea was called; it's been a long week.) *I'll* buy it, anyway. :)
Anise