Category: Geek

Superman IV – Nuclear Man I

No, not a goal line score from their last match up, more an amazing discovery of a whole bunch of cutting room floor footage from Superman IV.

You’ve all seen Superman IV right? If you haven’t you’re not missing out on much; I touched upon it recently as being ‘by far and away the worst of Reeve’s tenure‘ – and I stand by that (it’s still good though).

If you have seen it, then you’ll recognise the chap on the right above as Nuclear Man, the brawn created by Supes’ arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor.

However, on a recent journey around the more geekier corners of the internet, I happened upon an amazing nugget of footage that I never knew existed. Apparently, the Nuclear Man we know and love recognise is actually Nuclear Man V2. Version 1 was originally in the film too, and Superman (as you’ll see very shortly) disposed of him easily – hence Lex Luthor going back around a second time and coming up with v2.

Thing is, v1 was eventually cut (I can’ think why) and we only ever knew of v2.

What the HELL am I talking about?

Watch for yourself –

Just when you thought Superman IV couldn’t get any worse, right?
I’m just… lost for words.

Via iO9, with extra info (and lols) via i-mockery.

 

 

the coolest thing in the world

In Slovenia last week, one of my hosts, Aljosa Bagola (a cooler cat I never did meet), caught wind that I was a Batman fan and promptly pulled this image up on his iPhone.

joker kick flipping skateboard

Heath Ledger, as Joker, kick-flipping over Christian Bale on the set of The Dark Knight.

So. Freaking. Cool.

Enjoy it for a moment. Look at it over and over again. Then scroll down.

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It’s a fake.

But – like you – for a few moments, before I got ’round to blogging it at least, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

The-Joker-and-Batman-the-dark-knight-2022994-967-1450

Some thoughts on #DriveTime

This post is about the recent home release social media activation of the film DRIVE. There maybe spoilers ahead BUT I’ll be sure to yell loudly if they come near. Then again, we may make it without any. We shall see…

Drive: a stunning, nay breathtaking, film from 2011 (some would argue THE film of 2011). Woefully ignored by the Academy but adored by fans worldwide, its a glorious tale of love-driven revenge told through the haze of 70’s LA neon with a soundtrack to match.

Of Drive, I am a fan.

On Monday, Jan 30th 2012, Drive got its UK home release on both DVD and Blu-ray and, to celebrate said launch, film-studio-friendly agency, Think Jam, sent out early copies of the film out to a select group of fans on Twitter.

The aim? To kick-start a pre-scheduled participatory/group viewing, snappily referred to as #DriveTime.

Nice idea.

But not everyone agreed –

Dan has a point.

In fact, the whole conversation between him and Mike is worth a look (especially as both have proven experience in this kind of marketing). I stumbled across the conversation between the two of them after the film had finished, however found myself unknowingly agreeing with them midway through.

That aside, there’s also the very real issue of SPOILERS.

I would be gutted if someone I followed [on Twitter] unwittingly gave away key plot points throughout any film that I was yet to see (especially on THE DAY of its home release, ie; if you didn’t see it at the cinema then you’re stuffed). In fact, so much did it concern me that I issued my own warning before the film started.

Those issues aside, the ‘event’ seemed to go well. So well in fact, that my friend and I started kicking around some ideas around data visualisation that could work alongside it – yes, that’s right, we’re data geeks.

Bear with me, this is where things get interesting –

Data Visualisation around group events is nothing new, see The New York Times and the Super Bowl or before that, The Guardian and the World Cup; with swathes of data, you can make beautiful, beautiful visualisations.

But these events, they’re huge, global happenings with hundreds of thousands of tweets to process, giving you an extremely granular level of preciseness that you wouldn’t find with say, 1200 or so tweets… right?

Well, ish.

“…I bet they haven’t sold it in.”

One of the great things about these kinds of social media campaigns is that the data is (relatively) free and available for anyone to access. So what if you could steal the data from the Drive activity and not only present it back in a gorgeous fashion, but also demonstrate your skill as a potential new partner in doing so?

“Could you piggy-back another agency’s paid activity to showcase your own?”

Well, as I said, the data is there. So all you would need to do is farm that information and go from there… right?

Search term: “#DRIVETIME” – parameters 30-31 Jan 2012 – network: ‘TWITTER’ –

Export as .csv, group & subtotal the number of tweets by time published and… Voilà!

Look at that lovely data.

I’ve cleaned it up somewhat (only showing the data between 7pm and 10pm – the film started at 8pm) but you can clearly see the flurry of activity that happened throughout.

Now, we can sexify this chart (thanks Robbie) and we can also actually map the highlights of the film against the peaks and troughs of conversation.

A – 8pm: the film starts
B – End of [the awesome] opening sequence, ‘Night Call‘ kicks in
C – The Driver meets the girl for the first time – it’s encapsulating
D – Combination of ‘Under your Spell‘ starting + a key killer quote from our hero
E – Sequence of Driver and Irene spending time together [intense]
F – That elevator scene
G – Dip for a(nother) particularly violent piece
H – Film ends, people loved it and tweet according

.  Incredible.

What are the takeaways from this exercise?

  1. If you’re planning a scheduled viewing (over social media) make it both a) a universally accepted film (read: a classic that most people have seen) and b) perhaps one that’s not so visually sumptuous and arresting.
    .
  2. Think about THE DATA. Alright there was a Storify after the fact, but if me and my friends can throw together a crude visualisation of what our collective tweets look like… then Christ, what else is possible?

Which in turn asks a bigger question:

If today’s brands (and consumers) are ready to remix anything and everything, what’s to stop the agencies of tomorrow doing the same?

..oh and look, no spoilers.

Thursday Projects

focus

c/o Michael Hell

Taking an hour for lunch isn’t easy at the best of times. I try, we all do. Hell, (1000heads creative director) Robbie Dale and I have been trying to schedule a weekly lunchtime catch up for nearly two years now – it’s shocking how this meeting is hardly ever kept. However, the promise of it being there week in, week out at least makes us try to keep it…

Something new is required, a weekly focal point of something where I deliberately take myself away from the office (where possible) and attempt to build something new. Be it a new piece of writing or a new photography effort; the fourth day of the working week – the lunch break at least – is where I’m going to do it.

I started a fortnight ago and have already built something cool for the guys I work with; “1000heads is Out of the Office“.

This week? I don’t know… I might revisit This is my N8, maybe.

So here’s a challenge for 2012: book yourself an hour a week to build something new. Something fun.

Oh, and do it on a Thursday.

…

Get to it.

 

 

 

 

Learn

My first iPad wasn’t in fact mine. I merely had it on loan from the office. We danced and we played together but eventually, I had to hand it back. However, a couple of weeks ago (and thanks to some smart upselling from Vodafone), I picked up my own one.

This time an iPad2. Glorious.

This is the first time I’ve had an iPad ‘full time’ so to speak, and being a part-time student and observer of how technology influences human behavioural change, I’ve been keeping an eye on its influence on me.

The results so far? I’m reading more.

Allow me to explain: last year, I wrote about how the iPad did not mean the death toll for the publishing industry – and I stand by that. But, recently, I happened to come by an issue of The Economist’s lifestyle and culture quarterly, Intelligent Life (IL). It was my first encounter with said publication and, hidden deep within its pages, it featured a rather fantastic article entitled ‘Digital Africa‘. A super-relevant piece of writing and a subject that is dear to my heart. With that article alone, the magazine had found itself a new subscriber.

Later (and I don’t know how I discovered it, one assumes there must’ve been an ad somewhere inside), I soon learnt that IL had its own free iPad app. Even better. I thought, I know a lot of people with iPads and I know a lot of people that would enjoy that Digital Africa article. So… I’ll tell everyone who fits both those descriptions and that’ll be great.

I do, and it is.

Weeks later, my iPad2 arrives and the first app I download? IL. On top of the Digtial Africa copy, there’s a new issue available. I download that and read it, cover to cover, over the course of an afternoon.

‘Interesting’ being the key word here.

Confession time: I don’t read (in the traditional sense) as much as I’d like. It’s not a healthy admission to make, but it’s true. The, what might be seen as, usual time for reading – on the tube to and from work in the mornings and evenings – is usually taken up by writing. My Moleskine is my best friend when I’m travelling and I use the dead [read: ‘disconnected’] time to jot down my thoughts. Failing that, if my mind is bare, I catch up on email or just sit and listen to music. My daily reading habits tend to be made up of my Google Reader and that’s it.

However, upon finishing my second i-issue of IL, I then figured I’d give the Kindle a go. My sister and I bought one for our Mum recently and a few other friends have also extolled its virtues. I’ll get the app I say, that’ll do it.

I did, and it did.

The Kindle app is sitting quite nicely on my iPad as I type with ‘The Psychopath Test‘ by Jon Ronson (thank you Amanda) and ‘The Black Swan‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (thank you Jed) both sat ready to be read.

We’ll see how this goes, shall we? New technology, encouraging me to read. This I’m going to enjoy.

Before I close off though, there’s one last thing I want to share. Back in January 2010, mobile thought leader and visionary, Christian Lindholm, wrote these words about the iPad.

It may seem like a small change, but a generation which has instant access, quite literally, at its fingertips, will be a quite different generation to that which did not. We used to consider that someone was erudite if they had spent a number of years accumulating knowledge and expertise which they could deploy at the precise moment which it was required.
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Given that this information is all now on hand, people will come to rely more on an ability to recall data from the system. Ability to focus, and knowledge of the best places to look, will become the most important facets to consider. These are fundamental changes.

It’s still one of my favourite blog posts to date and I think that, in this age of the information rich, the sentiment stands true:

Irrespective of your thoughts on what the iPad is for, these shifts in the way we store, recall and interact with knowledge signify a human behavioural change that we – in our lifetimes – will probably never be able to truly quantify.

Learn.

 

 

Old sketches

Found my old photobucket account earlier today, forgot I even had it. Better yet, I found some of my old sketches from school…

Photobucket

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If I remember rightly (and in no order in particular): Sam Guthrie, Bobby Drake and Joseph. As well as a few nameless made up fellas.

1997. I don’t even know if I have these sketch books any more, damn pleased I took photos.

Paging Zuners

If that’s what you’re called.
I got this today:

Here’s a question: what do you think of Zune?

I’m going to make a few assumptions (and do please, correct me if I’m wrong); if you’re a Zune user – aka ‘a Zuner’ – you’re probably American and you may’ve even bought, and perhaps even still use, the original Zune machine handheld thing that was never launched over here in the UK.

However, you may also be a Windows Phone (WP) user and/or an Xbox owner. All of these things I expect to influence your response to this following, secondary question:

Is it actually any good?

Now please. Before you move forward with your answer (either in the comments field below or in fact perhaps, with your own blogged repost) please take into account that your opinion may bias towards the positive as you’ve made such a chunky investment (especially you original Zune hardware owners). So please, give full and valid responses – warts an’ all, if you will.

Why am I asking this question? Well, I am an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, soon-to-be Windows-Phoner and avid Spotify fan. The latter of the three costs £9.99pcm and allows me all sorts of awesome music-based fantasticness. Treats such as:

  • Access to an almost infinite amount of music
  • Downloadable content that I can play offline, both on my desktop and on my mobile
  • Sharable cross-platform playlists of awesomeness (that can be locked down or collaborative)
  • Thanks to the marvelous integration on both Spotify and Xbox Live, I can stream my most listened to tracks through my Xbox using the Last.fm application available through Live Gold
  • Bonus feature, said music can be controlled BY VOICE thanks to my Kinect

Understand that your answers will help inform my decision on whether or not to drop Spotify for Zune (when WP finally launches on Nokia’s devices). As it stands, I’m reliably informed that Spotify is coming to WP with the next software update (aka ‘Mango), but because I like things to just work – I’m tempted to move for the full Zune offering.

Friends, Zuners, fellow tech-heads and audiophiles – it’s over to you.