I always saw special effects as a way to help tell the story, not be the story itself. When a movie relies on special effects to simply be eye candy, I tend to get pulled out of the film immediately, but lately there seems to be this problem where you can’t have a good story and special effects at the same time anymore; it’s one or the other.

Every movie that James Cameron has ever made married both special effects and story in such a way where the two look like they were meant to be together. From Stan Winston’s work on Terminator to the Na’vi in Avatar, Cameron doesn’t let the effects get in the way, he blends them into the film.

Despite the hype and my own impatience, I went into this movie with no real expectations except that it’s a Cameron film and and I shouldn’t expect anything less than to get blown away. Not only did this movie deliver, but for the first time in years I want to go see a movie multiple times. I can’t even remember when I went to see a movie a second time simply to see it again and not because someone wanted to go and I tagged along.

I won’t spoil the story, but like other films that have borrowed from well known tales, this repackages it in a way where you forget that the story’s been told before. It’s how it’s told that makes a difference. One hundred fifty years from now, man has started exploring the world of Pandora, a moon orbiting Polyphemus, a planet of Proxima Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former marine, agrees to go to Pandora to replace his twin brother to “drive” an avatar, a being grown of the DNA from humans and the native Na’vi. His brother was killed, and since his DNA matches his brother’s, he’s a perfect match to drive the avatar. Driving an avatar means moving your consciousness into it from a remote location while your body stays inside the transfer machine. You taste, touch, and feel everything the avatar does. His mission is to gain the Na’vi’s trust and learn what he can from them so that he can convince them to move from their home. The land the Na’vi live on has the richest deposit of unobtainium which sells for $20 million a kilogram on Earth, and the company in charge of mining it (Weyland-Yutani?) will go to any lengths to get what they need. Jake lost the use of his legs and was promised an expensive operation to walk again if he succeeds in his mission to convince the Na’vi to move.

Jake meets up with a native of the Na’vi, a female named Neytiri (Zoë Saldana). Their relationship grows over the course of the film, which takes place over a period of three months. It shouldn’t be a surprise that his bond with her affects his view of the mission he’s on. The biggest problem is that he’s dependent on these transfer machines to connect to his avatar, run by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). Without them, his mission and his relationship are essentially over.

The technology used to render the Na’vi is the best I’ve ever seen on screen. Other companies such as Square (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children), and Paramount Pictures (Beowolf) have tried computer generated imagery before, and as impressive as they were, they can’t match up against what James Cameron and his team have done for Avatar. Not only are facial expressions perfectly captured, but I didn’t see a hint of any inorganic movement in these characters. One major issue I notice with computer generated characters is how they don’t seem one hundred percent realistic and organic. Sometimes you’ll get 75% organic and 25% algorithm with a sprinkle of artist interpretation. With Avatar, they seemed to capture everything the actors did and only rendered a new skin around them. That is how revolutionary this system is. If you watch this video, take note of the dots on the actor’s faces which are recorded via the camera boom in front of them.

The 3D isn’t gimmicky at all. I’ve seen 3D movies that intentionally throw things at your face or have something come at you so you get scared by it. I don’t enjoy that kind of experience because it’s not genuine. The 3D in this film is not used in any way to do anything other than make you feel like you’re there in the world of Pandora. Ash, insects, seeds, grass, branches, and birds fly around you, but never at you. You feel like you’re there, and other than a few shots of someone holding a spear at the camera, and one instance of debris coming at you for a fraction of a second, there wasn’t one gimmicky frame of 3D in the film.

The night scenes of Pandora with the bioluminescence really shows how well the 3D can absorb you into the film. There was a point early in the film where I was aware that it was 3D, but I let the imagery take over, and because it was so seamless, I really felt that I experienced the film more than if I was watching it in 2D.

The music by James Horner, who had worked with Cameron before on Titanic and Aliens, is as beautiful as Pandora itself. Film score fans will definitely hear many “Hornerisms” in the score harking back to movies like Star Trek II, Krull, and Titanic. His use of minimal, but poetic music for the night scenes in Pandora truly pull you into the film, and he uses the full orchestra for the battle scenes which are scored as well in the music as it is visually.

Speaking of battle scenes, the last 30 or so minutes of the film is a massive battle sequence which I haven’t seen the likes of since Return of the Jedi. Well choreographed, it plays out better than some of the other garbage you see nowadays that even I can’t make out (yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Michael Bay). Unlike today’s style of three-frames-and-you-miss-it action editing, Cameron keeps the old school style of letting you absorb a scene, even a battle scene, so that you can see exactly what’s going on, and understand it. It’s so refreshing to watch a movie and feel like the camera isn’t going to pull away at the instant you see something.

There were several times I realized while watching the film that my mouth was literally open. I kept saying to myself “how much work went into THAT scene?”. I’ve been watching the progression of special effects from the days of Star Trek on TV and of course Star Wars in the theater, and taking in this movie and knowing what I know of special effects, I can’t begin to imagine the sheer amount of research and talent that went into this film. This is truly a revolution in how movies will be made.

There were rumors of a Star Trek movie on and off for years, but it wasn’t until Star Wars’ release in 1977 that Paramount execs pushed a motion picture into production, but some people say they pushed it too hard too fast. Its script wasn’t even considered original since it mirrored an episode called “The Changeling” where a probe from Earth becomes sentient and seeks its “creator”, the budget was getting way out of hand. The movie was rushed so fast that Paramount didn’t even get to show it to test audiences. In fact, the story goes that the print sent to Washington, D.C. for the premiere was still “wet”, meaning it had literally come from the printer.

There’s so much more history to this film which I won’t rehash here. I suggest people read the Wikipedia entry on the movie to understand more about how the film came to be. This post is more about the film itself, and how Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a victim of the changes in how movies were made in Hollywood.

Star Wars changed how movies were made. Science fiction/fantasy films at the time were not always done well, and when a new scifi movie came out, the expectation was that it would be some bad actors in bad costumes reading bad scripts with bad special effects and bad music. Star Wars changed all that with modern special effects techniques, a witty script (albeit, not a truly original story), and a glorious soundtrack which probably helped save the film more than anything else. It was the first truly fun scifi/fantasy movie ever made that didn’t appeal to just a certain demographic.

American cinema at the time told their stories differently. Star Trek: TMP was the second-to-last American film to have an overture before the movie began which gave a sense that this film was epic in scope. “The Black Hole”, released a week later, would be the last American film to use one. I tell people that Star Wars itself started with a bang, but there’s no real action again in the movie until the escape from Mos Eisley 45 minutes into the film. Star Wars hides that fact very well. Many movies allowed their story to unfold slowly, and it wasn’t uncommon for a movie to be over two or two-and-a-half hours, especially epic films like “West Side Story” or “The Sound of Music”. In fact, Star Trek: TMP’s director was Robert Wise, who directed those two films. He allowed the story of Star Trek: TMP to unfold the same way, slowly telling the story of how the crew came back together and allowing us to fly around the refit Enterprise for four minutes.

This is where I believe the movie’s biggest flaw was. As a kid, I remember absorbing every frame of that movie, but even then I realized it was dragging more than it should, and I think it was because I was spoiled by Star Wars. Had Star Wars not come out, and had Star Trek not been rushed to theaters and edited better, I think it would have been received better. Star Trek was about exploration, but it had its share of battles with the Klingons and Romulans, and I think we were all expecting a bit of that. Instead, we got a film that took almost 40 minutes to get to the Enterprise, and then the rest of the film didn’t have any action at all. There was one short scene where the Enterprise’s warp engine imbalance places them in a wormhole they couldn’t get out of, and some nasty asteroid just happened to be pulled in with them, forcing them to fire a single photon torpedo to destroy it and get them out of the wormhole. That’s the extent of the action in the film.

The script didn’t give the actors anywhere to go in this film. So much of it was spent talking about the cloud, reacting to the cloud, dealing with the cloud, that they didn’t do anything else. Persis Khambatta and Stephen Collins actually had the best on-screen chemistry of the whole cast, but that was all the script could give. It wasn’t until the very end of the film where they reach who/what it is they’ve been trying to find that they break out a little. It’s not until Star Trek II that the cast does a much better job.

Star Trek: TMP’s scope was set higher than even science geek kids like me could believe. The cloud that comes back to find Earth is said in the film to be “over 82 AUs in diameter”. One AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun (92 million miles). That’s just ridiculous and I remember sitting there thinking “well, where the heck does this thing FIT in the solar system?”. To convey the scope of the ship inside the cloud to audiences, five minutes of screen time is dedicated to reaction shots of the Enterprise bridge crew looking at the alien environment as the Enterprise flies into the cloud. Five minutes of open mouths and “OMG I can’t stop staring” shots. Admittedly, the exterior shots showing the size of the ship compared to the Enterprise are impressive. Seeing the Enterprise as a spec against the mass of the alien vessel really does convey to me that this ship is bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, but unfortunately it was lost in the sea of “ooh, aah” reactions from the crew.

But this is part of how movies were made back then, before the MTV-style-orgy-of-three-frame-shots-you-missed-it-because-you-blinked Michal Bay editing. This is why I feel that Star Trek: TMP suffered from audiences expecting more Star Wars and getting 2001: A Space Odyssey.However, I think that if people can put those expectations aside and see the movie for what it was designed to be at the time, they would gain a better appreciation for it. At Star Trek conventions, people waiting on line with me would call it “The Motionless Picture” and I’d always ask the same question: “Had Star Wars not come out, would you like TMP more?”. Every time I asked that of a Trekk(ie/er…whatever), I’d get the same “huh, I never thought of that” look. I don’t know if anyone I spoke to back then really gained an appreciation of the movie after thinking that way about it, but I hope at least one person did. Star Trek: TMP is not a bad movie. Star Trek V is a bad movie.

As with Star Wars, Star Trek: TMP’s most redeeming quality was the music. Jerry Goldsmith wrote a beautiful score for the film, giving it an atmosphere that I think no other composer could have done. One of my favorite cues is the music used early in the film when we’re floating around the transport hub that Kirk beams into because the Enterprise’s transporters are broken. As much criticism as the crew’s reaction shots got, the score for that scene is truly amazing. One unique piece of equipment used in the score’s production was something called a Blaster Beam which was a signature piece of the film’s music. The sound helped shape the environment the crew was in. You can see Craig Huxley, inventor of the Blaster Beam, demoing it here. Ilia’s theme, used as the film’s overture, is considered to be one of the most beautiful pieces of cinematic music ever written.

Speaking of environments, I have to give credit to the special effects team for creating a beautiful visual experience. Douglass Trumball and his team did an amazing job of making you feel like you were right there. There’s one shot in particular which always stands out for me which is where the Enterprise reaches the cloud, and that shot coupled with Goldsmith’s score, really shows me what they were going for with this film. There are other shots, but that one in particular stands out for me. I gained an appreciation for the exterior shots of the Enterprise after seeing the film in Jersey City one weekend evening with my grandfather, and seeing the World Trade Center at night right across the Hudson. The towers looked like they were an inspiration for how the Enterprise was lit in the film.

Star Trek: TMP’s payoff worked if you’re a die hard Star Trek fan, but I can see why it wouldn’t work for most audiences. Merging with an alien, who has the essence of the woman you love inside it, and forming a new life form in the process, isn’t something I think most people would get. Even I don’t understand why Decker would do that considering there are billions of women in the galaxy, and he has a lifetime ahead of him as a successful Starfleet officer. Still, it’s part science fiction, part romantic, and it works.

As I did on line at Star Trek conventions, I will say the same thing to anyone reading this post: try watching Star Trek: TMP without the expectation of whiz-bang space battles. Think of how a book or an epic film unfolds and try to lose yourself in the story. Get a widescreen copy of the film (it’s currently out on Blu-Ray), and turn the lights off. Nothing will recreate the feeling of seeing it in the theater in 1979, but try to give it a shot. You may be surprised.

The game has been doing so well in Asia that it got MMORPG of the Year in Korea. NCSoft must have gotten the idea that localizing the game for North America and Europe would be a good idea and decided to start the port to other languages. On the Aion beta forums, I saw subforums for French and German, so it seems they’re going for more than just English at this point. With the game itself doing so well, it seems like the only thing that NCSoft had to change were the strings used to display text, and the voices of the characters. One thing I never really got used to from watching anime for so many years is the constant over-exaggeration that the voice actors make. The same holds true in the beta version I tested. Since the game has the original Asian voices, the characters have that overdone “karateeeeeeeeCHOP!” to their voice which I don’t think will fly in North America.

NCSoft started doing closed beta weekends in North America starting mid-June. Some people were able to get beta codes for specific weekends, but if you preorder the game you get into all the closed betas. I got the beta code for Aion from preordering the collector’s edition from my local Gamestop. I had to tell the (new) guy behind the counter that yes, you should have beta keys in the drawer behind you, and despite his reluctance to listen to someone that didn’t actually work there, he checked and was actually surprised I knew more about his store’s inventory than he did. I missed Closed Beta Event #2 by only a few hours and had to settle on waiting two weeks for CBE#3 July 2-6 to try the game for the first time. A note about this beta is that unlike some previous betas, this is actually a test of the 1.0.2 Aion client which was released in Korea a year ago. What’s really being tested are the translations, and although I couldn’t find anything official on the subject, I’m betting that NCSoft is testing the reaction to the North American and European markets.

The iPhone’s screen is 320×480 and has two tall banners on its home screen, one on the top and one on the bottom. What annoys me about slapped-together wallpapers is how they just resize images to fit the screen and don’t take the banners into account. If images are blindly resized, the result is cutting off heads or logos that look amateurish.

In these examples, the images are resized in such a way that Master Chief’s head is obscured by the top banner, as is the Ferrari logo. I’m betting these were desktop wallpapers that were resized without thought to what would be obscured.

When the iPhone was first released, one of the first things I did was put together an iPhone wallpaper Photoshop template so that people would have a guide to what their wallpapers would look like when set.

In the screenshot of the Photoshop guide above, I made the important areas different colors so that it would be easy to see where the borders of the areas are, and I put guides in so that tools such as Marquee will snap to the correct position when using it. I also made the top and bottom banners a separate layer so that you can switch them on and off easily.

I hope that this helps many of you crop and size your iPhone images properly.

Click here to download the iPhone Wallpaper Template for Photoshop.

I’ve had a pretty happy relationship with Windows XP, unlike the constant bluescreening from the Windows 9x family. In the beginning, there were some driver issues that had to be banged out with XP, but after a few months, it because quite stable and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a BSOD from it.

I also truly loved how you could customize it. I was a huge Object Desktop user, using everything I could to give XP a unique look. There was some heavy use of XP Customization on the neowin.net boards years ago. My favorite was creating icons for Y’z Dock which was a direct ripoff of the Mac OS X dock.

XP had its issues of burying certain features deep into control panels and advanced settings, but once you learned where they all were, you could make XP do what you wanted it to do.

When Vista was announced, I really didn’t care much. XP worked, and other than DirectX 10 which I didn’t really need, it offered nothing to me to want me to pay the ridiculous upgrade price for very little which I actually needed. Over time I found that Vista itself was plagued with problems and I felt I made the right decision to stay away from it.

Eight years later, I still use XP every day at work, and at home on my gaming rig. There isn’t anything that doesn’t run on it, and I really don’t feel that it’s old or antiquated, whereas the difference between System 6 and System 7 on the Mac were like night and day. System 7 made it obvious that it was light years ahead of its predecessor both under the hood and the body, but I don’t see that with Windows 7.

I played with Windows 7 and it’s cool and shiny, but I don’t get that feel that I need to have it like I did when System 7 came out for the Mac in 1991. When you install a new OS on any platform, the first thing I worry about is how much time it’s going to take before the drivers work properly, the games and apps are patched, and I don’t have to worry about how to jump through hoops to get something to work right. Currently, I see people using Windows 7 having driver problems which I know would drive me batty.

At the same time, I know that XP’s life is limited. Microsoft is going to drop support for it in 2014 which is a good five years away, but are app and gaming developers still sticking with XP? In my company they are. On gaming boxes you still see XP as a supported platform. I’m looking at the upgrade price at Amazon.com for the Windows 7 Professional version and I’m wondering if the $100 is worth it. Will I get eight years out of Windows 7? What technology’s coming to PCs that Microsoft could exploit in order to get people to pay for Windows 8 when it comes out? I think about how I upgrade Mac OS every two or three years for $129 without batting an eyelash, but now Mac OS X 10.6 has a $29 upgrade price, which makes me ponder the Windows 7 price even more.

In the end, I belive that upgrading after eight years probably isn’t a bad idea. I think I’ve squeezed enough blood from the XP stone that paying $99 isn’t going to bite me in the ass. So here, I go…

*click*

Since I have a launch day iPhone from 2006, I had never done a transfer of the contents of an iPhone before, so I researched a bit and realized that I had turned off the auto-backup feature of iTunes about a year ago. I reinstated it, and backed up my iPhone the night before.

I preordered my iPhone when they were first annouced, and it was delivered around 11am on Friday morning. I connected it to iTunes, which asked me if I wanted to set this up as a new phone, or restore it from the backup I had on the hard drive with my associated cell phone number. I told it to restore which it did, it transferred the phone number to the new phone almost immediately (my old iPhone now says “No Service”), and after about 30 minutes of backing up data, apps, music, SMS messages, and movies, I had my entire iPhone contents backed up to the new one. The only thing that was missing were my emails which I didn’t mind losing, and my voicemail password didn’t carry over, nor did my gmail password. Fixing my gmail password was simple since the iPhone asked for it immediately, but fixing my voicemail password was a little tricky. It asked me for my password the same way it would for email, but I didn’t know what it was. There was a little help “?” in the password field which sent me to AT&T’s voicemail system which reset my password immediately. The whole process took less than 60 seconds.

The first thing I wanted to do was try the compass to see how accurate it was. I realize that with all the other new features of the 3GS that the compass was probably the least favorite of some people, but since not many phones I know have one, I just wanted to play with it for a second. It was as accurate as I could tell, and if you go to maps and press the target icon twice, maps will show you which direction you’re facing.

Camera and video part 1

The second feature I wanted to try was the new camera. The new 3GS has a 3 megapixel camera which is a vast improvement over the nasty 1 megapixel camera the last iPhones had. The new camera also has an autofocus feature, and does video! I took my first video in portrait mode and tried to upload it to flickr. Flickr didn’t like the format of the video, so I posted it to youtube. Youtube properly pillarboxed the video by putting black bars on the side to fill the video out. I also posted the video to vimeo which told me I’d be in the encode queue for over an hour, and then it took almost 12 hours to encode a 14 second video. I think I’ll be sticking to youtube.

With my old iPhone now useless as a phone, I decided to wipe it to give to my daughter. The wipe procedure was going to take over and hour, so I went to Best Buy to get a windshield adapter for the iPhone since it’s now able to use GPS, and a new belt clip since my original one is starting to wear out. I found the Griffin Windowseat which works well if you keep the iPhone on the left side of the windshield. The problem with that is I also wanted to use the iPhone as my MP3 player, which means I would have to run the wire from the stereo in the middle of the car to the left side, over the steering column. I’m not very keen on this setup since it seems more work and mess than I want it to be, and if I need to plug the iPhone in to charge, that’s yet another cable to drape over the steering column.If I put the adapter in the middle, it’s designed in such a way that it takes up all the vertical space between my rear view mirror and the dashboard. I was hoping for something that would allow me to use it in the middle and not obstruct my view so much.
I got the Digital Lifestyle Outfitters HipCase since it’s the same one I bought with the original iPhone. It’s the same as before, but with a little patch of leather sewn into the back to compensate for the thinner 3G. It took some breaking in, but it’s working out very well.

Voice Control

With the original iPod still wiping, I decided to give Voice Control a try. This is exclusive to the iPhone 3GS, although I don’t see why you can’t use it in the 3G since third party apps deal with voice recognition just fine. This is great for driving, or when it would take you less time to find something embedded in your Contacts list than it would to say the person’s name.

What’s not in the video, is that the system will tell you if you have more than one person with the name you spoke in your Contacts list. For example, if you say “Call Bob”, it’ll tell you “There are multiple numbers with the name Bob”, and offer the suggestions. You can state the last name, and if there are multiple phone numbers for that person (home, cell), it’ll ask you which one you want to dial. Once you learn how to manage the Voice Control dialing this way, you can learn to say “Call Bob Johnson cell”. You can also dial by number (”call 1-973-555-1212″).
Voice Command will also control iTunes as you can see in the video. However, it’s tricky when it comes to artist’s names. For Jean-Michel Jarre, I had to pronounce it like a computer would read it: “Jeen Michele Jarray”. That worked.

Camera part 2

After getting my old iPhone set up for my daughter (who was ecstatic), I decided to try taking some pictures outside. The indoor ones were ok, but I wanted to see how well the camera too pictures in sunlight. I found that turning the camera 90 degrees for both picture and video produces better results.

Once AT&T turns on tethering and MMS, the iPhone will be an almost perfect digital companion. I say ‘almost’ because I’d still like the ability to use an external Bluetooth keyboard with it, and some other minor issues, but this will make other cell phone manufacturers look at the iPhone and realize they have a lot of catching up to do in the smartphone arena. I’m very happy with the iPhone 3GS and I’m sure I’ll be using it for a very long time.

Just a few minutes ago, Tweetdeck released their app for the iPhone. Tweetdeck’s been known for being the first desktop Twitter application to allow you to organize the people you follow into columns of your own choosing. It’s a great app, but I had issues with it since I could never get the devs to do one simple thing: notify you only if you got a reply or a DM. It either notified you on new tweets from everyone, or none at all. I found that to be extremely frustrating since I like to keep my Twitter app in the background when I’m busy and bring it to the front only if I have a reply. Since the devs never did this, I moved on to Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop.

Now Tweetdeck is out for the iPhone and already I’m in love with it. The app handles multiple accounts with ease, and also allows you to do Tweetdeck’s trademark feature of organizing people into separate columns.

When the app starts, you put in your Twitter credentials, but before you get started, you’re asked to create an account on tweetdeck’s servers. I hope this allows you to save your column settings between the iPhone ad the desktop app which is due later tonight. That would save an enormous amount of trouble setting up your app’s looks since all you’d have to do is sync them.

When you’re done with that, you’re shown a zoomed out look of your columns. You can zoom them into 100% view by tapping on it.

If you want to create a new group, just click “Add Column” in the middle. The app goes out and seems to get the people you follow, but unfortunately it did not get a complete list of friends and therefore I had to deal with a partial list. Once the list comes up, you simply tap their name to add them to your list. If a person is not on that list, you can add them manually.

When you have multiple columns, arrows appear in the bottom corners, telling you that you can move from one column to the other. I’d prefer simply swiping the iPhone to do this to save real estate.

A neat trick? Shake your iPhone to refresh!

I’m going to play with the app more, but I think I found my new favorite iPhone Twitter application.

Things I’d like to see:

A different color for replies to me.

Black text on white background. The black background is annoying my eyes.

At first I wanted to use the MobileMe calendar sharing, but to add her I have to pay $50 for additional accounts. Also, it seemed from what I researched that you cannot sync a calendar for collaboration among several people in your “family”, they can only subscribe read-only. No, thanks.

Since we both have Gmail accounts, I looked into using Google Calendar sharing instead. I didn’t want to because I was under the impression that by doing so you’d wipe your contacts out of your phone in favor of Google’s Exchange settings. It turns out that’s only if you set up your Exchange account to sync your contacts. You don’t have to, you can leave that option off.

By turning off Contacts, you keep your MobileMe contacts on your phone. I personally find this quite unsettling because I’m afraid that one swipe of my finger can wipe out my entire contacts list. I’m too afraid to try it to see if it at least warns you that it’s going to happen.

When you create a calendar on Google, one is created in your name (eg: starman.me@gmail.com). If you’re making a shared calendar, it’s probably best to create a new one with a better name for who you’re sharing it with. Once it’s created, you can add people to have access to the calendar, and set permissions for them. My wife has full read/write access to our family calendar.

However, you’d think that would be all you need to do, right? Unfortunately, no. I couldn’t figure out why the shared calendars weren’t showing up on my iPhone, only my own personal one. After doing a lot of digging, I finally figured out that you have to go to http://m.google.com/sync and there you tell Google which calendars you want Exchange to show you. Note: This should also help non-iPhone users as well.

Now everything’s synced and we have a shared calendar. Apparently I’m going to be very busy next week.

iChurn - This classic iPhone app will tell you exactly how many churns you need to make in order to finish making butter for that day.

Cheekcraft - Pick your side - Amish or Outworlder. Amish simply forgive their attackers, but Outworlders are armed with big boots and ice cream cones.

Zipper - Using the touchscreen, Amish can simulate zipping a virtual zipper.

CalcPower - Ever wonder how much energy your house consumes? Now you know! (hint: 0)

Clipper - Social media app that allows you to send out “clips” of what you’re doing at that moment.

SaveMySoul - Did you ever accidentally take a picture of an Amish person? Now you can blur their image and restore their soul to them.

Sundial - Using special reverse engineered technology, this will determine the position of the sun based on the shadow it casts and tell you what time it is.

Buggypedia - An encompassing wealth of information about the Amish.

Paperweight - Once you turn your Amish iPhone on, this app will brick your phone, turning it into a paperweight. Sorry, you can’t be using modern technology!

One of my favorite videogames of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was very skeptical about it when it came out because I wasn’t sure if it would work in the 3D world of the Nintendo 64. I reserved a copy anyway and picked up the gold cartridge on launch day. I still have that gold cart; I’ll probably never get rid of it.

Since it came out in 1997, I’ve played it several times to the end. I never finished the Master Quest version, though. I thought the whole game was different only to find that it was just the dungeons that were and I was playing at a time when I had higher priorities so I put it down.

In the last twelve years, I found that every time I pick it up, I get better at it. I remember more off the top of my head and find that I can get farther in the game faster each time. So I got to wonder whether or not I could finish the game in a day. Start at 6am and play on until I finish. It’s supposed to take 12-15 hours to finish depending on how deep into the game you go which would put my finish at 6-8pm the same day.

Why do this? Curiosity, mostly. I don’t need to do this in a day, this isn’t a dream I’ve had, I just wondered if I could. I wouldn’t necessarily have to get every skulltula or do the minigames, just beat Ganon.

And then I got the idea of livestreaming it on ustream. Would anyone watch? Would anyone care? I know there are a lot of OoT fans out there that would be curious at best.

So tell me what you think. Am I crazy, or is this something people would be interested in?