[Mongoose]

Looked back at Disney's Fantasia for the first time since I was six. It's still rubbish.

Sir we shall have words over this.  Fantasia is probably the most amazing project Disney ever produced.

Challenge accepted 

What exactly did you like about it?

Pretty much everything.  It's probably the purest example of flat-out animation that Walt Disney ever produced, and its format allowed for far more creative freedom than the standard big musical movie or Mickey Mouse short (not that there's anything bad about those, but they wind up being a lot of the same thing).  Tying the pieces to classical compositions lent a real sense of timelessness to it.  "Night on Bald Mountain" is one of my all-time favorite animated pieces ever...hell, in what other Disney work can you see topless demon women? As a general fan of animation, I absolutely love it when animators are able to cut loose and strut their stuff, and that's Fantasia in a nutshell.

[InsaneBaron]

Looked back at Disney's Fantasia for the first time since I was six. It's still rubbish.

Sir we shall have words over this.  Fantasia is probably the most amazing project Disney ever produced.

Challenge accepted 

What exactly did you like about it?

Pretty much everything.  It's probably the purest example of flat-out animation that Walt Disney ever produced, and its format allowed for far more creative freedom than the standard big musical movie or Mickey Mouse short (not that there's anything bad about those, but they wind up being a lot of the same thing).  Tying the pieces to classical compositions lent a real sense of timelessness to it.  "Night on Bald Mountain" is one of my all-time favorite animated pieces ever...hell, in what other Disney work can you see topless demon women? As a general fan of animation, I absolutely love it when animators are able to cut loose and strut their stuff, and that's Fantasia in a nutshell.

I'll concede that the animation was high quality, and the classical music well-selected. My problem with the movie was... inconsistency. I like classical music, and I've got nothing against disney cartoons, but Fantasia tried to fuse a very long music concert with an extremely long cartoon marathon. This leads, IMHO, to something of an identity crisis, or more accurately a target audience crisis. Kids who want to see Mickey Mouse cartoons will simply fall asleep; adults who want to hear some classical music will usually find at least some of the cartoon sequences annoying (the centaur one especially). If it works for you, all well and good, but it didn't work for me. If I want to hear classical music I go to a proper concert (to be fair, not everyone is lucky enough to have a great concert hall just a few hours away)

Regarding the Bald Hill/Ave Maria sequence... here's the thing. It's a really good sequence. The animation is spectacular, it fits the music better than any other part of Fantasia. I STILL find it frightening today, more so than most zombie or slasher films. And the conclusion, where the horrifying beast is driven off by the sound of church bells and the procession of simple villagers, is very poignant. It would have been great if had been released as a standalone short film.

Here's the problem. It's not. For one thing, You have to sit through two hours of, well, the rest of Fantasia to get to it. But much more troublesome is the fact that Bald Hill/Ave Maria is orders of magnitude more intense than the rest of the film. Fantasia is (ostensibly) supposed to be a kid's film, or at least a film young kids watch. BH/AV is NOT a young kid's cartoon. Once again, a sort of identity crisis. Sticking Mickey Mouse and CHERNOBOG in the same film strikes me as foolish; sticking Mickey on the cover and providing no warning about CHERNOBOG makes it feel like a cruel joke.

[Mongoose]

Whoever said that Fantasia was meant to be a children's film?  Mickey himself was certainly an all-ages character at the time.  Disney originally released the film as something of a "roadshow" targeting a broad audience, and his original plan was to occasionally swap in new segments to provide a continuously-evolving experience; this wound up being derailed because of finances and World War II.  In any case, it certainly wasn't meant as something exclusively for children.  I think you're falling into the unfortunately-common trap viewing animation in general, and Disney-produced animation in particular, as something automatically targeting kids.

[Dark Hunter]

Right. Disney's original shorts were targetted at all ages, adults as well as children.  The whole "animated is kids stuff" came later. And even Disney himself considered that sentiment to be stupid: "You're dead if you only aim for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway."

[InsaneBaron]

Whoever said that Fantasia was meant to be a children's film?  Mickey himself was certainly an all-ages character at the time.  Disney originally released the film as something of a "roadshow" targeting a broad audience, and his original plan was to occasionally swap in new segments to provide a continuously-evolving experience; this wound up being derailed because of finances and World War II.  In any case, it certainly wasn't meant as something exclusively for children.  I think you're falling into the unfortunately-common trap viewing animation in general, and Disney-produced animation in particular, as something automatically targeting kids.

You're absolutely correct that Fantasia is not, purely speaking, a young kids film like most modern Mickey Mouse cartoons. It was certainly marketed at a broad audience. Problem is, young kids were included in said target audience, but the Bald Hill/Ave Maria sequence is, IMHO, too intense for a film marketed even partially at young kids. Again, not saying it wasn't good, just saying it would have been better off as a standalone short with more accurate marketing.

[Mongoose]

You ever read any books that won the Newberry Medal when you were growing up?  Kids were pretty damn hardcore before we started coddling them.

[Colonol Dekker]

I'm moving to Cumbria.
 

[Luis Dias]

Adam Curtis has published a new documentary and I was pleased.

Then a twitterite sent me a youtube link for it and I was nerdgasmed.

I shall share it with thee, so as you will be also pleased. (Karajorma, take notice)

[BirdofPrey]

4k is complete overkill for anything except movie theaters (which is why it even exists).  I read an article on Cnet where someone did the math, and you have to be 5 feet away from a 55" TV for your eyes to resolve past 1080p.

Where is said article? I am interested in this.

Here's the article. It's quite a leap going from overkill-for-tvs to overkill-for-all-but-cinemas, but 4K is definitely not a feature that should make you choose one display over another despite all other features.

EDIT: If you're like me and you have an immense distrust of everything from Cnet this is a better explanation of the biological limits to our eyesight.

Sort of a discussion necro, but 4k may be a bit more relevant with computers.  You sit closer to the screen, so a higher pixel density is a good thing to have, though I will admit for smaller monitors you probably don't need to go all the way to 4K.  Still I wish monitors had a bit more pixel density in general; for all their improvements over the years, pixel density hasn't changed much, 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 minotes are around the same size as they were 5 years ago which means the pixel denisty is pretty much the same.

Aside from that though, I think even though you can't actually see the pixels there are some benefits to more of them.  The main one is it decreases observable aliasing.  For TVs this doesn't mean much since stuff like movies even if filmed in 4k have to be downsampled anyways to play at 1080p (which effectively bakes AA in), so the difference isn't as noticeable, but computers don't have that luxury due to rendering on-the-fly (though the newest GPUs support rendering at 4k and downsampling, which again nets a similar effect).

On a side note, if anyone watches tech news.  MHL announced around CES that they are going to make their own thing.  Previously it was pretty much just a way to allow HDMI through a USB 2.0 connection, but now they aim to replace HDMI.  While I appreciate something that is a bit more forward thinking (HDMI is getting a bit long in the tooth by now scrounging for bandwidth and have been making tradeoffs on higher resolutions in the form of chroma subsampling and/or framerate limits), I am not happy to have more competing formulas (especially when DisplayPort already exists and has the bandwidth required).  What really blew my mind though: they showed off the ability to have 8k 120Hz,TV.  For the reasons mentioned earlier, I think it's totally asinine a display like that actually exists even if it IS huge.

[FireSpawn]

I have nothing important to say, just letting peeps know that I'm still breathing

[An4ximandros]

I have nothing important to say, just letting peeps know that I'm still breathing

But how can your breath be real if existence is an illusion emanating from the quantum do-hickey?

[Dark Hunter]

Cogito ergo sum.

Quantum has nothing to to with it.

[deathfun]

In regards to the talk about Fantasia, that was one of my go to VHS films as a little kid

[BirdofPrey]

Ah VHS I think I remember those.

[Mongoose]

Just had a student submit an assignment to me as a Microsoft Works file.  Yes, that's right, Microsoft Works.  I don't think I've so much as thought of that name in a decade.  No wonder my iPad couldn't display the damn thing.

[BirdofPrey]

Wut
Does that even run on modern systems,  or does (s) he have an old Windows 95 machine?

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Man, and I thought Works was old fifteen years ago...

[LHN91]

Actually except for printing being a bit flaky, the version of Works that shipped on my parent's old Packard Bell Win95 box still works on Windows 7. Just copied the install folder and loaded it up. My dad still has some of his business tracking templates in Works - loads it up mainly to print more out.

[BirdofPrey]

Was picking through the VPs for ****s and giggles and found my way to the ST:R debrifing voice files.  The first of the you are promoted to ensign is hilarious.  Everyone else is whatever, but I laughed at that one.

So didn't get my ****s, but I did find some giggles.

[Mongoose]

Wut
Does that even run on modern systems,  or does (s) he have an old Windows 95 machine?

Shockingly enough, according to Wiki, the final version of Works (9.0) was released in 2008, which makes it several years newer than the version of Word I have myself.