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| Sunday, August 29, 2004 01:10 PM |
| Additions, Improvements |
 by Fëanor |
I realized today that I'd mentioned The Core in my post, and yet had not even added it to my movie list yet! I was horrified and embarrased. I have now corrected this glaring error. A few other movies have been added in this update, but I can't remember them all. One is Garden State, which I recommend. It's maybe a little less subtle than I'd like, but at least it's trying to do and say more than your average film. And really it's a very well put together film, very funny and moving.
And it made me re-realize how excellent an actor Natalie Portman is. If you need proof that George Lucas is a really bad actor's director (and I'm not sure why you'd need more proof at this point, but bear with me here), just watch Natalie Portman in the two Star Wars prequels, and then watch her in this film. The contrast is absolutely striking. In Phantom Menace and Clone Wars she seems wooden and talentless. In Garden State she is totally alive and real and vibrant and true. It's really astounding.
Recently, I've been working a lot on the rebuild of my Button Men applet. I've been talking about rebuilding it practically since I finished it, but I only recently got up the energy and the drive to actually do it. And now I'm almost done! I'm pretty excited. The original version of the game was one of the first applets I ever built; I kind of taught myself java in the process of it's making. So it's written very poorly--like, for instance, I wasn't really taking advantage of the fact that java is an object-oriented programming language. Like, at all.
So I've rewritten the thing from the ground up, and now it reads data from xml files, is far more modal and object-oriented, and even gets packed up into a little .jar file for export.
Of course, I'm not quite ready to release it into the wild yet. I have a trait or two left to code. Then I have to write the button creation feature, and the computer player. I want a much smarter computer player this time--one that you can actually lose to pretty often. So that'll take me a while. I also want to add a new feature that will allow you to save the buttons that you create. That should be pretty easy.
But anyway, that'll be out eventually.
And I really have to finish writing that film festival diary! I really slacked off on that. |
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