Memes Virulentos en español. Machine translation madness, and I'm sure native Castillian speakers will get a bigger kick out of this than I did.···

And in the worst Champions' League final I ever watched, AC Milan takes its sixth European title on a penalty shootout against Juventus. It was nice that Rui Costa finally got his European victory after Luís Figo got it at Real Madrid and now-retired Paulo Sousa got it twice at Juventus and Borussia Dortmund, so now the Golden Three all got European Cup victories. Problem is, this match sucked. Not that one would expect different from an all-Italian final, but anyway I hope this match wasn't broadcasted overseas as it was really bad publicity for soccer. That's what you get when you allow teams which define a perfect match as 'a match without goals because that means neither team made a mistake' in the UCL. After 120 minutes of football in excruciating agony, the penalty shootout. And even that was crap: can't the highest-paid professional footballers in the world shoot properly on goal 9 meters away? AC Milan's Shevchenko was the exception, and so they got the Cup. At least it is fun to be able to predict the players who will miss just by looking at their faces, and Shevchenko did look like reptilian. So FC Porto plays AC Milan in the European Supercup next season. Let's hope Milan then performs as poorly as yesterday.···

Animation exercise one: As if I hadn't enough stuff to do, I am attending an animation workshop during this week, and on your right you can see the result of my very first attempt at a cartoon character (which resembles quite a lot that Silly Putty Amiga computer game). I already skipped classes today so I could get back some sleep lost to work on my documentary and going to watch to see Reloaded yesterday, besides writing a very long (6 pages when the usual is no more than 2) essay about it for Film Analysis, since it allows me to finally talk about a genre I am at ease.···

Went to see The Matrix Reloaded. Well, at least the title of the first part of the sequel made some sense, but a movie that ends with a "to be continued" title that reads like "come back in November and pay 4 euros to know the ending" can't deserve much respect. And those special effects! What went through John Gaeta's mind? Was he on acid or does he need a pair of glasses? That Neo vs 200 Smiths fight looks more 3D animation than most 3D animation movies made nowdays, and in that scene (repeated throughout the movie) where Trinity falls of the building doesn't it look as she is wearing a mask with a static expression? Honestly, I think the special effects have been pushed further than currently technology allows, they wanted to increase the complexity and in the end CG animation is much more perceptible (and not that much greater as most of the scenes with the camera spinning around are irrelevant) than in the first movie. And the story seems a bit crap, but I hope Revolutions sheds some light in some of the irrelevant scenes we have seen so far. There were some good moments such as Neo's encounter with the Architect, Neo's fight with Seraph, the motorway chase and the ship's arrival in Zion, but other scenes — such as the 200 Smiths fight, that odd fight at the chateau, Morpheus' completly cheesy address of the Zion crowd and Neo playing Superman (he is The One, can't he just teleport himself?) — are just stupid. As with Star Wars, The Matrix Reloaded is a badly acted movie full of completely unnecessary scenes, but it is The Matrix. Which is nice.···

It was the most tense football match I ever watched on television, with the possible exception of FC Porto vs Bayern Munich 16 years ago (I was eight then and I don't remember feeling this nervous). Our coach was forced to make two substitutions because of injuries, the Celtic players thought they were playing American football, and the referee didn't sanction half the fouls Celtic players did, and didn't show half the cards (he did sent off Baldé though, but it was on an already extreme situation). And despite all this we won. FC Porto is the UEFA Cup champion, thanks to a couple of goals from competition best scorer Derlei (45', 115') and Dmitri Alenichev (54'), the Russian who usually stays in the bench but got his place in the starting eleven alongside star midfielder Deco because of his incredible end-of-season performances. Celtic's Henrik Larsson made the best out of our defensive errors and tied the game twice (47', 57') immediately after our goals, but we finally got the winning goal on extra-time. We had a few beers, the tension settled, and a friend of ours had to honour his bet and ran down part of Boavista Av. towards the Bessa Stadium (our crosstown rivals' ground) wearing only a Porto kit and underpants while we celebrated. Now everyone's back home, and tomorrow will be a new ordinary day, as victories wear off more quickly than defeats. Well, now at least we have as many European Cups as Benfica. It's only a matter of time before we overtake them in every postive stat.···

We're 24 hours away from the biggest football match of the year. FC Porto plays Celtic Glasgow in the UEFA Cup final, held in Seville tomorrow at 19:45GMT. I was eight when FC Porto won the Champions' League in 1987 (that final against Bayern Munich that featured one of the landmark goals in European finals — the one Madjer scored with his heel), and I can feel a very similar atmosphere here today. Let's hope we can thrash the Scots in the Clash of the Weird Kits as this final will probably be called. In the meantime, The Guardian profiles our translator-gone-coach José Mourinho, in an article that makes him look as a young Skywalker. May the force be with you, Zé.···

At the imagelog: Rem Koolhaas' Casa da Música (House of Music), Porto's new auditorium which should have been completed during the European Culture Capital in 2001 and well... it's 2003 and I think the images speak for themselves. Still, it looks like a helluva impressive building, that despite the Dutch architecture dystopia should make the Porto School architects (such as Álvaro Siza or Souto-Moura) consider whether dull white square buildings is what a dying town needs.

Images: one two three four.···

Oh, and there are new MP3s at Monotonik. There are some nice new Super Science tracks as usual, plus a few other electronica/idm songs I haven't downloaded yet.···

Via Beflix: Runme.org, has quite an impressive collection of software art. Funny thing though, I found my crappy A/V Mixer to be the only entry in the Useless section.···

And today I will also mention classic film: Normally most of the stuff we watch on Film Analysis is either interesting only for us students and boring for everyone else or truly boring-boring. But yesterday we watched Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a mindblowing film noir that replaces the usual detectives, cops and gangsters with newspaper columnists and publicists who will engage in deadly backstabbing and defamation. Dark and slick. Very good.···

But sometimes good things come out of the minds of people in the image business. Take for instance Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, a typical casino robbery movie with a twist, starring Nick Nolte posing as the leader of an Ocean's Eleven-unlike posse that will rob some priceless paintings off a Monte Carlo casino. Features many nice details, an 'exotic' (film-wise) location, and has a very interesting appearance by cult movie director Emir Kusturica, playing an alienated computer geek who spends his time in an abandoned factory playing Purple Haze with his electric guitar.···

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and 'Ensign Gomez' beam down to a planet. Which one isn't coming back?

And here are the top 10 things some guy hates about Star Trek. He is so right however. When you think of it, Star Trek is utter sci-fi rubbish that I like because of some strange reason. Perhaps it's because it was Captain Kirk, not Nietzche, that killed God in a fistfight.···

Here's the formula for creating the perfect film! I'm dropping out of college this very moment as all I need to know is that 30% action and 17% comedy will do the trick and make me rich. But err... According this the best movie ever made would be Toy Story 2. Gosh.···

The greatest scientific minds of the age all got pulled into creating special effects for SF films.

Why the classic science fiction future was called off.···

More seriously, here's what film buffs can do to show dissent against the Bush Administration: show Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove on May 14th.···

Hm, the Manager told me a funny story about how brothels in the 19th century were euphemistically called 'Sporting Clubs'. Hm, what does that tell us about the horrid green-jerseyed team of Sporting Club de Portugal (known overseas as Sporting Lisbon)?···

And just what we needed: A localized, do-it-yourself Iraqi Information Minister. Hm, someone stole the Contra Informação (the portuguese version of Spitting Image) sketch. ···

And here are the 25 All-Time Greatest American Comic Book Covers! Rrright. I did recognize Watchmen in there though. Anyway, I have no problem admiting the 12 Dumbest Comic Book Covers Ever page is probably right. ···

The Museum of Hoaxes. So you can start preparing next year's April Fools. (via Marciana) ···

Now that the post-production phase is well under way, and there are only a few scenes left to be shot, here are the first images from my forthcoming documentary, working title Zero, that should be finished in early June. Everything was shot using a standard domestic Digital8 camera which doesn't even have white balance control, so I used some filters in front of the camera to avoid color adjustment in post-production as much as possible. Unfortunately these stills don't do some of the scenes justice as the time-lapse scenes still amaze me. So visit the imagelog, or see them here:
[ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ]···

Blogging will be a little sparse over the next few weeks, as I really need to focus in finishing my documentary film, my script, besides delivering a few essays and playing director of photography in a 16mm film (luckly my robot nonsense proposal wasn't accepted). That's film school for you, everything is left to the last month. So that means the usual Academic Week boozefest (which started yesterday) bashing won't take place, and I'll try to avoid picking up conflict with other webloggers and pseudo-intellectuals who envy the fact I understand the offside rule despite knowing a few things about art.···

Is G.W. Bush the Antichrist? Nah, don't worry. He's just an oligarchical puppet and a pseudo-messiah, but either there are lots of Antichrists around or this is just the Oldest Dictatorship in the World afraid it might lose its already weak 'leading' role. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if in his second term Bush pulls an Henry VIII and declares the President of the USA as the Head of the Church. (link via TND)···

Here's the PTWeblogs forum, where plenty of glorious flamewars full of witty sarcastic remarks will almost certainly be fought by your arrogant narrator in the future, as most webloggers are wankers who will deserve every bit of disrespect. There. First one to fall for it and reply to this will get a well deserved slap with a bronze penguin. I'm so evil.···

FC Porto are the new Portuguese champions. Which is nice. Now let's see if they bring the UEFA Cup from Seville.···

Phew! When my primary hard drive started to have bad sectors in the work partition I thought it would be a good idea to move all the work to a new drive and leave the faulty partition untouched, so that I could keep running the system from the first partition and avoid the hassle of reinstalling everything all over again. It seemed like a new idea, but then programs started to crash, and a disk scan would show those nasty bad sectors all over the place. Therefore, I lost the last couple of days reinstalling everything all over again, and now I have a faulty drive on my desk that I can spank with a cricket bat whenever I feel angry. Still, there's nothing like a clean install of Windows, waiting for all spyware to ruin it all over again.···