I went to see Girl with a Pearl Earring the other day. It shows why Portuguese director of photography Eduardo Serra is an Oscar nominee, as the film catches quite accurately the visual aspect of Vermeer paintings. Shame the story is a bit thin. However, I did realize something: Scarlett Johanssen is indeed another new talent in that group of actors who make a carreer out of being completely inexpressive. Actors who rely heavily in the Kuleshov effect. You know, here's Johansson, here's a painting under a piece of cloth — she's curious. Here's Johansson, here's some bread — she's hungry. Here's Johansson, here's that brat who tried to get her fired — she's angry. Only I could have shown you the exact same close-ups of Scarlett Johansson's face! It's a long way from Passion of Joan of Arc, baby! Call it the Steven Seagal acting techniques. But a pretty face does make a difference, doesn't it?

* Passion of Joan of Arc, shot in 1928 by Carl Dreyer is considered a landmark film as it relies almost solely on the expressiveness of the close-ups of the lead actress, Maria Falconetti's face. ···

Blog too much and then you run out of topics for the rest of the week.···

The metrosexual. A very typical example, if however not suffient, of a metrosexual would be the opportunistic man who explores the fact many women enjoy having a gay friend, and so he dresses and acts a bit gay in order to approach women. You can also define the metrosexual as a narcisistic bastard — regardless of sexual orientation —, or as a stupid fad promoted by fashion and fashionable magazines. Or simply put, metrosexuals are most likely hypocritical sexual predators who fake qualities they don't have — men acting as if they were actually nice (and the keyword is 'act' as in 'actor'), because it's a fashionable way to pickup chicks. Jake of 8bitJoystick debates whether he's a metrosexual. That's not a question for me: I'm too anti-fashion and people often criticize me for being too blunt, so I can't possibly be a metrosexual. I can, however, play the game of seeing if I do look like one, or instead, if the template-metrosexual acts like guys like me. Let's see some pros and cons:

- I like to wear sober but nice-looking clothes.
- ...which I buy from the nearest outlet of some Spanish textile megacorporation. Besides, I have trouble finding a decent coat.

- I like to use cologne (Americans, mind the cultural difference — I'm European...).
- What's a facial cleanser? Water and soap will do.

- I study cinema.
- I hate those french/danish pseudo-intellectual wastes of film.

- I know the arts rather well, and I see myself as an artisan in a rather exclusive craft.
- I truly like football (=soccer). Poooortoooo!

- I minimize my use of the car, and I walk a lot thus burning any possible trace of fat.
- Meat. Red meat. Grrrrranhamamnham. Juicy and yummy.

- I can spend a small but obscene amount of money in luxury items like Moleskine notebooks.
- Again, I think however pays €50 for a pair of trousers is out of his mind.

- I tend to watch quality documentaries and art programs on TV.
- ...And football matches.

- I'm proud of having a good urban and fashionably unfashionably dated tastes in music.
- Science fiction pulp.

- I'm perfecting the art of the sideburn.
- I shave my own hair. Let it grow for a couple of months. Repeat.

- I know what affection-image and small form of action-image mean.
- I know what date("d.m.Y", $timestamp) and onMouseOut mean.

- I can have open and honest conversations with my female friends.
- ...While having toast at some crappy coffeehouse.

Veredict: Metroindependentsexual, or something.···

The browser ain't yours: It infuriates me to visit a website where through the use of Javascript you are prevented from reading the URL of the link you are hovering in the status bar. This seems to happen mostly in Blogspot sites, where clueless authors experiment every crap Javascript snippet they come across. Like those who prevent you from right-clicking anywhere on the page, not allowing you to copy a link to the clipboard and worse, displaying a dialog with some copyright information. That's clueless — the people who would be interested in stealing your code know how to circumvent this, and you end up giving a poor experience to people who don't know keyboard shortcuts or like to rely on right-clicking. I know, if you coded a 'the perfect browser' it'd display some description metatag in the status bar and there'd be no 'View Source...' command... But that'd be a bad browser indeed.···

Oh yes. I've read that in most European heraldies, a diagonal red band from bottom-left to top-right means you're a bastard. So be extra-careful if you are designing mock heraldic insignia for 'quality' brands, or if you're one of those guys frustrated at your nouveau-riche roots, obssessively sporting such fake insignia in your clothes just to feel the aristocrat you never were. Mind the bastard.···

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, a Flash guide to one hundred and forty-two genres along with music samples. 142! So you can know your Illbient from your Artcore, your Trip-Hop from your German Techno, your Synthtron from your Nu Italo House. Labelling genres is useful (if you see genres in a liberal way, as poles of attraction instead of as tiny hermetic boxes), but this is mesmerizing and utterly exaggerated. Still, it's fun to browse and listen to all samples.···

Someone sporting a Blogspot address had the very unfortunate idea of copying this weblog's HTML source and pasting it into the Blogger template, probably to reverse-engineer it turning it into a functional template. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and this page ends with a copyleft sentence, so I shouldn't be pissed. However, two things really pissed me off: One, although the URL in question gave you an exact copy of a few days old IF THEN ELSE, this person did go change the author meta tag, which considering the graphic element in the left side stating 'this is a weblog by Eduardo J. Sousa...' made me think I visited a work in progress of a webpage which would only change the name of the author and then remain exactly the same. And two, all graphic elements and CSS were deep-linked to my own server, so I was actually paying for being stolen, in the form of bandwidth. Hey, the site is copyleft'd so you can — I allow you to — take things from the webpage, but it's ethical to credit the original author — and copying it entirely just changing the signature is something you can't do. Of course, I'm just guessing the intentions of a hipothetically malevolent author, the worst case scenario. My realistic guess is this person knows nothing and is trying to customize my design slowly, bit by bit, turning it into a Blogger template with his/her own content. But that still leaves deep linking and bandwidth theft. That's what happens when your page contains images (and other content) hosted elsewhere. And with that, I dealt the most radical way, which also solves theft I might not be aware of. I googled for some webserver help (do people know this by heart?) and added these lines to my Apache .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?asseptic\.org/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|css|js|swf)$ — [F]
JPEG, GIF, BMP and PNG images, Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript and Flash files will only be served if they are requested from within asseptic.org. Also, that third line will allow those files to pass if no referer is given — call it benefit of the doubt. The practical consequence is that invoking images, CSS or Flash from other websites will return a 403 — Forbidden error. Obviously that doesn't stop people from visiting your site, grabbing the content and hosting it on their own server, but I'm ok with it — I'm not billed for that.···

Science fiction inventions. Sort them by date, author, or by category. I have a feeling some things are missing, but it's rather interesting to campare old sci-fi invention with real-life gadgets of today.···

The Null Device points out to a parable about perfectionism. In a short sentence: "Practice makes perfect".···

I hadn't read McSweeney's for a while and all of a sudden I was laughing like a lunatic in front of a bland webpage. Reasons: Quotes from either George W. Bush or Senator Palpatine and Actual Dialogue from Radio Commercials, as if People Really Say Such Things. True.···

An interesting color scheme generator, probably the best I've seen in the web. I'm not really into resorting to 'scientific' color harmonies, but this might be a handy reference.···

I got an e-mail from Ana and Pedro at Blogo, concerning my comments about those webdesign awards. They explain the obvious and the understandable — e-mail votes are easier to control, however from 200 visits a day to that page only 46 people did send a vote, which is on par with my experience — people generally don't e-mail unless they got a gun pointed to their heads. Considering Cafeína and its 500 visitors per day, you can see there's massive lurking in there. Anyway, awards don't have much value since they are inherentely flawed. Sometimes these flaws prevent you from having a better chance, others these flaws will benefit you — take the film festival we won last week...···

If you live in the Porto area and have a secret desire to appear in a movie no-one will never know about, here's your chance: My class needs willing actors for a seven-part fiction film (I'll be directing the third part) which will be shot in 35mm in later April / early May. We need people of both sexes and all ages, and the casting process is already taking place. If you are interested, auditions will take place in March, and you should send an e-mail before March 5th with your personal information (and maybe a photograph) to my colleagues in charge of production at actores7@hotmail.com, so they can set a date for auditioning.···

Ah yes, that weblog design competition's results are out. This weblog came out between 4th and last (it'd be nice to know if any of the 46 voters did vote for me), and my personal favourite Lightstripping came out 3rd with let's see 0.152x46 = 7 votes, I think. Barnabé, the winners, had 15 votes. Hm. I'm not willing to act like a sour loser, but the Blogo people could at least say 460 people voted. That's be less embarrassing... for their own sake. Barnabé, despite its appealing quality (to me at least) as a good rational left-wing blog, is not exactly a website noted for its aesthetic appeal, and I think sheer traffic (I can figure it out since I have many hits from their blogroll) did play an important part since there were so few voters overall. An award based on just 46 votes... ought to feel too much like electing the class delegate in junior high.···



Via BoingBoing (as many things lately), a Flash page where you can Barcode Yourself. It does feel evil and inhuman, but it's not a very dystopian-evil-pragmatic barcode since it encodes obvious and irrelevant information (weight and height — why?), so you better think twice before even thinking about making a tattoo. You freak.···

Free Tiny Apps for Windows, no more than a few hundred kilobytes each. File next to the list of Linux autoboot CDs, weighting at several hundred megabytes each.···

Smoke kills, indeed: I found this Russian Flash cartoon incredibly funny. I hope patriotoid Americans don't get offended. Might be work-unsafe, especially if your boss is a belligerant flag-waving drone.···

This will be the only post, I promise I won't be a cellphone freak like Alexander: I did purchase a Siemens C62 the other day, so that I could finally bury that old S35. Well, I'm happy with it. It just works. The 128x128 display is probably among the best color displays you can get in a low-end phone. I've already transferred some small (WAP downloads can't exceed 5KB) .gif images via GPRS and set them as wallpaper since the images Siemens included are, in a word, shite. The messaging works fine and although the games aren't good — but I never did much mobile gaming anyway — the utils (i.e. calendar, calculator, memo, etc.) are very good compared to other phones. Just a warning, though: The software that came with it (version 11) was buggy as hell. I immediately went to the Siemens dealer and had it updated to version 16, and now the phone seems to work fine.···

Monotonik delivers! For You & For Me, a full double CD of gorgeous icy IDM from Russian musician Sleepy Town Manufacture, as free MP3 files. Very, very nice.···

Hypocrates, despite being a movie so depressing I have to wonder why aren't people slashing their wrists after watching it, won Best Short Fiction at the FEST2003 film festival held last weekend. My congratulations to my friend Joana Costa, who wrote and directed it. And see? All my yelling as assistant director and my stiffness as editor did work... Congratulations also to Joana Gaio — always my first choice when I direct and need a good art director — who won Best Experimental Video and the Public Choice award with her Orange.···

It's done! The music video I directed last December is now fully edited and effected. It was meant to work as a somewhat skewed comedy about a passive-agressive couple having breakfast. Unfortunately we had too much trouble and the end result doesn't work that well as a comedic effort, even though I'm happy with the editing and how it successfully limited a lot of the damage from having the male actor quit a couple of days before shooting started and consequentely having our director of photography (an actor himself at the University Theatre), somewhat sick with flu, covering his job. And not to mention the last-minute decision to shoot it in my own kitchen, since the place where we were going to film became unavailable, which being so narrow made me change all planning (since travelling shots were impossible) in a rush. Had I known better, I should have postponed the shooting, but alas I didn't because I wanted the burden off my head.





Still, people who've seen it didn't dislike the end result. One should never be tempted to leave stuff for post-production to handle, but it can indeed be a last-resort life-saver.



Ah, the video does end with a food-fight slow-motion scene. It's a shame all that chocolate cereal was wasted. I'd upload a streaming video version for you all to see, but that'll have to wait. Since it's a college exercise, it's an unauthorized video for Stereolab's Les Yper-Sounds, and I'm not willing to get nastygrams from their record label. It'll rest for internal display only until I put together some replacement automusic in Acid or while putting use to the Apple Soundtrack my college bought. I'll most certainly will have to reedit the video in order to sync it to some events, but then it'll certainly will be available for your viewing pleasure, since I did get an e-mail from my hosting provider announcing a big increase of bandwidth limits. Which was nice.···

Two movies by two great directors. Woody Allen's Anything Else is a great return to Allen's better days, after a few minor films. Interesting to note the kid from those American Pie movies engaged in a master-disciple relationship with Allen, and successfully emulating some of Allen-as-protagonist quirks. As a secondary character this time, it's amusing to see Woody Allen as a paranoid gun apologist, and that scene in which the inoffensive-looking director smashes up a car is antological. As for Christina Ricci... what a bitch! She really does incarnate that ruthless character fine, and remembers me of a few girls I knew.

As for Tim Burton's Big Fish, which is also said to be a good return to happier days, I'm not that certain. It tells us the story of one Edward Bloom, a full-of-shit (or isn't he?) old storyteller. It's like that uncle who tells us about the Guinea War in Christmas Eve, how he killed a dozen enemy soldiers, blew up a tank and jumped into a flying helicopter to make it back to Bissau and enjoy cheap seafood and pineapples. The problem is, the Big Fish stories which are meant to be great, fantastic, amazing... they're not that colourful. In fact, they're boring. I rather imagine those olympic goals when my father tells me how he was a better footballer than Eusebio when he played a season at a Division Three club. Perhaps this is a symptom of the growing cultural difference between us Europeans and Americans. They say there's a lot if southern USA mythology in Big Fish. But it just fails to touch me, despite the unique Burtonesque look.···

Portuguese pedestrians have yet another reason for concern. As if the release of a 255 horsepower Renault Clio — it's like a rocket-powered bycicle — which should be illegal wasn't bad enough, Segways shall be hitting the streets in March. Of course, Segways should be nice, as their availability would prevent people from getting into a car to travel half a kilometer. However, it's more likely Segways will be enrolled as yet another rich kid's deadly toy, instead of being used as a preactical solution for urban transportation.···

Burt Reynolds? Nope. Tom Selleck? Uh uh. Try Chile D. Molester. Shave that fucking mustache.

If you suspect someone likes to do a lot of cocaine, don’t let them “borrow” your CDs.

All those skinheads over there? They’ll beat your ass.

God created assistant managers when he was in a really shitty mood.

Now that you’ve climbed up there, it’s a lot higher than it looks, isn’t it? Dumbass.

Dungeons and Dragons never goes away. Girls will still sense that shit 20 years later.
...and more at Uncle Patrick's Advice to Children. (via The Null Device) ···

I haven't dragged much stuff to blog about to my desktop lately, that's maybe why everyone else has posted this selection of bittersweet Valentine cards first. "You just make stalking feel so right", "I think I loved you more last year", "I hope you don't have to fuck as many men this year to find true love", and "You are the styrofoam peanuts to the poorly-packaged cardboard box of my soul" are among my favourites, but you really should check out the drawings too. And there seems to be plenty of interesting stuff at YouYesYou.net.···

Did you know Andy Warhol used a Commodore Amiga? (page in Spanish, however containing a link to a PDF document in English)···

Speaking of stupid intelectual property issues, I remembered back in 1998 or 1999 I had made a website called 'A Esfera' ('The Sphere') which was a rather thorough collection of hand-coded HTML tutorials for people who were starting from scratch. Some Brazilian dick sent me an e-mail threat because he had made a website (it was some kind of humour site) also called 'A Esfera' first. I pageslapped him with a link to an Altavista search for 'a+esfera' which returned dozens of websites with that name, and almost all were from Brazil and older than this guy's. Damn, I felt I was being threatned after naming my son John. In Portugal, there are even laws forbidding the trademarking of common words found in the dictionary, and some of the greatest Internet scandals of the days preceding the dotcom fever had to do with the illegal registration of .pt domains consisting of common words.···



Eheh. Were I a copyright bastard, I'd be ranting on how Warp Records stole the name of that music weblog I maintained along with Alexander (the content has been merged with the Cafeína database for some time now), and which had been a somewhat illegal streaming radio (ok, I still think a 24kbps stream should count as a citation) until I got paranoid early on the Napster case (remember?). Anyway, I'm not a believer in intellectual property enforcement except for cases of seriously blatant theft (which I narrow down to a single situation — exactly copying someone's work but putting your signature in it), and the use of an incredibly obvious name (which I believe it'd be immoral to trademark) obviously doesn't qualify. So I do welcome Warp's online store, which sells straight MP3s, although I find the price for each single track (£1.35) a bit punitive, although I understand it's meant to force you into buying a complete record instead. Only one more thing: given that TDR was one of my biggest influences in design, it's rather strange to look at this website. The name, the big bold Helvetica, music I listen to, it strikes me as something I could have designed while I thought I was asleep, were I a schizofrenic. Only, of course, my bank statement says I didn't...···

Turning a Livejournal into a book seems a reasonable idea as I've been thinking about starting to print every entry posted to this blog and into Cafeína, after we had a discussion at school about the archiving of digital data. It's quite likely that in a few years you'll lose a great part of your life — you blog, your digital photos, your videos — as accidents happen, digital media deteriorates, and formats change and you maybe left with a stack of Hi8 video tapes and no one in town will own a working camera which you could use to copy those tapes to DVD, only that in the meantime stupid DRM technologies block you from accessing your own work and analog cables are outlawed. And never mind my toy digicam, which records videos in a proprietary codec which probably won't work in the next version of Windows. In 5 years, did I forget to convert that video of my 25th birthday or something? Too bad. Face it, History — Memory is going to be — it's being — destroyed at the same time it's being created. Everyday some hard-drive with the only copy of something crashes hard, some analog tape is accidentaly put into the trashcan, a VCR head slices that tape of your infancy in two. Paper fades, but at least resists longer. I can look at pictures of my grandma's grandfather working in a field. Will a digicam image jump four generations? We better print the important stuff.···

Moleskine notebooks. An overpriced luxury? Well, you can buy a lot of Moleskines with the money you'd spend on a PDA and believe me — as a proud owner of various of these overpriced notebooks —, a Moleskine notebook works better. It has quality. 10€ may be a lot for a notebook, but it is the perfectly-designed notebook (although I don't like those that seem wrapped in carpet). Either one of this or else I make my own notebooks. Anyhow, there's a blog about Moleskines now. Yet another strange symbiosis of traditional and modern. *I'd like to note I'm a complete sucker addicted to quality stationary and office supplies. Better that than smoking.···

Musical atavisms are a strange phenomenon, though. Today I woke up with that beautiful theme song (not the latin ones) from Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood for Love in my head. I had seen the film months ago and I spent most of the morning trying to figure out what it was. Anyway, I did some research after I found out where it was from. The song is called Yumeji's Theme. Go fetch.···

Talkie Walkie, Air's newie, is indeed a great record at the beginning of 2004. It seems they get better and better, as in fact I don't like Moon Safari at all and I still think their first hit, Sexy Boy, is a damn irritating song. Well, Premiers Symptomes was fine though, and so was 10000Hz Legend, and now I absolutely love their new record. In a word, it's soothing, just what I need to take a break from all dirty crappy electrorockclash crap. It's a funny thing, consider that in the mid-90s alternative music was geared towards smart and self-confident looking, dignified female vocalists (take three very different examples: Beth Gibbons, Björk and Martina Topley-Bird, besides the lots of jazz singer-esque ladies appearing as guest vocalists in fashionable trip-hop and breakbeat compilations). Now we have Peaches. And male-wise, The Darkness. The music zeitgeist may well go fuck itself.···