Two matters to blog about tonight, both related to Mr. Quentin Tarantino.
Firstly, I watched Kill BIll Vol.2 this evening and thought it was masterful. A welcome return of Tarantino's citrus-sharp dialogue which seemed to be in shorter supply in volume 1. The cinematography however was just as wonderful as it was in volume 1. Particularly the entire cifu sequence, which from the very start was obviously going to be a complete homage to 70's-80's Kung Fu movies. The colours were perfectly matched to the film quality of the genre and the same amateurish pans and zooming cuts that were clumsy artifacts of most Kung Fu film's production were lovingly reproduced. Excellent film.
Secondly a new application has been released for OS X who's coming has been awaited by many with baited breath. It's a news aggregator with far more scope and power than any before it. Its name and hence its connection to Mr Tarantino, is 'PulpFiction', in recognition of both what it does and who it's made by (Freshly Squeezed Software). I tried it out and I loved it. Wonderful application and easily the best in its field, far surpassing NetNewsWire in my opinion. However I don't have much use for an aggregator - many of the Iraqi-run blogs I visit don't have RSS feeds set up, although new blogger apparently makes them very easy to configure.
Perhaps later on I might move to a more aggregator based web-experience, but for now I'll make do with Safari and the helpful 'Open All Tabs' button. The problem, which prompted me to download PulpFiction when it was released - my unhealthily large blog-habit - has been solved. I've put the blogs, which ballooned to saturate their amalgamated bookmarks folder, into 2 folders now: one for fun blogs and one for punditry and analysis. Much better and I now have load times which don't necessitate the making of a cup of tea to kill time.
(Edit: Aha! Thanks to Kevin I've discovered that all blogs run by blogger now have an XML feed from /atom.xml )
By the way a quick hello to anyone who's new to the site in light of my increased traffic. I hope you like it, stay a while - it's not like I'm going anywhere :)
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at May 16, 2004 01:01 AM