Last night (this morning) at 12:01, I went and saw Wall•e, the latest addition to Pixar’s family of animated features. To saw the least, it was amazing. The story was very clever (written of course by Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter), and made the idea of “robot emotion” seem feasible. Through Pixar’s creative use of humor and emotion, they made it possible to call an animated piece of metal “adorable”. That’s a feat in itself.
The film’s touching story was complemented by the studio’s usual ground-breaking animation techniques and of course another excellent score by Thomas Newman.
In addition to the feature, the new Pixar short showed before the film was fantastic! It was the story of a magician and a rabbit, and it was non-stop hilariousness.
I highly recommend that everyone go and see Wall•e at the next available and oppurtune moment. You’ll find a touching story, excellent animation, many laughs, a shout out to the Apple computer, a great score, and another smash-hit for Pixar.
Kevin’s movie rating:
Absolutely incredible
Movie Rating Key:
- Best movie I have ever seen
- Absolutely incredible
- Pretty darn good
- I would watch it again
- Good, but only time I am seeing it
- Disappointing
- Not very good
- Horrendous
- Shouldn’t have been made
Over the last few days, I have been collecting material to start phase 1 of the Apollo Simulation Project (I think I need a better name…), which is the research phase. I found a bunch of high-res flight manuals and flight plans, which I had printed at Kinkos. They are each more than 300 pages, so they provide quite the wealth of information.
In addition, after quite the adventure, I got a library card at the Cupertino Public Library, and then proceeded to check out some books on the physics surrounding rocket flight, particularly in the Apollo missions. There is a lot to learn!
The Apollo Simulation Project progress:
Current phase: Research.
I just put up pictures on the Photos page for Leslie’s and I’s biking stint in Chicago and my roommates’ and I’s adventure to Stanford University.
Check them out!
Though many of you would claim that I’ve been a nerd for a long time, of which claim I will not dispute, I think yesterday I officially inducted myself into nerd-dom. I was reading the Saturn V rocket manual, and I wanted to know a little bit more about the use of retrorockets (small rockets used for slowing down a space vehicle). The Wikipedia article on them claimed that for the Apollo missions, they were not used. So I was like, “hold on, I just read that they were used for backing off the S-IC and S-II stages after booster shutdown.” Consequently, I edited and corrected the page.
Yeah, I’m a nerd. Score.