I just “read” (listened to) Jurassic Park and I’m almost finished with Lost World. Great fuckin books. Dude, yeah I liked the Lost World movie but why the fuck did they fuckin change the damn plot so much? it would have been SO much better if they followed the plot of the book. spielberg sucks for doing that.
i’m not even just talking about him turning Malcolm into a anxiety-ridden little bitch, or how he completely leaves out Biosyn and Dogdson, or how he completely sanitized every character…
it’s the little things like… he took the concept of 2 kids stowing away to the island (Arby and Kelly) and just included Kelly then decides, oh she’s Ian Malcolm’s daughter plus she’s not an academic, instead she’s a gymnist. A plot twist only built so she could do dumb gymnist shit to confuse a velociraptor (what?!) then kick it through a wall (…!!!)
little things like Spielberg couldn’t even be arsed to make the dinosaurs the much more descriptive colors Crichton described.
and… San Diego!!! wtf.
what happened in the first two Jurassic Park movies is they took events from both books, stripped them of all their “believability” (i know), then randomly scattered them into the movies while also assigning roles to the completely wrong characters for said events.
john hammond not dying a death by dinosaurs in the first movie was screenwriting SIN.
anyway, the books are awesome. way fuckin better than the movies. i get how it works but honestly i don’t really understand why they decided to just go in a completely different direction than Crichton’s work. and yeah i know he dgaf because they dumped a shitload of money on him and signed the rights to Lost World before he even wrote it. but still. the fuck, man
Completely agree. I still remember asking myself why they changed that about Hammond after reading the book decades ago!
I don’t mind differences between book and movie, but they have to make sense for me. However, I always thought that the movie adaptation of “Cloud Atlas” was absolutely great, one of the best translations from book to movie I know despite all the creative freedom they took, and that one probably LOST money while Jurassic Park was a huge success, so…
Seminal and very inspiring. I went looking for Curtis’s initial description of pulsar synthesis, ended up reading backwards to get some context and then just started at the beginning. For a 25 year old text it’s chock full of great ideas.
This is adapted from his 1999 dissertation but it’s not completely unreadable. There are certainly technical and analytical sections, but he also includes a lot of “and here is how I put it into practice making music” parts as well. The initial chapter on the history of microsound/granular is really interesting.
It’s worth pointing out that the text occupies a sort of weird middle ground - if you use any sub-tonal/granular effects or synthesis, the people that made them were likely influenced directly or indirectly by this book. At the same time, there are massive amounts of research, implementation and documentation in the intervening 25 years you can read if you want a more cutting edge take on the processes (most of which are incredibly dry but probably more technically useful by comparison). I still think this book serves as a great overview of the field without getting bogged down in the details and can offer up some interesting ways to think about and use those tools.
I have had this book for over a decade now and studied it a bit while I was in the composer bachelors program at SFSU. it’s quite a bulk of information, can get a little… overloaded?.. at times, but like you I stumbled upon certain parts that struck me inspirationally enough that this book (unlike many of the required textbooks from that time) will always remain on my shelf. i’ll have to pull it out again, thanks for reminding me of it.
Just finished this guy; honestly, I didn’t think making music (or is it sounds?) like this was going to be as flexible and fun as it turned out to be, but being able to create makeshift UGens on the fly is absolutely nuts. And the concurrency tricks you can pull off with the system are really interesting, not to mention that it just side-hustles as a MIDI-spitting livecoding machine.
Pure Data was always clunky as shit for me, so this is sort of the perfect alternative.
Goin’ on down to clunky town, after all. Since I have limited options, being able to host PlugData and prototype pseudo-modules in VCV Rack has made this avenue pretty appealing again. Unfortunately there’s some botched audio outputs on either the VCV or PD end, but at least you’ve got traditional left and right to play with, polyphonic MIDI input, and parameters to modulate from the outside. That’s more than enough to work with
This genuinely does feel like the missing manual. I know there are help files everywhere, but something about this book just explains everything better.
I was going to rant about how cool PDLua was, too, but I think I should move that to the prototyping thread (if at all) to not clog up this one like I’m usually inclined to do
