The Spectrum food court has ripped out the planters. I guess they realized they needed the floor space after they chopped off one end.
It’s Halloween, so Target has the Christmas decorations up! 
Just heard a commercial that started off, “Winter is Coming.”
The Great Park Balloon in Irvine, California, all dressed up as a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween. I was hoping to get a shot of it aloft, but it landed as I approached the park.
It looks really eerie lit up at night, floating off in the distance. Or just floating above office buildings.
It’s not as good a picture as the one I found on Flickr last week, but you can see the whole face.
More of my own photos of the balloon on Flickr, including this non-zoomed shot, showing the big empty field and Saddleback in the background:
Castle as a “space cowboy” – “Didn’t you wear that, like, 5 years ago?”
They so should have called this episode “Castle-vania!”
Balloon, originally uploaded by blueskyoveraquatic.
Actually it’s the Great Park Balloon in Irvine, done up with a Jack-O-Lantern face. I keep meaning to run out at lunch and try to catch a photo of it floating above the office parks, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
For now, this photo I found on Flickr will do.
This weekend we went out to see The Prestige, which was quite good. The next theater over was running The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D, and we figured, what the heck? After the first movie, we got tickets for another.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies, but for some reason the 3D release didn’t really interest me when I first heard about it. It felt too gimmicky, like when they project a regular movie on an IMAX screen even though the movie itself isn’t really made for that format.
I got a little more interested when I read an article about how they did it. ILM essentially re-did the entire movie as a computer-animated film, matching each frame exactly, then shifted the virtual camera over a bit. One eye gets the original film, and the other eye gets the CGI copy.
I was astonished at how seamlessly they matched. I couldn’t remember which eye got the original, and I honestly couldn’t tell. Most CGI-animated films have a cartoony, sort of vinyl look to them, which would not blend at all, but ILM is used to matching their CGI to photographed actors and sets, which I suppose makes them the ideal animation studio for this sort of thing. It had to be the most effective reformatting of a film that I’ve ever seen—compare it to colorizing movies, or the Star Wars special editions (which were done by the same effects house, but with older technology)—because it didn’t detract (or distract) from what was there in the first place.
Of course, it wasn’t long before I stopped looking at the technical merits and just settled into watching the movie.
Having re-watched it, I’m now very interested to see what director Henry Selick does with the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book, Coraline
