An attack of SRMD: ToneMatrix in HTML5 and Javascript

Many moons ago, I admired a lovely little program called ToneMatrix by Andre Michelle. I had Flash envy hard after seeing it, and I wanted to figure out if it was possible to make such a thing using only HTML.

Well, with the latest audio standard from the W3C (note that that's a "Raw Tip" specification, meaning that it's completely vaporware), it is now possible. Chrome supports much of the WebAudio specification, so this in what I hacked together in the past, oh, four hours or so: HTML5 Tone Matrix.

Compared to the original, it's not very pretty at all. I don't understand audio. But it's a start, and like all experiments, won't suffer from further experimentation and understanding.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Last night, Lisakit and I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes film. It is directed by Guy Ritchie, so it has the same look and feel of the first film, and Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law reprise their roles as Holmes and Watson in a wild bromance as they hunt down the wily Moriarty, an industrialist who uses assassination and blackmail to slowly build a massive empire of coal and steel. The whys of this are a plot point I shall not reveal.

Like the first one, there's a lot of ramping, and Holmes' preternatural ability to script out an encounter before it happens is blocked only by Moriarty's equal capacity with it, so there are some intriguing intellectual cat-and-mouse games.

There's a massive amount of real, human stuntwork in the film. The stunt crew was almost as big as the digital effects artists list, which tells you something about the amount of work that went into making everything look real.

The soundtrack pummels you into submission. It's getting worse in the theaters as they get more and more desperate to "entertain" you.

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows is, in the end, a big banging booming, sometimes funny take on the Holmes story, with gorgeous photography ocassionally ruined by an overeager director.

Disclaimers of the 21st Century

One thing about last night's movie: being a period piece, there was smoking. By both the heroes and the villains. At the end, the credits assured us that "No entity associated with the production of this film received any compensation, financial or otherwise, for the depicted use of tobacco products."

Dear Hollywood: Please Stop Raping My Childhood

Last night, before the movie began, there was a "turn off your cellphones" PSA that had a fuzzy little orange creature trying to hush everyone around him on their cellphones and chomping down on snacks too loudly. At first, I thought he was just one of those strangely hideous CGI creatures that some studios think is cute. But then he shouted out, "I am the Lorax! I speak for the audience!" He then gave a spiel about being silent in the theater, followed by a "Don't forget to see me, the Lorax, in the upcoming..."

I damn near hurled my dinner on the row before me. You would too, if you were revolted by seeing the ongoing sodomization of Dr. Seuss's corpse like that.