Yeah, kat, South Mountain was the one I mentioned. Uncle Cece talked about it too: [link]

I don't think so. Anything that's Sorta Cute But Off is going to trigger the Uncanny Valley response.

Maybe you'd end up with something like the optical illusion of the vase/two faces - the brain would be able to recognize the cute or the Uncanny Valley, but never both at the same time.

thanks bon! as ever, you ROCK. I wrote a snarky email to the editors at LATimes. you've made my day.

Goslings is Bermudan rum! Never touch the stuff.

It might very well be good, but there's too much Appleton's between me and it.

I just had someone tell me to not see King Kong because she didn't like how it ended. I explained to her that's how the first one ended, but she was adamant that they should have taken the ape back to Skull Island. "The ape dies, Hamlet dies, Romeo and Juliet die. They're tragedies." She was suprisingly resistant to the idea. You know when you realise you just can't talk to someone?

I think it's theoretically possible for some CGI creature to posess high levels of both cuteness and Uncanny Valley-ness.

Totally!

I was just listening to a podcast about AI, and this really annoying woman was talking about Kismet (an MIT research project by one of the Roomba guys) where they decided to make the robot cute, because people wouldn't interact with the adult-looking robot appropriately. Thing is, Kismet is hideous.

Kismet is freakish. I've always wanted to tell them to finish the damn thing. Of course, that might be worse.

I wonder if some day we'll have police robots that have been made cute to make them seem less threatening.

"I'm your worst nightmare - a Hello Kitty with a badge!"

Kismet is damned scary.

Of course the ape dies. What the hell did she think she was watching?

I found myself not nearly as sympathetic to the ape as Jackson meant me to be, because of the volume of collateral death. It's a tricky balance, and I don't think they managed it all that well.

The woman was so fucking annoying. It was a day of irritating podcasts, of scientists talking about research without enough detail ("Women's self image was more improved by actual progress in their physical strength, not just their perceived progress." Dude, I need methodology, because you sure made it sound like everyone actually knew their increases in physical strength). This AI/theology woman kept going on and on about why people fear or crave AIs, and the minute a caller introduced a new idea (creating artificial intelligence as an act of worship) she not only got too broad in her generalisations (isn't now a good time to mention Muslim prohibition of representing the human form in worship?) she also refused to respond further because she'd never thought of it before.

Sorry about taking you offscript, dearie.

eta:

What the hell did she think she was watching?

Yeah, she was annoying too. By collateral damage, do you mean the number of innocents who died in the rampage? How does that compare to the other two movies? Did PJ give into his lust for spectacle and up the body count past the originals?

The park acreage thing is interesting. I grew up hearing this:

With its massive expanse of 1,769 acres, which encompass the Kansas City Zoo and Sprint IMAX Theatre as well as the 7,795-seat Starlight Theatre, Swope Park is the second-largest city park in the United States.

I've never heard what they considered to be the largest though.

By collateral damage, do you mean the number of innocents who died in the rampage? How does that compare to the other two movies? Did PJ give into his lust for spectacle and up the body count past the originals?

Yes, don't know, and yes. Kong does a lot more chewing on people in the first movie, but they don't try to make him sympathetic. And the New York sequences in the new movie show lots and lots of people dying, not to mention anyone who was near the building when Kong finally fell. So I had difficulties in reconciling all that. Sure, I felt bad about the last of his kind thing, but I didn't really feel it was inappropriate to kill a huge wild animal that was rampaging through the city stomping on people.

I've never heard what they considered to be the largest though.

When I lived in Portland, they always claimed Forest Park was the largest wilderness park in an American city, whatever that means. It's pretty damned huge: you could get seriously lost in it for days, I suspect.