Month: February 2021

Review: Treasure Planet (2002)

Now that I’ve got access to Disney +, I have plenty of video to watch. A few months ago, someone on Deviant Art referred to Treasure Planet and suggested it would be worth watching. The commenter said that reviewers had panned the film. On the-numbers.com, I learned that it wasn’t a very successful movie financially. It’s worldwide gross did not quite compensate for the film’s budget.

Treasure Planet is a story about a youth, Jim Hawkins, voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is drifting after his father had left the family. His mother, voiced by Laurie Metcalf, was desperate to keep him out of trouble. Despite his mother’s reservations, after getting a map to the legendary Treasure Planet, Jim starts on an adventure in search of riches. The film is inspired by the story Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, but it’s set in outer space. The story uncomfortably conjoins the pirate and buccaneer genre with the science fiction adventure genre. It used Jim, in the role of a troubled youth, to tie them together.

The film was passable but I’m glad I watched it. The crew were little more than caricatures and had their personality revealed by their visual appearance rather than their actions. One of the bright spots of the movie was Morph, voiced by Dane A. Davis, a shape shifting pet who took the place of a pirate’s trusty parrot. Morph added some comic relief and often distracted from the main action—I was spending more time looking and paying attention to its antics instead of the rest of the action. The robot B.E.N. voiced by Martin Short is also a bright spot in the performance.

The pirate John Silver voiced by Brian Murray has a more complex personality than the other characters. Rather than Jim’s stereotyped journey in the story, Silver has his own journey that is more compelling. Jim has a standard fairy tale ending while Silver leaves transformed. The gender roles in the film are pretty stereotypical. The writers realized that the majority of the story didn’t have any female characters, so the captain, voiced by Emma Thompson, was recast as a woman almost as an afterthought.

The art of the movie was well done. I appreciated the ethereal visuals of the sky. The resources spent to make them effective were well spent. If the space environment had not been so colorful and varied, the film would have been very dull and flat. The different ships and other vehicles seemed incongruous with the space theme, but their styling kept the story’s connection to Treasure Island apparent.

Treasure Planet was an acceptable movie. It isn’t close to the top of the pantheon of Disney Films so it’s probably not worth renting but if you want a humorous take on Treasure Island, it might be worth putting on your list of to-watch-someday films. There’s plenty else on Disney+ that is appealing.

Diceware and User Names

Diceware is a system to make passwords that are easy to remember but very difficult to guess. The technique uses dice throws to choose a passphrase.

Diceware was invented and trademarked by A G Reinhold and is available at https://diceware.com. It requires five dice and a table such as the one Reinhold created. For each roll of 5 dice, there are 7776 different possible outcomes. Each combination selects a different short word from a 36 page table.

If I roll 61544, 21455 and 65243, the phrase that the tables return is “track cove yves” This doesn’t have enough entropy to be a good password and diceware.com explains why in more depth and authority than I can.

My idea is that you can use diceware to create usernames. I tend to use the same phrases for a username. If you see those phrases, there’s a good chance it’s me, which isn’t good for anonymity.

I can use two or three rolls and Diceware to construct a username that is unique and won’t be reused anywhere else. Diceware usernames won’t be biased by the difficulty that humans are poor when they try to pick randomly. Google is a nice place to use Diceware to create throwaway user names that google won’t mangle with numbers at the end. [Ignoring the paradox that if I create my usernames this way, it’s still not anonymous because very few people do it this way so it can be a little obvious.]

I just created my account at http://archiveofourown.org. AOOO is an archive for fanfiction of all sorts. I’m hoping to add fan fiction based on Vernor Vinge’s Hugo winning works A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. I didn’t find any other AOOO fanfiction for him, so I can do all the world building I want as Blitz72hero. (In addition, it’s a cooler name than I could have come up with on my own!)