Depressing

It occurs to me now that all the music I keep on my iRiver is crushingly depressing. This was probably not intentional.

Marmaduke + Explanations = Funny

An oft-mentioned topic during dinner last night was the best Joe Mathlete entry ever posted:

Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke

warrenellis.com - Human Bomb

Oh my God, this is it.

This is it.

And I didn't even go looking for it. Warren Ellis brought it to me. Good boy.

warrenellis.co, - Human Bomb

Riddle Me This

Something The Riddler might ask:

When is an architecture-optimized version of Firefox not an architecture-optimized version of Firefox?

Answer: When the unoptimized version runs faster and better.

For a few months now, I've been using "Bon Echo", a custom-built version of Firefox that is optimized for the PowerPC G4 chipset found in my Apple iBook. Problem was, the performance as a whole started to seriously degrade and network latency in the browser was getting so bad it turned into an "oh no, do I have something saturating my router" situation last night.

I downloaded Firefox 2.0.0.3 and the overall experience is much better. So long Bon Echo, I'm sticking to the branded version of Firefox from now on.

Apophenia

In the "Slave Auction" episode of Green Wing, Mac makes a concerted effort to avoid the advances of Staff liaison Sue White. She warns him that he is obligated to attend the charity event, and that she has "an unlimited budget". As she stalks him around the hospital he runs away, telling Martin that he is trying to hide from "The Madness of Queen Sue".

Pretty funny joke, right?

It gets better. Julian Rhind-Tutt, the actor who plays Mac, was in the film The Madness of King George. Neat.

A "review" of 300

Ladies and gentlemen of the American movie-going public, I cannot stress this enough. Run. Do not hesitate, fumble, or falter. Do not waste time, do not contemplate your actions. Run, I say. Run, don't walk, away from 300. Your very life may depend upon it.

When I first saw the trailer for 300, it looked gorgeous. Gold and copper tones highlighted the film and the slow-motion action sequences looked like living comic book pages. It was Sin City, BC. When the film was released on 2007-03-09, I was prevented from seeing it on opening night by job duties. As the early reports started coming in, there were criticisms of the film's plot, the acting, and the overt modern political parallels forced onto the unrelated landscape of ancient Greek combat.

They were all right, but they were all wrong.

The critics were right. The film is heavy-handed in discussing freedom and how we must vigilantly fight against sinister Middle Eastern forces who wish to do us harm. The film is bland in plot and trite, clichéd even, in dialogue. The music is inappropriate and every frame is inaccurate to the point of anachronism. So what? 300 is not even remotely intended to be a film that aspires to be anything other than a neat way to show some new special effects and look pretty doing it.

The critics were wrong. They were not wrong in their poor opinions of the film, but in the weakness of their delivery of the message. "The acting is poor in this film," they said, a understatement that is criminally negligent of the sanctity of their duties of critic and reviewer. Last year they may as well have said "Hurricane Katrina would make visiting New Orleans slightly unpleasant". Or perhaps "Mike Tyson is a bit aggressive".

I believe that it is a person's duty as a human being to warn friend and foe alike of the dangers of seeing this movie. In truth, I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to waste 117 minutes of his life on this travesty of cinema. I'll say it again:

Kant believed that is a moral imperative for a man who is capable of intervening to prevent another from causing harm to himself through ignorance. You are expected, for example, to prevent a blind person from walking into a burning building. You possess the faculties to know that they are both in danger and incapable of recognizing so. As a human being, it is your responsibility to intercept them and keep them safe. It is an essential attribute of our own humanity to protect our own kind from immanent danger. Just as I would act to stop a total stranger from falling down an open elevator shaft, I would act to keep people from seeing 300. Let's discuss why.

Walking into the theater, I had very low expectations. I'd heard bad things and I was pretty much just expecting a movie that looked good. If the film had delivered even this small thing, I would not have been disappointed. Instead, I was tortured for 2 hours while some buff actors in front of a blue screen committed act after act of grotesque video game violence with the picture's saturation turned way way down. Hell, it wasn't even 2 hours of fighting. They tried to work a mediocre plot into the mix, too. While the Spartans are kicking everybody's ass, there's some insipid quote-unquote "drama" surrounding the queen trying to drum up some city-state support to mobilize more troops.

Just as Sin City suffered from an imbalanced emphasis of style over substance, 300 is devoid of any significant content. Unlike Sin City, however, the style in 300 just isn't enough to carry the rest of the film. The movie is stylish, but not stylish enough to actually make you feel justified that you spent 2 hours listening to insipid soundbites spat from the MacBook of the lowliest J. T. LeRoy wannabes. To wit:

Some dying Spartan: "It's an honor to die next to you."
The King of Sparta: "It's an honor to live next to you."

Do you see what he did? He took what that first guy said and turned it very slightly around! Wow! What incredible mastery of writing it is to pull off such a witty bon mot! And that's not the only incident in the movie where Frank Miller's writing is bastardized into something retarded. In one scene, the queen of Sparta — arguably a very important position in town — has to bang a seedy councillor just to gain an audience with the city elders and politicians. (Uh, OK. Whatever.) As the sleazy politico is preparing to forcibly mount Her Majesty, he taunts her and warns that he will make sure that what she is about to experience will not be quick or pleasant for her. At that point, I kind of wanted to go take a shower, but after he gets her some floor time with the decision makers the following day, he ends up sabotaging her speech and calling her an adulterer and a whore. She winds up stabbing him to death in front of the whole parliament, and here's the twist: as she's stabbing him, she pulls him close and whispers in his ear that she will not make his death quick or pleasant!

You go girl! You took the words that he said to you as he defiled you and then said them right back to him! You must have learned that from your husband before he left!

In my imagination, this isn't a fault of the screenwriters for 300, and it's just common knowledge in Sparta that the royal family just aren't very good conversationalists:

Spartan: "Your majesty, the people have toiled in the fields to make a feast."
The King of Sparta: "Spartan, the people have feasted in the fields so that they may toil."
Spartan: "What? Oh, right. Moving on. We also have a shortage of corn for the harvest."
The King of Sparta: "Then we must have a shortage of harvest for our corn."
Spartan: "Sire, are you retarded or something?"

This glut of hackneyed faux writing taints the film from start to finish, and you have to start sifting through meaningless scene after meaningless scene looking for something salvageable. I can't blame the actors for failing to really give their all for such terrible writing. The stylistic choices of making everything look copper ends up giving the film a faded look. Ultimately, 300 eschews any kind of message and instead descends into absurdity and full-on what-the-fuckisms. Instead of a rockin' tale about warriors defending their home, the movie skips gears and begins to assault the audience with non-sequiturs and deliberately bizarre scenes like goat-headed musicians playing for a harem of pierced transsexuals. Instead of the epic fight sequences from the Lord of the Rings movies, we end up with choppy, stunted action snippets of primarily one-on-three-or-four combat. My friend Nevin suggests that they tried to capture the same vibe of Lord of the Rings, but made the fundamental mistake of thinking it was OK to substitute New Zealand with Quebec.

The individual combat sequences themselves — fighting being the only feature of the film that could have possibly been considered worthwhile — are for shit. They'd be fantastic if the cinematography didn't make them look washed out and claustrophobic. It's like you aren't so much watching a movie but are instead playing a giant video game on a movie theater screen. The moves of the combatants are fluid and pretty, but as formulaic as right-right-right-left or up-up-up-down-towards. More than once I felt like I was watching the next logical progression of the interactive fighting game. There's plenty of chopping, cutting, and dismemberment, complete with el fake-o arterial spurting. 300 isn't a movie so much as it's what it would be like if somebody found a way to play Rome: Total War with the Mortal Kombat blood code turned on. For the uninitiated, the blood code (A-B-A-C-A-B-B) was a means of taking the Sega Genesis game from PG to PG-13 by adding "realistic" blood spurts whenever the fighters pounded on each other and the ability to execute horrific "fatality" maneuvers on wobbly, defeated opponents. The blood wasn't really realistic. It was a contrived splatter of red dots that would fly around the screen and disappear after a few moments, exactly the way mortal wounds act in 300. The copious quantity of sword chops and spear wounds all generate plenty of blood spray, artificially glooping out of the victim and freezing in mid air for a second before sort of just fading out of existence forever. The physics of blood spatter in Greece is apparently unaffected by forces like gravity or momentum. Maybe some benevolent time traveler would like to give the ancient Greeks access to an Xbox 360 so they can use a better physics engine and get that fixed because without it, the unfathomable depravity of men slaughtering each other just looks stupid.

Regrettably, at no point in this ridiculous video game of a movie did anyone shout "Get over here!" or "Level up!" or "I'm sorry, but the princess is in another castle". The only real difference between 300 and a video game is that video games tend to have better exposition sequences, graphics, and dialogue. 300 also doesn't have any pauses for "Loading..." screens while the audience waits for the next scene to cache. I guess that means there's one good thing about this movie.

As it turns out, Sin City still had a pretty good plot to fit its revolutionary new film style and daring cinematography. 300, I'm happy to say, will serve as a terrific counterpoint to what a director can accomplish when he tries to put a comic book on film without having to stress out about things like acting, plot, writing, or making anything look good. I'd like to end this review with a joke I just thought up. Q. How would you describe the good, the bad, and the ugly? A. Sin City and 300 twice.

Are you laughing? Me neither.

I Am So Proud of Matt

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

You are a good old-fashioned six-sided cube, otherwise known as a d6. Others know you to be plain, predictable, conservative, average, ordinary, and downright boring. You prefer to describe yourself as dependable, honest, practical and trustworthy. People usually know what to expect from you, since you rarely hold any surprises. You hate to make decisions, and if forced to decide, you'll always fall back on how it was done in the past. You always order the same thing at your favorite restaurant, and your jokes, while funny, are never too offensive. It seems that you are well liked, but maybe that's simply because there's nothing to hate.

An Update, in Q & A format

Q. Toby, where have you been?

A. I've been busy.

Q. Have you read any good books lately?

A. I haven't actually had time to do much more than pick up my trusty Sedgewick this weekend and read more about Patricia tries.

Q. Is it a good idea to play a drinking game based on the movie Starship Troopers on St. Patrick's Day?

A. No.

Q. What can you suggest for someone who would insist upon doing such an idiotic thing anyway?

A. Don't play as the bugs.

Q. Didn't you TiVo the extended version of Apocalypse Now?

A. I don't own a TiVo, but yes, I did.

Q. How was it?

A. My non-TiVo TiVo automatically deleted it, unwatched, in order to make room for more episodes of The Avengers.

Q. You still watch that show?

A. Close. I still love to watch that show.

Q. How's Erica?

A. She's a crazy-go-nuts knitting machine. It's like yarn goes in and hats come out.

Q. Seen any good movies?

A. I've been waiting, patiently, since March 9 to get the time off to watch 300. It looks like, fingers crossed, it just might happen this weekend.

Q. Didn't you want to go see Pan's Labyrinth, too?

A. Don't remind me. It's coming out on DVD sometime soon, I hope.

Oh Frabjous Day

15 Mar 17:02:14 ntpdate[26741]: adjust time server 1.2.3.4 offset 0.000171 sec

Damn it all if I don't just love time synchronization.

Like he was channeling Monk

An IM conversation I had with my boss the other day:

[13:21] My Boss: dude, i really dig the postal service
[13:22] Me: As well you should
[13:22] My Boss: next time u have a band like this that i need to hear
[13:22] My Boss: stand in my office and dont leave until i put it on ;)
[13:22] Me: I'm pushing The Magnetic Fields onto [a coworker].
[13:22] My Boss: groovy

About a spam

I saw this today as the complete text of the subject of a spam message I received at work:

"If two polys breed, the kittens often have multiple toes on their rear paws as well."

Probably true.

When Startups Go Wrong

The other day I stumbled across the IM-based task managment service called IMified. Their elevator pitch is that their servers use IM as an interface, so you can leave notes and reminders for yourself or schedule appointments through Google Calendar just by IMing a special agent.

The problem is, it doesn't really work out so well. There's a "new" interface for Blogger that's only about 8 months old that the IMified developers haven't gotten around to implementing, so there's no love trying to blog through IMified.

OK, maybe it's asking too much to think that a company that offers a service will keep up to date on every last little interactivity bit with every third party service they claim to support.

But their internal offerings are top notch, right? Negatory.

You can pretty easily set a reminder in IMified. "Hey, repeat back to me 'go get some eggs at the store' at 2 PM," you tell IMified by means of their numerical interface.

In theory, anyway, you should then get an IM of your own at the determined time. Too bad that doesn't work, either.

"Hey," I said this morning, still giving the service a chance after getting burned with the Blogger API fiasco, "Hey, make sure you tell me 'blah' at 2 PM." At 3 o'clock, I got the message, right on time, if anybody was counting EST.

So unless IMified keeps their servers in Arizona or parts of Indiana, their clocks are wrong.

Points off.

Viva M. Emmet Walsh

A night watching movies yesterday resulted in a very important lesson about 1980s film: M. Emmet Walsh can do no wrong.

If you haven't seen Blood Simple or Blade Runner, you owe it to yourself to go out and find them. Granted, the characters Walsh plays in each film aren't necessarily ground-breaking. He's either a Texan in a VW Beetle or a haggard police chief, but both of these movies are, in my opinion, essential viewing.

I appreciate the director's cut of Blood Simple, which tightens up the pacing a bit, and the director's cut of Blade Runner is really the only canonical version you should view for a variety of reasons.

Andromeda in Bondage

I'm an ignorant and simplistic art lover. If you show me a painting of flowers, I will judge the quality of the picture based solely on how closely the blobs and strokes of paint resemble actual flowers. High similarity = high quality. Low similarity = low quality. By even this limited dataset, you could correctly assess that I love the work of photorealist Ralph Goings and that I strongly dislike the cubist movement that Pablo Picasso so famously represents.

I'm simple like that. So sue me.

Because of my limited appreciation of art history, I have to enjoy when there is such a stark comparison of a common theme among a selection of artists that span centuries. Any artist could do anonymous flowers, but how does one interpret something like a Pietà? It is a benchmark of an artist to be able to create his or her own impression on the subject matter (no pun intended, Monet fans).

In a recent post by Gloria Brame, she compares the various selections of art history surrounding the Greek myth of Andromeda being fed to a sea monster. I found it interesting to compare how one image can be reworked and reinterpreted according to a variety of artistic styles, from byzantine to Renaissance to art deco. Wow.

Andromeda in Bondage

Girls Are Pretty | True Lava Always Day!

Girls Are Pretty | True Lava Always Day!: "You went to Hawaii on your honeymoon and as luck would have it, a volcano erupted and killed your husband. He got caught in a shower of lava and he turned into one of those lava people who get preserved as an ashen sculpture in the exact position where they were standing. You kind of hate going to visit him on that pretty hill, because of all the people who got preserved by lava there, your husband is the only one who is both picking his nose and scratching his balls at the same time."

Movie Idea

Inside her fashion catalog last night, Erica found an advert for a sequel to the dance/cheer/teen movie "Bring It On".

I want to make a sequel to "Bring It On", too. I'll call it "Bring It On 3: The Bringinonining".

Little Girls and Ponies

SuicideGirls > News > Culture > True Stories by Rob Corddry: The Playboy Interview: "Playboy: You're notorious for spending a lot of time at Plato's Retreat, New York's infamous swingers club.

"Rob: I love to fuck. I love to do oral. I'll put my cock into anything. I'm like a little girl that wants a pony for her birthday but my pony is fucking and my birthday happens every night at eleven-thirty."

Impressive

I literally just now found out that SCM utility Darcs records its patchsets using UTC.

Bravo, Darcs. Good show. I am duly impressed.

An Escape Pod, Short and Sweet

I enjoy listening to the podcast "Escape Pod", but sometimes the stories just prattle on forever. I liked the recent story "Blink, Don't Blink", simply because it's good sci-fi without a sixty-five paragraph intro about how syntho-flavo-tabs revolutionized the planet after the fifth world war.

I also like characterization without exposition. How a character talks and thinks, and what they think about — what they regret — tells me a lot more than I would get from a sequence where the character gives his complete life history, what his childhood was like, and any various food allergies he may have.

Double-plus good for "Blink, Don't Blink". Quick, poignant, and memorable.

I don't want to alarm anyone...

...but I think my TV just rebooted itself or something. Sure, it's working now, and it may have been just a cable glitch, but my money is on "fucked up TV guts". I'll watch and wait to see if it does it again.

On Tea

May God forgive me that which I am about to do: make chai with Earl Grey.

Bunny Bond

Best thing ever? No, not quite. But quite good nonetheless: James Bond moments, enacted by bunnies

On Black Snake Moan

Tell it like it is, Sam:

Black Snake Moan | SugarBank: "The tags from the movie's IMDB page are: Interracial Romance / Drugs / Nymphomania / Nymphomaniac. If they'd added 'car becomes robot' they could shut down Hollywood and go home forever."