Blackmoor Vituperative

Dan Farber at ZDNet has an tepid piece on Lawrence Lessig‘s speech at the Open Source Business Conference. I wish we could have access to the full text of Lessig’s speech. Instead, Farber provides us with sound bites:

“There is a war against the freedom to innovate and this community has done way too little to resist,” Lessig said. “I am a puny, independent law professor. If you are depending on me [to fight the war] you are hopeless and lost,” he added.

A good summary, but I would have liked to read the meat of Lessig’s speech. I could also do without Farber’s facile acceptance of the tragic state of intellectual property law and the one-sided propaganda from RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk:

The battle isn’t strictly about open source versus closed source software or whether piracy is an evil. That’s a given.

No, Dan: it’s not a given. It’s not a given because defining the vast majority of “unauthorized copying” as “piracy” is a fiction invented to demonize fair use so that large media companies can further pervert our legal system to line their own pockets.

It’s a shame that the main theme of Lessig’s speech went over Farber’s head:

“More significant is to become part of the debate. The biggest problem is that the debate is dominated by lawyers and lobbyists who don’t have a direct stake in the outcome.”

He’s talking about you, Dan. Take your head out of the sand and stop parroting the propaganda from the real pirates: RIAA, MPAA, and the other robber barons of the digital age.

This is a test of Vagablog. I am writing this on my T5 in the waiting room of the Honda dealership. Susan’s car is a 1999 Honda Civic HX with a continuously variable transmission. It’s a nifty piece of technology, even though I prefer my 2003 Hyundai Tiburon.

The title of this entry is “Hondacare” because it’s about to expire on the Civic. Fortunately, it hasn’t expired yet, because the car needs a $1000 repair to the CVT. Thanks to Hondacare, that isn’t going to cost me a dime. Very cool. So if you by a new Honda, pay a little extra and get Hondacare. It’s worth it.

This Vagablog program is pretty neat. And just let me say I am thrilled with this T5. I like it much better than my old Zodiac 2.

It’s official: I have a new job. 2005-04-20 is my last day here at JFCOM. Shortly thereafter I will be reporting to EchoStorm, where I’ll be doing Java development. I’ll probably still be called on to do some web development and learning management system consulting, but Java will be the core of it. I am thrilled.

My one regret is that I never did get to go to Kiev. I had a chance to attend the ADL Working Group meeting, but the government thought it would be better to send politicians intead of people who might actually learn or contribute something. Typical. Ah, well: at least I got to see Prague and Oslo. I should be grateful of that, because I probably won’t ever leave the USA again, now that the government is cracking down on people traveling. I thought traveling by air was already ridiculous, due to the rampant lunacy which broke out in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, but it’s going to get much worse. I think clamping down on our borders is just the beginning. Twenty years ago, who would have thought that Americans would ever be subjected to uniformed agents demanding our “papers” at “checkpoints”, like some film noir spy movie set in East Berlin?

Fifty years from now, people will wonder what madness possessed us to turn the Land Of The Free into a gulag. I wish I had an answer for them.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the new job.

It’s no secret that I am, and always have been, a huge fan of Hero System (what used to be called Champions, back when it was a role-playing game rather than a collection of rules). Yet, there are things about Hero that bug me. As elegant as the system is, it exerts pressure on the player toward some character types and away from others. I have never really sat down to analyze this, but I will some day. In the meantime, David Blue recently posted a damned good description of this phenomenon. If you play Hero System (Champions, Fantasy Hero, et al.), you really should take a look at this, and give it some serious thought.

Well, my number of projects has diminished a bit. I finished seting up my new T5, I listed all of the crap I needed to list on eBay, and the game book I offered to lay out (for free, as a favor to a game publisher whose work I like) is going to be done by someone else because the folks to whom I made the offer have consistently refused to provide me all of the files I need to do the work. I have no idea why, but that’s their prerogative. If they want someone else to do it, so be it.

On the other hand, I am now going to be putting in a gravel driveway, by myself, so that’s a new project that will join the old. Oh, well. Here’s how the project scroreboard looks now, sorted roughly from most important to least important:

1. hang out with Susan a whole lot more
2. rack mead into secondary fermenter
3. Costume Shop
4. upgrade my home Linux server to Fedora Core 3
5. set up my Linux server as a DVR (probably with FreeVo, but MythTV is also a possibility)
6. frame out the borders of my new driveway
7. convert Rough Magic over to Hero System
8. finish painting the Cylon Raider I started painting back in 1998 or so

Still no news on the new job, though. I have been waiting for a definite offer since December of 2004, so it’s not like I am holding my breath.

Sin City

• Directed by:
  • Frank Miller
  • Robert Rodriguez
• Rated: R

Caveat: Reviews are bunk. Trust no one’s opinion but your own.

Sin City is a movie based upon three of the Sin City comics by Frank Miller. In the comics, Basin City is a rough place populated by rough people: crooked politicians, ugly killers, and beautiful whores. In Miller’s highly concentrated film noir universe, innocence is brutalized and no good deed goes unpunished. Despite this bleak setting, Miller’s books are successful in being both titillating and amusing. With plentiful use of nudity and violence, Miller’s “Sin City” books are entertaining, if a bit repetitive.

The movie brings to the screen three of Miller’s comic miniseries (which you can now find collected as “graphic novels”). The translation is faithful to a fault. The dialogue and scenery which is evocative and striking on the page of a comic book is merely silly and contrived when seen on a screen populated with real people. Too often, Sin City seems more like a parody of film noir than a real movie. In some scenes the dialogue is so bad that the audience I was part of couldn’t help laughing, and I joined them.

I was reminded of another movie adaptation of a comic, Dick Tracy. The two movies have a lot in common, aside from their graphic origins. Both feature characters in heavy appliances, purple dialogue, implausible plots, and visual styles that are more appropriate to a small page than a big screen. However, Sin City is even more cartoonlike than Dick Tracy, with characters even more shallow and stereotypical. About halfway through the movie, it seems that Sin City is lapping itself: beautiful whore, ugly killer, crooked politician. How many times can we see the same story in one film? Apparently the answer is “four”.

Some will also draw parallels to Pulp Fiction, the brilliant second film from Quentin Tarentino. Both movies have a non-linear timeline, and both movies feature outrageous violence. But the similarity ends there. Pulp Fiction has a variety of unique and interesting characters with clever and realistic dialogue. Sin City has three characters (i.e., ugly killer, beautiful whore, crooked politician) with dialogue so over-the-top and melodramatic that it parodies actual film noir.

What works on the comic page does not often work on the big screen: the exceptions are dramatic and well-known. For example, The Crow deviated significantly from the comic in both style and substance, but it was a much better movie. In fact, I think The Crow as a movie was a much better movie than “The Crow” as a comic was as a comic. “Sin City” the comic is a much better comic than Sin City the movie is as a movie. It kind of reminds me of early television shows, which were basically radio shows in front of a camera. They’re different media, and they require different techniques to use them well.

Like so many movie adapations of comics, Sin City is mildly entertaining, but not very good. The best way to enjoy Frank Miller’s work is in print, but if it’s film noir you are looking for, you would be better off renting The Maltese Falcon, Touch Of Evil, Blade Runner, or The Grifters.

Style: 5/5 (faithfully reproduces the look of the comic)
Substance: 2/5 (a repetitive parody of film noir)
What’s it worth: $5.00 – $6.00 (in the Wal-Mart bargain DVD bin a year from now)

Okay, I know — we all know — that Star Wars 6 will suck. I know it as well as I know my own name and where I live. And yet, like the starry-eyed kid who saw Star Wars like 29 times in 1977, I will dutifully drag Susan to the theatre and sit patiently while George “Brain Damage” Lucas puts the final blaster-bolt into my dreams.

(sigh)

In the meantime, the Empire … er, I mean Wal-Mart… is hosting 48 Hours Of The Force this weekend, starting at 08:00 on Saturday morning. And yes, I’ll be there, too.

I’m an idiot.

I have too many projects. This has always been one of my greatest flaws: I take on more projects than I have the time (or discipline) to work on simultaneously. I plan to knock out at least two of these this weekend, which should put me in better shape.

1. rack mead into secondary fermenter
2. finish layout for a game book I’m doing as a favor
3. Costume Shop
4. upgrade my home Linux server to Fedora Core 3 (Core 4 is out soon, so I may just wait on that one)
5. set up my Linux server as a DVR (probably with FreeVo, but MythTV is also a possibility.
6. sell a huge pile of crap on eBay
7. convert Rough Magic over to Hero System
8. finish painting the Cylon Raider I started painting back in 1998 or so
9. hang out with Susan a whole lot more

Whew. All of this, and I hope to have a new job soon — one that will require a lot more of my time.

My very first scanner was a HP ScanJet IIcx. It was a huge metal-and-glass monster that took two men and a boy to move, and it cost (if I recall correctly) around $800. I still have it, actually, although it’s gathering dust (I don’t have a SCSI card anymore). I recently bought a HP ScanJet 4600, and I’m pretty amazed at how far things have come. The 4600 is a slim metal-and-glass unit that looks a lot like a neomodern picture frame. It installed easily under Windows XP, and it works great with Photoshop. Most surprisingly, the 4600 costs under $40 — one twentieth of what the IIcx cost. I’m amazed.

Unfortunately, the scanning quality is terrible. It has visible vertical bands of grey. Apparently this is not an isolated problem: you can read the reviews at Amazon and see that others have had this same problem. I am very disappointed. It’s such a beautiful scanner, and it feels more sturdy than any other scanner I have seen in the past few years. But scanning quality is what it’s all about, not what it looks like on my desk. What a shame.

I ordered a Canon CanoScan LiDE 500F to replace the 4600, which I’ll be listing on eBay this evening. The Canon is almost as pretty as the HP. I just hope its scans are better.