Blackmoor Vituperative

Here’s a factoid for you: my Creative Zen Touch MP3 player has 40GB of storage. In the year 1956, that would equate to a stack of punch cards roughly 56 miles tall.

Windows patching: cheaper than open source?

Excerpt: “And if you believe that, Microsoft has a nice bridge in Brooklyn it would like to sell you.”

I am so sick of hearing people apologize for the glaring inconsistencies between Star Wars and the five sequels.

The bottom line is that Lucas either handles continuity poorly (like the ridiculously lame line that Yoda gives Obi-Wan about training to surpass death), or not at all (with examples too numerous to bother listing, starting with “I am your father” and ending with Bail Organa not memory wiping R2-D2). These aren’t small gaffes, either, like a glass going from empty to full to half-empty between jump cuts. These are the hallmarks of someone who shouldn’t be writing or directing at all.

It’s my opinion that Star Wars and its various derivative works like Revenge Of The Sith have been successful despite Lucas, not because of him. If it weren’t for Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas would be considered no more than a second-rate Bert I. Gordon. What little credit Lucas merits is due to his involvement with the genesis of ILM and Pixar.

But hey, check this out: Star Wars Episode III: A Lost Hope.

Today was my first day on my new project: redesigning the system that the Virginia Marine Resource Commission uses to track and license commercial fishing and fishing equipment. Pretty darn cool, and good money (better than I got with SAIC). What’s more, I’m telecommuting: I only have to go into the office for meetings. The rest of the time, I am in my comfy leather manager’s chair, at my nice desk, using exactly the hardware and software that I need to do my job (and if you’ve been following my recent exploits, you know just how important that is to me). So I’m sitting here and wrapping up for the day, when I hear a tremendous racket from outside. I open the door and look outside, and what do I see? Hail. There are chunks of ice the size of dice raining down out of the sky. Ice. This is May 23 — it’ll be June in a week, and there are chunks of ice falling from the sky. Lots of the them!

Man, that’s just weird.

Okay, it quieted down outside, so I went outside to look again, and the ice is gone. Apparently it all melted in the time it took me to type this. Or was it ever there to begin with?

Coming June 3rd – Fantasmo Cult Explosion Episode 3: Invasion of the Giant Monsters!

While movie monsters have been around since the dawn of cinema, in the 1950’s giant movie monsters became a full-blown phenomenon that is still going strong today. These creature features included the Godzilla movies of Japan, the atomically spawned ants, spiders, and miscellaneous insects of the United States, and the stop-motion beasts created by Ray Harryhausen to name but a few. On Friday, June 3, at the Chesapeake Central Library, Team Fantasmo is bringing two shining examples of the genre back to the big screen for your viewing enjoyment! These two outstanding genre entries are:

7:30 p.m. – The Mighty Peking Man (1977) – An unbelievably bad (but the good kind of bad) Hong Kong rip-off of the terrible 70s American remake of King Kong. This one gives new meaning to the word spectacle!

9:00 p.m. – 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957) – A classic monster movie featuring the special effects work of the legendary Ray Harryhausen (Jason & the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, etc.). Not to be missed on the big screen!

If you have the courage and the fortitude, we invite you to join us in watching as these beloved creatures lay waste to a variety of model cities and aircraft! See you on June 3rd!

I have worked my way through the first three seasons of Justice League (I may or may not start on season 4 tonight). Wow, this is really a good series. Thanks the gods for Shareaza.

There are too many things I like about Justice League for me to list them all, but I’ll list a few. I have never cared for Wonder Woman, but I really like the incarnation of her in this cartoon. The whole Hawkgirl plotline really tugs at my heartstrings. She looks even better without the bird mask. And what the heck is this recurring subplot with the shadow government? Is the Question (other than being brilliantly portrayed by Jeffrey Combs) really right about The Conspiracy?

No, don’t tell me. Season 4 is still under way, and I don’t want to spoil anything. 🙂

P.S. I normally link to Amazon’s page for the various TV shows and movies I watch, but I’m not doing it for Justice League. The DVD releases are way overpriced for what you get. Paying full DVD price for two episodes of a television show is just wrong and stupid. When they come out with the full seasons on DVD at a reasonable price, then I will recommend that you buy them. Not before.

Anyway, this is a great series. If anyone out there has missed it, I strongly suggest you install Shareaza and download the previous seasons while you still can.

Star Wars 6 (aka Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith)

Directed by: George Lucas
Rated: PG-13 (Violence)

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

Susan and I just got back from seeing Revenge Of The Sith, the sixth and (I hope) final Star Wars movie. As you have no doubt heard by now, Star Wars 6 is better than Star Wars 4 and Star Wars 5. It was actually a pretty good movie up until Palpatine’s face turned into a bad rubber Halloween mask. We were buying Palpatine’s whole line: save Padme, defend the Republic, learn powers the Jedi are hiding, we were on board for the whole thing. Dark Side? Great! Where do we sign? And then Palpatine’s face turns into a bad rubber mask. Susan snorted, and I laughed out loud (and I wasn’t the only one). Okay, so the movie had some bumps. But overall, it was pretty good.

One thing which disappointed us was that the costumes in Star Wars 6 were, in comparison to Star Wars 4 and Star Wars 5, rather lackluster. Amidala was pregnant, and wore shapeless dark tents practically the entire time — except when traveling to the lava planet, when she chose to change into a dull brown minidress (!). And she wore a nightgown with strands of pearls that went all the way around her shoulders. How comfortable could that be? She probably wakes up with pearl dents in her biceps. My theory is that her new job as a Senator doesn’t pay as well as being Queen of Naboo, and she’s recycling whatever they let her take with her when she left the palace. I guess it doesn’t help that Natalie Portman spends most the movie crying. The only time I saw any chemistry between her and Hayden Christensen was when Anakin was strangling Padme.

I was also bummed that Aayla Secura (that’s the blue babe in the picture) didn’t get any lines, or even any good scenes. She’s one of the few Jedi that doesn’t wear a damned bathrobe all the time (gee, I wonder why?): I would have really liked to see her in action. Instead, she’s on screen for maybe five seconds, and then gets shot down like Al Leong. Poor Aayla.

Another thing I was disappointed in was that the Jedi still didn’t catch on to the fact that they had been fighting on the side of the bad guys for the last few years. Only Amidala seems to even suspect it. How can they possibly be that stupid? “Hey,” the Chancellor says, “those guys want to leave the Republic. Let’s go attack them!” In what society is it considered reasonable to go shoot at people who simply want to leave? Seriously, what does that remind you of? I’ll tell you what it reminds me of: a street gang, or the mafia. I guess Jedi don’t watch gangster movies.

Susan was horrified that Obi-Wan left Anakin to die while he was still on fire. I figure he was just so overwrought with grief and pain that he wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe Obi-Wan was happy that Anakin finally had something to whine about. Still, he would have saved everyone a lot of grief if he’d put Anakin out of his misery right then.

But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if Obi-Wan had killed Anakin. After all, the inconsistencies between the movies make it pretty clear that they do not actually take place in the same universe. Like the Highlander sequels, the various Star Wars sequels share similar settings, similar plot elements, and a few of the characters, but it’s clear that they don’t all share the same history. For example, we know that Leia remembers her mother: she told Luke so. But in Revenge Of The Sith, Leia’s mother dies in childbirth. And of course, in the first movie — the real Star Wars — Luke and Leia weren’t siblings at all, and Darth Vader was not Luke’s father. So it’s clear that the sequels aren’t actually sequels, but are merely derivative works that share some of the same elements. Much like Highlander.

There should have been only one.

Style: 5/5 (great effects, great scenery)
Substance: 3/5 (pretty good for space fantasy)
What’s it worth: $6.50

P.S. The review in The New Yorker is hilarious. Here’s a particularly funny tidbit:

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

I just received a spam which proclaims that it is the final “newsletter”, and that the author is going to start posting to a blog from now on:

So why did I switch? Mainly because I was getting creamed by SPAM blockers, virus stoppers, text-only browsers and the like. With each issue I sent out, less and less got through.

Wow, if only that were true. It would be nice to think that the filthy spammers are getting frustrated in their filthy spamming. Of course, Rule #1 is “spammers lie”, but it’s still a nice thought.

For the benefit of any potential employers out there, I want to remind you how important workspace ergonomics are. Employee injuries cost money: they reduce productivity and they increase your health care costs. It may strike you as nifty to have your entire development team using laptops full time (full time and then some — how many developers do you know who work a mere 40 hours per week?), but “nifty” is not a replacement for usability and efficiency. Even if the laptops you select have monitors with adequate contrast (unlike the Apple Powerbook) and keyboards with full-size keys, intelligently arranged (unlike the Apple Powerbook), the physical reality of a laptop computer means that it is not appropriate for long-term use.

So if you are one of those people who would place your own sense of niftiness above concerns like productivity and efficiency, and who would give an employee grief when they request a real keyboard (much less a real computer), do some research.

Here’s a start:

• Office Ergonomics – University Of Wisconsin
• Tips For Using A Laptop Computer – Cornell University Ergonomics Web
• Computer Workstation Ergonomics – Centers For Disease Control
• Survey Of Physical Implications Of Laptop Computer Use By School Children – Curtin University Of Technology, Australia
• The Ergonomics Of Laptops – Lapvantage Dome

Doctor Madblood Presents Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn at the Naro Expanded Cinema! Show times are 23:00 Friday 2005-05-13 and Saturday 2005-05-14. Details can be unearthed at the NARO Expanded Cinema (757-625-6276; 1507 Colley Avenue, Norfolk, VA 23517). Coming in June: Jason And The Argonauts!