Blackmoor Vituperative

Just finished watching Gamera 3: The Revenge Of Iris. This is probably one of the best kaiju movies I have ever seen (and I have seen most of them). A major plot element of Revenge Of Iris concerns a girl who blames Gamera for the death of her parents. It’s true: Gamera smashed her parents’ apartment building into rubble while fighting the Gyaos. Of course, had Gamera not fought the Gyaos (or had Gamera not existed at all), the death toll from the unstoppable Gyaos would have been much higher, but as you might imagine, that’s small consolation to the girl.

I think some of the best villains are those with understandable motivations. In the case of Ayana (the aforementioned orphan girl), you feel sorry for her and sympathize with her, even though she is tragically misguided in blaming Gamera for her parents’ death: she ought to blame the Gyaos. But it’s an all-too-human failing to place blame using emotion rather than reason. That’s an element that’s hard to pull off without being either heavy-handed or simply ridiculous (particularly in a movie about giant monsters), but I think this movie does it successfully.

I am imposing a unilateral un-grimmening! No more grim tidings for at least one week. Time for Christmas cheer and good will.

As a start, here are my favorite Christmas specials and movies, in no particular order. Some are great. Some are just terrible. Some make me laugh. Some make me cry. I love them all.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the real one, not the Jim Carrey abomination)
Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas
Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
(Mexican) Santa Claus
Gremlins
Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
Silent Night, Deadly Night
Elf
Bad Santa
Scrooged
Star Wars Holiday Special
Hogfather
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

Merry Christmas!

I just had a panic moment when I thought that a Google document I’d spent the better part of a week writing had vanished. This is what I plan to do from now on, once a week, until I forget about it and stop doing it.

1. In Google Docs, go down to the far left bottom menu item, and select “More V” and then “All Items”.
2. Click the select box at the top of the screen next to “TITLE” to select all items.
3. Click the “More V” button at the top middle of the screen, next to the eyeball (“Preview”) icon, and select “Download”.
4. Select “Change all formats to… OpenOffice”, and click the “Download” button.
5. Wait a couple of minutes and then download the file somewhere.

When Rango came out in theatres, I had no interest in seeing it. It just didn’t look interesting. Why would I want to see a movie about a chameleon in a western town? Dull.

I was wrong. Susan and I just finished watching this on Amazon Prime, and not only is it a good animated movie (better than the last three Shrek movies, easily), it’s a damned good western — and there aren’t that many of those made these days.

If you have Amazon Prime, see Rango. It’s free. If you don’t have Amazon Prime… hell, see it anyway.

This is a damned good movie.

Just came back from seeing Skyfall with Susan. I confess that I am puzzled by all of the glowing reviews. I can forgive technical absurdities like the biometric pistol (an idea which first got floated around over 20 years ago, and which was discarded because no sane field agent would ever depend on it) and the head of Q branch plugging a known enemy asset into their network (although after the last two movies got so many computer details right, that was kind of disappointing).

The glowing reviews puzzle me because the movie was so slow and dull. Even the theme song is dull. The movie didn’t even have a villain for the first, what, two hours? And when we do meet him, he’s just… creepy. Not scary. Not menacing. Just icky, in the way the grocery store bagger who looks a little too long at your personal hygiene items is icky.

It’s not the worst Bond movie I have ever seen (A View To A Kill and Octopussy are both much worse), but even A View To A Kill had a better villain. Christopher Walken, now, he knows how to play a deranged blonde genius.

Last night’s interstitial Cult Movie Night SPECIAL EDITION was Silent Night, Deadly Night (a Christmas tradition!) and Brick. It was going to be Silent Night, Deadly Night and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but I was overruled.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a much better movie than you might think, if you’ve never seen it. It spends a good portion of the movie introducing you to the main character, Billy, and gives you insight into why he later snaps and start killing people dressed as Santa Claus. It also includes a lot more nudity than you see in slasher movies nowadays (something I miss). But it’s not torture porn, like Saw and Hostel — there aren’t long, lingering scenes of people tortured and in pain. The violence is over the top and fun, not sadistic and disturbing. That being said, there are some genuinely creepy and scary parts, primarily in the early part of the film where we see Billy being traumatized by his early experiences.

Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is completely different. Brick is a film noir mystery set in and around a high school. That might sound camp, but Brick works because everyone in the movie takes it deadly seriously. It works because in high school, every ridiculous little thing is deadly serious. There’s very little violence, some mild language, and no nudity. An episode of CSI has more violence in first fifteen minutes than Brick has in the whole movie. Yet the movie is rated R for “Violent and Drug Content”, showing you what a load of crap the MPAA ratings are.

I just spent too much time pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to get Google Docs to paste spaces and keep them spaces, rather than turning the spaces into tabs. I couldn’t find a way to prevent it, so here is what I did.

1. Paste my text into a text editor, such as Notepad++.
2. In the text editor, find & replace every instance of a space ” ” with a character that does not already exist in the text, nor in the document you intend to paste that text into. In my case, I used a tilde “~”.
3. Copy this modified text, and paste it into Google Docs.
4. In Google Docs, find & replace every instance of the placeholder character with a space ” “.

Is it ridiculous that you need to do this to keep Google Docs from corrupting what you are pasting? Yes. Yes, it is.

I had to double check to make sure this wasn’t an Onion article. This is amazing. I thought the media robber barons had successfully brainwashed everyone in Washington.

Copyright was an Enlightenment-era social experiment: use the power of government to prevent people from selling or copying creative works without the consent of the creator for a limited time. As originally conceived, I think it was relatively reasonable. However, the current perception (perpetuated by large media companies that seek to own and control our cultural heritage) that when someone creates something once once, that they (rather, the corporation they work for) should be able to monetize that and prevent other people from sharing it or building on it forever has caused and continues to cause severe damage to our common culture, and to the culture of future generations.

If current copyright law had always existed, there would be no libraries, because there would be nothing to put in them.

Update (2012-11-18): That didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after this “eminently sensible copyright position paper” was posted, the paper has been pulled and the Republicans are falling over themselves to placate the media robber barons. Money doesn’t win elections, but this makes it abundantly clear that money does buy politicians. (In case you doubted it.)

Should you want to read the paper, I have a mirror of it here, and there are also a mirror at KEI, and another from the MD Pirate Party.

Okay, another political thing, but this is less about politics and more about accuracy. When people talk about the former Confederate states voting as a block for Romney, those people are full of hot air. (In fact, pretty much any time someone starts spewing invective about the South or the North, you can safely bet they are full of hot air.) The Electoral College votes are not representative of who people actually voted for.

I’ll say that again:

Electoral College votes are not representative of who people actually voted for.

“Cousin Cole” made the above graphic and posted it on Facebook.

I made this because 1) I wanted to see what it looked like and 2) I think it’s kinda important. Talking about red states versus blue states in a monolithic way is reductive and annoying.

Several people have asked how this was done. The numbers were taken from MSNBC. I matched the percentage of blue in an RGB color picker to the percentage of the vote Barack Obama got and did the same for Romney and red. Green stayed at zero.

So if a state had voted 100% for one or the other, you would see the bluest blue or reddest red your computer screen can produce. The reason all the colors are more or less in the middle is because no state went more than ~70% for one side or the other. Although if you zoom in you can see that DC is very bright with 91% for Obama.

A few people mentioned that they’d like to see this done by county. Personally I don’t think the county map would be that useful unless it reflected the population disparity between counties (which is harder, but maybe possible). I’m thinking about it.

The USA is not divided into huge subcontinent-sized areas that voted for Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum in monolithic blocks. There is a good chance that half of the people you meet on a given day voted more or less the way you did, and half didn’t. That’s true whether you live in New York or Georgia, Alaska or Florida. People who spout hate and demonize entire regions of the USA based on electoral college votes aren’t interested in accuracy or seeking common ground: quite the opposite.

Be accurate. Seek common ground. Assume good faith in others until they prove otherwise. Don’t distort the truth to spread hate and divisiveness.

P.S. Mapping politics (and the politics of maps)

I don’t interpret the election results the way anyone else does. When given the choice between two virtually identical candidates and three other very distinct candidates, 98% of the country voted for the two virtually identical candidates, and the votes for those two candidates got split almost exactly in half. To me, that says that a) 98% of the country approves of our current domestic and foreign policies, and b) that the two major parties are very good at choosing candidates that appeal to nearly everyone, to the extent that choosing between them may as well be a coin toss.

I find the chest-thumping of the winners and the hand-wringing of the losers surreal. Half of the country wanted a Pepsi, and a very tiny fraction less than that wanted Coke. This means that Coke is no longer relevant, can no longer be seriously considered as a soft drink, should be removed from grocery store shelves and relegated to local convenience stores, and so on? This means that people who want Pepsi are morally and dietetically inferior (or superior) to people who’d rather drink Coke? It’s the end of the world and/or the beginning of a new era because a very tiny fraction of the population prefers one brand of carbonated brown sugar-water over another brand of carbonated brown sugar-water?

It all just seems a wild overreaction to a very tiny difference in preference between two extremely similar things.