- wednesday 11 20 02 -

Hot damn, another month gone by without a friggin' peep out of me. I had that burst of creative enthusiasm, blended with a healthy dose of vitriol driving my updates during the whole unemployment thing, but now that I'm working, I have less free time to be a webmonkey. And right in the middle of posting this, I had to start working again. Shit.

So, it's 23:00, and I'm needing some sleep. Managed to check out Titus - based on some Shakespearean grand guignol, I have to say that any movie featuring Sir Anthony Hopkins hacking his enemies up to make pies, neck-stabbings, spoon-in-the-throat-gouging, internecine slaughter, and Jessica Lange in both muddy fur and polished brass D-cups has enough to keep me interested for two hours. With some genuinely powerful acting and great production design, this one wins points with me. Take a look next time you're at the video store - look for Anthony in blue clay. Thanks to yet another Canadian - well Canadian via Greece - for the tip-off on this one. On the other hand, trying not to fall asleep during this particularly dull version of the Bard's work was not worth the effort. Decent ideas, fair acting followed by painfully bad non-acting, and a sense of pacing that would render the most dedicated speed freak unconscious. Boo.

Reading up on Gregory Benford, who also does cool shit like this on the side - would highly recommend his Tides of Light to anyone who needs to get hooked through the brain by uncompromisingly great science fiction. There are four other books in this series, and if they're anything like this one, Frank's Dune series may have some competition for the prime space on my bookshelves.

Other news - discovering that while I can drive a car pretty damn well, I might as well resign myself to getting a a mudhole stomped in my ass in other fields of endeavor. Rolling off 22-button combos in under a second is something I might have pulled off at age 7 - I'm afraid that all my other hobbies have taken their toll. Also, someone needs to donate a lot of money to me so I can get one of these, and some other new items to go along with it. Feel free to donate to the cause.

- friday 10 25 02 -

A post inspired by death - a great actor has left the stage. I'm left wondering if anyone else can be Albus Dumbledore - Harris was as perfect for that role as Ian McKellen is as Gandalf. I've had a moment of silence over a great beer in tribute to the man and his works.

On a slightly different death trip, you should check out this particularly twisted piece of cinema, courtesy of my fellow Texan, Bill Paxton. Get ready for some seriously disturbing moments - this film is a nightmarish head trip into the Bible Belt. If nothing in this film bothers you, you should consider a new line of work, maybe something like this. Worth the ride, but most likely not for everyone. The ending is well worth the wait, however.

Also recommended for those night when you want to wonder what the hell just happened - David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. You will most likely have to watch it twice, or go find somebody to explain it to you. Well done, and worth a visit.

Not highly recommended - David Fincher's Panic Room. Typically Fincher, with its moments of bloody gore punctuating the dialogue like exclamation points, the movie has some great ideas that just don't get worked out properly. The first review listed at the above link hits the nail on the head. Forrest Whitaker is very good, as usual - Dwight Yoakam does a good job as a redneck asshole, and Jared Leto is just an asshole. Jodie Foster doesn't seem as invested in this one as she usually does - it's certainly not a Clarice Starling caliber performance. Ah well - maybe next time.

Something cool from Google, in case you didn't stop by today:

Finally, if you haven't had a hardware-related laugh today, you should go visit Dan and read this. The funniest article about routers that you'll read all year. And remember:

Why do ducks have webbed feet? To stamp out fires.
Why do elephants have flat feet? To stamp out burning ducks.

- thursday 10 10 02 -

Well, it's been a week - time for an update. Been so busy working on my site, my new job, and everything else that I completely skipped talking about two of the best movies I've seen this year - Sexy Beast and Black Hawk Down.

Sexy Beast is the tour-de-force performance of Ben Kingsley as Don, a psychotic, paranoid British gangster, backed up with an incredibly solid ensemble featuring Ray Winstone as Gal, an ex-thief called back from idyllic Spain for one last caper in the UK. With non-stop language that would burn the hair off any sailor's head, and a tension level that just keeps cranking to the point that a shotgun slaying is a relief, this is a great noir gangster movie wrapped around a classic love story with a healthy dose of surrealism to top it off. Damned impressive, and I'll be watching for the next effort by director Jonathan Glazer.

Black Hawk Down - regardless of how the politics and propaganda and characterization may be lacking, this is hands-down the most intense war flick I've ever seen. It's not at the classic level of A Bridge Too Far or Bridge on the River Kwai or Saving Private Ryan, but it is the most unrelenting, nerve-sizzling, brutally realistic portrayal of modern combat that I've seen. Ridley Scott doesn't bother dwelling on humanistic themes. You get about twenty minutes of idling while the characters fart around the base, joking, shooting the shit, and introducing themselves. Then the movie drops it into first and smokes the tires for two solid hours of insanity. It shows that no matter what the original cause or purpose, war is simply about people mutilating and killing and getting mutilated and killed. The outcome doesn't matter to the people dying on the ground - it just becomes an endless grind of seconds that may or may not be the last of your life. In depth analysis of the movie as a whole will reveal a lot of intellectual holes, and some slipshod writing in spots, but this movie is not about intellect or conversation. Take that with you going in, and you're in for a ride - I realized at the end of the movie that I'd had my fists clenched for the entire flick, waiting for the next soldier to take a bullet or a mortar round. Go see it, preferably in surround sound at full volume. Now.

I'm thinking that I'm going to leave the top joke in Belgium here on the front page, because I still laugh when I read it:

Why do ducks have webbed feet? To stamp out fires.
Why do elephants have flat feet? To stamp out burning ducks.

- sunday 09 15 02 -

I got a job, I got a job, I got a JOOOOOOBBBBB! And I'm damn happy about it, too. W00t!

To make the above situation even better, this bad mother has been released. Color me thoroughly impressed. Judging from the demo, I'd say this is going to be one seriously impressive game. Gone are the crappy-looking, low-poly maps from the original Unreal engine. It's funny, but it seems like the Epic folks have had an extreme reaction to having to work in the tiny confines of their old engine - the new maps are like running around in the Grand Canyon. Ceilings arch hundreds of feet overhead, outdoor areas are expansive, stairs and butresses are huge. With gametypes like the Bombing Run, which is similar to the old Quake Gridiron mods - football with high explosives - this promises to be a lot of fun. My only problem is that I'm going to have to talk the wife into letting me buy a $400 video card to run it. Damn.

- monday 09 09 02 -

Well, just got finished with a weekend worth of work - not full time, but it was damn nice to be working for a living again. Now I'm in the process of running down the lyrics for *all* of the songs in my MP3 collection. Those of you who have *seen* the MP3 collection, pick your jaws up off the floor. I'm trying to get enough data together to give me something to work with either mySQL or Microsoft SQL 2000, so I can expand my skill set into some new areas. I figure a searchable lyric / title / artist / album / file size database would probably give me a goodly chunk of data to work with and break. Three-thousand six-hundred seventy-seven tracks ought to give me something to work on for a few weeks.

On other fronts, Dan is at it again. Look down gods, and see what Dan has wrought.

Finally, on the media front. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are mellowing out with an album that veers from traditional punk-funk to ska and Spanish-guitar flavored odes to Chicano men, James Dickey, John Boorman, and companions have got it going on (I finally know the full effect of "Squeal! Squeal like a pig, boy!" ...), and this woman is a better writer than this guy. I've waded through the three prequels from young Brian Herbert and his crony Anderson, and I'm convinced that Frank would not approve. While an interesting exploration of the history leading up to the magnificent Dune series, the three novels have none of the depth and mystery that the elder Herbert wove into his mythology, and thereby sink to the level of mere sci-fi. If Frank had lived long enough to do these himself, I think he'd have approached things a bit differently. Ah well, a decent set of time-wasters. I'd be more correct in recommending Mrs. Smith's books - don't be put off by the whole Southern women thing - she writes a Southern gothic as well as anyone I've read out there. So far in the book I'm working through, every major character has either died, gone crazy, or had intimate relations with a first cousin or better. Good characterization and voice, strong sense of place, quick flowing prose. Dig in for something different.

Quite possibly something else will come along here - check back. Oh, in case you didn't notice, I archived the old shit.

Updated a few more pages, as well. See if you can find 'em.

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