awkwardly

The Serpent's Peg

2012-02-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

Bet you didn't realize the cast of cult tv show Square Pegs starred in a remake of Ingmar Bergman's neglected 1975 masterpiece The Serpent's Egg. They didn't. Just another mashup I made.

Movie & Story Dissection Index

2012-02-10T09:53:00.005-05:00

Here are some blog posts or articles I've written that analyze movies and tv shows and comics:

Hell on Workers: What #OWS can learn from Hell on Wheels

Lysistrata and Stitch

Deck The Halls is the new Fitzcarraldo

Formula for early Sherlock Holmes movies

Horton Hears A Flawed Parable of Faith Versus Skepticism

No Country for Satisfying Endings

Why did I watch The Queen?

2009 Dramatic Movie with Stakes Most Twee

Dramatic Movies with Stakes Most Twee (2008)

The Radcliffe Project by Robert Levi. Audio commentary to second Harry Potter movie, in which the narrator describes the hidden messages planted by Chris Columbus, J.K. Rowling and Time Warner to prevent Mr. Levi from marrying the star of the film, Daniel Radcliffe.

Chick Movies of the Tragic Chinese Variety

Lilo & Stitch - the Best Disney Movie for macho guys (An early draft of Lysistrata & Stitch)

Movies that capture "The Horror of Childhood"

Subtext Ahoy! Pseudo-Freudian interpretation of the UK tv show "Yoho Ahoy"

Psychiatric Help 5¢: Jungian Archetypes Applied to Charlie Brown and Peanuts (1993)

The Tao of Pooh vs. The AAUGH! of Brown

Movie reviews:
~ Snake People (1968) (15 JUL 2004)
~ Death Ride To Osaka (1983) (2 JUL 2004)
~ The Hulk (5 JAN 2004)
~ The Light at the End of the World, aka Pirates vs. Lighthouse Keeper.
~ What I like about Hostel
~ Rise of the Dead
~ Watchmen
~ Fried Green Tomatoes with Boys On The Side

How to write like a bad movie:
Event Horizon
John Carpenter's Vampires
Meet Joe Black
John Hughes' Underdogs Only Win If They're Bitches

Hell on Workers article on Overthinkingit.com

2012-02-09T11:06:00.001-05:00

I got published! Go read my article "Hell on Workers" on Overthinkingit.com.

If you're checking out my blog for the first time after reading that, you might enjoy some other things I've written, like a novel of jet ski piracy on the Detroit River called Grand Theft Boblo.

You can get it as a paperback from Lulu.com or Kindle edition from Amazon.com. You can also borrow the Kindle edition for free if you're an Amazon Prime member.

If those are not the words you are looking for, you could also try my collection of short stories, Dungeons and Dayjobs. Click on the title for paperback, or download the free ebook in multiple formats from http://www.archive.org/details/dungeons_and_dayjobs_anthology and even more formats from Smashwords.

Dungeons and Dayjobs available in more ebook formats

2012-01-11T10:08:00.003-05:00

On the off chance that you haven't read Dungeons and Dayjobs yet because it wasn't available in the ebook format you prefer, you'll have to come up with another excuse. You can get it now from Smashwords.com for 99¢ in .epub, .mobi for your Kindle, pdf, rtf, lrf, pdb, txt and html.

I'll probably post Grand Theft Boblo there eventually, but I made the ebook version of that exclusive to Amazon for 90 days to try out some kind of borrowing/royalties thingy. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow the Kindle ebook version free, and I earn a royalty from it depending on how many people borrow it.

Lozie's Theme

2012-01-04T12:55:00.005-05:00

(About our cat Lozie, sung to the tune of Bicycle Built for Two)

Lozie, Lozie,
Born among the kudzu
Cheesy popcorn ashtray
Those are the colors of you

You won't have a chance for marriage
We fixed your undercarriage

But you've hit all your cues
and sang Delta Blues
since when we pulled you from the kudzu.

Why did I watch The Queen?

2011-12-29T15:24:00.006-05:00

I'm not sure which seems more improbable -- that Brits still tolerate and pay for the Royals, or that a cast and crew of probably hundreds worked together to dramatize a conflict between Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth over what her PR strategy should be regarding the death of Diana. And people paid to watch this as if it were dramatic! It made money!

I had already noticed a trend in the late 80s of fewer cop movies and tv shows, moving the drama into the sphere of lawyers and courtrooms. L.A. Law was great, and I can watch any iteration of Law & Order all day or night. But still, it seemed like they were moving away from the action of cops, to lawyers and witnesses describing action that happened off screen. Now we've moved further away from action to the drama of people debating over their public relations strategies. Not that there's much action to be found in the lives of Elizabeth or Albert or Charles or Camilla, but is this segment of their stories worth focusing on?

Screenwriter Peter Morgan has made a career dramatizing angles and moments you'd be hard pressed to give a shit about. Behind-the-scenes battle over public relations strategy in The Queen. A TV interview in Frost/Nixon. The drama of coaching a soccer team and all the public relations maneuvering involved in The Damned United. At least I can take heart that one of his more recent movies, The Special Relationship, was made for tv. Are the major studios recognizing that these are not worth making features about?

Here's my pitch for Morgan's next smash hit. Just give me a story credit and you can run with it...

Two towering figures of global importance. Christopher Hitchens. Charlie Rose. What better way to show the dramatic depth of their lives than to explore the narrative of Charlie Rose's associate producer discussing with Hitchens's agent whether their next interview will touch on the topic of Natalie Holloway's disappearance in Aruba. Or would that be too brutal and raw and close to the nerve? Perhaps we should pull back another level, further behind the scenes, and just show the children of Hitchens's agent that morning, arguing whether to have porridge, shredded wheat, or bangers & mash for brekki. (From their choice, we infer how the rest will play out.)

Working title: The Damned Weetabix

Deck the Halls is the new Fitzcarraldo

2011-12-21T09:48:00.006-05:00

Deck the Halls is a wacky Christmas movie that aims for and falls short of the comedic heights of a Roadrunner cartoon. Danny DeVito and his wife are neighbors from Hell, loudly moving into their home late at night. Matthew Broderick first meets him as new neighbor DeVito is reaching to steal the newspaper from his front step. By the time he walks away, DeVito has his newspaper and mug of coffee.

DeVito decides to leave his mark on the world by making a Christmas light display on and around his house, bright enough to be visible from space. The noise and nuisance upsets traditionalist Broderick's holiday season. Hijinks and hilarity are sure to follow, you'd think.

Compare with Fitzcarraldo, about a man who wants to leave his mark by building an opera house in a small town in Peru. In order to do that, he has to haul equipment and building materials by steamer through miles of jungle, past unfriendly tribes. He employs natives to physically lift the steam ship over a mountain with a system of ropes and pulleys. Werner Herzog wrote and directed this true-ish story about the obsessed Fitzcarraldo, putting himself and others in danger for fleeting, ephemeral rewards. The danger and ephemeral rewards describes both men, Herzog as well as his subject, because in order to film it, Herzog really employed natives to lift the 340-ton steamer intact over a mountain, without special effects, and directed the steamer to run through dangerous rapids that resulted in injuries to three of his film crew¹. The real life Fitzcarrald was at least reasonable enough to disassemble the ship before transporting it over the mountain.

So if you accept the hype that it's a movie warning us about the dangerous obsessions of madmen, then Herzog is warning us about himself and others like him.

Now if you can stand to, watch the fifteen minutes or so of behind-the-scenes dvd extras on Deck the Halls. This guy spends ridiculous amounts of time and money and effort on stringing and synchronizing Christmas lights, to attract attention to himself. He loses his job and almost loses his wife to his obsession, as does his competitive neighbor. Then together they rediscover the True Meaning of Christmas, allegedly.

As with Fitzcarraldo, the amazing thing in Deck the Halls is the story behind the story, the obsessed people who created a story of obsession. It's impressive that they covered a house with 14,300 LED nodes to turn the roof and front of the house into a low-res video display. It's impressive that they kept energy usage for all that down to 7,150 watts of energy, "the equivalent of four average hair dryers"². It's somewhat impressive that they created the illusion of Massachusetts winter in the middle of summer, although that's nothing new.

I'm always amazed by how much time and money goes into film building sets. In this case they built two largish houses. Presumably they didn't finish or dress out every room in both houses, and they could sell the houses after filming, but it still seems amazing to construct entire houses for less than two hours of silly film. I guess if you built two houses for two hours of real families living in them, you wouldn't gross $35 million domestic.

Here comes the ludicrous display of obsession for meager rewards: since Deck the Halls is all about outdoor lights, sixty percent of the film takes place at night. To gain more time filming the houses in darkness, they constructed a tent 300 feet long, 60 feet high, covering both houses and some of the surrounding snowy lawns. The kind of temporary structures used by the military for airplane hangars.

In order to make a funny movie about one man's obsession, creating an ostentatious display of Christmas lights that could be seen from space, the makers of this movie created that ostentatious display, plus they built two houses and covered it with a military-grade airplane hangar tent, so they could capture 93 minutes of Danny DeVito phoning it in.

If it all plays out like Fitzcarraldo, I can't wait for the multiple documentaries, biographies and autobiographies of John Whitesell and how he realized his mad dream of filming Deck the Halls. Woulda been a lot funnier with Klaus Kinski though.

1. http://www.iquitosnews.com/page14a.html
2. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790604/trivia

Leo Kottke anti-earworm technique

2011-12-20T14:45:00.002-05:00

Just using my blog as artificial memory to augment my own memory right now. I always mention this to people when they talk about getting songs stuck in their heads. Now I can point to a video where Kottke explains it. (Skip to 9 minutes, 10 seconds.)

Rick "Um" Perry jumps the gay shark of Obama's non-existent war on religion

2011-12-08T16:25:00.002-05:00

Would it be appropriate to call some of the claims in this commercial factually inaccurate, or just exaggerated and out of touch?

1. "... But our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas..."
What kids in the US are prevented by the government from celebrating Christmas? Unless your definition of "openly" means pushing or exhibiting their religion in schools or in places funded by government dollars, this is clearly false or wildly exaggerated. You can pray and shout as much as you want in your home, in private places, in lots of settings that are not public schools or government places.

2. "... or pray in school." Ahhh. He has some confusion about what the Bill of Rights means when it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." If you feel like you can't freely exercise your religion without praying in school, then you can go to a private religious school so that the public doesn't have to pay to support your favorite religion. Because having prayer in public school would mean a kind of establishment of religion. Is it that hard to understand?

3. "As President, I'll end Obama's war against religion..." What has Obama done or endorsed that was different from the last 5 or 10 Presidents? He opened a White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and participates in the National Day of Prayer, which seem to be removing some of the separation between church and state. I'm amazed by the ways some people characterize Obama as something more than a mild, compromising centrist. Are we talking about the same Obama? Do you mean Barack Hussein Obama I or one of the President's relatives making war on Christianity?

4. "... and I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage." I'm not sure what Perry would see as liberal attacks on Christian heritage, but I assume it's things like this blog post right here, just pushing back against overreach and encroachment of fundamentalists who hope to establish theocracy. Like the claim of "Obama's war against religion", there's no real substance to the idea unless you're way out of touch with reality.

It's amazing how Perry and some Christians can portray themselves as victims of discrimination. SRLY? Last time I checked, polls showed that atheists were more despised than gays, Muslims and African-Americans. How many people say in public they wouldn't let their daughter marry a Christian, or wouldn't vote for a Christian President?

And how much power do liberals have to "attack" Christians in the media? Ever try to drive through Mississippi or Alabama and find a radio station that isn't playing sermons or morality plays or gospel? Way more challenging game than "I spy with my little eye..." Compare that with the number or radio stations that specialize in a liberal agenda, keeping in mind that Air America went belly-up in 2010. It was a quaint novelty for a few years, and things went back to normal: dozens of Christian radio stations, dozens of stations broadcasting conservatives like Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Reilly, and corporate stations that tried to present unbiased news more or less. The only way you'd think a radio or tv station had a consistently liberal agenda would be if you are so conservative that you felt Bush was too much of a centrist.

I suppose if you have the kind of worldview that sees most media as liberal, as if corporate media can really be liberal, as if Bush's claims about WMDs in Iraq were reported unquestioningly by Judith Miller because the New York Times is the frontrunner of liberalism, then maybe it would make sense for (fundamentalist) Christians to fear the power and anger of liberals.

What Perry sees as a liberal "war against religion" and misattributes to Obama is really a holding action of citizens and even some non-fundamentalist Christians against theocracy.

Justin Bieber jumps steam shark in Santa's sleigh

2011-12-07T08:09:00.004-05:00

Santa has gathered some scrap parts and constructed a steam-powered ski boat, a shoddy ramp and a wind-up robot shark. He's using more steam devices to keep the lake free of ice. And he's pulling Justin Bieber towards the ramp at breakneck speed.

In how many different directions does this video fail?

5. The sleepy-sounding corpse of Michael Jackson called on behalf of the Jackson Five. He wants his singing style back.
4. Get as many cogs and gears from a watch repair shop as you can. Glue and sew them to every costume and surface. Steampunk!
3. All those straps and chains and extraneous fashion accessories dangling from shirts, hats and pants, and nobody can invent a device to hold pants up? The crotch of Bieber's pants rests at his knees. You'd think a crafty, DIY group like this could measure an inseam better than that.
2. In typical movie-commercial fashion, the song is interspersed with irrelevant scenes from a CGI cartoon. Thus fans of Bieber feel like they're watching a commercial for a movie, and fans of the movie feel they're watching a commercial for Bieber (if they bother to stay for the end credits.)
1. Justin Bieber continues to sing and exist.

Knit and crochet projects

2011-12-04T04:44:00.004-05:00

Apparently this is what I do with my time lately instead of writing stories or making mashup videos.

Another bite out of the Apple

2011-10-26T09:25:00.002-05:00

I just discovered another flaw in my iPod nano. As usual, the hardware is great, the software is problematic. My first complaint was that they force you to download and use iTunes. Other programs like Windows Explorer are able to move files onto the nano, but it will only play songs if they are added via iTunes. If I go to a friend's house and he wants to pass a song to me, then he either has to download iTunes, or else he can move the file onto my nano, and it won't play until I take it home, copy it onto my computer there, and finally use iTunes to add it back to the Nano? The only purpose for that is for Apple to maintain control and establish a monopoly on the use of their software. It doesn't help end users.

Anyway, the new thing I discovered today is that my nano appears to have a copy of every single song I've ever loaded onto it, even thought I thought I had deleted some of them. It lets you create folders to help organize or categorize your music. It also creates a default folder with "All Songs." I usually go straight to folders and don't mess around with All Songs, but yesterday I tried it. Instead of moving forward through the songs, I moved backwards, and discovered dozens of podcasts and old time radio shows that I thought I had deleted.

For some reason, it automatically keeps one copy of every file in "All Songs" and another copy of every file in the individual folders. If you delete songs from the individual folders, it doesn't remove them from All Songs. Which explains how it stays filled up to the maximum lately, and doesn't make much room even when I delete a bunch of songs.

I realize they were trying to keep instructions simple (it came with a tiny fold-out pamphlet, ten pages long but each page is literally one inch square). But this is the kind of thing that would have been helpful to know months ago.

What I'm finding is that Apple makes assumptions about what's most useful to consumers, and doesn't even tell you what they've done. Hopefully there will be more products with open source software and hardware when I'm next in the market for some tech.

Sci-Fi: I don't think that word means what you think it means

2011-10-18T22:04:00.005-05:00

Do you have a rough idea of how you'd define science fiction?

Good, then I'll take it for granted we both have the same idea in mind. There are a few people who have something different in mind, and unfortunately they're fairly famous and influential.

Cory Doctorow: "In his new novel Spook Country, William Gibson take science fiction to an amazing, unseen world: the recent past. ... These characters inhabit the exciting, futuristic world of 2006. And it is a futuristic place, our recent past, a place so weird and light-speed that we don't even notice it. Not until a master storyteller and keen observer like William Gibson comes along to show us what we're all living in." Spook Country was published in 2007, and Doctorow's post about it was from 31 July 2007.

"Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steam-punk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying."
Gibson interviewed in the Summer 2011 Paris Review

Margaret Atwood: the road to Ustopia
"The author of The Handmaid's Tale has been criticised for not wanting to call her books science fiction. But what is SF anyway, and how does it connect with her lifelong fascination with creating other worlds?"

Instead of saying that some sci fi is good and some is bad, or that some is plausible while some is not, she wants to reserve the term "science fiction" for "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today". If you find her novels plausible or convincing or possible like she does, then she can escape from the ghetto of science fiction. The term she prefers is "speculative fiction", meaning "things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books."

No matter that the rest of the world uses the term "science fiction" (synonymously with speculative or extrapolative fiction), Atwood will hold tightly to a different meaning, and pretend that the rest of us are being uptight when we try to remind her what the term commonly means.

Neal Stephenson had made some statement in an interview saying that Cryptonomicon and his Baroque Cycle could be classified as science fiction because they explore ideas that sci fi fans would enjoy. It annoyed me at the time, but looking back for those quotes, he seems to be qualifying the statements a lot, not necessarily stretching the definition of sci fi.

The Importance of Job Creation on Birdwhack Island

2011-10-16T19:53:00.004-05:00

Ten people live on Birdwhack Island. The island is pretty bare, so the two remaining trees aren't big enough to make a canoe or raft. All food is imported. For some reason the only fish or crabs or insects or birds that come to the island are inedible. The remaining grass and bushes are inedible and can't make a cool Kon-Tiki type boat like Thor Heyerdahl made.

One guy has a big motorboat which he uses to get chicken and yams and whatever from the nearest island 20 miles away. (Or whatever distance would be farther than most humans could swim in a day.) He doesn't let anyone else use his boat. If you like eating, George is the man to see.

The island is named after its dominant economic activity, bird-whacking. George was once attacked by a sparrow when he was five, so he employs the other nine islanders in grabbing every bird that lands on the island and whacking it to death on rocks. These are seagulls and cormorants and terns, not much like sparrows, but George wants them dead anyway, anything with wings. They've never attacked anyone on the island. The dead birds can't be eaten, aren't used as fertilizer. Killing them serves no purpose other than fulfilling George's whim.

Let's say George doesn't like Kevin's whacking technique. He demonstrates how he wants the birds whacked, but Kevin is fired when he's unable to make the elegant motion that George demonstrates. Now Kevin has no way of getting food. If the other islanders can't share because they're getting just enough to sustain them, and he can't get George to donate food to him, he's going hungry.

The way people usually talk about this kind of problem in the US is to say Kevin needs to find someone else who can give him food. It's a lack of jobs, or maybe they need more vocational training on Birdwhack Island so Kevin can get that elegant technique George prefers. It starts to seem like birdwhacking is an inherently important task because everyone's ability to eat depends on it, and shame on Kevin for not finding something he can do that George will trade food for.

I assume people reading this analogy would talk about how unfair it is that George is the only supplier of food. In other words, George controls the means of production.

How can the situation be changed without socialism or violating George's property rights? Put the means of production in the hands of the workers? Perish the thought! It's George's right to use his boat how he wants, and to forbid others from using it. He could donate food to the others if he felt like it, but he should feel free not to donate if he doesn't want to. I suppose the dastardly Union of Birdwhackers could go on strike until George rehires Kevin or agrees to feed everyone. But George could just leave the island and stop bringing food to any of them.

Remind me again why George's right to own and control the means of production is more important than other people surviving? Damn the property rights, full socialism ahead. I understand some of the dangers of people redistributing wealth, some portion of the population deciding to take the property of others and deciding how to spread it. I understand some of the historical examples of how it has gone wrong. I don't think redistributing wealth or common ownership of the means of production requires all the other hideous baggage that accompanied it in Russia or China, like assassinating and imprisoning dissidents, causing famines, central planning by the state. There are other models that I think could work. I'm partial to a thing called "Participatory Economics" which is all about worker-owned and worker-run businesses. It's almost like a module that could be used in a socialist state or a stateless anarchist collective. In some ways there's overlap between socialist and anarchist ideas, although socialism seems to imply a state is involved. Anarchism doesn't mean people can't form organizations and work together.

Anyway, what I wanted to show in that analogy is how people sometimes hold jobs sacred, for no good reason as far as I can see. Whether they are doing any job, no matter how pointless, becomes more important than whether they have food or shelter or health care. Why are jobs that sacred?

The way we've been brought up to view jobs is that if one person pays another to do some task, then the job is contributing to society. I don't buy it. Not that Paris Hilton needs more money, but someone paid her to appear in House of Wax, and a commercial for BK, and a reality tv show. Is she contributing more to society by working those jobs than someone who has no job? Financiers have been busy making loans to people they knew couldn't pay, then repackaging and selling the loans to other people as toxic assets. That was harming society, but the financiers earned lots of money from it, and then got bailed out and given bonuses.

If jobs are not all contributing to society or not mostly contributing to society, and we're telling people they should starve to death or have their illness untreated because they haven't got a job, that means we're expecting poor people to choose between humoring rich people, or death. Are you sure you haven't tried as hard as you can to humor some rich person? Did you wear a really big jester cap with bells and bling?

On the other side of the equation, there are people whose skills aren't very marketable, or aren't getting a chance to earn enough money to support themselves. Just because they can't do something that a corporation or business would be willing to hire them for, or can't start their own business and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, doesn't mean they are slacking. The economy seems to be currently organized so that money goes out to workers based on whatever rich people think will help them get richer. Capitalism. People with capital leveraging it to get a return on their investment. Just because people can't or won't participate in that doesn't mean they're causing a problem.

If we can't feed everyone by hoping for capitalists to hire everyone, then we should move on to some other system that will.

Tread On Me

2011-10-14T08:56:00.007-05:00

I saw one of those flag stickers on the back of a pickup yesterday, rattlesnake on a yellow background with the caption "DON'T TREAD ON ME." I'd been debating economics, health care, and libertarian vs. socialist outlooks with a friend, and had a little epiphany.

Don't Tread On Me seems like a good soundbite summary for a general conservative or libertarian outlook. I think of gated communities and survivalists stockpiling food and ammo in fall-out bunkers, expecting to fight off hostile intruders, seeing everyone around them as potential hostiles. You go get in your bunker and your gated community, I'll get in mine, and that's the best way for both of us to survive. If you come to my bunker asking for help, I'm sensitive about the possibility that you're taking advantage of me, so it's best if I stay independent and you stay independent.

I've read some arguments via Boingboing.net saying that stereotypical survivalist mentality seems like it would be ineffective in the long run. You try to hoard some resources and protect them out in your country bunker. Kids and older folks in the country are inquisitive. They check out new houses going up in the old field. They see a new driveway coming off the road and they'll ride bikes up to see where it goes. Even if your bunker entrance is hidden, you're going to leave some tire tracks going up to it when you bring construction materials, tools, and all that ammo and freeze dried astronaut ice cream to outlast the coming crisis. Will you be hunting or trapping to supplement your food stockpile? Using a silencer or bow, or something that will be heard a half mile or mile away? Leaving traps that could be noticed by outsiders? You'll probably attract attention one way or another, and then they just need to gather enough nasty friends to root out your camouflaged bunker entrance and overcome your defenses.

And what if you get in a situation where you need help? You might need a doctor or someone to fix a broken tool or machine, or you might run out of some important supply. Do you know anyone nearby that you can depend on to help you, or are they hunkered down somewhere secret? Did you already turn them away when they came to ask you for help or space in your limited shelter?

A more sustainable way of surviving a crisis, even liberal apocalypse fantasies about Peak Oil or the collapse of capitalism, is to work together with your community. See them as potential neighbors who will help you and who need your help, instead of potential moochers and thieves. Instead of your nuclear family plus Aunt Bea trying to fend off the complete cast of Sons of Anarchy, you could be part of a community that will help defend any of its members getting attacked. I suppose we could keep escalating and imagine larger and larger groups of attackers, warlords with armies that would crush any communes they can. I don't know how we stop that from happening, other than trying to convince people that being part of a warlord's army is more dangerous in the long run than being part of a democratic community.

Now how could you fit that helping attitude on a bumper sticker with as few words as the rattlesnake flag?

LEAN ON ME
For one thing, it evokes all the rest of the song. It's about offering help to people who need it, because we're all likely to need help at some point in our lives. Independence is good, but losing connections with people is bad. Traditionalists and Dana Carvey's grumpy old man have been complaining about this trend for decades or centuries, families getting smaller and more distant because we move far away from parents and siblings (mainly for jobs), we're bowling alone instead of in leagues, keeping a safe emotional distance from neighbors. Wouldn't it be nice if we could establish some new traditions that reversed that trend and established stronger connections between people? Or if we could just change our thinking about whether to fear other people or connect with them.

People might object to my simplistic interpretation of the libertarian or conservative outlook. They don't hate their neighbors or family. They might be just as likely as anyone else to bond with neighbors or personally offer help to strangers in need. It just doesn't show in their attitudes about government social programs because they don't trust the government to decide on those things. Unfortunately, there are more people now who seem to genuinely need help IMHO than are able to get it from charities. If it comes to the government protecting the freedom of people to hold as much money as they can legally get, versus the freedom of people to eat and have shelter and survive (FDR's Freedom from Want), I know which of those freedoms seems less important to me. (Maybe it's not an either/or situation like that.)

On the other hand, the LEAN ON ME outlook might seem naive, making yourself vulnerable to slackers and moochers and grifters and thieves. Sounds PLEASE TREAD ON ME. That is a fair point, but it works both ways. When you tell people "DON'T TREAD ON ME", are you rejecting people who need somebody to lean on? If you have to ask someone to help share your load, will you have to ask help from someone you turned away before, or someone that you encouraged to follow the motto "DON'T TREAD ON ME"?

So our attitudes should include a little of both.

LEAN ON ME, BUT DON'T TREAD ON ME.
I like it in that order. Initially it's offering help to everyone, carrying all the implications and explanation of the song. But it also shows you're wary of people taking advantage of you. I'm afraid the rattlesnake pretty much undermines any hint of helpfulness, so it needs a visual overhaul. Maybe keep the yellow background from the Gadsden Flag, but have Bill Withers with a guitar. Doesn't look very threatening, but he looks like he could hold his own.

Now how do we implement specific policies based on a bumper sticker slogan, in ways we'll all agree on? Yeah, right. I'll get back with you on that by Wednesday.

I, for one, reject our social network overlords.

2011-10-08T08:40:00.005-05:00

Melinda has gotten screwed over by Youtube again. It's a reminder that corporate websites are not here to help people or make useful products or be our friends. They are here to make money, and we are tools to that end.

As you may or may not know, Melinda stumbled into Youtube a few years ago and has spent most of her waking hours since then watching, responding to vlogs in comments, and making her own daily videos. She occasionally gets fed up or freaked out and stops participating for a while, occasionally deleted all her videos or closed her channel, but she never stays away for long.

After interacting with popular vloggers, she attracted viewers to her channel, and plenty of devoted trolls and haters. Eventually she learned that arguing with some popular vloggers is like slapping a hornets' nest, attracting thousands of that person's devoted fans to sting you, so she tries to keep out of drama lately. She had enough fans that she qualified to become a Youtube partner, which means earning money from the ads they put on your videos. She made $100 or $200 from it, which means a lot to someone who hasn't held a job and worries about it.

When I say devoted trolls, I mean there were a few who made videos taunting Melinda, photoshopping her head onto porn images, extracting her voice from videos and putting it over movie rape scenes. Plus text comments, a constant string of vicious insults and threats that make those visuals seem tame by comparison. Trolls also "flag" Melinda's videos, supposedly warning Youtube that her videos are offensive or violating copyright when they aren't. Anything to cause trouble.

Youtube doesn't want to pay a "partner" who fraudulently clicks their own ads. They have rules against it, and presumably ways of tracking IP addresses of people who click ads. Makes sense so far, except I wonder how they deal with a partner living in Georgia who asks an accomplice in Borneo to click ads hundreds of times and generate more revenue for them. The partner in Georgia could claim they know nothing about it, and how could Youtube know if it were true? The answer is they don't bother to verify it. Their policy is to punish any partner whose ads get clicked too frequently by any one user. That's what they did to Melinda.

How does this account for trolls and haters who intentionally click ads dozens of times to make it look like fraud? Or authentic friends who think they're doing you a favor by clicking ads, and don't realize it will get you kicked out? How do you appeal if something like that happens? On Youtube, you cross your fingers and ask them to reconsider. I would have thought Youtube would be smart enough to understand that haters will do that thing. They probably do, but they don't have the tools to distinguish between fraudulent clicks from partners and fraudulent clicks from haters, so they err on the side of haters.

That's how you run a site when you see participants as resources, not as humans. They told Melinda she was cheating their system and dropped her. She can still post videos and use the website, and they may still run ads alongside her videos, but they won't pay her because they claim someone clicked on her ads fraudulently.

Even if you haven't been screwed over in that way, you've seen how Youtube and Facebook will initiate policy changes or tweaks to their website with no notice. Do they care what you think about the changes? Do they care enough to let you know before it happens, or to ask what you want? If there's a big enough backlash, they'll change it, but they don't get input from users beyond some focus groups or surveys. These websites are not your friends. They're just not that into you.

How do you like the latest changes on Facebook? I hear you've got a ticker down the right side of your screen that you can't get rid of, showing things you don't care about. It never showed up for me, and I don't know why. If there's a site or rss feed where they post info about their changes, I haven't heard of it. Haven't even found it when I looked for it. Yes, you might be able to tell me about a link to it now, but that's not the point. Isn't that the kind of thing they should make easily accessible, or at least easy to find when people go looking for it? Should they rely on people getting answers from their friends? That would be bad customer service, but we're not customers. Advertisers are their customers. We're something below customers.

A few days ago, Melinda heard a person on Youtube talking about his foot fetish, so she made a joke video where she held a cigarette between her toes and smoked it. Two great fetishes in one video. It was about one minute long. Her foot was bare but she was wearing more layers of clothes than you'd see on Baywatch or your average booty-shaking or dick-slangin dance video. She takes a few puffs. I think she said one sentence at the end about how silly it was, and that's it.

Unfortunately I can't give you a link to see it because Youtube took it down. I don't know if some user flagged it as inappropriate, or Youtube moderators made that decision on their own, but it was a ridiculous decision either way.

Yes, it had "fetish" in the title. Search results for 'fetish': about 30,000 results. Yes, some people might have been turned on or got off to it. But they can do that to anything. Watching young Jody Foster dressed as a hooker in Taxi Driver could get some people excited, and they might abuse themselves while watching it. Does that mean Taxi Driver is kiddie porn? No Denis Leary or Bill Hicks stand-up routines or Edward R. Murrow interviews because someone might see them smoking and want to jack off? There would be almost nothing left on Youtube, the website would shut itself down if they consistently removed all the innocuous things that inspire some people to wank.

Does it make a difference that Melinda used the word "fetish" in her title or talked about it? Is it offensive just to talk or joke about those things now? Should we pretend that it doesn't happen, at the risk of having our videos removed? If that's the case, how was she able to hear that guy talking about it on Youtube in the video that inspired her?

To add insult to injury, Melinda got a "strike" on her account, meaning she could be banned by Youtube if they decide that she breaks some of their other rules in the next six months. That's nice that they drop it from her criminal record after six months, but could she have reasonably expected that Youtube would consider smoking a cigarette between her toes a violation? I look at the many search results for "dick slang" and "booty bounce", and I don't think so.

You could see this as sour grapes, a person who breaks some rules and complains about getting penalized for it. Or you could see it as a disagreement about how to moderate a website. I see it as a problem of capitalism. It wouldn't be all utopian sunshine and rainbows and gravy if we lived in a non-capitalist society, or if we were talking about non-capitalist websites that currently operate. As long as there are humans, there will still be disagreements between humans. But users face a big disadvantage on sites that keep their software and actions and policies opaque, with decision-making limited to people who happen to have more money, or who leveraged their position as early adopters to make more money.

A good forum would have users making decisions about how to run it. If they run it into the ground, then presumably there will be other forums to try, and some of them will work. A large enough group will have most of the users working within the rules, maybe kicking out users who break rules.

A forum where users have little influence, where the existence of the forum is meant to earn profit for a small group of people, is not a very open or good forum.

No one is putting a gun to my head. If I don't like the way Youtube or Facebook or Google+ treats you, then I can take my ball and go home. But on social networks, I can't necessarily take all my friends and go home. I'm sure there are already non-profit alternatives right now. I'd like to try them, but it requires other friends and acquaintances to use them. Otherwise you can be the loudest tree falling in the quiet woods, with no one around to hear you.

This is not meant to convince my friends to stop participating in/on/with corporate websites today or this week. I would just like you to think about what it means that profiteers are running these websites, making decisions about how you communicate, whether you're allowed to participate on the forums where a lot of your friends and acquaintances do.

Meanwhile, if you know of any non-profit, user-managed alternatives right now, please let me know anyway.

The Geek Cred of Agnes Moorehead

2011-08-17T08:21:00.003-05:00

Yeah, yeah, you loved her as Endora on Bewitched. But did you realize how often she dabbled in horror, pulp and sci-fi, working alongside legendary actors and writers in some of the greatest genre movies and radio shows ever?

For film geeks, she plays the mother of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. She was often typecast as a grouchy aunt or mother. Her other famous sons include Jerry Lewis, Jesse James, John Wayne in the role of Genghis Khan, and Superman (1940s radio version).

For horror geeks, she appeared in Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Mina Harker in Mercury Theater's 1938 Dracula (getting drained by Orson Welles as the Count), and starred in The Bat (1959) with Vincent Price, plus weird thriller/horror films like Dear Dead Delilah and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

TV geeks might not be satisfied by Moorehead's role in Bewitched, but they could find her in "The Invaders", a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone written by Richard Matheson. Agnes had no lines and the only dialog is spoken by other characters in the last minute of the episode. She also did two episodes of Night Gallery and won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy in 1967 for her role as a villainess on Wild, Wild West.

Old Time Radio geeks might remember that Moorehead was billed as "The First Lady of Suspense" for her dozens of popular appearances on that show. She played "Dragon Lady" on Terry & The Pirates radio show (reinforcing or maybe originating that Asian stereotype, unfortunately). As a regular member of the ensemble for Orson Welle's Mercury Theater group, she played large and small roles in dozens of shows, though she provided only background screams for their most legendary show, the Halloween 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds.

The most important item of geek cred on Agnes Moorehead's resume dwarfs all of the above, even her appearance in the greatest film of all time, and the most popular radio episode of all time. A radio show called Detective Story Hour ran for several years before its mysterious narrator became the focus of the show. Walter Gibson began writing a pulp series about him, until finally in 1937 the title of the radio show was changed to The Shadow. Although other actors had voiced the character before, Orson Welles starred in this version of The Shadow. Agnes Moorehead originated the role of The Shadow's sidekick and love interest, Margot Lane.

Open Thread

2011-07-29T07:58:00.003-05:00

Here's a topic for you to discuss: I fucking hate open threads. Open a forum or message board or chatroom on your blog if that's what you want. Don't muddy up your rss feed with weekly posts that just say "open thread." Dag, man.

No Soliciting

2011-07-24T06:25:00.002-05:00

New sign I posted on our storm door:

NO SOLICITING
We will not buy,
sign, vote for,
worship or debate
with you about any
products, services,
politics, faiths,
or afterlife theories
offered door-to-door
including but
not limited to:
- VACUUMS
- LAWN CHEMICALS
- WINDOWS
- NATURAL GAS SWITCHOVER
- REPUBLICANS
- DEMOCRATS
- INDEPENDENTS
- END TIMES
- HEAVEN
- HELL
- ~~GIRL SCOUT COOKIES~~

Don't Take This The Wrong Way: The Elevatorgate Romantic Comedy

2011-07-12T21:20:00.007-05:00

According to Wikipedia and an Irish medical student I used to correspond with, "culchie" is the Irish equivalent to the term "redneck" in the US. Country folk. It can be pejorative, but some people have reclaimed the term culchie and intentionally apply it to themselves, just like some rednecks in the US do.

Rory Calhoun is just a name I made up, imagining that this unidentified "elevator guy" was a Dubliner since the conference was held there. "All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed." - Vonnegut

Seriously now, I agree that the atheist community is probably no less sexist or racist or heterosexist than the larger society we're a part of, or not much less. I'm sure there are actual sexist things that people say and do to Rebecca Watson at conferences or anywhere else. I agree that if atheists expect to be treated fairly, we should push for other groups to be treated fairly, whether it's women or ethnic or racial minorities or LGBTQTs. (Get it, QT = cutie?) We should call out sexism when we see it. I agree with a lot of points Watson made in her panel, although she sounded like she somehow expected people not to make trolling inflamatory comments or videos on youtube. Welcome to the Internet. First day here? Here there be trolls. Not that I approve of the way trolls behave, but you get to the point where you know it's going to happen and hopefully it stops bothering you. You wouldn't expect comments on a youtube video or controversial subject posted on a blog to be widely viewed and still free from trolling or racism or sexism, any more than you'd expect not to be hit on by a person coming out of a bar with you at 4 in the morning. Ooops. Maybe I have really weird expectations.

Anyway, it's fascinating how you can see bloggers and vloggers retelling the story and tweaking it to make it sound better or worse depending on their perspective. Elevator guy sounds more and more like a stalker as they embellish the story, always playing up the fact that the guy hit on her at 4AM, that she was alone in a foreign country in an elevator, playing down the fact that she just came out of a bar with this guy at 4 AM, that she was a woman in a foreign country in a bar until 4 AM. I'm not saying people who sit in bars late at night deserve whatever you want to throw at them, but how naive do you have
to be to expect people not to hit on you at a bar? How much milder could this proposition be than with a disclaimer at the start like "DON'T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY, BUT..." I'm not going to suggest that sex or petting wasn't on his mind, but how much more meekly and respectfully could he have expressed it?

Now it's not the elevator that makes it a sexist act, right? That part might be scary, but I don't see how the elevator makes it sexist. The fact that he asked her to his hotel room after she had said earlier in the day that she hates getting propositioned at conferences, is what's supposed to be sexist. So what's the time limit? Don't ask her for a date during a conference, she already said she doesn't like that. Don't ask her for a date later on the same day of the conference? Don't ask her for a date the next day? If you ever saw her at a conference, you shouldn't ask her out because it would diminish how seriously you might have been taking her last year at that conference?

Watson said in an interview on Citizen Radio (omfg, why did I bother to listen to even a portion of an interview about this?) that she doesn't oppose sex. She didn't mention a vow of celibacy at the conference. But when could a reasonable person make the overture, in a way that she would find fair or respectable? Jamie and Allison on www.wearecitizenradio.com made it clear that this guy shouldn't have come on to her at that point because if Watson had been interested, then she would have shown her interest earlier, or she would have made the first move.

Word to the wise, guys: don't do that. Don't ask a woman out on a date. Ever again. Because you are sexualizing her.

Sorry to break character, but everyone who has sex with each other or innocently goes a-courting with the intention of one day getting married and having sex is sexualizing each other, sexually objectifying each other. Apparently that part is okay. But how do you start the ball rolling without being accused of sexualizing her, you misogynist? Answer: you shut up and wait for the woman to make the move. She sexualizes you, and then you're allowed to respond. Women are allowed to sexualize, because they know how to do it right. Men who do it are being sexist, just don't get it, are failing to understand what women go through. Also you shouldn't form an opinion about the Vietnam War because you weren't there, man, you don't know what it was like, you couldn't possibly understand.

Yes, there are plenty of sexist pigs making knee-jerk reactions about Elevatorgate, but I think this angle is why it has elicited so much response. Because where do you draw the line? In as far as it is acceptable in some circumstance for a man and woman to respectfully agree to share orgasms with each other, when is it fair for a man to hint at that possibility, and when would he be reasonably considered sexist for doing that? If it was just the elevator or the time of night, and if sex is not forbidden, then there must be some other place or time when it would have been acceptable. It still would have been sexually objectifying her though. If you are a living human being with a mother and father who loved each other, then they were "guilty" of sexually objectifying each other, and that's how you came into the world. Not the stork or the cabbage patch.

The real question is: what time of day or circumstance is acceptable to let someone know that you are sexually objectifying them? Did she drop some hint at the conference or at the bar that she was off-limits for that night? Is there a certain number of days that you should assume a woman wants to remain celibate after she talks about getting rape threats on email? Yeah, that's very off-putting. The internet is very off-putting. Have you ever seen Goatse or Two Girls, One Cup? I don't know how many hours after seeing those things you would want to try to eat lunch, or make out with someone. Your mileage may vary. I don't think Watson is following EPA standards for determining mileage, if you follow my metaphor. I think she needs to recalibrate.

The Forgotten Awesomeville That Was Keye Luke

2011-05-27T10:47:00.004-05:00

You will remember Keye Luke as the actor who played Master Po on the TV series Kung Fu. If you ever called someone "Grasshopper," then it was the accent of Keye Luke you were mangling.

For me, the only reason to bother with any incarnation of Green Hornet has been when they had someone cool playing Kato, like Bruce Lee in the Sixties tv show or Keye Luke in the Forties serials.

Although you must be aware of his long career as a character actor and occasional star, here are some awesome roles and high profile gigs you might not have heard about:

* Sci-fi, fantasy and action connections:
Voice of Mr. Han in Enter the Dragon.
Mr. Wing in Gremlins and Gremlins 2.
Uncredited voice in the English version of Rodan.
Surgeon in Invisible Agent.

¤ Small parts in major movies: Young Man with a Horn, The Good Earth.

¤ Cliffhanger serials: The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, Green Hornet, Secret Agent X-9, Green Hornet Strikes Again, Lost City of the Jungle.

¤ Appearances on Star Trek, General Hospital, MacGyver, Miami Vice, A-Team, Quincy, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, dozens of other shows.

¤ Voice work in Thundarr the Barbarian, Jonny Quest, Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, Battle of the Planets, uhhhhh, Jem? The Chipmunks??

¤ 1966, voice of Brak in the original Space Ghost tv series!

Critque of the Rings

2011-05-22T07:51:00.002-05:00

I'm reading a revisionist "apocryphal" version of Lord of the Rings called The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov. Imagine that everything you read was wrong, that LOTR was propaganda and the good people of Mordor were fighting to defend themselves. It was written in Russian and hasn't been sanctioned by Tolkien's estate, as if that matters, but a non-commercial English translation by Yisroel Markov is now available. (That's a 1 Mb pdf file, 139k words.)

There are quirks or flaws in it, and I can't tell if they are errors in translation, errors in the writing or editing, or just part of the way that Russian novels are different from English ones. For example after two interesting chapters that draw you into the story by focusing on some sympathetic Mordor characters on the run, chapter three starts like this:

Two types of climate epochs follow one another in the history of any world, including Middle Earth – pluvial and arid; the growth and shrinking of polar ice caps follow a single rhythm, which is a sort of a pulse of a planet.

Now that's scary. But easy to skim or skip over the chapter if you get totally bored, and there aren't a lot of raw exposition dumps like that. The quirks or flaws seem small enough to overlook so far, and overall I'd recommend it.

Anyway, in the course of looking up this story, I saw a comment thread on Metafilter about it, where people pointed out essays by Michael Moorcock, David Brin, China Mieville, and one by Kirill Yeskov explaining why he wrote his apocryphal treatment. Most of them are critiquing Tolkien, saying much worse things than I would have expected. They talk politics and whether escapism is good or bad, whether fantasy must always be comforting and reassuring and have happy endings (yes! no! maybe).

Epic Pooh by Michael Moorcock. (written in 1989 but updated since then.)
'The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies.' Moorcock compares a few paragraphs from Tolkien against A. A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh), L. Frank Baum (Wizard of Oz), C. S. Lewis (Narnia), Ursula K. Le Guin, and a lot of other fantasy writers that I now want to try. I knew that Moorcock had a reputation as being contrarian and kinda crotchety, but was surprised that he had such a dim view of Tolkien and Lewis. And he's not the only one . . .

J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress by David Brin. (2002)
Doesn't it make you feel a little weird when you remember that all the good guys in LOTR are fighting to put a king in power, or fighting on behalf of their local aristocrats like Theoden? Sure, we know that Aragorn is a good guy, but would you rather have a good king or a democracy? Brin points out how Tolkien and many other fantasy stories indulge our yearning for a simpler time when men were men, women mostly knew their place, and politics was simpler because we could rely on benevolent leaders to decide for us. Brin talks about Romanticism and the Enlightenment, future versus past, tradition and nostalgia versus progress, and how these differences are reflected in Star Wars and Star Trek.

Fantasy and revolution: an interview with China Miéville (2000)
Why has fantasy literature so often appeared to be conservative and reactionary? Please don't freak out too much about the fact that this comes from International Socialism Journal, or that Miéville is a Marxist.

How and why I wrote an apocryphal treatment of The Lord of the Rings by Kirill Yeskov, translated by Markov.
Discusses Tolkien and Middle Earth, the differences between sequels and "apocryphal" stories. Ends with the line "Rozenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead – long live Rozenkrantz and Gildenstern!"

CDC zombocalypse campaign

2011-05-19T20:38:00.000-05:00

Formula for early Sherlock Holmes movies

2011-05-02T10:41:00.003-05:00

I'm not a connoisseur of Holmes stories or movies, but I've seen a handful of these old ones lately. I can't help but notice a formula in most of them.

1. The criminal and/or victims are introduced.
2. Holmes spies some woman across the street from 221B and amazes Watson with deductions about her, including that she will come to them with a new case.
3. Depending which movie you're watching, boring stuff happens here.
4. We see a disorienting scene of some outlandishly large-nosed, boisterous working class character interacting with the villain and/or victims.
5. The large-nosed, boisterous character interacts with Watson, sometimes entering 221B, eventually revealing that he's Holmes in disguise.
6. More stuff happens.
7. The end.

It's interesting that most of them don't open on Holmes right away but bring him in after a few scenes highlighting other characters. That can be an intentional narrative tool to alienate the audience from Sherlock somewhat, or keep him from being as sympathetic as a character who was introduced and followed by viewers from start to finish. Think of Psycho where we begin following Janet Leigh's character as if she's the protagonist, then we don't know who to follow or think of as the protagonist when she gets killed halfway through. (Oh, spoiler there, sorry.)

It might be intentional with these Holmes stories, or else one of the earlier films might have begun the trend and others continued it without thinking or realizing the narrative effect. It keeps Holmes aloof and also makes some of his deductions seem more amazing. Viewers have literally seen more of the story and mystery, and yet Holmes is able to deduce those details without having seen as much as we have.

Christopher Lee in an eye-patch is definitely listed in my notebook of scenes to use for mashups eventually.

Joseph Conrad vs. Lovecraft

2011-05-01T08:30:00.003-05:00

More Lovecrafty vocabulary terms I found in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim:

ACCURSED: 4 hits.
INDESCRIBABLE: 1 hit.
LOATH: 1 hit.
LOATHSOME: 2 hits.
MADNESS: 6 hits.
MORTAL: 2 hits.
NAMELESS: 1 hit.
NOISOME: 1 hit.
UNUTTERABLE: 1 hit.

TERROR is not uniquely Lovecrafty, but it's worth noting that the word is used 14 times in Lord Jim, and repeated ("strike terror . . . terror, terror I tell you . . . ." [sic]) in a single sentence by Gentleman Brown, which reminds me of "The horror! The horror!" from Heart of Darkness.

BATRACHIAN: Chapter V. "Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he doesn't. Good ol' tradition's at a discount nowadays. Eh! His--er--visions are batrachian. Ha! ha! No, seriously, I never remember being so interested in a case of the jim-jams before."

Also fourteen mentions of the Necronomicon and two of the Pnakotic Scripts. ;)