I was attempting to read a movie review from 2004 using this link:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/life_of_david_gale/articles/1235143/_alan_parker_lures_you_into_the_theater_but_then_you_sit_down_and_all_he_has_waiting_for_you_is_a_whoopee_cushion
only to find a splash page saying that “The Star Democrat is no longer a website affiliate of the Zwire product.”

Following the link on that page to TownNews.com, the first thing that greets me is your motto:

“Our mission: To help newspapers thrive in an online world.”

Does your company feel the best way to implement that mission is to completely break all links to the Star Democrat’s content?

Breaking links is a sin. Don’t do it.

And if you’re a content creator, and you’re about to sign up for TownNews.com… make sure you put something in your contract to prevent them from totally screwing up your Google ranking and advertising revenue after you stop using… whatever service they provide.

(BTW, visit the real Star Democrat site to give these guys some ad impressions that TownNews.com is stealing from them.)

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View it at IMDB– Oh wait, there’s an annoying long ad you have to view before the trailer. Try viewing it at Apple– Oh wait it requires QuickTime. Well, let’s try viewing it at YouTube– Hey look, it just starts playing without any bullshit. Attention Internet company big-wigs: this is why people like Google!

So anyway, according to the trailer, a bunch of space marines with headless robots land on this planet. They volunteer one of their guys to transfer his brain into the body of one of the natives, who are blue elf creatures named the “Na’vi” which is obviously a Native American analogue. They have little tails. He’s released to live among the blue elf dudes, possibly to spy on them, and over a period of time he comes to appreciate their culture more than his own. He also meets some blue elf chick with a bow. When the space marines start to attack the blue elfs, he joins the elf side and leads them in battle with the marines.

So it’s Dances with Wolves.

Separated at birth?

Oh, but also the blue elfs train giant cats and ride dragons, apparently. That would be cool, if they didn’t look like blue elfs.

One of my buddies brought up that having the aliens in your movie be, basically, Native American elfs is pretty goddamned uncreative. Especially since this movie has a budget of over $300 million. Obviously none of that money went into hiring somebody who can come up with a creative and original alien race– hell the guys working for Lucas came up with like a dozen more creative and original alien races in the cantina scene alone! Seriously.

My original theory was that, due to the dragon riding and giant cat taming, the aliens in this movie were just way to obviously bad ass compared to the space marines, and so the space marines lost any sense of threat. So Cameron redesigned them to be elfs, and added cute little tails, to offset the bad ass-ness. (Note: this is also probably why he would add headless robots to the marines, so they kick more ass.) Good theory, but probably not true.

My second theory is that someone involved with this movie thought to themselves, “we need the audience to make an emotional connection with the Na’vi… I don’t think people will make a connection to something that doesn’t look or act human.” To that, a brief rebuttal:

Think about it.

Oh, and when we have guys in a movie riding dragons? Please make the dragons bigger than that. It just doesn’t satisfy the “wait a minute, this looks totally wrong” test if you have a human-sized guy riding a dragon with a wingspan of maybe 15 feet. Let’s see some dragons on film that are actually big enough to carry people around, not these wimpy ones.

• I watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra last night
• I thought it was actually an ok movie

So here are some comments.

Rating:

G.I. Joe is rated PG-13 by the lovable, huggable, MPAA. Here’s an short list of things you can show in a PG-13 movie, apparently:

• Decapitation
• Decapitation via head explosion
• Woman getting pierced all the way through her torso, all the way through the tablet PC she was holding by a sword (oh, and the tablet was a Panasonic Toughbook model, so you know it was a forceful blow)
• Man falling through high-voltage lines and being burned to dust

Of course, in all of those scenes, there’s no blood because kids are too stupid to realize violence is happening when there’s no blood, right? Gee, the MPAA totally fucking up a movie rating? Unthinkable!

Product Placement:

I’m not some slick Madison Avenue advertising dude, so maybe I’m way off-base here when I say that I would assume product placement is more effective when the good guys are using the product. Although, I’m sure my new-found knowledge that psychotic brain-washing mad scientist Dr. Mindbender uses Norton Internet Security on his torture computer will influence my purchasing decision next time I need anti-virus.

Cisco gets off easy by having product placement for a technology (holographic tele-presence) that’s used by both the good and bad guys in the movie, although the product is far too useful and creative (and easy-to-use) to actually come out of stodgy Cisco.

Hummer’s use by the bad guys, in a car chase that involves billions of dollars of damage and dozens, if not hundreds, of fatalities– maybe that was an environmental message?

Sci-Fi:

Surprisingly, the sci-fi element of the movie isn’t completely and utterly ludicrous. The tele-presence system mentioned above is a safe prediction for the next twenty years. Some guy already build a prototype of the stealth suit.

There are some problems, though. Nano-bots, really? That’s waaay out-there considering the stuff seen in the rest of the movie. They could have used something more believable, like a portable EMP or Fallout 3-esque mini-nuke. And they never explain why you need a particle accelerator to “weaponize” nano-bots.

Wrong.

See, it turns out, that bus schedule is actually a work of fiction. No bus leaves SODO at 4:10. And none leaves at 4:25. They are phantoms, they exist only in the mind.

I arrived at the bus stop at around 4:10, which is plenty of time to catch the 4:10 route (it’s scheduled to arrive at 4th and Cherry at 4:15.) But the bus didn’t show up. Around 4:20, I figured I’d just wait for the 4:25 bus to show up. But it didn’t show up either.

Finally, and at long last, a 510 bus arrived at 4:45, actually on schedule! Amazing. Of course, since the previous two buses had disappeared into the Twilight Zone, it was completely packed. Sardine-packed.

Just to add to the misery, this happens to be a record-breaking heatwave in the Seattle area. Look, we even have a “stagnant air warning“, whatever that is. The poor bus’ air conditioner was trying to keep up, but it was futile.

Then to add insult to injury, when the bus finally arrived at Everett Station around 5:55, it was directly followed by another 510 bus. (Probably the one that was actually scheduled to leave at 4:40. I wager the one I was in was either the half-hour-late one or the 15-minutes-late one.)

Grr.

Anyway, I wrote a complaint.

The sign at this bus stop says the bus is scheduled for 4:15 and another for 4:30. I arrived at the bus stop at 4:10, but did not see a 510 bus until 4:45.

When the bus finally arrived half an hour late, it was completely packed and very uncomfortable to ride in this hot weather.

When it arrived at Everett Station, another, mostly-empty, 510 bus pulled in directly behind it. I can only guess that this bus was the one that was only 15 minutes late, which was probably only a few seconds behind the half-hour late bus.

I completely understand that traffic issues are beyond your control, but this is the second time that this has happened to me in a short period of time. Is the schedule incorrect, has the 4:15 run been canceled with no notice? If so, both the signs at the stop and the website have the wrong schedule.

If buses are going to be a full half-hour late, I would like some notice of that so I can instead take the train.

Thank you.

Trying to be polite so I actually get a response.

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Seriously. Slashdot is supposed to be full of smart and technical people, and they can’t even get a goddamned website right? How is that image even being shown to me, the end-user? Have they ever heard of the concept of “staging servers?” It’s fucking disgraceful.

It’s not like I’m using the hated Internet Explorer browser, or some experimental web browser from beyond the stars, or that I’ve hacked the shit out of my system, it’s fucking stock Firefox with one fucking add-on.

Oh, and to make it all worse, I have Slashdot set to use the “classic” (read that as: “working”) comments system, not this new piece of shit they’ve been shitting out over the last year. Not that anybody at Slashdot gives a fuck for my preference, since I still get the new version on my user page, and half the templates.

Maintaining this site is somebody’s full-time job. In fact, there are several people who work for Slashdot and only for Slashdot… what the hell do they even do? Think up more creative ways to cram so much fail in such a small space?

Slashdot is the only website I’ve ever seen where the owners/administrators of the site simply don’t fucking care.

They just do not care.

I got to stop posting about Slashdot, it’s kind of pathetic. Not a third as pathetic as Slashdot itself, though.

I’ve been playing Left4Dead recently. One of the zombie types is the “smoker”, which shoots out a long tongue that ensnares one of the survivors and drags them away from the group.

Take a look at this approximation of what happens, in cute Valentine’s Day form:

So when I was playing the other day, I was surprised to learn that you can actually save a survivor being dragged by using your melee attack. Somehow, in the magical zombie-infested world of Left4Dead, slapping someone upside the head with the butt of your automatic shotgun will unravel a mutated tongue wrapped around their neck. I’ve been playing the game for several weeks, and I’d never heard this before, but lo and behold it works.

And it makes no sense.

Thing the second:

The other day I signed up for an account at Mint.com. I put in my bank info, and it went and retrieved my balance sheet from Bank of America using magical Internet technology somehow. It worked pretty good, except for one thing: for some reason it categorized ATM withdrawals as mortgage payments.

So I dive in and try to fix the problem. For each transaction, Mint.com has a list of dozens of categories you can select from. But for some reason, I couldn’t find ATM Withdrawals anywhere on the list. I knew it existed, because a friend I was talking to told me as much, but where was it? Turns out, the category “ATM Withdrawals” is a sub-category of “Uncategorized.”

And that makes no sense, either.

Lesson learned:

Maybe I’m some kind of freak, but if I think that something’s not going to work, I don’t even try it.

For example, in Left4Dead, since whacking a fellow survivor with your melee attack is something to be generally avoided, and since there’s no possible way that could (in real life at least) uncoil a choking snakelike tongue, it never occurred to me to try it.

Similarly, when looking for a category named “ATM Withdrawal” it would never have occurred to me, in a million years, to check underneath the menu item called “Uncategorized.”

In short: things are easier to use when they make sense. Make sense.

• An offline data uploader applet, so that I don’t have to store my username/passwords to the web. I don’t know about most people, but I have trust issues with stuff like that.
• Depreciate cars. Right now you just plop in the value of your car, and that’s it– since Mint.com doesn’t know the make/model/year of your car, it has no way of judging the value of it other than what you specifically type in.
• Recognize Bank of America ATM withdrawals by default. Not only is Bank of America one of the largest banks in the US, but ATM transactions specifically show up with the descriptive all-caps text: “BANK OF AMERICA ATM WITHDRAWAL” on them. Despite that, they showed up in my Mint account as “Mortgage Payments.”
• Similarly, a purchase from Steam Powered.com (i.e. Valve’s Steam game service) showed up as a coffee purchase. I’m pretty sure that Valve’s Steam is bigger than whatever podunk coffeeshop is also named “Steam Powered.”
• If I tell Mint I don’t have a credit card, it should remove the “Credit Cards” section from my homepage. The “add account” wizard seems to be smart enough to stop asking when I say I don’t have one, but the homepage isn’t similarly smart.
• Also, there’s a bug with their lightbox where sometimes it’ll get taller than the browser window and become impossible to close. Wasn’t just me on this one, a friend saw it also.

I gripe because I gripe a lot, but Mint.com really is a good service, and I think it’ll be very handy to me. Since I’m godawful with money, generally.

You might notice that sites that used to auto-log in, like your webmail provider, now require you to manually log in each time. Your login information is stored in cookies, and this likely means that Firefox’s cookie file is corrupted.

Navigate to the following folder (in Vista):
C:\Users\[Your User Profile Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default

Put your Windows user name in the first blank. The actual folder has a randomly-generated name, something like “5gjbzh6p.default”, but you most likely only have one of them. You’ll need to have Explorer show hidden files and folders, as the “AppData” folder is hidden by default. (In Vista, the setting for this is in Organize->Folder and Search Options->View->Show hidden files and folders.)

Inside that folder is a file named “cookies.sqlite”. This is the corrupted file. Rename the file to something like “cookies.backup”. (So that we can restore the file, if it turns out that this wasn’t the problem after-all.)

Open up Firefox, log in to your favorite website to set your cookie. Now to test if cookies are saving correctly, close Firefox, re-open Firefox, and go to your favorite website again: you should be automatically logged in.

• The camera work was a little problematic at times. It’s like they used some special lens to emphasize lens flares in some attempt at “realism.” There are scenes with huge lens flare rectangles right above the actor’s faces. Also, there were a couple fight scenes where the cuts were so quick you couldn’t tell what was happening in the fight. Editors: we know quick cuts indicate action, but if you make to too quick nobody can tell what the hell is going on!
• While they did a pretty good job of following the Star Trek canon, I’m pretty sure that the Federation didn’t build the Enterprise in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. That was just weird. (Also, what were those super-tall Iowan buildings? Was that a future-city, or was it just the biggest grain elevator ever?) Oh and the Enterprise is at least twice the size of the old one… the original had room for maybe 2-3 shuttles in its landing bay, this new one has like 16. I guess this movie si a “reset’ so it’s not that big a deal. They also changed Star Trek’s warp drive to work more like Battlestar Galactica’s jump drive.
• That scene you saw in the preview where the classic car is racing along the Iowan freeway, then falls off a cliff while Kirk holds on for dear life? That actually has nothing to do with the plot. At all. Not even slightly. It is, believe it or not, part of a product placement for Nokia.
• Apparently all Federation ships now include vast engineering areas that resemble, more than anything, cheese processing plants. I’m actually ok with this, given the larger size of the Enterprise it almost makes sense– except for one small point: since there are no computers or really controls of any type (just pipes and tanks), Scotty’s engineering shots just consist of him running alongside pipes.
• Just say no to cute little comic relief sidekick alien characters. They suck. There’s one in this movie, accompanying Scotty. Just try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

That all said, the movie is vastly more entertaining than I expected it to be. Chris Pine did a great job of playing Kirk, without copying William Shatner’s un-copy-able Kirk. Zachary Quinto, as well, made an excellent Spock, and was much better than I expected. (I guess the crappiness of Heroes was firmly rooted in the script, not in the acting.)

All of the classic bridge characters are there, and all of them have their particular quirks/talents re-inforced: Chekov’s accent, Sulu’s fencing, that weird antenna thing in Uhuru’s ear, Scotty and McCoy’s classic lines. Captain Pike is there, playing the same role as Kirk’s mentor. Even the Kobayashi Maru test is present, and Kirk’s “cheating” is shown in a particularly comical way.

In fact, I was surprised at the amount of humor in the film. Even the villain is given a humorous line at one point, that made the whole theater laugh. It’s really at the level of, say, Star Trek IV, almost sliding into the comedy genre.

My recommendation: Watch it.