One of my chronic laments, is how the coolest art-hacks seem to get the least amount of DVD extra, behind the scenes documentation. Make zine has changed that around quite a bit, and I'm happy to see another artist take up the challenge in a more mainstream forum.

Art Geeks tile their bathroom

Some days, it doesn't take much to make me very happy.

The Weekly's astrology column caught my eye today.



Sagittarius (Nov. 22–Dec. 21)

There's a time to get pissed off about the status quo, and a time to simply accept it. Determining which this is depends on you. You can change things if you want, although it might require tremendous effort. Are you willing to make that effort? Bitching and moaning about something without bothering to try to change it is a waste of time and energy. Don't bother. If you're going to let yourself get fired up, then you'd better be prepared to step up and put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, I advise just letting it go and keeping your mouth shut. Change it or live with it. No griping allowed.



Sounds really good, doesn't it? I can imagine the same advice being given to black Americans in the 60's in the south.

What if we were never allowed to talk things over with each other before acting? It would be like being invited to a brainstorm, but having every idea shot down before they could be written on the chalkboard.

It's true that a lot of chronic griping doesn't go anyplace, and there are some ways to talk about malcontent that are more productive than others. But those would be shades of gray that depend on how receptive one is to hearing the stuff in the first place. This astrologer is telling us that if we're not firmly committed to taking risks, we shouldn't talk about those risks before jumping. Fight Club would be proud.

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I've got a different idea about complaints. We live in a really messed up place, at a really messed up time. A whole lot of things are going to change about our situation, whether we like it or not. Talking about fucked up things, and deciding how fucked up they are, is really important. When someone says, "Oh, you don't like it, what's *your* solution?" they are basically saying that this current situation is the best one possible, all other solutions must have been found wanting, because this one actually happened. Or really, they're probably saying it's too complicated and painful for them to think about, and they'd rather you not try to drag them into it.

I think things right now are worse than we like to talk about. Things are going to get worse still. If no one bothers to talk about how bad things are now, the chances of things improving all on their own seem pretty small. I don't trust the people who are running things, to know (or care!) what's best for me if I just keep my mouth shut and let them work. That really would be crazy.

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there's a whole 'nother half to this, that somehow embraces the warm fuzzies, the rainbows and unicorn chasers, the stuff that makes the hassle worth enduring. But I'm kind of depressed these days, and I don't have a lot of attention myself for that kind of stuff. I'm too stubborn to quit, even when I don't have a better world in mind. That will have to be enough for now.

Imperial fleet week in San Francisco

http://current.com/items/89204971_death_star_over_san_francisco

It's a cool video that makes me squirm. No explosions, no one running around saying, "Oh My God!", just complacent acceptance of our imperial master's right to dominate the sky.

It's the same feeling I get when the Blue Angels take over the airspace above my city. I guess I should be grateful they're not bombing me, that I'm not really being terrorized, it's someone on the other side of the planet who's taking it in the shorts for the sake of low, low prices.

I kind of miss it when the Star Wars franchise was about bad guys and good guys going at it. Clearly, the bad guys have won.

I didnt really ROTFLMAO until about 1:15 into the scene...


How To Beat The Claw Game - Watch more free videos

I've been taking season four very slowly, but like a slow-motion car crash, I can't quite stop looking.

After watching chief Tyrol go through his own dark night of the soul in The Road Less Traveled, I realized what's so hard to watch for me. I hate to watch bad writing, but good writing can be just as bad if not worse. A storytelling friend of mine was telling me how much people like to hear that they are good. BSG tells us something different about ourselves. We are messed up beyond belief, and don't expect any help finding the good stuff that makes it all worth it, not in this series.

Good writing about bad people, oh yeah. I'm all set to watch Faith now.

Explaining the new toy is probably redundant.

Yeah, I heard about the guy who thought he was stuck in a GTA level, beating up motorists at random and taking their cars.

Now there's Truman Show disorder, somewhat more mundane, since it's less interactive, you're just on display.

I have to wonder exactly how much of it is in their heads, though. I'm not talking tin foil hat here, I'm talking about the stuff that's public knowledge.

Most everybody knows that feeling you get when you're being watched. It's not even explained in the movies, a character will say they feel like they're being watched, and the audience doesn't take that as a sign of mental illness.

And we know the phone company is allowed to break the law as long as its on behalf of the government. We just don't know how far that goes, or what kind of security agenda is being pursued here.

There's another angle to this too, where the big consensus-reality game that we all more or less agree is just a Very Important Game... the vague suspicion that it's really a sham, and we are actually doing something much weirder than we know. My favorite version of this, is that insurance greed and bureaucratic inefficiency are just a smokescreen for massive scale medical experiments in which americans are nearly-willing lab rats. But the global warming experiment, the grand terror experiment, or the information monopoly empire experiment all come pretty close.

( OK, now I probably AM talking tin-foil-hat stuff )

How bad does Hellboy 2 suck? I think it sucks so badly that the usual spoiler-cut just doesn't apply. So if you still want to catch this turkey on the big screen after reading this, a little thing like knowing what happens isn't likely to stop you.

Let's start with the steampunk fairy angle. Oh, that part sounds cool all right, it's what tipped me over into finding a big screen to watch it. But it's not really clear what the filmakers have in mind when they talk about fairies. There's the cute insectoid version used to good effect in Pan's Labyrinth, but they have no guile, and no relation to anything else in the fey world. They're just a plot device that could have been any kind of swarming nasty beastie. Killer bees and rats have been used to better effect.

Then there's the fairies supposedly at the center of the film's "plot". There wasn't really anything very fairy-like about them. There was certainly a lot of borrowing from LOTR's elves, these guys are tall and pretty and pale and strong. But what makes fairies dangerous is not their physical prowess, but their trickiness. And there was nothing subtle or tricky about these fairies. It looked like the director wanted vampires when he did the over-the-top goth makeup design, with a little bit of Hellraiser's Pinhead grid pattern on the nose. But none of these design elements held together to say "fairy" to me.

And then there's the diabolical plot to take over the world with an army of robots. If you're going to do something that cliche, then you have to bring something that we haven't seen before. And I'm not talking about pretty CGI puppets! As it was, it *might* have made a little bit of sense, if it had been gnomes or dwarves making all the mechanical stuff happen, but our single hobgoblin spokesthing has nothing to do with the plot, except to move the heroes from one place to another.

The first Hellboy borrowed heavily from the horrific imagery of two world wars. The nazi sand-puppet clockwork critter was really scary not just for what it was, but also what it represented. In this film, there is absolutely no reference to german badasses, except for a lovable eccentric german accented sand puppet. We are clearly expected to forget everything we saw in the first movie.

And then, Oh No! When the inevitable happens, and the One Ring to Rule them All is finally wielded, and the Army that must not awaken is awoken, how do our heroes prevail against all odds? The villain, with no explanation or build up, inexplicably kills himself in the middle of the battle. I paid money to see this?

{and before I get a lot of pedantic "That's not what happened", I ask you-, is my version any worse than what we did see?)

...not to say that such logic plays any part in this film. It doesn't even work as mindless popcorn fare, because the writing is so bad, so clumsy, that nothing that happens on screen really makes sense.

I've gotten so spoiled by movie sequels that were as good or better than the first one, it was easy to forget everything I hate about bad sequels. Selma Blair and Ron Perlman are fun to watch, I just wish they'd been given something interesting to do.

Color me unsurprised, there's a whole blog devoted to one tiny slice of american engrish.

And here's a lovely page containing a remedy. Except, this is more about snark than improving things. And sometimes snark can help make things better, just that a little goes a long way. (besides, I imagine that the folks most likely to make this error are least likely to be internet savvy enough to find that page.)

I have an idea for an official looking infraction notice, the kind of joke sticker you put on someones car who's parked badly. Only it's issued by the grammar police, and it contains an authoritative sounding snippet from Webster's, that's written to a 4th grade reading level.


But that's as far as it goes, I don't want to write it. I'm too focused on trying to write to whatever grade reading level I'm stuck in.

Either I'm confused about something pretty basic, or someone else is. You be the judge.

I'm in the middle of browsing my friend's list, when out of nowhere, a dialog box obscures the middle of a friend's speaking about a delicate social matter. And if this were some more stupid malware trying to get me to click on porn, I wouldn't be that surprised.

But this is a message from my web browser, telling me that a fresh update is now suddenly available, and wouldn't I please like to erase all my open tabs and re-boot my browser so I won't have to endure the shame of running obsolete software for just one more minute?

Well, duh. I close the dialog box, and go back to reading. Except now, I'm out of the zone. I'm too irritated at the interruption to continue reading, and I'm not going to go back to it until I've posted something about it.

I have to go back to the EULA I clicked through to install the damn thing: Did I specifically give them permission to interrupt my web browsing experience at their discretion? I'm pretty sure there's a hold harmless clause in there somewhere, but if this were an episode of Boston Legal, I would take them to court over it. (except this being me, I would simply try to force them not to interrupt me in the middle of a read. I still like Firefox, just not when it takes on the bad habits of Those Other Guys(tm).)