Big post error. I love that.

My longest post ever. Researched. Cool. Logical. Engaging. EATEN BY A BLOGGER ERROR. Enlightening. EATEN BY A BLOGGER ERROR.

So, yeah, great redesign, behind-the-scene code gnomes. I surely can't find anything wrong with it. I am certainly happy and satisfied.

From now on, no more thinking before posting. Just gibberish and pictures of bears wearing hats. Here is a list of RIAA members. I will be avoiding them. Why? It no longer matters, because I have thrown reasoning right out the window. ONLY PURE REACTION FROM ME.

While running some errands today, I started thinking about sequels which I like more than the original. Here are a few.

Aliens: Alien and Aliens are very different films, the former being a space monster movie and the latter being a space Vietnam movie. Space Vietnam apparently appeals to me more. No great artistic statement here on my part, though. But things blow up!

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: The objective value of anything genre is hard to determine. There are more than a few people who would put any genre work on a different, if not necessarily lower, level than a "mainstream" work of art. Putting aside the difficulties in charting the mainstream, let's just say that something like Star Trek exists in a world whose values are occluded to the majority of the public. Fans tend to judge the value of any individual piece of Star Trek, or by extension a genre work in general, by whether it is "genre" enough. That is, there is a whole set of values whose meaning is completely occult to the general audience. The new Enterprise is not "22nd century" enough? What on earth does that even mean? Well, it means a lot, if you're in on the secrets. But what I really want to say is that, any consideration of "Star Trek-ness" aside, The Wrath of Khan is a really good film. Its focus is tighter than the notoriously casual first film, but beyond that, it stands out as one of the really good science fiction films of the 80s; in my opinion at least as worthy of consideration as Terminator, or Blade Runner, or Aliens, or what have you.

Monty Python's Life of Brian: Holy Grail is a funny collection of Arthur-themed sketches. Life of Brian is just as funny, and it also happens to tell a cohesive story, making it, in my eyes, more of an actual film than any of the others. Except for the bit with the aliens, maybe.

Pinkerton: Weezer's second album, and the first one to include a song that really caught my attention. (Not due to the first album failing to do so, but due to my own "musical awakening" only occuring around the time this one was released.) There are a lot of good songs on the blue album, but with Pinkerton Rivers Cuomo presents a whole album of songs about really awkward moments in his love life. There's lots of embarrassment and pain, and things are said that Cuomo might, in retrospect, wish weren't. Which is why it is so good. After this, Weezer doesn't lose their ability to write really neat music with lots of hooks, (Assuming that word means what I think it means in this context.) but they have as of yet written no lyrics that really say anything worth saying.

That's a few, anyway.

Some thoughts on turning 23

So today is my birthday, and I wanted to write down a few things before that was no longer true. My original plan was to find some particularly interesting news item or article, and then link it to me in some way. For instance: "Today it seems that the island of Malta was purchased by Conhugeco, and the Knights of Malta are now corporate assassins. This reminds me of when I was a boy." I've had no luck finding such a story, though. Someday I should share the essay I wrote that combined painful personal experiences with the Epimenides paradox. It was not so cohesive as I had hoped it would be.

Well, I guess the Rosenbergs were executed today. That's something. I mean, not today, but on this date fifty years ago. And Blaise Pascal was born today (in the same sense). So was Salman Rushdie. I skipped over the Pascal section in my medieval philosophy textbook, though, and have never read anything by Rushdie. But wait! I have stumbled onto some sort of topic!

According to the History Channel, here are a few things which happened an exact number of years ago:

Intel bought some of CNET. Uh, who cares? Thanks for nothing, History Channel. And according to my clock, it is June 20th already anyway. Well, this being the History Channel, surely something interesting happened to the Luftwaffe today. No? What a letdown.

So forget that.

Hey, wait, it seems that the Statue of Liberty arrived in the United States on June 19, 1885. That's kind of interesting. I am both tired and poor.

Nope, nothing. One thing I did want to mention was that I really hate it when people try to just barge in on existing conversations with things that apply only to them. Like, if you and I were talking, and somebody sitting near us just started relating some event that occured to them that had no connection to our subject. For instance, we might be discussing the chart-topping song for June 19, 1973 ("My Love," Wings) and this other person would just blurt out "Hey, it's my birthday!" But if we cared, we would already know. Anyway, I successfully went all day without blurting that out, though I really wanted to, because I am emotionally needy. An example: I am at the hip burger joint in Yakima. "I would like a large chocolate milkshake, please." (32 ounces of milkshake. Probably a bit too much.) "Ok," says the lady. "It's my birthday is why," I successfully did not say. "No one else is buying me a milkshake, you'll notice. In fact I am in town all alone. It's my birthday." A victory for me.

Totally unrelated: Some birthday resolutions, and progress made on each so far:

1.) Get a job. Job applied for. Test to see if I can spell and work my fingers: Tomorrow. Well, today, now.
2.) Write for one hour each day. Failed.
3.) Get a giant chocolate milkshake. Completed. WITH INTEREST.

I got the following from Warren Ellis. Not in the sense that he handed it to me. I suppose "I got the following from Warren Ellis' weblog" would be more accurate, but namedropping is the whole point of having a weblog, and I don't want to be left out, even though I don't know anyone who has a weblog personally and I'm reasonably sure that no one actually reads this one.

But this is what I got: Iraqi boy band is seeing stars.

Really, there isn't much to say, other than making a brief Zeitgeist reference (that's the Bruce Sterling novel, by the way), and maybe either decrying the way Western pop culture is swallowing the world or being happy about the way traditional cultures (and the animosities that go with them) are melting away into this very odd cultural melange (it is a big word for smarty pantses!) we have now. Uh, I suppose I lean towards the latter. Mostly I just wanted to put this up as a companion to that earlier story I linked to about the budding bin Laden pop star.

A little tinkering and my archives work. But they don't look like I think they're supposed to. Anyway, knock yourself out, if you're so inclined.

The last time I had something to post here it was ruined by a dying battery. So, until I have time to think of something clever, this quotation will have to suffice.

'There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them...A broken chip has invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.'
--
Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown

Sterling has a way with words I've found to be unmatched. Sure, there are authors whose prose is just as pretty, or fancy, or even fancier. But he has a way with a phrase that just punches past everybody else. It isn't lyrical beauty. It's something I can't quite put my finger on. But when I say something like "technology destroyed beauty," it's Sterling I'm trying to imitate. Bold statements so crazy they simply have to be true.

Whoops, technology destroyed beauty. At least, for now. No doubt some completely unimaginable beauty-enhancing technologies are in the works. On-the-fly CG overlays, maybe. Or perhaps we'll just have to build a better human face.