The blog will be on hiatus for a little while, at least through the end of the year. I need to devote some of these energies somewhere else, and with the back pain and the back-pain-related meds I'm on, updating is becoming difficult.
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So, I threw my back out last night. God, do I feel old. I'm doing better this morning, that is to say I can sit up and even stand for short intervals without being in debilitating pain.
Suck-fest.
But I've seen a doctor, and I didn't have anything planned that's going to be interrupted, so that's good. And Abby's been an incredible help yesterday and today--I honestly don't know how I'd have made it through without her.
So yeah, if you ever have a chance to throw your back out, don't.
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So yesterday I asserted that Santa Claus is the only real example of a vast conspiracy that enjoys any degree of success, and that's its dubious success is a tribute to the inability of a vast conspiracy to accomplish anything meaningful. The obvious follow-up question is this: "Kurt, you snarky non-believer, you--why didn't you cite God as an example of a vast conspiracy?"
Couple reasons. Namely, there's a difference between a grand delusion and a successful conspiracy. Also, there are plenty of conspiracies that are successful, but they're hardly vast, and the larger they get, the more likely they are to fail. But I'll back up a bit and address the actual question. Is God a vast conspiracy? No, I don't think so--a vast delusion for sure, but not a conspiracy.
That there are plenty of grand delusions out there that aren't conspiracies. These may be self-delusions guided by greed or groupthink. They may simply be commonly accepted mistakes--to be a genuine conspiracy, the conspirators really have to know that they're lying. And I think religion is a combination of self-delusion, misinformation, greed, and groupthink (where two or three are gathered in his name, there is someone making shit up in their midst).
But on a more personal note, I find the example of Santa Claus to be nonetheless informative (aside: hey, it's Christmas, you didn't think I'd pass up a chance to blaspheme, did you?).
Think about it this way: kids believe in Santa for reasons that make sense to them. They've had their picture taken with him, he brings them presents every year, he drinks their milk and eats their cookies. But at the end of the day, believing in Santa requires the ability to believe in a certain amount of magic in the world. And once children discover the truth, they find plausible explanations for all the "evidence" of Santa in a world without magic. They have no incentive to do so, but they don't need him anymore, and to continue to believe would be intellectually dishonest.
So the other night I went to a Christmas Eve church service, because I am a dutiful son-in-law. And it felt good to walk into a church--it was like a comfort food. I've been a church-goer for most of my life. I began to ask myself if it would be worth attending just for a the camaraderie and the music. But as soon as the service proper started, I remembered why I don't go anymore. I have seen truth, and I can't force myself to buy the lie anymore. I am simply not capable. There was a reading from Isaiah 9, that allegedly prophesied the coming of Jesus, and Abby was quick to point out that verse 7, at the end of that prophecy, didn't come true. (For the quibblers, you can say that it may yet come true, and I can say that Jesus's alleged arrival actually served to make things worse, and we can go on about it all day, so let's pretend like we already did, since it is an anecdotal example and not directly contributing to any particular argument).
I can't speak for my wife, but I miss the church in some ways--I miss believing that there was a certain amount of magic in the world. Although I have pointed out in the past that the day I gave up on God was one of the happiest of my life. But I'd love it have it both ways--the acknowledge the truth but live the lie. But I can't. To do so would be intellectually dishonest, and a disservice to both myself and any church I happened to be attending.
For I have found better explanations of the way the world works that don't involve magic.
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Christmas is a great time to point out why conspiracy theories don't work. People suck at keeping secrets. Really, there is only one great conspiracy: Santa Claus.
No, really, stay with me on this.
Santa Claus is not real (spoiler!). But we tell people that he is, we hire actors to imitate him, we leave false evidence of his existence. We do all this to create a sense of joy and, simultaneously, coercive morality in the target of this conspiracy.
And it works. Barely. It helps that children have no real system for evaluating complex truths and are unaccustomed to being lied to by their parents. Also, we're bribing them into believing. And did I mention the mounds of fabricated evidence? And even then, you're lucky if a child still believes past the age of about eight.
So when people complain about a vast conspiracy to steal their freedom of [insert paranoia here], I can't help but laugh. I might believe that if you bribed me, hired actors, and had the rest of the world winking along with you, but only if I were eight or younger.
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So Evan and I have been playing Team Fortress 2 lately instead of our usual Left 4 Dead 2 sessions. You know, change of pace and all.
So it turns out that Twitter is now actually profitable, thanks to Google. Now every local and national newscaster the world over is engaging in social media without draining worthwhile investment capital.
So Abby and I went to go see Avatar this weekend. The best description I've heard of it is that it's basically a $100 hamburger: well-crafted, painstakingly presented, thoroughly enjoyable, and at the end of the day, just a hamburger. A really good hamburger. But a hamburger nonetheless.
I didn't see it in 3D because I am done with 3D. I don't need the headache to witness the splendor. I will say this: I liked it. The plot was well-thought-out if not terribly adventurous. The plot twists were all telegraphed fairly early on. The fight scenes were great--Cameron really should do space operas. And the technical achievement of the film cannot be understated: the movie looks incredible. The CG characters emote believably, and the environments and creatures are splendidly real and visceral.
I will complain a little about the writing. The plot-driving McGuffin is a mineral called... wait for it... "unobtainium."
Yeah. Really. Spoken without irony.
There were a few other vocal gaffes: "take it to the next level" and "we're not in Kansas anymore" that were a bit hackneyed, but for the most part the characters were colloquial enough to be believable, if not eloquent.
It's curious to me that this film was released against Oscar hopefuls rather than as a summer blockbuster. I can't help but think that Cameron expects Avatar to be a shoe-in for Best Picture. And he's wrong. Although I wouldn't be too surprised if he managed a nomination.
Anyway, good flick, exciting, 'splody, gorgeous. Is it worth the hype? Probably not. Worth seeing? Well, you could do a lot worse for $10.
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This weekend, I ate a strawberry-flavored moonpie.
It is an abomination against nature.
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So I'm spending part of this weekend with my mother-in-law, which becomes an excuse for me to work on any of her collection of jigsaw puzzles.
I enjoy jigsaw puzzles--I don't do them very often, but I find them meditative. I hardly ever do them at home because we just don't have an accomodating surface for them--the coffee table is big enough, but it's also the coffee table. And it's got a lip on it that makes clean-up a bit tricky. So I've been saying that I need to get a card table, so I can do puzzles in the basement.
Anyway, since I'm here at my mother-in-law's (mother's-in-law?... grammar joke), part of me responsibility is to take back some presents, and I couldn't help but notice that one of them with my name on it is rather large and flat. And roughly card-table-shaped.
Makes me happy.
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Having played around with Wave, I'm beginning to see some of the uses. Google describes it as a tool for collaborative document editing, but to really grasp it's usefulness, you need to have a fairly loose definition for what constitutes a "document".
A document could be a proposed set list, or a set of suggestions for where to eat lunch, or a meeting agenda, or anything like that. I've been using it mostly as a notepad for things that I might want to share, particularly with bandmates. It's the kind of thing I use Google docs for, actually, but it's more flexible in some ways, especially with respect to sharing information.
Of course, the big drawback is still that no one actually checks their waves, but that will change as the usefulness becomes more evident. I'm still not convinced that it's any kind of be-all-end-all toy, but I'm a lot more optimistic than I was a few months ago.
Incidentally, I've got like a dozen invites, so if you or anyone you know wants to play around in it, just ask.
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So, if you haven't checked out the trailer for Iron Man 2, do so now.
I'll wait.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first film, despite going into it with fairly modest expectations. It was big and 'splody but it had tremendous heart, a fair amount of wit, and a wonderfully charming leading man whose struggles against his very real demons externalized themselves in fantastically sci-fi ways. It looks like everything is going to continue in that vein with the sequel.
We get a brief glimpse of Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, and Don Cheadle as War Machine, but it looks like the main conflict is going to be against Whiplash, played by a nearly unrecognizable Mickey Rourke (although the character is said to be equal parts Whiplash/Backlash and Crimson Dynamo). It looks pretty damned spiffy.
So I'm excited. Your thoughts?
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It's kind of a shame to say it, but now that Dollhouse is in it's death throes, we're getting some really interesting plotlines. It's made me realize something:
Time for a little righteous indignation. There will be unnecessary anger. There will be cursing. You're warned.
This is early speculation on my part.
For a while now I've been saying that blu-ray will never take off as a format because it doesn't have a vehicle propelling it. The tech is starting to get cheap enough and enough people have hi-def television these days, but there's no movie that you have to own and that must be owned on blu-ray. Not like The Matrix was for DVD.
Again, this is speculation. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have a suspicion that Avatar is going to be that movie.
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So I picked up Madonna's The Immaculate Collection the other day. I was born in the 80's, but I definitely missed out on its music, including Madge's hayday, but it's fun to look back and rediscover a once-phenomenon like that.
If you don't read Sheldon, you should. It's perhaps the most... charming... comic on the web. I have at least one friend who doesn't read web-comics, but he reads Sheldon.
Kurt doesn't feel like posting today, so here's another website he enjoys: True On The Internet.
Abby related to me that the original women's "sufferagettes" were a militant group in England that burned homes, restaurants and churches, cut phone lines, smashed government buildings' windows, sent explosives by mail, and bombed Westminster Abbey. Eventually, women in England got the vote, and I think there's a lesson here for all of us.
Watched a movie the other night called Humpday about two friends who decide to make an art-porn together. Here's the gimmick: they're both straight males, and they would be having sex with each other. I was amused enough by the trailer to drop this in my Netflix queue, and really the only reason I rented it was because I forgot that I had it in my Netflix queue at all. Eager to return it and wide awake, I popped it into the DVD player fully expecting to give up after twenty minutes (a la Shrink).
Kurt doesn't feel like writing a post, so he will instead point you towards a website he likes.
http://autocompleteme.com
That is all.
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I'm so bothered by the tendency towards ignorance in political discourse. Bill Maher comes out against the H1N1 vaccine. Any doctor in the world will tell you that it's worthwhile, but one comedian thinks he knows better?
Hilary Clinton vocally says that the people know what's better for the economy than economists, never mind that economists are paid to know about the economy. Anti-evolution religious figures and climate-change deniers claim to have a better understanding of science than scientists.
In short, it seems commonplace for a random person to believe that they know more about a given discipline than people who have devoted their professional lives to the study of that discipline.
Hubris.
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Finally got around to see Terminator Salvation and I can think of no better way to describe it than this:
It's a big-budget fan-fic.
SPOILERS AHEAD
TS's action sequences are big and 'splody, but there is no drama. The second-act plot twist that Marcus is a terminator was given away in the trailers. The third-act plot twist that the machine-killing McGuffin and the presence of Marcus are Skynet-engineered subterfuge are clever but rather obvious. The characters do absolutely nothing to endear themselves to you--we root for John Conner because he's John mother-fucking Conner and for no other reason. He's heralded as a prophet and a respected leader, but we don't ever get to see him do anything that is particularly charismatic or respectable. Rather, he's generic tough with requisite dark-melancholy. If you don't already know about the going-back-in-time plot device that fuels the first films, you're just out of luck. We get next to no explanation of why Kyle Reece is important, just the assurance that he's extremely important.
And, in the manner of true fan-fiction, the movie is littered with homages both subtle and holy-crap-did-John-Conner-just-say-"I'll-be-back"?!?!?! We get a retread of the liquid steel and frozen terminator sequences from T2 (in fact, that entire fight scene was eerily reminiscent of the second film's factory climax). We get a bombed out gas station in the middle of a desert outside Los Angeles that looks surprisingly like the gas station in the middle of the desert outside Los Angeles from the end of the first film (may be coincidence, anyone else get that vibe?). When Conner blares a radio in the street, the song that plays is Gn'R's You Could Be Mine, which was the highly promoted single from the second movie's soundtrack.
And then we get a naked Arnold. In short, a movie that could have been a stand-alone action thriller in a very unique setting is instead a series of action set-pieces punctuated by inside jokes and a complete lack of character development.
Of course, I have a larger beef with the continuing Terminator franchise. The first movie made sense. James Cameron took a wild premise and made it fairly believable by focusing on the human struggle and by being James mother-fucking Cameron. Then he made the second movie, which was bigger and 'splodier than the first, but he still made it work. And the end of that film was a beautiful way to cap off the franchise--and really, how could it go on? How could a John Conner who was coddled and protected as a child ever grow up to be the fearsome warrior who would save mankind. Frankly, T2 stretched the range of believability on that end and only redeemed itself by averting the Judgment Day calamity altogether. Yeah, they managed to send back another set of Terminators, and yeah, we decided to send them later in time because, well, I'm not sure why. But we went with it because it was a phenomenal film with cool new special effects that was able to tell a hugely emotional story. I love the fact that part of the T-1000's downfall is that he assumes a mother can be tortured into betraying her child.
Everything after that is cinematic masturbation--making more films (and TV shows) that are poor executions of a hugely popular brand name.
Meh.
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So a while back (i.e., last month) I wrote about Microsoft's ploy to inflate Bing's search numbers by incorporating it into the file-search feature of Windows XP. This is just one strand in a web of Microsoft being deceptive dicks that we've all dealt with at some point. I got another taste of it last week.
Do they still make made-for-TV movies? I remember when the Amy Fisher scandal broke back in 1992, there were three different movies about it on TV. They weren't like tiny insignificant films, either. The Amy Fisher Story was a huge career-builder for former child-actress Drew Barrymore (much bigger than Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story was for Alyssa Milano).
Against my better judgment, I watched Angels and Demons over the weekend. It's not bad, certainly a step above the painful-to-watch The DaVinci Code. But it's not what I would call a "good" film, by any stretch.
