No Wrench

Reasons why having a little sister isn’t all bad

crimsonc — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:19:53 +0000

because she’ll grow up and say things like this to you:

man, if there was ever one word in a fantasy book review to make sure i’d never read it that word would be ‘ninjas’
‘Ninja-like Claw assassins’ is just over the line
i mean seriously, wtf
they’re probably all named something like christiano da’gaz’burgh and have swords that are painted black with a ruby in the hilt

Voracious reader

crimsonc — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:05:38 +0000

So Art Garfunkel has put up a post of every book he’s read since 1968. Which is pretty cool. But I have to take issue with the assertion that he is a voracious reader. The man has read 1000 books in 40 years, which comes out to 25 books a year. While that is nothing to sneeze at, I wouldn’t consider it voracious. I average, in a bad year, over 50 books a year. I went through over 100 books last year and I’m on pace to put away 80 or 90 books this year (not really sure why I’ve slowed down this year). So even if we take my worst year as a baseline, I’ll go through 1000 books in 20 years or more than twice as fast as Garfunkel. This isn’t meant to be a dicksize competition, but I think referring to his progress as voracious suffers from some verbiage inflation.

And people never learn

crimsonc — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:28:47 +0000

Real quick, what’s the best way in the Internet age to get people to pay attention to something? Easy, try and prevent them from looking on it. So really, what did BoingBoing expect when they ‘unpublished’ Violet Blue’s contributions. So now what is everyone talking about and reading? Violet Blue’s ‘unpublished’ posts on BoingBoing. So when BoingBoing says

Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day.

it is hard to believe that people who are often at the center of the fight to spread information about the web to route around censorship could be so dumb. I mean granted that is usually Cory and not Xeni, but come on, you have to have absorbed something. The only thing that this incident resulted in was Violet Blue getting lots of sympathetic attention and BoingBoing being made to look hypocritical. Whether this is censorship (not really) or just a fit of piquant house cleaning doesn’t really matter to the perception. If you’re going to fight for the forces of good, then you don’t do shit like this.

And the vague smear campaign Xeni now running against Violet is just kinda pathetic. Could you sound any more Paris Hilton? “She knows what she did.”

The beauty of the Internet

crimsonc — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:59:55 +0000

Google just change their favIcon, which has the effect of causing the little icon that shows up in firefox tabs to change. It used to be the distinctive uppercase G surrounded by a box. It is now the lowercase ‘g’ from the middle of their logo without a box. For someone like me that often has forty or more tabs open, the tab icon is the only thing I can usually see and I use it to pick out what I want quickly. Thankfully, I am not the only person so afflicted. This being the internet, there was already a community of pissed off people and someone has already create a Greasemonkey script to fix the problem. This is why the internet is amazing.

Tribeca - Fighter

crimsonc — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:46:14 +0000

Finished off Tribeca incredibly well once again. Just like last year I was somewhat skeptical of the movies I was seeing on my last day and somewhat burnt-out from having seen so many films. And just like last year, the movies I saw on the last day turned out to be amazing and were completely worth it. Fighter is a Danish movie about Aicha, a Muslim high school girl who wants nothing more than to be a martial arts fighter. Her family is very traditional and her father regards her infatuation with martial arts as unladylike and refuses to let her train with any team where boys and girls fight together. Obviously, this is unacceptable to Aicha who starts sneaking off to train with a local mixed team. The film is definitely about growing up and finding one’s identity, but it is much more about how hard it is for girls trapped in traditional families, but living in liberal countries, to try and reconcile the freedoms they see around themselves with their desires to be true to their families and their culture.
At no point in the film is a rejection of the Muslim culture something Aicha considers. Instead it is about how can she reconcile her culture with her dreams. And it is about how her parents, especially her father, cannot and will not understand that and refuse to compromise on his vision of what a Muslim daughter should be. The acting and directing are superb. The special effects and wire work in the fight scenes are as crisp and coherent as any I’ve seen in a long time (compare against the crap they had in Three Kingdoms). Five out of five.

Tribeca - Lioness

crimsonc — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:44:25 +0000

Team Lioness was the name given to female Army soldiers who were sent out as support teams with male soldiers in Iraq. Their missions usually involved raiding houses where insurgents were suspected to be hiding. The females were needed because cultural and religious beliefs prohibit men from patting down females. So rather than have to deal with dozens of freaked out and angry Iraqi women (as well as inciting cultural hatred), Team Lioness came along to deal with the female searches. Nothing sounds so bad, so far. However the problem with fighting an insurgent war is that there is no battlefield, there is no end to combat. So while a mission might be intended to be a simple raid, it could quickly turn into an all-out firefight. Essentially, a non-combat mission becomes a combat mission. And this is exactly what happened repetitively to Team Lioness. Now American law prohibits female soldiers from engaging in combat and, in fact, none receive front-line combat training (just like male support staff). So what happened in Iraqi to these women was most likely illegal and clearly outside their mission profile.
The documentary looks at the aftermath for some of these women and how they are trying to deal with being in combat, having to kill people, losing some essential part of what they feel makes them human. It is not prescriptive or particularly ideological: there is never a moral statement on the war in Iraqi or whether these women should have been fighting. But it still manages to raise a number of very difficult questions for its viewers. Hit the jump for more.
(more…)

NZ: Day 18

crimsonc — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:33:02 +0000

Drove back down to Auckland. First stop was the aquarium, where finding parking was a clusterfuck. But we managed to get a parking space and went to Jack Tarley’s Ocean Adventure or whatever it is called. We got to see baby penguins, which were very cool, and walked through their clear acrylic tanks which had fish, sharks, and rays swimming all around you. There was also a recreation of Scott’s South Pole camp, from his fatal attempt to reach the pole, which was cool. My sister was much more interested in the animals, so we did not spend as long in the camp. All told, it was smaller than I expected, which was a little disappointing. But it was a good time. Spent the rest of the day wandering around Auckland, though lots of things were closed because it was Sunday and Easter. This made it hard to find a bookstore for my sister (something we rectified at the airport, where everything was open) to acquire British science fiction books in, for their vastly superior covers. Got some lunch at a little Italian place, got some drinks at an outdoor cafe, and then headed off to the airport. The flight back was pretty fucking rough with the turbulence. Never really been on a flight that bucked and rolled so much. Kept trying to fall asleep and kept failing as the entire bottom of the plane felt like it was trying to escape. But we made it through fine, which was nice. The food options were pretty much as lame as they were on the way out, but whatever. Made it to LA fine and the trip was over.
For as much stuff as we did there, I really feel like we only scratched the surface. There are numerous multi-day tramps I would have loved to do, as well as national parks where we did a single hike which have many more cool hikes to offer. In terms of the touristy stuff, I think we hit most of the high points, so that was fine, but a trip back to do much more of the outdoor adventuring is totally in order.

NZ: Day 17

crimsonc — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:32:35 +0000

Drove up to the Waipoua forest area on the peninsula at the north part of the island. The hike I had planned for us was the Hauturu Highpoint hike. It starts off as a cool loop hike up the side of a waterfall, which we both had a lot of fun climbing. You then get to a turnoff for the high point. The sign there said it was another 2km to the top and it was steep the entire way. Rather than face a mutiny from my sister, who probably would have thrown me over the waterfall if I had made her climb up that, we just skipped the highpoint and completed the loop. It wasn’t the intense hike I was hoping for, but the forest area was really beautiful. On the way back from the hike, we stopped off at the kauri forest groves and saw the largest trees in New Zealand. We actually tried to take a hike through the forest, but after conferring at length and deciding the correct way to proceed, we managed to end up walking in the wrong direction back into the parking lot. This is what happens when two people with no sense of direction attempt to find their way.
We drove down into Dargaville and found our hotel. It was not the world’s most impressive hotel, but was fairly nice given how small the town was. We wandered for a long time trying to find somewhere to eat dinner and finally ended up a surprisingly good Indian restaurant. The guy who waited on us was crazy, but the food and beer were good. My sister actually ate Indian food, which was impressive. I was almost as stunned as I was the night she willingly ordered a mushroom appetizer. Crashed out in our hotel. Last night in NZ.

Tribeca - Dying Breed

crimsonc — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:26:28 +0000

Boring and uninventive horror film from Australia. Wasn’t particularly scary, wasn’t particularly well made, all the characters were just annoying. It gets a two.

Tribeca - Trucker

crimsonc — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:26:04 +0000

A sometimes funny drama, about an independent woman who makes her living as a trucker being forced to deal with the son she had years before who she now has to care for. The real strength of this film are the performances of all three of the lead actors. Michelle Monaghan is just awesome as the lead; as the director pointed out afterwards there were plenty of scenes where she never had to say anything because she could say so much with her body posture and her face. Jimmy Bennett is also great as the kid, avoiding any of the cloying overacting that is so common among precocious kids trying to pander to an adult audience (the ‘isn’t he so twee’ phenomenon). And Nathon Fillion is just the man. I’ve never seen him in a role where he wasn’t just awesome, and this film is no exception (it probably helps that all his roles are fairly similar).
I’m torn between giving this a four or a five. It didn’t strike me as being quite as good as the other dramas I gave a five (Let the Right One In, for example), but there is nothing glaring that stands out to indicate if should get a four. It is the sort of situation where I’d love to give a four and a half, but that’s not the rules of scoring films in the festival. So it gets a five.