Movies July 2010

Chocolate
Maudlin, but the final fight scene was worth the price of admission. I don't even know how you'd plan a fight scene on the side of a building... it was fantastic to watch, and eminently stealable for D&D.

Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries)
This has ageda little? But it's still quite good. Looking forward to watching the first couple of seasons again with M,

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Dwane McDuffie keeps knocking these out of the park, scriptwise. Every other aspect is also quite good!

The Last Airbender
"Your exposition is here, Mr. Shyamalan. Where d'ja want it?"
"Oh, just put it anywhere."

Shiri

A Korean action movie that was pretty good! Recommended.

Superman Doomsday
Pretty disappointing.

Inception

Christopher Nolan does movies I want to see, so I wanted to see this. I enjoyed it, but I didn't just loooove it. It was a smidge too intricate for movies, too much expository work. That level of plot intricacy works in novels, but movies have a ceiling, I think. Also, Lady or the Tiger endings have been frustrating since immediately after "The Lady, or the Tiger?". I think Cobb never made it back out. But maybe... maybe he did?

Jericho, season 1, disc 1

A short-lived, pretty good TV drama about life post-nuke attack in the U.S. of A.

Observations:

• Jericho is far too racially integrated to truly exist in Kansas.
• The black guy's character is so aggressively mysterious I want to punch him through the television.
• This show seems to have the same curious hiccup that other genre-esque dramas have: The writing staff appears to have more show to fill than quality to spend. Some storylines and arcs are suspenseful and challenging, while others in the very same episode are dumb as doorknobs.

We'll keep watching though.

Helvetica

I like fonts, but this documentary failed to hold my interest. This seemed pitched more at insiders than outsiders. Every once in a while, a moment of "oh, that's interesting," would take you off guard, but then it would switch to some aged German or Swiss man saying something dry.

Surrogates

Relentlessly mediocre. I was sort of interested in seeing this last year in the theater, but not interested enough to do anything about it. Now I know why. This movie spent all its money on Bruce Willis and marketing, not necessarily in that order. It had scenes that in all senses -- script, acting, lighting, camera work, scenery, and more -- looked like were lifted from the "how to shoot an '80s action TV series" handbook. The story was workmanlike in its conventionality.

Pillow talk

Over the last few weeks I have found new fire to start a new product line. I am making pillows.

For a couple of years now, I've had boxes of Karlstad sofa covers from Ikea sitting around my office. They were on sale for like, $1 each, and I bought a couple on spec. I assumed I would make monsters from them at some point, but the fabric is sort of upholstery-grade, tricky business on the 6-12 inch scale I usually work in.

I made a round back pillow out of a t-shirt for a show a few weeks back, and it set my mind to thinking about pillows. Then I went to Shanghai to visit a friend, and saw some cool pillow/monsters with a certain shape. I sketched it in my notebook and brought the idea home.

After modifications and trials with fabric and various shapes, I hit upon this design, which I'm pretty happy with. We've had a prototype on our sofa for a few weeks now, and we both really enjoy it. It's not just weird looking, it's comfortable. I'm leaning on it now as I write this.

The production units are going up on Etsy as I get them done and photographed. Check 'em out while they last!

I also have vague plans to try to advertise this batch around crafty places the Web. That's new territory for me, but last time I put up a bunch of stuff on Etsy, nothing moved for 3 months. I also barely told anyone it was there, so I have to consider that I could be partly responsible.

Bynamite idea!

This New York Times link about a start-up that proposes to pay users for their personal information might be hidden by tomorrow, so I'm cherry-picking quotes here:

“Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

...

Every search on Google, Mr. Acquisti notes, is implicitly such a transaction, involving a person “selling” personal information and “buying” search results. But people do not think about, or are unaware of, the notion that typed search requests help determine the ads that Google displays and what its ad network knows about them.

Bynamite, Mr. Acquisti said, is “simply trying to make these kinds of transactions explicit, more transparent to the user."

...

In essence, the company has a libertarian, free-market ethos. If consumers have more power and control, it says, personal information should flow more efficiently to the benefit of both consumers and advertisers, who will be able to more accurately aim their ads.

...

IF Bynamite gains momentum, Mr. Yoon predicts that individuals will be able to use their portfolios of interests as virtual currency. He calls the idea a “consumer’s preference wallet.

I've said several times that Facebook can have, resell, and use my personal info for the low, low price of $20. Let's make it $25 because I'm a good capitalist.

That number should be way higher, because Zuckerberg knows they're making way more than $25 off each user. But I like to play nice, and thanks to scarcity rules, I don't have a lot of bargaining power. So 25 bucks for my name, email address, and marketable interests. I've never heard or read on the whole wide Internet anyone else making that kind of claim, and I'm surprised about it.

I normally acquiesce to charges of curmudgeonly behavior. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes it's accurate. But this quirk doesn't belong in that category. This is one of those rare instances where I'm right and everyone else is wrong for some reason.

You should expect a cut of the money when someone uses a resource you provide. I doubt this will be a pure, beautiful, cash-based transaction that I want. But it shows me I'm not completely alone in my thinking.

Where smart fails

Why Intelligent People Fail is a succint catalog of failure.

As Kottke points out, it's pretty much the same reasons everyone else fails.

Intelligence is wildly overrated. Smart is great. But smart has practically no correlation with success, however you define it.

Smart people need to be told this, and they need to continue to see the statistics that back this truth. Because smart people think they're super-special by virtue of an inborn trait. And everyone wants to be smart, and to be considered smart, to the point of self-deception. That's cultish behavior centered around a trait that has recently decided to look down on religion.

I find it personally galling when people use intelligence as a bulwark against theism. Although no one has ever said to me, "I thought you were too smart to believe in God," the surprised looks I've received when I talk about Jesus say it just fine. (On the flip side, a woman once assumed I was an atheist because I "looked so smart.")

Malcontent intelligentsia for the last 150 years or so have tried to con us into thinking that intelligence implies humanism. As in so many other instances though, intelligence corresponds with one thing: Intelligence. MENSA is a disappointing epicenter of this self-congratulatory canard.

You can mix and match intelligence with any other human trait. Anxious. Beautiful. Racist. Musical. Spiritual. Good, bad, silly, it doesn't matter. Intelligence doesn't make you better or worse. It just makes you smart.

The crux of the problem is that people confuse intelligence with wisdom. Wisdom takes you to good and lofty places. Smart just knows how to read the map. It don't know nothing about picking a good route or a good destination.