picture pages, picture pages

This comic is hilarious:




Also, I don't know if any of you have been hearing the internet furor over the upcoming Samuel L Jackson joint, "Snakes on a Plane", but people have been having a blast making fake promotional material for it. I can't wait for this movie. "Get these motherfucking snakes off this motherfucking plane!" I wish they'd have the line "Do they speak ENGLISH in hssssssss??", but I don't have high hopes.






I thought "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" was an insanely stupid movie title, but "Snakes on a Plane" takes the cake. I'll be there opening day.

bugs

Who knew that reading bug reports could be so interesting?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330884

This mozilla bug has become not only a discussion of a flaw in Firefox, but a personal outlet for a woman's story about breaking up with her fiance, and then the people working on the bug actually giving her relationship advice. It's hilarious. Excerpts:

"This privacy flaw has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for 5 years."

...

"And ok, bugzilla isn't the place for this, but I can't help it. Honey, I would
think you would be the LAST person to be bothered by this. Not only did was he
using your computer to be unfaithful, he wasn't smart enough to cover his
tracks, and you got to know about it BEFORE buying the goods. If you're really
THAT upset about finding out, take him back and pretend you never knew, or hold
it over his head and use it to keep him in line."

"in all fairness, and not to sound like a two-dimensional bore, it's
possible he was a habitual browser -- along with the being a liar -- where he
just BROWSED the sites and looked at profiles, etc.. There's no telling
whether he ever DID or would have had the cahones to really get out there and
do something... Maybe he just fantasized. Maybe he just made-believe.. If
that helps. It's a difficult thing to bridle the male sex drive."

and the clincher:

"I think the only solution for now is very simple:

Never share your computer with your girlfriend."

Amen, brother.

fran lebowitz

Wow, I've never heard of Fran Lebowitz before tonight, but she's talking on NPR right now, and she's freaking amazing.

I looked around the NPR and KQED site for a link to archives of City Arts and Lectures so I could recommend it to you guys, but I can't for the life of me find it on their crappy sites. Sorry. But if you can find a copy of her talk, definitely listen to it.

She's a hardcore angry leftist, but here's the amazing part, she's not stupid and pious and pigheaded about it like most of them. She's great! I've listened to her for the last hour completely lampoon so many things that I hate about the right, and the left, and smoking bans, and bad parents, and animal rights.. you don't hear people talk like this anymore. She has zero interest in political correctness, she screams and yells about what she thinks is the absolute truth without any regard for other people's feelings at all, which I respect above all things. And I agree with her about much of what she's saying. She's completely dismissive of really popular liberal issues for really logical reasons, that either a) they don't matter at all (smoking bans, prayer in school, animal rights), or b) they galvanize the right so much that it's basically counterproductive to pursue them (gay marriage). You can just FEEL the uncomfortable laughter in the room. She says things that most people know deep down are true, but have been trained to not say aloud, and feel guilty for even thinking.

She's a satirist who was apparently pretty big in the 70's for writing two books (which I just ordered), and has suffered from writer's block ever since. Not a single book, she just tries to write books, and goes around and talks. And man can she talk. Her statements weren't prepared, she was able to answer audience questions with wit and cleverness, without ever annoying me, and that's pretty goddamn tough.

Oh, her talk just ended. That's too bad. I'm going to poke around and see what else she's written that I can find.

give me books

Okay, it's time for my annual call for my friends to recommend some books to me.

I like some non fiction and books of various types, but my one true love has always been science fiction. I've looked at my bookshelf and I realized that everything I really love is 2-3 years old. That's not good, I don't want to get locked into liking books from a certain era and not reading anything new.

But the problem is, it feels like really good sci fi is in a bit of a lull. Maybe it's not, and you guys can give me some good books you've read, but everything lately is of the Bruce Sterling/Cory Doctorow/Max Barry style. You know, one clever idea, and a book wrapped around it. A lot of winking and cleverness and post-modern "Web 2.0" ideas, but no depth. You put it down when you're done and never go back.

What I yearn for is GOOD sci fi. I'm talking Neuromancer, Fire Upon the Deep, Snow Crash, A Signal Shattered, Vurt, Synners, Cryptonomicon, Ender's Game... I want a whole world, and lots of good ideas, and something I really can't put down and sticks with me for a long time. The only modern writer that has come close has been Broken Angels by Richard Morgan, but I didn't like his newest book at all.

I think you all know what I'm talking about, and hopefully you've read something good recently. Tell me in comments, tell me in email, but feed my brain.

Another thing I've been wanting to pick up is manga, but I'm not sure if anyone who reads my blog is a manga nerd. If you are, and can recommend any manga series that has really knocked your socks off, that would be sweet too.

I used to read every single night before I went to sleep, and I haven't done that for months. I refuse to become a non-reader who does all his reading on blogs and news sites.

bzzzzow

Okay, what's up with this amateur light saber battle:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=672422470842718521

... being better than any of the fights in the most recent Star Wars movies?

Seriously, it's well made, it's clever, it's innovative, and my god, it was done by two nerdy kids in a warehouse somewhere. No stupid underwater race, or shucking and jiving Jar Jars. Just a good old fashion light saber battle.

DO YOU SEE THAT, LUCAS? Mark Hammil's career is rolling over in it's GRAVE.

pronounciation

In my Japanese class that I'm taking, I heard the professor make the same remark that I've heard in different forms from people all my life, regarding one language or another. "You want to say karaoke right, not like KAR E OH KEE, so you don't sound like an ingnorant American".

Keep in mind that he was talking about going to karaoke here in the US, not in another country.

So riddle me this, Batman. Would that same person consider any foreign person speaking English as "ignorant" when they misprounounce words? If you speak to someone who learned English as a second language, they will almost invariably say words incorrectly. Speak to someone who is Japanese or Indian or Mexican, and they will speak English in an accented way, colored by the language that they know.

Why is the "ignorance" title reserved exclusively for Americans? Should I sneer at any Japanese person who says "preese" to me, instead of please? Does that show that they're arrogant and ignorant and don't give a shit about speaking correctly? Or should I not be a dick about it, and realize that if I understand what they're saying, and that they're trying to speak my language, and get the stick out of my ass? I choose the latter.

Every language makes foreign words their own. The Japanese have bastardized television into "terebi", and personal computer into "pasocon". Is this arrogance? I don't think so. Is it different than us taking foreign words and pronouncing them in ways that fit our pronounciation style? No. Even in the middle of a Japanese sentence, a Japanese person saying a word in English will prounounce it according to Japanese standards. This is *exactly the same* as an English speaker saying a foreign word according to English standards. Note that I'm simply defending the use of foreign words in English. If I'm speaking Japanese, I will strive to say each word in a way that would be considered correct to a native speaker.

It's a simple matter of several issues coming into play. The first is when you hear it from native English speakers, puffed up with pride over knowing something others don't, and wanting to lord their knowledge over others by deriding them. The second is that Americans are the universal strawman, and calling them ignorant and arrogant won't offend anyone, because we're the big bad punching bag. It reinforces stereotypes, so it's comfortable. Nevermind that it's mean and discriminatory, when you're an American you're supposed to just grin and bear it, you're powerful enough that you don't have the right to object.

People need to step back and realize how stupid they're being, and how hypocritical. If you're going to pass judgement on misprounounciation, you have to do it universally. Or, you could just take a deep breath, realize that it really is okay that we all speak each other's languages differently, and stop annoying the rest of us.

Miike

Okay, I know Miike is a weird director. I loved Ichi the Killer, I didn't really like Gozu. I like how he's really weird and random and edgy, and pushes lots of boundaries with what he makes.

I just finished watching Dead or Alive, and if anyone out there is a fan of Japanese cinema and can tell me why the ending wasn't completely retarded, I'd love to hear it. The whole film was pretty well done, lots of really offensive material and a good cop/yakuza story. The last five minutes ruined the whole thing for me.

Spoiler alert, for any of you who care.

At the end, the cop and the main bad guy get in a fight, in the middle of a field. The cop, out of nowhere, pulls a rocket launcher out of his shirt. The bad guy pulls a GLOWING RED BALL OF ENERGY out of his own chest. They shoot their weapons at each other, and THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF JAPAN EXPLODES. They show this from a satellite view, the whole country explodes. And the credits roll.

Keep in mind that this was a normal cops and robbers movie up to this point. There's no context where this ending would make sense, and it doesn't resolve anything. It's like the director just threw up his hands and said "I have absolutely no idea how to end this film." A drooling retard could have ended it more creatively.

I know Japanese movies tend to end weirdly. I watched Suicide Club, where we got a musical number in a bowling alley, where a villian sang a song while dressed in drag, while his henchmen raped a woman under a billowing sheet. It seems to be a theme among Japanese films that they have no idea how to end them, and just get really bizarre. But this really has to take the cake. Maybe that's what he was going for, but it was still really stupid.

china

There was an NPR report this week about health care in China, talking about how hundreds of thousands of people there are dying needlessly because they can't access health care. NPR mentioned that on average, the government pays for about 10% of citizen's health care costs.

Compare this to the fact that in the US, the government covers about 45% of people's health care costs, despite the fact that we're theoretically a non-socialist government. I'll leave my rant about that aside, because that's not really the purpose of this post.

Also, average unemployment in China is at 20%. Compare that to the average unemployment in the US unemployment of 4.8%.

The reason I'm mentioning all this is it begs the question, why the hell is China communist? What in the world do their citizens think the perceived benefit is? Communism at its core is supposed to care for its citizens, and it's completely and utterly failing to do that as well as an evil, heartless, capitalist society.

I'd be curious to hear *any* benefits that are being afforded by communism in China, since I'm unable to see any. You'd think that the citizens would change their government.

come work with me

Tellme (where I work) is in the middle of a massive expansion period. We do IVR (interactive voice recognition) for a lot of really big companies, like Verizon, Fandango, American Airlines, Dominos, Cingular, Etrade, and many others. And we're signing on more clients every day. Our long term goal is, any time you pick up a phone, anywhere, you get a Tellme interface. We're trying to do voice reco right for once.

We're a pre-IPO startup of about 300 people, and we're profitable. We have a completely open work environment, with no offices or cubicles. People go out and socialize, bring pets to work, we have a big kitchen with all the free soda and cereal and ramen you can eat. And we all really enjoy what we do, it's the largest VoIP deployment on the planet, so the protocols and solutions you write have generally never been done before.

A big part of Tellme is we only hire really good people, even if that slows our recruiting down to a crawl, and the best way to do that is to have people that you know, or a friend knows. So I'm using my blog to say, if any of you guys are looking for a job, talk to me. Send me a resume. Even if you just want to know more about Tellme, our recruiters would be happy to talk to you.

We have all kinds of jobs open:

Network Engineer (writing the VoIP platform that everything runs on)
Java (J2ME) engineer (writing mobile apps for phones)
QA Engineer (testing it all)
Network Operations Center (monitoring and designing and running our network)
Sales, Marketing
Finance

There's a complete list here:

http://www.tellme.com/current.html

Some of the jobs are really unusual, like "Advertising relevancy engineer". We're doing some amazing things that have never been done before, and working on these things is really exciting. Come join me. Drop me a line, or send me a resume. Send it to tcoziahr@hotmail.com

the pace of things

Upon seeing this ridiculous deal for a 250 gig Seagate hard drive for $80, I decided to do some math.

I know this subject is continuously beaten into the ground, but it's still shocking to me when I really think about it.

250 gigs for $80 comes out to 32 cents a gigabyte.

Around 1995-ish, my family bought a new hard drive for our home machine, for the good price (at that time) of about $400. For a 40 meg drive.

40 megs for $400 comes out to $10000 a gigabyte.

So over the course of one decade, hard drives have become about 31,000 times cheaper. That's not a bad rate of progress.

unbelievable

Jesus.

Pussycat Dolls have a new song called "Beep", and I was just watching the video on MTV. So, the entire song is about how men don't appreciate women for their brains, and only look at their bodies. That's it, the song addresses nothing other than women being more than their bodies.

Ask yourself, if you wrote that song, what is the last, absolutely last thing you would want the video to be?

How about a video where the girl that sings the song writhes around with a dozen other insanely hot women, partially clothed, shaking their ass and breasts at the camera? Can you think of any concept for a video that would be more the antithesis of your message, or more hypocritcal? And no, they weren't being ironic.

"Fuck the message, we'd rather be ogled at and get paid".

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching them writhe around half naked. I just think they're idiots.

asiansploitation???

Why did no one tell me that ASIANSPLOITATION films exist??

We've all seen Shaft and all the other blacksploitation films from the 70's. But I recently discovered that there are asiansploitation films too. The "Pinky Violence Collection." Check it out:

http://www.panikhouse.com/archives/2005/08/the_pinky_viole.html

Check out some of those trailers, they're absolutely hilarious. Even the titles are pure gold. "Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess"... "Girl Boss Guerilla"... oh yes. Oh yes indeed.

And miracle upon miracles, Netflix actually has all four of them in stock. I just added them to my queue. If they're as awesome as the trailers, I might even have to buy them. Hell, they'll even be good practice for helping me learn Japanese.

As long as I'm throwing links at you, this nerd mockumentary about dorks playing D&D made me snork my beer through my nose.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7521044027821122670

I am working throughout the weekend, taking breaks only for asiansploitation trailers. Send booze and whores.

coolest game evar

I know this is floating around the net, so some of you may have seen it already, but if you haven't, go watch this gameplay demo of a new game coming out called Spore.

The video is long, but it will blow your hair back. You start at a multi-cellular organism level, floating around in goo. Each time it lays an egg, you get to evolve the next generation of creature, and the game creates behaviors based on the structure you decide on. It literally learns how to swim and walk and fight just from its attributes and skeleton.

You lead this creature all the way through its evolution, walking on land, hunting, creating cities, all the way to space technology. But it doesn't stop there, you can explore surrounding worlds. And here's the even crazier part, the world is populated by creatures that you've asynchronously downloaded from OTHER people playing the game. So you go to another city or planet, and there's some weird creature that I've created at some other time. And you get to decide to try to live with them, or fight them, or whatever.

The game is basically a sim-evolution, sim-universe megolith. Watch the video, it's unreal to see these things literally learn how to live before your eyes. They should have named the game "Playing God".

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore